The Valley of the Kings was a security decision before it was anything else. For roughly five centuries the kings of the Old and Middle Kingdoms had advertised their burials with the largest stone structures on earth, and for those same centuries robbers had emptied nearly every one of them. When the pharaohs of the New Kingdom chose a dry desert valley behind the cliffs of western Thebes and cut their tombs deep into the rock instead of piling stone toward the sky, they were not inventing a new kind of grandeur. They were trying to solve a problem the pyramid had failed to solve. A tomb no one could find could not be robbed. That was the wager, and the whole design of the valley follows from it: the hidden entrances, the disguised shafts, the workers sworn to secrecy in a walled village over the ridge, the mummies packed with the wealth of an empire and sealed behind rubble.

The wager mostly lost. Within a few generations, and in some cases within a few years of a burial, thieves were inside the royal tombs, and by the end of the New Kingdom the plundering had become so systematic that the state ran criminal investigations and the priesthood eventually gathered up the violated royal mummies and hid them in bulk. What the valley leaves us is therefore a double lesson: a masterpiece of funerary engineering and religious art, and a demonstration that concealment could not defeat the economics of gold. Understanding the Valley of the Kings means holding both halves together, the ambition and the failure, because the failure is written into the same walls that carry some of the finest painting the ancient world produced.

This guide sets out what the valley is, when and why it was used, who lies in it, how the tombs were cut and decorated, and how the security strategy at its heart broke down. It also corrects the most durable misconception about the place, the belief that a hidden tomb was a safe tomb, and it advances a single organizing idea for reading the whole necropolis: the hidden-tomb thesis, that the Valley of the Kings traded the pyramid’s visible glory for secrecy, and that the trade did not pay.

What the Valley of the Kings Is and When It Was Used

The Valley of the Kings is the royal necropolis of the New Kingdom, cut into the limestone of the Theban west bank across the Nile from the temple city that Greek writers later called Thebes and that stands beneath the town of Luxor. It is not a single ravine but a system of dry watercourses, or wadis, folded into the desert hills behind the cultivated strip. The main branch, the one that holds the great majority of the royal tombs, is the East Valley. A smaller, quieter arm to the west, the West Valley, holds a handful of tombs, among them the burial of Amenhotep III and the tomb prepared for Ay. Above the whole necropolis rises a natural peak called al-Qurn, the Horn, whose profile the Egyptians read as a pyramid standing over the valley without a single block having to be quarried. The kings who abandoned the built pyramid buried themselves beneath a pyramid the landscape had already made.

The valley served as the burial ground of pharaohs from the early Eighteenth Dynasty through the end of the Twentieth, a span of roughly five hundred years reaching from around 1500 BCE to a little after 1070 BCE. The Eighteenth Dynasty had reunified the country after the expulsion of the Hyksos and launched Egypt into its imperial age, and the decision to hide the royal dead belongs to that opening moment of the New Kingdom, when the memory of plundered pyramids was a live administrative concern rather than an abstraction. The reunification and the empire that made the valley possible are the subject of the wider complete guide to the New Kingdom of Egypt, and the valley is best understood as the funerary expression of that period’s wealth and anxiety in equal measure.

The First Royal Burials

Royal burials in the valley began in the early Eighteenth Dynasty, around 1500 BCE. Thutmose I is the king most often named as the first to be interred there, though some scholars trace the choice back a reign or two to Amenhotep I. The founding decision was a deliberate break from the pyramid tradition of earlier ages.

Assigning the very first royal tomb is genuinely uncertain, because the earliest phase of the necropolis is precisely the phase whose evidence was most disturbed by later reuse and robbery. A biographical inscription of an official named Ineni, who served under Thutmose I, records that he oversaw the cutting of his king’s tomb in a secluded place with no one watching and no one hearing, a line often read as the earliest description of the concealment strategy in action. Whether Thutmose I or a predecessor first committed to the valley, the pattern was set by the reign of Thutmose I and held for the rest of the New Kingdom: kings, and a select group of favored queens, high officials, and royal children, would be cut into the living rock rather than housed beneath a monument.

The Number of Tombs and the KV System

The valley contains more than sixty known tombs, numbered in a KV series that runs past sixty. Not all belonged to kings; some held queens, princes, nobles, and officials, and a number were used for storage or never finished. New tombs and chambers continue to be identified, so the total is best treated as open rather than fixed.

The KV numbers, short for Kings’ Valley, were assigned in order of discovery rather than by date or importance, which is why the sequence jumps around the map. The system was begun in 1827 by the English traveler John Gardner Wilkinson, who painted numbers at the tomb entrances, and it has been extended as later work has revealed additional tombs. Because the numbering tracks the history of exploration and not the history of the necropolis, a low number such as the tomb of Ramesses VII, KV1, sits near the entrance where early visitors found it first, while the tomb of Tutankhamun, buried under debris and overlooked for millennia, carries the much higher designation KV62. A researcher who understands that the KV series records the order in which the tombs came to light, and not the order in which they were dug, is protected from a common source of confusion about the site.

Why the Valley Existed: Purpose, Religion, and Politics

A royal tomb in ancient Egypt was never only a grave. It was a machine for turning a dead king into a living god, a stage set for the rituals that carried the pharaoh through the dangers of the underworld and joined him to the sun. The Valley of the Kings inherited that whole theology from the pyramid age and rehoused it underground. The purpose of a tomb here was funerary in the deepest sense, to guarantee the king’s passage into the afterlife, and the architecture and decoration were engineered toward that single end. The tomb was where the body was preserved, where the funerary goods were stored, and where the texts and images that guided the dead king were inscribed on the walls so that they would work forever.

The burial tradition the valley carried forward is the one that had already been worked out during the pyramid age and set down in the great funerary literature. Readers who want the underlying theology, the judgment of the dead, the weighing of the heart, and the machinery of mummification, will find it treated in full in the discussion of pyramids, death, and the Egyptian afterlife; the valley did not change the destination of the royal soul, only the address of the tomb. What changed was the calculation about how best to protect the body and the treasure that the theology required be buried with it.

That calculation was political as much as religious. A pharaoh’s legitimacy rested in part on the proper burial of his predecessor, and the wealth interred with a king was a statement about the reach of the state that could afford to bury it. The New Kingdom was the imperial peak of Egyptian power, its treasuries fed by conquest, tribute, and the gold of Nubia. The scale of what went into the ground reflected that wealth, and the economics of empire that filled the tombs are the subject of the account of gold, tribute, and the Egyptian empire. A tomb in the valley was, among other things, a vault, and the same imperial gold that made the burials magnificent made them targets.

Separating the burial place from the memorial was central to the new design. In the pyramid age, the mortuary temple where the king’s cult was maintained sat directly against the pyramid that held his body, which meant that the location of the burial was advertised by the very building meant to honor it. In the New Kingdom the two functions were split. The tomb was hidden in the valley, while the mortuary temple where priests made offerings to the dead king was built out on the edge of the cultivation, a comfortable distance away, in full public view. Deir el-Bahari, Medinet Habu, the Ramesseum, and the vanished temple of Amenhotep III marked by the Colossi of Memnon are the surviving members of this line of memorial temples. A worshiper could attend the king’s cult at the temple without ever knowing where in the hills the king actually lay. The separation of cult from corpse was the single most important architectural idea of the necropolis, and it followed directly from the failure of the pyramid to keep the two apart safely.

Why does a pyramid-shaped peak rise over the valley?

The peak is al-Qurn, a natural pinnacle roughly 420 meters high whose pyramid-like shape presided over the necropolis. The Egyptians associated it with the cobra goddess Meretseger, She Who Loves Silence, guardian of the valley. Its form let the kings keep the pyramid’s solar symbolism while abandoning the pyramid itself.

