The Valley of the Kings: Egypt’s Royal Burial Ground and Its Robbed Tombs

Deep in the desert hills across the Nile from ancient Thebes, a narrow wadi cuts through layers of limestone laid down tens of millions of years ago, when the Mediterranean still reached as far south as Aswan. For nearly five centuries, this was where Egypt buried its kings. Today it holds 65 known tombs and chambers, from a simple pit barely large enough to hold a coffin to a sprawling underground complex with more than 120 rooms. Almost every one of them had already been broken into and stripped of its treasures long before modern archaeologists arrived.

A Desolate Valley Chosen on Purpose

The valley sits beneath al-Qurn, a peak the ancient Egyptians called “The Peak,” whose pyramid-like shape may have deliberately echoed the Old Kingdom pyramids built more than a thousand years earlier. That resemblance, combined with the valley’s isolation, made it an appealing site. Its narrow access points meant a dedicated force of tomb police, the Medjay, could actually guard the place.

After Ahmose I reunified Egypt by driving out the Hyksos, Theban rulers began building grander tombs to match their new power. The earliest kings of this revived dynasty, Ahmose I and his son Amenhotep I, were likely buried at Dra’ Abu el-Naga’, though their exact tombs have never been identified. The real shift to the Valley of the Kings came with Thutmose I. His advisor Ineni recorded, in his own tomb, that he personally oversaw the excavation of the king’s rock-cut tomb “alone, no one seeing, no one hearing” — a telling line, given how badly that secrecy would eventually fail. Scholars aren’t even certain which tomb was his; it was probably KV20 or KV38.

From roughly 1539 BC to 1075 BC, the valley served as Egypt’s primary royal burial ground. Despite its name, it wasn’t reserved for kings alone. Favored nobles, royal wives, and children were buried there too, often in smaller chambers near their masters’ tombs. Of the tombs discovered so far, only about twenty actually belonged to kings; the rest house nobles, royal family members, unmarked pits, and caches used in the embalming process. The ancient Egyptians called the site Ta-sekhet-ma’at, “the Great Field,” part of a much longer ceremonial name invoking “millions of years” for the pharaoh.

Building Tombs in Treacherous Rock

Carving a tomb here was never straightforward. The valley’s rock quality swings from finely grained to coarse and structurally unreliable, and bands of shale caused real trouble: this stone swells when it absorbs water, prying apart the surrounding rock. Builders had to adapt tomb shapes to whatever geology they ran into, sometimes quarrying through existing limestone clefts, sometimes digging behind slopes of loose scree, sometimes working at the edges of rock spurs carved out by ancient floods.

Those difficulties show up starkly in the story of Setnakhte and his son Ramesses III. Setnakhte began excavating KV11, only to accidentally break into the already-occupied tomb of Amenmesse. Work stopped, and he instead took over Twosret’s tomb, KV14, for himself. When Ramesses III needed his own tomb, he simply extended the abandoned KV11 his father had started. Ramesses II’s tomb shows a similar compromise, reverting to an older bent-axis layout, probably because of poor rock quality along the Esna shale.

The valley’s hydrology posed its own threat. Violent, if infrequent, thunderstorms over the Theban hills send flash floods down at least seven stream beds into the valley’s center. Ground-penetrating radar surveys conducted between 1998 and 2002 revealed that the valley floor isn’t flat bedrock at all — it descends in a series of natural stone “shelves” buried under scree. One major flood near the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty apparently buried several tombs under metres of debris; three of them, KV55, KV62, and KV63, were dug straight into the original wadi bedrock, which sat about five metres lower than the valley floor does now. Later dynasties leveled the valley, pushing flood debris further downstream — and in doing so, buried those earlier tombs so thoroughly they weren’t rediscovered until the early twentieth century.

