Tutankhamen’s tomb is not the only Egyptian tomb to be found nearly intact (the tomb of Yuya and Tuya in the Valley of the Kings and that of Hetepheres at Giza are two examples), but no other find comes even close to the quality and quantity of contents in KV 62.It seems likely that Tutankhamen was buried in KV 62 because he died unexpectedly, still a teenager. If a tomb had even been begun for him at such a young age, the work was not far enough along for it to be used. The way in which the funerary objects were crammed into the tomb suggests a burial done in considerable haste.

But a recent claim that Tutankhamen was murdered by court officials and his burial done quickly to hide evidence of the crime is not widely accepted. Almost immediately after it had been sealed, the tomb was robbed, not once but at least twice, perhaps by some of the guards assigned to protect it. Both robberies were quickly discovered. Eight gold rings were found  by Carter lying on the floor of the Treasury, wrapped in a piece of cloth as part of the goods the thieves were planning to haul away. Apparently they were thrown back into the chamber when the thieves were apprehended. There is ample evidence for these ancient thefts. But there is no evidence to support recent claims by several hack writers that Carter and Carnarvon had found KV 62 long before 1922 and were systematically plundering it until nearly caught and then, in a panic, staged its “discovery.”Tutankhamen’s treasure, now displayed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, is breathtakingly beautiful, and visitors coming to the Valley of the Kings often expect the tomb to be equally impressive. It is not. The tomb consists of four small chambers covering only 110 square meters (1184 square feet). It is claustrophobic and virtually empty. But a lovely quartzite sarcophagus still stands in the burial chamber, inside it the outer coffin and the mummy of young Tutankhamen.

 Only the walls of the burial chamber  were decorated, very simply, with few figures and little text. The rest of the walls are bare. The entrance staircase to KV 62 was discovered by Howard Carter’s workmen on 4 November 1922, and the next day they exposed the now-famous sixteen steps that led down to a tomb entrance closed with mud and stone and stamped over thirty centuries earlier with seals of the necropolis guards.Carter cabled his English benefactor news of the discovery and impatiently awaited Lord Carvarnon’s arrival before breaking through this doorway on 24 November. “At first I could see nothing,” Carter later wrote, “the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold— everywhere the glint of gold.” It took ten years of painstaking work to photograph, record, remove, and conserve the more than three thousand objects found inside, and still today many of them remain unpublished.

The tomb has an unusual plan, different from other royal tombs and the small nobles’ tombs at Thebes. But if the entrance staircase that leads to what Carter called the Antechamber were moved around to the Antechamber’s left end, the resulting tomb plan would not be too different from standard Dynasty 18 royal tombs: a staircase and corridor leading to a burial chamber with a side chamber. An ENTRANCE CORRIDOR lies at the bottom of the sixteen steps, 8 meters (27 feet) long and 1.7 meters (6 feet) wide. When Carter entered this corridor it was filled with rubble. But originally it had been used as another store room until necropolis guards discovered that the tomb had been robbed. The contents of the corridor were then moved to another site, KV 54. They included large jars, dockets, bags of natron, bandages, and  flowers—materials apparently used for the embalming of the young king. After re-burying the objects, necropolis guards filled the corridor with debris as a further means of thwarting future tomb robberies. KV 54, the embalming cache, was found and excavated in 1907.The first chamber beyond the corridor, the ANTECHAMBER, measures 7.9 meters (26 feet) by 3.6 meters (12 feet) and is 2.8 meters (9 feet) high. Into this relatively small space Tutankhamen’s priests had crammed huge beds, war chariots, chairs, stools, elaborately inlaid and painted boxes, alabaster jars, mummified ducks, and gilded statues that stood guard at the entrance along the right (north) wall.

At the left side of the rear wall of the Antechamber a small, low door leads into what Carter called the ANNEXE (4.4 meters or 14 feet long and 2.6 meters or 9 feet wide). Its floor lies about a meter (3 feet) below that of the Antechamber, but its ceiling is lower, too (2.6 meters or 8 feet). Into this room priests had packed foods and unguents, bottles of wine, jars of oils, baskets of fruits and vegetables, and there were pieces of clothing, jewelry, and furniture.

The floor of the BURIAL CHAMBER is also about a meter below that of the Antechamber and measures 6.4 meters (21 feet) long by 4 meters (13 feet) wide. It is 3.7 meters (12 feet) high. Four gilded shrines that nearly filled the room nested one inside the other and held the quartzite sarcophagus inside which were two gilded coffins holding a third, of solid gold, in which lay Tutankhamen’s mummy. East of the burial chamber lay the Treasury, 4.8 meters (16 feet) by 3.8 meters (12 feet) and 2.3 meters (8 feet) high. It was filled with a gilded canopic shrine, boats, shabti-statuettes, boxes filled with figures of gods and goddesses, a large statue of a recumbent Anubis jackal, and two mummified fetuses that may have been Tutankhamen’s unborn children.The only decoration in KV 62 is on the walls of the Burial Chamber and it bears some similarities to KV 23, the tomb of Ay. On the left (west) wall twelve baboons, each in its own rectangle, kneel beneath the night bark of the sun god in its form as Khepri, the scarab beetle, preceded by three male and two female deities. This is a scene from the first hour of the Imydwat.

On the rear (north) wall, king Ay stands before the royal mummy, wearing the elaborate panther-skin costume of a sem-priest, performing the Opening of the Mouth ritual. Between the two figures, a low table is piled with various instruments needed for its performance and five small bowls of incense. At left, Tutankhamen, wearing an elaborately folded kilt, stands before the goddess Nut in whose hands are hieroglyphs representing water. Farther left, Tutankhamen (in the middle) and his ka stand before Osiris.

Like all of the decoration in KV 62, the figures here are rather hastily done and ill-proportioned. The figure of Ay and, to a lesser extent, one of the figures of Tutankhamen, shows the influences of Amarna art. Note their sagging stomachs, for example, the thin limbs, long fingers, and slightly prognathous chins. The artist has managed to show genuine affection in the way the hands of the king and of Osiris reach out to touch and embrace each other. On the right (east) wall of the chamber, the funeral procession is led by twelve senior court officials, similarly dressed but two of them without wigs. They pull on a rope tied to the sled on which the mummy of Tutankhamen lies in an elaborate shrine guarded by two small figures of Isis and Nephthys. On the front wall of the burial chamber, not visible to tourists today, the king is welcomed into  the netherworld by Hathor and Anubis.

The red quartzite sarcophagus standing in this room is finely carved and shows four goddesses, Nephthys, Isis, Serqet, and Neith standing protectively with winged arms outstretched at the four corners. The goddesses wear bluepainted necklaces and arm bands. Concerns have been expressed about the condition of wall painting in Tutankhamen’s Burial Chamber, and some scientists believe that a multi-million dollar program to clean the walls and remove bacterial growth that covers their surfaces is badly needed.

From" The Illustrated Guide to Luxor" by kent R.Weeks ,published by the American University in Cairo Press. Copyright © 2005 White Star S.p.a