The choice of this particular valley was not arbitrary, and al-Qurn is a large part of the reason. The pyramid had always been a solar symbol, an image of the primeval mound and of the sun’s rays turned to stone, and giving it up meant giving up a piece of theology that the kings were unwilling to lose. Burying themselves beneath a mountain that the eye read as a pyramid let them keep the symbol without building the target. The goddess Meretseger, whose name declares her the patron of silence, was imagined dwelling on the peak and watching over the tombs and the workers, punishing those who did wrong in her domain with blindness or snakebite. The landscape itself was enlisted as both a symbol and a guardian, doing the double work of the abandoned pyramid, standing for the sun and hiding the dead at the same time.

How the Tombs Were Cut: The Real Construction Story

The tombs of the Valley of the Kings were not built; they were excavated. Where a pyramid rose block by block, a royal tomb descended cut by cut, driven as a series of corridors and chambers into the flank of the hills. The basic method was subtractive. Teams of workmen struck into the limestone with copper and, later, bronze chisels and wooden mallets, loosening the rock, while others hauled the debris out in baskets. The stone of the Theban hills is a fine limestone, workable and capable of taking a smooth plastered surface, but it is interleaved in places with bands of soft shale that swell and crack when wet. Where a tomb cut through these shale layers, later flash floods could turn the rock to a heaving paste that split walls and buckled floors, and several tombs show exactly this damage. The engineers learned to route corridors around the worst bands where they could, and the choices they made about direction and depth were as much geology as ceremony.

The work was carried out by a permanent, specialized workforce that lived apart from ordinary Egyptian society, and it is one of the extraordinary facts of the valley that we know these people by name. They were housed in a walled village in a fold of the hills between the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens, a place the Egyptians called Set Maat, the Place of Truth, and that archaeology knows as Deir el-Medina. The village was a company town in the most literal sense, established to build and decorate the royal tombs and supported entirely by the state, which delivered its rations of grain, fish, vegetables, water, and other supplies across the desert. Because the villagers were literate to a degree unusual in the ancient world, and because the dry desert preserved the flakes of limestone and pottery on which they scribbled, Deir el-Medina has yielded tens of thousands of ostraca and papyri that document the tomb-building operation from the inside.

The Workmen Who Cut the Tombs

The tombs were cut by a state-employed community of workmen who lived at Deir el-Medina, the walled village between the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. Organized into two gangs and supervised by foremen and scribes, these craftsmen quarried, plastered, drew, and painted the royal tombs across generations, often as inherited family trade.

The workforce was organized like a ship’s crew, split into a right side and a left side, each gang assigned to one half of the tomb under a foreman, with a scribe keeping the records that survive. A full complement might number a few dozen workmen at the core, swelling with support staff who ground pigments, carried water, cut wood, and did the labor that kept the skilled crews cutting. The men worked an eight-day stretch and rested on the ninth and tenth, sleeping in rough huts on the ridge above the valley during the working days rather than trekking home each night, and returning to the village on their days off. The trades passed down through families, so that a boy learned the chisel or the brush from his father and the same names recur in the records across generations. This was not a mass of anonymous laborers but a hereditary guild of craftsmen, proud of their work, quarrelsome, and entirely dependent on the state that fed them.

That dependence produced one of the most telling episodes in the whole record of the necropolis. Late in the reign of Ramesses III, around 1157 BCE, the grain rations that paid the Deir el-Medina workforce fell into arrears, and the men downed tools and marched to the mortuary temples to protest, staging what the surviving journal of the necropolis records as an organized work stoppage. It is among the earliest documented labor strikes in human history, and it survives not as legend but as a dated administrative account written by the scribe on duty. The strike tells us something important about the valley: the machine that cut the tombs ran on bread, and when the bread failed the machine stopped, no matter how sacred the work. The tombs were a state project subject to state logistics, and the same imperial system that could pour gold into a burial could also fail to deliver a grain shipment on time.

The Time a Tomb Took to Cut

A royal tomb took years to cut and could occupy much of a reign. Work generally began when a king took the throne and continued as long as he lived, so a long reign yielded a large, deep tomb and a short reign a small one. The unfinished state of many tombs shows that death frequently arrived before the excavation was complete.

The link between the length of a reign and the size of a tomb is one of the clearest patterns in the valley. Because cutting started at accession and stopped at death, the tomb was in effect a clock measuring the king’s years on the throne. The vast tomb of Seti I, KV17, the longest and among the most lavishly decorated in the necropolis, reflects a substantial reign and a well-funded operation, while the cramped tomb of Tutankhamun, who died young after a brief reign, is so small that many scholars suspect it was not originally intended for a king at all and was pressed into royal service in a hurry. When a king died with his tomb unfinished, the burial party did what it could, plastering and painting the completed chambers and leaving the rest as bare rock, and a walk through the valley is in part a walk through interrupted projects, each stopped at the moment its owner ran out of time.

How did royal tomb design evolve across the New Kingdom?

Early Eighteenth Dynasty tombs bent sharply, often turning ninety degrees partway down, sometimes ending in a cartouche-shaped burial chamber. Over the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties the plan straightened into a long, largely axial descent. The trend ran from hidden, dog-legged early tombs toward grander, more open corridors.

The evolution of the plan tracks the changing balance between secrecy and display. The earliest royal tombs, such as that of Thutmose III, KV34, plunge and then turn hard, with a bent axis, a protective well shaft meant to catch flood water and deter or trap intruders, and a burial chamber shaped like a royal cartouche, the oval that framed a king’s name. This early design was built to be hidden and hard to penetrate. As the New Kingdom went on, the tombs grew longer, straighter, and more monumental, their corridors widening into processional avenues descending in a nearly straight line, as in the Ramesside tombs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties. The well shaft survived in many tombs, sometimes as a genuine obstacle and sometimes as a symbolic feature decorated as if it were a shrine. The drift from the cramped, twisting early tombs to the broad, axial later ones reveals a slow shift in priorities, from concealment toward the wish to make the tomb itself a grand descent through the underworld, even as the concealment that had justified the whole project was already failing.

The Decoration: Painting the Road Through the Underworld

The walls of the royal tombs carry some of the most sophisticated religious art of the ancient world, and none of it was decoration in the modern sense. Every register of text and every painted figure had a function: to equip the dead king with the knowledge, the passwords, and the divine company he needed to survive the night journey through the underworld and be reborn with the sun at dawn. The tomb was a book you could walk into. Its corridors reproduced, in order, the hours and gates of the netherworld, so that moving from the entrance toward the burial chamber was a physical passage along the same road the king’s soul would travel.

The decoration was applied in a sequence of skilled stages that the Deir el-Medina records let us reconstruct. First the rough-cut rock was faced with a plaster of gypsum and, where the surface was poor, a preliminary coat of mud plaster. Draftsmen then laid out the scenes using a grid of red guidelines snapped with a cord dipped in pigment, ensuring the standard proportions of the human figure across the whole wall. Outline scribes drew the figures and the columns of hieroglyphs in red, a master corrected them in black, and then either sculptors cut the designs in low relief or painters filled them directly in color, depending on the hardness of the stone and the time available. The pigments were mineral: black from carbon, white from gypsum or chalk, red and yellow from ochres, blue and green from ground synthetic frits and copper compounds. Bound in a gum or glue medium and sealed in the dry, stable air of a closed tomb, these colors have held their intensity across three thousand years in the best-preserved chambers.

The Wall Program of the Royal Tomb

The tombs were painted with funerary texts and the scenes that go with them, above all the guides to the underworld: the Amduat, the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, the Litany of Re, and passages from the Book of the Dead. Astronomical ceilings, images of the king before the gods, and the sun’s night journey complete the standard program.