Life and Death Behind the Scenes

The tombs themselves were cut and decorated by workers from the village of Deir el-Medina, tucked into a small side valley between the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. These craftsmen left behind an unusually detailed record of their daily lives, preserved in tomb inscriptions and official documents. Among the surviving papers is what may be history’s earliest documented labor strike, recorded in the Turin Strike Papyrus.

Because the royal tombs themselves were meant to stay hidden, the mortuary temples honoring each king were built separately, closer to the cultivated land facing Thebes. These temples became stages for public festivals, most notably the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, when the sacred barques of the god Amun-Re, his consort Mut, and their son Khonsu traveled from Karnak across the Nile to visit the funerary temples and shrines of dead kings on the west bank.

Construction patterns shifted over time. Early in the Eighteenth Dynasty, only kings got large tombs in the valley; nonroyal burials were small chambers near their master’s tomb. Amenhotep III built in the separate Western Valley, and though his son Akhenaten moved tomb construction to his new city at Amarna, the unfinished tomb WV25 may originally have been meant for him. After Akhenaten’s religious upheaval ended, Tutankhamun, Ay, and Horemheb all returned to being buried in the traditional royal necropolis. By the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, burials increased sharply, and Ramesses II and Ramesses III each built enormous shared tombs for their many sons — KV5 and KV3, respectively. Not every king made it into the valley, though: Thutmose II was buried in the nearby Western Wadis instead, Smenkhkare’s burial has never been found, and Ramesses VIII appears to have been buried somewhere else entirely.

Tourists, Treasure Hunters, and the Rediscovery of Tutankhamun

The robbing of these tombs wasn’t a modern phenomenon. Visitors were touring the valley back in antiquity, especially under Roman rule, and many left graffiti behind. Researcher Jules Baillet catalogued over 2,100 instances of Greek and Latin graffiti alone, plus smaller numbers in Phoenician, Cypriot, Lycian, and Coptic. Nearly a thousand of these are crammed into a single tomb, KV9, and the earliest graffiti with a confirmed date goes back to 278 BC — proof that people were marveling at these ruins, and presumably picking through them, for well over two thousand years before archaeology existed as a discipline.

Serious European exploration began in 1799, when members of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt mapped the known tombs and first identified the Western Valley. Giovanni Belzoni, working for British consul Henry Salt, discovered several tombs in the early 1800s, including Ay’s tomb in 1816 and Seti I’s elaborate tomb the following year. Convinced he’d found everything of value, Belzoni declared the valley exhausted. He was wrong, though it would take more than a century to prove it. John Gardner Wilkinson, living in Egypt through the 1820s, copied inscriptions from the open tombs and used the still-incomplete decipherment of hieroglyphs to piece together a chronology of New Kingdom rulers. His tomb-numbering system is still in use today.

The discovery that truly transformed the valley’s reputation came in 1922, with the uncovering of Tutankhamun’s tomb — a find that drew global attention to the site and cemented its place as one of the world’s most famous archaeological locations. In 1979, UNESCO designated the Valley of the Kings a World Heritage Site, as part of the wider Theban Necropolis.

What we still don’t know

Even after two centuries of excavation, huge gaps remain. Only eleven of the valley’s tombs have ever been completely recorded. The exact tombs of early kings like Ahmose I and Amenhotep I have never been pinned down, and even the identification of Amenhotep I’s tomb within the valley itself is disputed. Thutmose I’s actual burial place is uncertain, narrowed only to two candidates. Smenkhkare’s tomb has never surfaced at all, and nobody knows for certain where Ramesses VIII ended up. The valley’s flood history, too, is still being pieced together through modern radar surveys — work that itself led directly to confirming the buried tomb KV63 in the twenty-first century, a reminder that this ancient burial ground hasn’t finished giving up its secrets.

Sources

– This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article Valley of the Kings (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Kings), by Wikipedia contributors, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). We rewrote and edited the text. The material adapted from Wikipedia is available under the same licence. Readers wanting primary sources should follow that article’s reference list.