These compositions form a library of afterlife literature painted straight onto the rock. The Amduat, whose name means That Which Is in the Underworld, maps the twelve hours of the night through which the sun god travels in his barque, and it appears in the earliest fully decorated royal tombs. The Book of Gates organizes the same journey around a series of guarded gates, each defended by fire-breathing serpents that the dead must name and pass. The Book of Caverns and the Book of the Earth develop further versions of the descent, while the Litany of Re invokes the sun god in his seventy-four forms. Overhead, astronomical ceilings mapped the decans and constellations and the goddess Nut arched across the sky swallowing and rebirthing the sun. Later Ramesside tombs added the Books of the Heavens, the Book of the Day and the Book of the Night, tracing the sun’s course above and below the horizon. Woven through all of this were scenes of the king himself, greeted and embraced by Osiris, Ra, Hathor, Anubis, and the other gods, shown not as a petitioner but as one already among the divine. The wall program was, in sum, a complete set of directions for becoming a god, and its purpose explains its density: nothing could be left out, because an omission might strand the king at a gate he could not open.

The style of the painting shifts across the centuries in ways a trained eye can date. The tomb of Thutmose III preserves an early manner in which the Amduat is drawn in a spare, cursive line, its figures reduced almost to stick shapes and its hieroglyphs written as if on a giant unrolled papyrus, so that the burial chamber reads like an open scroll. Under Seti I the art reaches a peak of refined low relief, the figures modeled with a delicacy that later tombs, working faster and often in paint alone, rarely matched. The Ramesside tombs favor bold, brightly colored painted scenes over carved relief, trading some of the earlier finesse for scale and speed. The variation is not random; it reflects the resources of each reign, the time available before the king’s death, and the evolving taste of the court, and it lets specialists place an undated fragment of tomb painting within a reign or two on style alone.

Who Is Buried in the Valley of the Kings

The valley holds the greatest concentration of New Kingdom royalty anywhere in Egypt, a roll of kings that reads like the political history of the empire itself. The Eighteenth Dynasty occupants include Thutmose I, Thutmose III and his son Amenhotep II, the boy king Tutankhamun, and the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, who ruled as king in her own right and whose tomb, KV20, is among the deepest and most awkwardly cut in the necropolis. Hatshepsut’s extraordinary reign, the erasure of her monuments after her death, and the debate over what that erasure meant belong to the profile of Hatshepsut, Egypt’s great female pharaoh; here she matters as proof that the valley was open to a ruler who happened to be a woman, buried with the same rites and in the same ground as the kings who preceded and followed her.

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties fill out the roster with the Ramesside kings. Seti I lies in the longest and finest tomb in the valley, KV17. His son Ramesses II, the longest-reigning and most self-advertising of all the pharaohs, was buried in KV7, and his many sons in the sprawling KV5 nearby. A long line of later Ramesses kings, from Ramesses III in the magnificent KV11 down through the weaker rulers of the dynasty’s decline, occupy tombs of diminishing scale as the New Kingdom itself faded. Beyond the kings, the valley admitted a select company of others: certain queens, princes, and a few exceptionally favored officials, such as Yuya and Thuya, the parents of Queen Tiye, whose nearly intact burial in KV46 was one of the richest found before Tutankhamun.

Identifying Who Lies in Each Tomb

Not every tomb’s owner is certain. Robbery, reuse, and the ancient relocation of the royal mummies scrambled the evidence, so that some tombs are attributed on the strength of decoration, inscriptions, or the objects left behind rather than a body still in place. The identification of occupants is an ongoing act of reconstruction.

The single most famous burial, that of Tutankhamun in KV62, is the exception that proves how much was lost everywhere else. Because his small tomb was buried under the debris thrown up while cutting the later tomb of Ramesses VI, it escaped the systematic plundering that emptied its neighbors and survived nearly intact into the modern era. The story of its discovery, the objects it contained, and what a single unrobbed burial reveals about what the others once held is told in the account of how Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered. For the valley as a whole, though, the norm was the opposite of Tutankhamun: tombs stripped in antiquity, their owners’ mummies removed, and their identities pieced back together by scholars from whatever the robbers and the priests left behind.

What the Valley Tells Us About New Kingdom Society

A necropolis is a mirror of the state that builds it, and the Valley of the Kings reflects the New Kingdom in unusual detail because of the archive that Deir el-Medina left behind. The first thing the valley shows is the scale of surplus that empire generated. Cutting, plastering, and painting a royal tomb was a decades-long project supporting a permanent skilled community, and doing that continuously for five centuries required an economy that could reliably feed non-farming specialists out of the agricultural surplus of others. The tombs are, in one sense, a graph of the state’s ability to extract and redirect wealth, and their decline in size and quality in the late Twentieth Dynasty is a visible symptom of that ability breaking down.

The second thing the valley reveals is the texture of ordinary working life with a clarity found almost nowhere else in the ancient world. The Deir el-Medina ostraca record wages paid in grain, disputes settled before local courts staffed by the workmen themselves, absences logged against each man’s name with the reason noted, from illness to brewing beer to a wife’s confinement, loans, sales, marriages, adulteries, and complaints. We can read the letters of a scribe named Butehamun and follow the fortunes of particular families across generations. This is social history at ground level: not the propaganda of the temple walls but the account book and the grumble, the record of a community that happened to spend its working days cutting the tombs of gods and its evenings arguing over unpaid debts. The workmen who built the resting places of the divine kings were themselves buried in decorated tombs of their own on the hillside above the village, a middle stratum of Egyptian society made visible by the accident of their trade.

The third thing the valley makes plain is how thoroughly religion and administration were fused in the New Kingdom state. The same bureaucracy that logged grain rations also governed the sacred labor of preparing a king for divinity, and there was no boundary between the two. The scribe of the tomb kept the accounts and recorded the strike; the vizier, the highest official under the king, personally inspected the work and adjudicated disputes; the security of the necropolis was a matter of state policing. When that policing weakened, the tombs were robbed, which means the fate of the royal dead was ultimately a function of the strength of the government. The valley thus connects the loftiest theology to the most practical questions of order and supply, and it teaches a lesson that runs through all of Egyptian history: the sacred depended on the solvency and the reach of the state, and when the state faltered, so did the protection of its gods.

The Myth to Correct: A Hidden Tomb Was Not a Safe Tomb

The organizing belief behind the valley was that concealment would defeat theft, and the most durable modern misconception about the place is that it worked. It did not. The great majority of the royal tombs were robbed in antiquity, many of them within a few generations of the burial and some almost immediately, and the treasure that the theology demanded be buried with the king was precisely what made the concealment fail. Gold does not care whether it is hidden. A tomb packed with worked gold, silver, precious oils, and fine linen was worth robbing no matter how well disguised its entrance, and the very people best placed to rob it were the small, closed community that knew exactly where each entrance lay.

This is the heart of the hidden-tomb thesis. The Valley of the Kings represents a rational strategy of concealment over monumentality, a deliberate trade of the pyramid’s advertised glory for the security of secrecy. But the trade rested on a flawed premise, that the location could be kept secret from the only people who could exploit it. The tombs were cut and stocked by a hereditary workforce living a short walk away, supervised by officials, guarded by a necropolis police force, and known to the priests who conducted the burials. Secrecy on those terms was never real. The knowledge of where the kings lay was distributed across exactly the population most tempted and most able to act on it, and when the discipline of the state that fed and policed that population weakened, the knowledge turned into opportunity.

The Reality of Ancient Robbery

Yes. Most of the tombs were plundered in antiquity, often within a few generations of burial, and the robberies are documented in the Egyptians’ own records. Investigations, arrests, and confessions from the late New Kingdom survive on papyrus, and the near-total absence of original grave goods across the valley confirms the scale of the looting.

The evidence for ancient robbery is not an inference from empty tombs alone; the Egyptians left a paper trail of the crime and of their attempts to punish it. A group of documents known collectively as the Tomb Robbery Papyri, dating to the reigns of Ramesses IX and his successors around 1110 BCE, records official investigations into the plundering of royal and private tombs on the Theban west bank. Inspectors were sent to check which tombs had been violated, suspects were rounded up and interrogated, sometimes under beating, and their confessions were transcribed. One robber’s account describes breaking into a royal tomb, stripping the gold from the king’s and queen’s mummies, and dividing the spoil among the gang. These papyri also expose a political scandal: the investigations became entangled in a feud between two Theban officials, and there are signs that some in authority were themselves complicit in the trade. The robberies, in other words, were not the work of outsiders slipping past the guards but a systemic corruption reaching into the administration charged with protecting the dead.

The robbery of the valley was so complete and so consequential that it became one of the forces pulling the New Kingdom apart, as the looting of the royal necropolis merged with a wider breakdown of order on the Theban west bank. That larger story, the connection between the plundering of the tombs and the collapse of the New Kingdom state, is the subject of the account of tomb robbery and the fall of the New Kingdom; for the valley itself, the essential point is that the concealment strategy had failed so badly by the dynasty’s end that the state could no longer guarantee the safety of a single royal body.

How the Priests Salvaged the Royal Dead

The final proof that concealment failed is what the Egyptians themselves did about it. Rather than continue to trust the individual hidden tomb, the priests of the Twenty-first Dynasty, in the generations after the New Kingdom, went through the valley recovering the violated royal mummies, rewrapping them, sometimes relabeling them with notes on which king each battered body belonged to, and gathering them into a small number of hidden group burials, or caches, where they hoped the dead might finally rest undisturbed. This was an admission, written into the archaeological record, that the original plan had collapsed. The kings could no longer be protected one tomb at a time, so they were hidden together in secret.

Two of these caches account for most of the surviving royal mummies of the New Kingdom. One was a shaft tomb near Deir el-Bahari, discovered in 1881, which held dozens of royal and priestly mummies packed together, among them Seti I, Ramesses II, and Thutmose III, kings whose own splendid tombs had long since been emptied. The second was the tomb of Amenhotep II, KV35, found in 1898, which the priests had used as a second collective hiding place, its side chambers stacked with rewrapped kings. The discovery of these caches restored to history the actual bodies of the great pharaohs of the empire, but it did so in a way that underscored the failure of the valley: the mummies survived not in their magnificent decorated tombs but bundled anonymously into borrowed holes in the rock, stripped of the gold that had been buried with them, saved only by being moved out of the very tombs designed to protect them. The hidden-tomb strategy ended with the kings hidden a second time, from their own necropolis.

The Great Tombs and the Largest of Them All

Within the valley the tombs range enormously in scale, from single unfinished shafts to vast multi-level complexes, and the largest of them overturn the assumption that a royal tomb was a simple corridor to a burial chamber. The tomb of Seti I, KV17, discovered by the Italian showman and excavator Giovanni Belzoni in 1817, descends more than a hundred meters through beautifully decorated corridors and halls to a vaulted burial chamber, its ceiling painted with an astronomical map, and it long stood as the benchmark of what a royal tomb could be. The tomb of Amenhotep II, KV35, is notable both for its decoration and for its later career as a mummy cache. The tomb of Ramesses III, KV11, offers some of the most varied painted scenes in the valley, including unusual images of daily life and foreign peoples that break from the strictly funerary program of the walls.

The largest tomb in the valley, though, belongs not to a king at all but to the sons of one. KV5 was known to early explorers but dismissed as small and choked with debris, and its true extent came to light only through the systematic re-examination of the necropolis by the Theban Mapping Project under the archaeologist Kent Weeks. Clearing the flood-packed rubble, the project revealed not a modest tomb but a sprawling complex of well over a hundred chambers and corridors radiating from a central pillared hall, the largest tomb ever found in Egypt. Inscriptions and images identify it as a collective mausoleum for the numerous sons of Ramesses II, a communal burial for the princes of the most prolific royal family of the New Kingdom.

The Significance of KV5

KV5 is the largest tomb in the Valley of the Kings, a complex of well over a hundred chambers built as a communal burial for the many sons of Ramesses II. Long dismissed as minor and clogged with flood debris, its scale was revealed by the Theban Mapping Project, transforming what scholars thought a royal tomb could be.

The rediscovery of KV5 mattered for reasons beyond its record-breaking size. It demonstrated that the valley was not fully known even after two centuries of exploration, that debris-filled tombs written off by earlier diggers could conceal major finds, and that patient mapping could outperform the treasure hunting that had driven so much early work at the site. It also revealed a kind of tomb the standard model had not prepared scholars for, a branching family sepulcher rather than a single royal descent, expanding the understanding of how the New Kingdom court handled the burial of its collateral royalty. KV5 stands as a warning against assuming the valley has yielded all its secrets and as evidence that the necropolis was a more complex institution than the roll of famous kings suggests.

Locating the Valley: Geography and Setting

The Valley of the Kings lies on the west bank of the Nile opposite the ancient city of Thebes, within the modern governorate whose administrative center is Luxor in southern Egypt. Its position was chosen for a combination of practical and symbolic reasons that together explain why the New Kingdom kings settled on this particular fold of desert. Geographically, the west bank was the land of the dead in Egyptian cosmology, the side of the river where the sun set and where the living crossed to bury and commemorate their dead, while the east bank held the temples of the living gods at Karnak and Luxor. Building the royal cemetery on the west was therefore theologically inevitable, and the great temple of Karnak across the water, whose priesthood of Amun grew into a power rivaling the crown, is treated in the study of the temple of Karnak at Thebes; the valley and Karnak were the two poles, funerary and cultic, of the same Theban sacred landscape.

Within the west bank, the specific choice of the valley added concealment to symbolism. The tombs are tucked into a natural amphitheater of high cliffs reached through a narrow, easily watched entrance gorge, a bowl in the desert screened from the cultivation and dominated by the pyramid peak of al-Qurn. A cemetery in such a place could be approached only along a few controllable paths, which suited a project built on secrecy and policing. The desert setting also served preservation: the extreme dryness that mummified the workmen’s discarded ostraca did the same for painted plaster and organic grave goods, so that the arid isolation which the kings chose for security also gave posterity the preservation that makes the valley so rich a source. The one thing the setting did not reckon with was water. On the rare occasions when desert storms sent flash floods pouring down the wadis, the same narrow gorges that channeled visitors channeled torrents into the open tomb entrances, and much of the worst damage in the valley comes not from robbers but from these violent, occasional inundations soaking the vulnerable shale.

How the Valley Was Explored and Studied

The recovery of the Valley of the Kings for knowledge was a long process that ran from plunder toward science. In antiquity the Greeks and Romans were already tourists here; a number of the open tombs carry ancient graffiti scratched by classical visitors who came to marvel at the corridors and their paintings, evidence that some tombs stood open and known long after the kings were gone. Through the medieval and early modern centuries the valley was known to local inhabitants and occasionally to European travelers, but systematic recording began only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the scholars attached to the French expedition surveyed and drew the accessible tombs and the English traveler John Gardner Wilkinson numbered the entrances.

The early nineteenth century was the age of the great clearances and, too often, the great removals. Giovanni Belzoni opened several major tombs, including that of Seti I, and shipped antiquities to European collections. Much early work was frankly a hunt for portable treasure and inscribed objects, conducted with little regard for the context that modern archaeology prizes. The turning point in the popular imagination came in 1922, when Howard Carter, backed by Lord Carnarvon, located the nearly intact tomb of Tutankhamun, a find whose completeness let scholars finally see what a royal burial had originally contained and whose fame fixed the valley in the modern mind. The methods that revealed the fullest picture, however, were the unglamorous ones: the meticulous mapping, recording, and conservation of the twentieth century, above all the comprehensive survey of the necropolis that reopened questions the treasure hunters had closed and rediscovered the true scale of tombs like KV5. The trajectory of study in the valley runs from smashing into tombs for gold, to copying their texts, to mapping and preserving them as a total record, and each stage has left its mark on how much of the site survives to be understood.

The Valley of the Queens and the Wider Theban Necropolis

The Valley of the Kings did not stand alone but anchored a whole landscape of west-bank cemeteries, and distinguishing it from its neighbors clears up a frequent confusion. A short distance to the south lies a separate valley the Egyptians called Ta-Set-Neferu, the Place of Beauty, known as the Valley of the Queens. This was the burial ground for queens, princesses, and royal children, distinct in both location and function from the kings’ necropolis. Its most celebrated tomb is that of Nefertari, the great royal wife of Ramesses II, QV66, whose painted chambers rank among the finest in all of Egypt for the delicacy and preservation of their color. The tombs of the Valley of the Queens carry a QV designation, for Queens’ Valley, paralleling the KV series of the kings.

Between and around these two royal valleys spread the tombs of the nobles, the officials and priests of the New Kingdom court, cut into the hillsides of the Theban necropolis in their hundreds and often decorated with vivid scenes of daily life, banquets, hunting, and agriculture that complement the strictly funerary art of the royal tombs. The workmen’s own cemetery climbed the slope above Deir el-Medina. Taken together, the kings’ valley, the queens’ valley, the nobles’ tombs, the workers’ village, and the row of mortuary temples along the desert edge formed a single vast city of the dead, organized by rank, each stratum of New Kingdom society finding its place in the west-bank landscape. The Valley of the Kings was the summit of that hierarchy, reserved for the god-kings themselves, but it makes full sense only as the crown of a much larger funerary world.

Kings’ Valley and Queens’ Valley Distinguished

The Valley of the Kings held New Kingdom pharaohs, while the nearby Valley of the Queens held queens, princesses, and royal children. They are separate wadis on the Theban west bank with distinct tomb numbering, the KV and QV series. The kings’ tombs are generally larger and their programs centered on the king’s divine rebirth.

Why Royal Tomb Building in the Valley Ended

The valley stopped receiving royal burials at the close of the New Kingdom, and the reasons are inseparable from the wider collapse of the imperial state. As central authority weakened in the late Twentieth Dynasty, the west bank descended into insecurity, the tomb robberies became endemic, and the machinery at Deir el-Medina that had sustained the work for five centuries broke down along with the government that fed it. The last king generally reckoned to have prepared a tomb in the valley was Ramesses XI, whose tomb, KV4, was left unfinished and apparently never used for his burial. With the fragmentation of Egypt after the New Kingdom, the political conditions that had made the valley possible ceased to exist.

The fragmentation itself, the splitting of Egypt into a northern kingdom and a Theban priestly domain, is the subject of the account of how Egypt split after the New Kingdom, and that political rupture is the direct cause of the valley’s abandonment as a royal cemetery. The kings of the following period were buried elsewhere, most famously in the delta city of Tanis, where later rulers built their tombs within a temple enclosure in the north rather than in the exposed and by then thoroughly plundered Theban hills. The choice of Tanis was itself a verdict on the valley: a burial inside a walled temple in a populated city was judged safer than a hidden tomb in a desert that had proven impossible to protect. The end of the Valley of the Kings was thus both a political fact, the loss of the unified state that ran it, and a security judgment, the recognition that the concealment strategy had failed and would not be tried again in the same form.

The Close of the Valley’s Use

Royal burials in the valley ended with the close of the New Kingdom, around 1070 BCE, after roughly five centuries of use. The last royal tomb prepared there is generally attributed to Ramesses XI, though it appears never to have received his burial. Later kings were interred elsewhere, notably at Tanis in the delta.

Preservation and the Valley Today

The Valley of the Kings endures as one of the most studied and most visited archaeological landscapes in the world, and its survival is a continuing act of conservation against real threats. The greatest dangers are not the ancient robbers, whose work is long done, but water, humidity, and human presence. Flash floods remain a periodic hazard, and elaborate drainage and diversion works have been built to keep storm water out of the open tombs. Inside the tombs, the breath and body heat of visitors raise humidity and deposit moisture on the painted walls, and the salts and microbes this encourages can lift and blister paint that survived three millennia of dry stillness. Conservators manage the site by rotating which tombs are open to the public, installing barriers, glass, and climate controls, and in the most fragile cases, such as the tomb of Nefertari in the neighboring queens’ valley, restricting access sharply.

A durable tension runs through the modern management of the valley. The tombs are a source of knowledge and of national income, and they are meant to be seen; yet every visitor is a small agent of decay, and the paintings that draw the crowds are damaged by the crowds that come to see them. The response has been to create facsimiles, precise replicas of the most vulnerable tombs that let visitors experience the art without breathing on the original, and to concentrate research on recording every surface in full before it degrades further. The valley that the kings built to be hidden and closed has become one of the most open and photographed places on earth, and preserving it now means, in a sense, partially re-hiding it, limiting the access that its fame generates so that the paintings survive for the study and wonder of those who come later.

Access to the Tombs

Yes. A rotating selection of tombs in the Valley of the Kings is open to visitors, with a general ticket covering several tombs and separate tickets for the most famous, such as those of Tutankhamun and Seti I. Access to the most fragile tombs is limited or managed through replicas to protect the ancient paintings.

The Anatomy of a Royal Tomb

A tomb in the valley followed a recognizable sequence of parts, each with a name and a religious meaning, and learning that sequence turns a bewildering warren of corridors into a readable structure. The tomb began at a cut entrance in the rock face or the valley floor, sometimes concealed beneath the debris of an earlier excavation, opening onto the first of a series of descending corridors. The Egyptians had technical terms for these elements, preserved in a papyrus plan and in the workmen’s records: the corridors, the passages, the hall that the texts call the hall of hindering, and the pillared chamber. The descent was rarely a single straight shot in the earlier tombs; it turned, dropped through a protective well, and opened into halls before reaching its goal.

The well shaft is one of the most distinctive features. In many tombs a deep vertical pit interrupts the corridor partway down. Its practical purpose was probably twofold, to catch and hold any flood water that entered the tomb before it could reach the burial chamber, and to obstruct robbers who would have to bridge or descend the pit to continue. Its religious meaning layered onto the practical one, for the well was associated with the burial shaft of the god Osiris and often decorated as a sacred space. In some tombs the far wall of the well was plastered over and painted after the burial to disguise the fact that the corridor continued beyond it, a concealment that the robbers, who knew the standard plan, rarely found convincing for long.

The heart of the tomb was the burial chamber, which the Egyptians called the house of gold, the room where the king’s sarcophagus stood and where the transformation into a god was completed. In the grandest tombs this chamber was a pillared hall with a vaulted or astronomically painted ceiling, its walls carrying the culminating scenes of the underworld books, its floor sometimes dropping to a crypt that held the massive stone sarcophagus. Around the burial chamber clustered subsidiary rooms, storerooms and annexes and side chambers that held the funerary equipment, the furniture, the food, the ritual objects, and the many other things a king would need. The tomb of Tutankhamun, small as it was, still had its antechamber, burial chamber, treasury, and annex crammed with thousands of objects, and it lets us imagine, multiplied many times over, what the great emptied tombs of the powerful kings must once have contained.

What did the burial chamber hold?

The burial chamber, called the house of gold, held the king’s stone sarcophagus enclosing nested coffins and the royal mummy, surrounded in the finest burials by gilded shrines. Its walls carried the climactic underworld texts, and adjoining rooms stored the funerary equipment the king needed for the afterlife.

What Was Buried With the Kings

The grave goods of a New Kingdom pharaoh were staggering in quantity and value, and reconstructing them depends almost entirely on the single tomb that survived intact, because everywhere else the robbers reached the treasure first. From Tutankhamun’s burial, and from the fragments and inventories that survive elsewhere, we can sketch what a royal burial contained. At its center lay the body, mummified through the elaborate seventy-day process, wrapped in linen with amulets between the layers, its face covered by a gold mask in the richest cases, sealed within nested coffins, themselves enclosed in a stone sarcophagus, itself surrounded by a series of gilded wooden shrines fitting one inside the next like a set of boxes.

Around this core the tomb held everything the theology and the king’s status demanded. There were canopic containers for the preserved internal organs under the protection of four goddesses; hundreds of shabti figurines, small servant statuettes meant to do the king’s labor in the afterlife; furniture of the finest craftsmanship, beds, chairs, and chests inlaid with ivory, ebony, and gold; dismantled chariots; weapons and staves; jewelry in gold and semiprecious stone; vessels of alabaster and precious oils; clothing, sandals, and linen; and food and wine to sustain the dead. The scale of precious metal and rare material buried in a single royal tomb reflected the wealth of the empire at its height, the same gold and tribute flowing in from Nubia and the conquered lands that the account of the Egyptian empire’s wealth describes. That concentration of portable riches, sealed in the ground behind a disguised door, is the plain reason the concealment strategy was doomed. A body could perhaps be hidden; a fortune in gold, known to exist and known roughly where to lie, could not be kept safe by secrecy alone.

Guarding the Necropolis

Concealment was only the first line of defense; the valley was also actively policed, and the machinery of its security is well documented. Responsibility for the west-bank necropolis ran up a chain of officials to the vizier of the south, the highest administrator under the king, who inspected the work and adjudicated the most serious matters. Day to day, the tombs and the desert approaches were watched by the Medjay, a corps of desert patrolmen who served as the police of the necropolis, and by guards and doorkeepers attached to the work. Access was controlled at the narrow entrance to the valley, and the tombs themselves, once sealed, were closed with plastered doors stamped with the seal of the royal necropolis, the jackal over nine bound captives, so that any breach of a seal was in principle detectable on inspection.

The written record of this security apparatus is the necropolis journal, the running account kept by the scribe of the tomb, which logged the comings and goings, the deliveries, the absences, and the incidents. It is from these records and from the tomb robbery investigations that we know the system in operation and, more tellingly, in failure. The inspections that were supposed to detect robbery instead sometimes documented it after the fact; the officials charged with protection were sometimes the ones profiting; and the seals that were meant to guarantee an undisturbed tomb were broken and, occasionally, crudely resealed by robbers hoping to buy time. The security of the valley, in short, depended on the honesty and the strength of the people running it, and both were finite. When the state was strong and its officials disciplined, the tombs were reasonably safe; when the state weakened and its servants went unpaid, the same insiders who guarded the tombs became their plunderers. The policing of the necropolis is one more demonstration that the fate of the royal dead tracked the health of the government.

Why the Pyramid Failed and Whether the Valley Was Better

The whole rationale of the Valley of the Kings rests on a judgment about the pyramid, that as a strategy for protecting a royal burial it had failed, and it is worth examining that judgment directly. The great pyramids of the Old Kingdom were engineering triumphs, but as security devices they had a fatal flaw: they announced exactly where the king lay and concentrated all the effort on making the burial chamber hard to reach rather than hard to find. A determined robber with time knew precisely which mountain of stone to tunnel into, and given generations, robbers found the chambers and emptied them. By the New Kingdom, the pyramids of a thousand years earlier stood open and looted, a visible object lesson in the failure of monumental burial, and the theology that had once made the pyramid a solar machine could no longer justify the risk it posed to the body inside.

The valley was an attempt to fix the flaw by inverting the strategy: hide the location instead of fortifying it, and separate the memorial from the grave so that honoring the king no longer meant advertising his tomb. On its own terms the logic was sound, and it is a genuine question whether the valley was in fact any better than the pyramid at keeping the dead safe. The honest answer is that it was not much better, and possibly no better at all. Both strategies ended in near-total robbery. What the valley bought was not safety but a delay and a concealment that failed more slowly and less completely, and the survival of Tutankhamun’s tomb, saved only by the accident of being buried under later debris, hints that the concealment could occasionally work when reinforced by luck. The deeper lesson is that no burial strategy could overcome the fundamental problem, which was not architectural but economic: as long as the theology demanded that immense wealth be buried with the king, and as long as the location was known to the people who did the burying, no design could keep the treasure safe. The pyramid failed by being findable; the valley failed by being knowable. The choice between them was a choice between two ways of losing.

Was the hidden tomb really more secure than the pyramid?

Not meaningfully. Both the pyramids and the hidden rock-cut tombs were robbed in antiquity, and the valley’s concealment delayed rather than prevented plundering. The core problem was economic, not architectural: burying great wealth with a king, at a location known to the workers, made robbery nearly inevitable under any design.

The Tomb as a Book of the Afterlife

The funerary compositions painted in the royal tombs deserve closer attention, because they are not a random assortment of religious images but a developing literary and theological project spread across five centuries of walls. The underworld books are the New Kingdom’s great contribution to Egyptian religious thought, and the valley is their primary surviving library. Their shared subject is the nightly journey of the sun god through the twelve hours of darkness, a journey that the dead king joins and by which he is reborn, and each book approaches that journey with a different structure and emphasis.

The Amduat is the oldest and most fundamental of these guides. It divides the underworld into the twelve hours of the night and shows, register by register, the sun god traveling in his barque through each hour, meeting its inhabitants, overcoming its dangers, and reaching the dawn. It is a map as much as a text, naming the beings and places the traveler will encounter so that the king, equipped with the knowledge, can pass safely. In the earliest tombs it appears in a spare, almost diagrammatic style, and its presence in the burial chamber turned the room into the deepest hour of the night, the point of union between the sun god and the dead king from which rebirth proceeds. The Book of Gates, appearing somewhat later, restructures the journey around twelve gates, each guarded and each requiring the traveler to know its keepers, and it introduces a famous scene of judgment and a striking depiction of the four races of humankind as the Egyptians conceived them. The Book of Caverns dispenses with the hourly structure and organizes the underworld into caverns filled with the blessed and the damned, dwelling on the punishment of the enemies of the sun god in pits of fire. The Litany of Re, often placed near the tomb entrance, hails the sun god in his many forms and identifies the king with him from the outset of the descent.

Overhead, the ceilings carried a different but complementary vision. Astronomical ceilings charted the decans, the star groups by which the Egyptians told the hours of the night across the year, and depicted the constellations in their peculiar Egyptian forms, the hippopotamus, the bull’s foreleg, the crocodile. In the grandest tombs the sky goddess Nut stretched across the ceiling, swallowing the sun each evening to give birth to it each morning, her body the vault of heaven through which the sun and the dead king passed. The Ramesside Books of the Day and the Night traced the solar course above and below the horizon in a single continuous scheme. Reading a royal tomb from entrance to burial chamber, a knowledgeable Egyptian would have moved through a coordinated cosmos, the walls carrying the journey through the hours and gates of the night while the ceiling arched the heavens overhead, the whole ensemble engineered to accomplish one thing, the transformation of a dead man into an immortal god traveling forever with the sun.

A Walk Through the Notable Tombs

To make the necropolis concrete, it helps to walk in imagination through a few of its most significant tombs, each of which illustrates a different facet of the valley. The tomb of Thutmose III, KV34, hidden high in a cleft and reached by a steep climb, preserves the early bent-axis design and the oldest complete Amduat, its burial chamber painted to resemble an unrolled papyrus with the sun god’s night journey rendered in a swift, cursive line and its walls listing the hours of the night. It shows the necropolis in its formative phase, when concealment and defense still governed the plan.

The tomb of Seti I, KV17, represents the artistic summit. Its long descent through hall after hall of exquisitely carved and painted relief culminates in a vaulted burial chamber whose astronomical ceiling and finely modeled figures set a standard that later, faster work rarely reached. Belzoni’s opening of it in 1817 introduced Europe to the full splendor of a royal tomb, and its alabaster sarcophagus, translucent and covered in funerary texts, is among the treasures carried off to a European collection. The tomb of Ramesses VI, KV9, is striking for the completeness of its cosmological program, its ceilings carrying the full Books of the Day and the Night with the elongated figure of Nut arched across the heavens, and it holds a further significance for the valley as a whole: the debris thrown up by its cutting buried the entrance to the small tomb below it, and that accident preserved the burial of Tutankhamun for posterity.

The tomb of Ramesses III, KV11, sometimes called the Harpers’ Tomb for its images of blind musicians, breaks from the purely funerary program with scenes of daily activities, foreign peoples, and the goods of the world, offering a rare glimpse of the range Egyptian tomb art could encompass. And KV5, the vast mausoleum of the sons of Ramesses II, stands apart from all of these as a reminder that the valley held more than the tombs of individual kings, that it could accommodate a branching family sepulcher of unprecedented size, and that even a site explored for two centuries could still surprise. Each of these tombs is a chapter in the same story, the history of how the New Kingdom buried its kings, told in stone and paint from the formative concealment of Thutmose III to the grand cosmology of the late Ramessides and the sprawling ambition of KV5.

The Debates That Remain Open

For all that is known about the valley, real questions stay unsettled, and honest treatment of the site means naming them. The identity of the first king to be buried in the valley is genuinely uncertain, caught between the claims of Thutmose I and the possibility of an earlier start under Amenhotep I, and the disturbed state of the earliest tombs may mean it is never firmly resolved. The attribution of a number of tombs remains provisional, resting on decoration, inscriptions, or associated objects rather than an undisturbed body, and reattributions are still proposed as evidence is re-examined. The very completeness of the valley’s exploration is itself in question, as the discovery of new tombs and chambers in the modern era shows that the necropolis had not surrendered all its contents even after two centuries of digging.

A subtler debate concerns motive. The account given here, that concealment against robbery was the driving reason for abandoning the pyramid and adopting the hidden rock-cut tomb, is the standard explanation and is supported by the Ineni inscription and the whole logic of the separated mortuary temple. But some scholars stress other factors: the pyramid-shaped peak of al-Qurn that let the kings keep the solar symbolism, the practical suitability of the Theban cliffs for rock-cutting, the concentration of the New Kingdom court at Thebes, and the religious pull of the west bank. These are not necessarily rivals to the security explanation so much as reinforcements of it, and the most persuasive reading treats the choice of the valley as overdetermined, security and symbolism and practicality all pointing the same way. What is not in serious doubt is the outcome. Whatever mixture of motives put the kings in the valley, the tombs were robbed, and the concealment on which the whole enterprise was premised did not, in the end, protect the dead it was built to hide.

The Economy That Fed the Tombs

Cutting a royal tomb was an industrial operation sustained by a supply chain, and the Deir el-Medina records let us follow the flow of goods that kept it running. The workmen were paid in kind, chiefly in grain, emmer wheat for bread and barley for beer, delivered on a monthly cycle and calculated by rank so that a foreman or a scribe drew a larger ration than an ordinary workman. Beyond grain, the state supplied fish, vegetables, oil, and water, the last hauled across the desert to a village with no well of its own, along with the firewood, wicks, and pottery the work required. The tools of the trade, copper and bronze chisels, were themselves valuable and were issued, weighed, and accounted for, since the metal could be stolen or melted down; a chisel returned lighter than it left raised suspicion of theft.

This economy was fragile at its edges because it depended on deliveries arriving on time from a central administration that had its own troubles. When the harvest failed, when transport broke down, or when corrupt officials skimmed the supply, the rations fell into arrears, and the record of the strike under Ramesses III shows what happened then. The workmen, who had no land of their own and no alternative source of food, faced hunger the moment the deliveries stopped, and they responded not with riot but with organized withdrawal of labor, sitting down at the mortuary temples and refusing to move until they were paid. The episode is a window onto the whole system: the sacred labor of preparing kings for godhood ran on ordinary bread, and the ordinary bread ran on a supply chain that could and did fail. The tombs were sacred, but the operation that produced them was an economy, and it obeyed the ordinary laws of economies, including the law that unpaid workers stop working.

The lighting of the work is a small detail that illustrates the ingenuity the operation demanded. Cutting and painting deep inside a sealed rock tomb required light, and the workmen used lamps, wicks of twisted linen burning in oil, sometimes with salt added to reduce smoke that would have blackened the ceilings they were decorating. The lamps were issued and counted, and the number of wicks supplied is one of the ways the records let scholars estimate how many hours the crews worked. That a bureaucracy meticulous enough to count lamp wicks lay behind the paintings of the underworld captures the double character of the whole enterprise, at once a religious project of the highest ambition and a closely administered public works program run on ledgers and rations.

The Royal Body and Its Preparation

At the center of everything the valley did stood the body of the king, and the treatment of that body was the point of the whole apparatus of tomb and text. Royal mummification was the most elaborate version of a process the Egyptians had refined over many centuries, aimed at preserving the physical form so that the spirit could recognize and reinhabit it. The process, carried out over roughly seventy days in a place of embalming, involved removing the internal organs, drying the body thoroughly with natron, a natural salt, treating it with oils and resins, and wrapping it in many layers of linen with protective amulets set between the wrappings. For a king, the finest materials and the most skilled embalmers were employed, and the wrapped body was fitted with a mask and enclosed in coffins shaped to the royal form.

The care lavished on the royal body is exactly what made its violation so shocking and so profitable. When robbers reached a royal mummy, they did not merely steal from the surrounding tomb; they tore the wrappings from the body itself to reach the gold amulets and the precious mask, hacking at the mummy in their haste. The tomb robbery investigations record confessions describing precisely this, the stripping of the gold from the bodies of the king and queen, and the damaged state of many surviving royal mummies bears the physical evidence of that plundering. When the priests of the Twenty-first Dynasty gathered the violated kings for reburial, they were handling bodies that had already been ransacked, and their rewrapping was a salvage operation, an attempt to restore some dignity to remains that the robbers had reduced to a source of scrap gold. The royal body, prepared with such labor to last forever as the vessel of a god, became in the end a target to be torn apart for the metal wound into its wrappings, and its fate is the sharpest single image of how completely the concealment strategy failed.

The Later Life of the Valley

The valley’s history did not end when the last king was buried; the place went on being used, visited, and reused for the millennia that followed, and those later chapters are part of what any full account must include. In the centuries after the New Kingdom, with the royal burials removed to their caches, the open tombs stood empty and accessible, and they attracted visitors. Greek and Roman tourists came to see the famous tombs and left graffiti on the walls, thousands of scratched inscriptions recording their names and impressions, so that a modern visitor to certain tombs reads not only the ancient Egyptian texts but the marginalia of classical sightseers who came, as sightseers still come, to marvel. These graffiti are historical evidence in their own right, showing which tombs stood open in antiquity and how the valley was understood by later ages that had lost the language of its walls.

In the early Christian centuries the tombs found yet another use. Coptic hermits and monastic communities took shelter in some of the open tombs, converting the pagan sepulchers of the god-kings into cells and chapels, and leaving Christian symbols and inscriptions layered over the older decoration. The valley that had been built to hide kings became, in turn, a tourist attraction for pagans and a refuge for Christian ascetics, each age finding its own meaning in the corridors. Then came the long modern engagement, the surveying, numbering, clearing, and preserving that turned the valley from a place of plunder and curiosity into a subject of disciplined study. The trajectory across three thousand years runs from a working royal necropolis, to a robbed and abandoned one, to a classical tourist site, to a Christian refuge, to a modern archaeological landscape and heritage site drawing visitors from around the world, each layer adding to the meaning of the place without erasing what came before. Readers who want to keep track of these layers and to build their own timeline of the necropolis and its occupants can save this guide and build a personal Egypt history timeline free on VaultBook, organizing the kings, the tombs, and the phases of the valley’s long life into a study resource they can return to.

The Robbery Investigations in Detail

The documents that record the plundering of the Theban tombs are worth dwelling on, because they are among the most vivid criminal records to survive from the ancient world and because they show the valley’s security failing in real administrative time. The main body of these texts dates to the reign of Ramesses IX and the years around it, near the end of the New Kingdom, when the west bank was troubled by unrest and hunger. The investigations began when reports reached the authorities that tombs were being violated, and commissions were appointed to inspect the necropolis and determine which tombs had been breached. The inspectors’ reports survive, listing tombs examined and recording, tomb by tomb, whether each was found intact or broken into, a bureaucratic tally of a disaster in progress.

The interrogations that followed are grimmer reading. Suspects, often quarry workers, artisans, and men with legitimate access to the necropolis, were arrested and questioned, sometimes under beating of the hands and feet, and their confessions were transcribed. One well-known confession describes a gang breaking into a royal tomb, forcing the sarcophagus, stripping the gold and silver from the coffins and from the very bodies of the king and his queen, setting fire to the coffins to recover the gold more easily, and dividing the metal among the eight members of the gang. The matter-of-fact brutality of the account, the reduction of a king’s carefully prepared immortality to a heap of scrap divided eight ways, is the plainest possible statement of what robbery meant in practice. The investigations also revealed that the corruption reached upward, entangling officials who were supposed to protect the tombs, and they became caught up in a political rivalry between the two chief administrators of the Theban west and east banks, each accusing the other’s people of complicity.

What these documents establish beyond argument is that the robbery of the valley was not a late aberration but a structural feature of the necropolis in its final phase, endemic, organized, and reaching into the very administration charged with prevention. They also establish the limits of the concealment strategy with the authority of contemporary evidence: the tombs were known, their locations were no secret to the men who broke into them, and the state’s response was not to prevent the robberies, which it could not, but to investigate and punish them after the fact, which did little to stop the hemorrhage. The investigations are the paper record of the hidden-tomb thesis proving itself false, the state’s own admission, in its own words, that the tombs it had hidden could not be kept.

Why the Valley of the Kings Matters

The Valley of the Kings matters beyond its art and its famous tombs because it makes a general truth about the ancient state legible in a single place. It shows that a burial is a political and economic act, not only a religious one; that the security of the dead depended on the strength of the living government; that the concentration of wealth invites its own plundering regardless of the defenses raised around it; and that a rational strategy can fail because its premise is flawed, not because it was executed poorly. The kings who chose the valley were not foolish. Their reasoning was sound given what they knew, and their concealment was genuinely more subtle than the pyramid’s brute advertisement. They failed because the fundamental problem, the burial of great wealth at a location knowable to insiders, admitted no architectural solution, and recognizing that is more instructive than admiring the paintings.

For the study of Egyptian history the valley is doubly valuable, as a monument and as an archive. The tombs preserve the fullest surviving corpus of the New Kingdom’s funerary religion, the underworld books in their developing sequence, and some of the finest painting the civilization produced. The workers’ village beside it preserves, uniquely, the daily texture of the community that made the tombs, from wages and strikes to lawsuits and love poems, giving social historians a ground-level view of ancient life available almost nowhere else. And the robbery investigations preserve the record of the necropolis’s failure, a rare case where we can watch an ancient security system break down through the state’s own documents. The valley is thus a place where the loftiest religion, the most ordinary economy, and the hardest political realities meet, and where the gap between what a society intends and what actually happens is written plainly into the rock. That gap, between the hidden tomb meant to protect the king and the robbed tomb that could not, is the lesson the valley teaches most powerfully, and it is why the necropolis repays understanding rather than mere wonder.

The Verdict: The Hidden-Tomb Thesis

The honest verdict on the Valley of the Kings is that it was a brilliant solution to the wrong problem. The kings correctly diagnosed the pyramid’s failure, that a monument advertising the king’s location made his tomb a standing target, and they designed an alternative that addressed exactly that flaw, hiding the tomb, disguising its entrance, separating the memorial temple from the grave, and policing the approaches. Judged as a piece of reasoning, the strategy was sound, and judged as architecture and art the tombs are among the supreme achievements of the ancient world. But the strategy rested on a premise it could not secure, that the location of a tomb full of gold could be kept from the small community that cut, stocked, and guarded it, and that premise failed. The valley delayed robbery and occasionally, by luck, prevented it, as with Tutankhamun, but across the necropolis as a whole it was plundered as thoroughly as the pyramids it replaced.

This is the hidden-tomb thesis in full: the Valley of the Kings represents a deliberate trade of monumentality for concealment, of visible glory for secrecy, undertaken as a rational response to the robbery of the pyramids, and it did not pay, because the problem was never really about visibility. It was about the incompatibility of two things the Egyptian theology demanded at once, that the king be buried with immense wealth and that his tomb be kept safe, an incompatibility no burial design could resolve so long as insiders knew where the wealth lay. The kings could hide the tomb from the public but not from the workmen; they could disguise the entrance but not the fact of the treasure; and in the end they were reduced to hiding their own violated bodies a second time, gathered into secret caches by later priests who had given up on the individual tomb altogether. The valley’s beauty and its failure are the same story, and understanding the necropolis means seeing that the concealment which produced the undisturbed art also could not, and did not, keep the kings safe. The pharaohs traded the pyramid’s glory for the valley’s secrecy, and the trade bought them magnificent tombs and no lasting protection at all.

The Techniques of Concealment

Since concealment was the organizing purpose of the valley, the specific techniques the Egyptians used to hide and protect the tombs deserve a closer look, both for what they reveal about the ingenuity of the effort and for how each measure was ultimately defeated. The first and most basic technique was the choice of an inconspicuous entrance. Rather than a grand doorway, a tomb might begin as a modest cut in the valley floor or a cleft in the cliff, easily covered over with rubble and sand once the burial was complete, so that the surface betrayed nothing of the chambers below. The spoil from cutting a later tomb was sometimes dumped over the entrance of an earlier one, deliberately or otherwise, and it was exactly this kind of burial under debris that hid Tutankhamun’s tomb so effectively that it survived.

Inside, further measures multiplied the obstacles. The well shaft, already described, served both to catch flood water and to interrupt any intruder’s progress, and in some tombs its far wall was plastered and painted after the burial to disguise the continuation of the corridor beyond, so that a robber reaching the bottom of the shaft might believe he had reached the end of the tomb. Sealed doorways of stone and plaster, stamped with the necropolis seal, closed the burial chamber and the storerooms, and the passages behind them were sometimes filled with rubble to slow anyone who broke through. In a few cases the builders seem to have constructed decoy elements or unfinished-looking chambers intended to mislead. The whole descending sequence, with its turns, its shaft, and its sealed and disguised doors, was an obstacle course designed to defeat the patient, knowledgeable intruder.

Every one of these measures was, in the end, overcome, and the reason returns to the same flaw. Concealment and obstruction work against an intruder who does not know what he is looking for or where. They are far less effective against someone who helped build the tomb, or learned its plan from someone who did, and who knew that behind the plastered wall of the well the corridor continued, that the rubble fill could be dug through, that the sealed door led to the treasure. The techniques were clever, and against an ignorant outsider they might have held, but the people who robbed the valley were rarely ignorant outsiders. They were insiders or the associates of insiders, and against that adversary the disguised entrance, the false wall, and the sealed door were delays, not defenses. The sophistication of the concealment and the totality of its failure sit side by side in the same tombs, and together they make the valley’s central lesson unavoidable: you cannot hide from the people who helped you hide.

The Findable Record: A Summary of the Valley

The Valley of the Kings can be summarized as a single coordinated answer to the problem of the royal burial, and the table below draws together the dimensions this guide has examined, pairing each with the evidence on which our knowledge rests. It is offered as a study reference, a compact map of what the valley was, how it worked, and how it failed.

Dimension	What the evidence shows	How we know
Purpose	A hidden royal necropolis meant to protect the king’s body and treasure by concealment rather than by monument	The abandonment of the pyramid, the separated mortuary temples, and the Ineni inscription on cutting a tomb unseen
Location	The Theban west bank opposite Thebes and Luxor, in desert wadis beneath the pyramid peak of al-Qurn	The surviving tombs and their setting, the west-bank sacred landscape, and the necropolis records
Period of use	Early Eighteenth Dynasty to the end of the Twentieth, about 1500 to 1070 BCE, some five centuries	The sequence of royal tombs from Thutmose I to Ramesses XI and the dated administrative documents
Occupants	More than sixty tombs holding New Kingdom kings and select queens, princes, and officials	The decorated tombs, their inscriptions, associated objects, and the recovered royal mummies
Builders	A hereditary state workforce housed at Deir el-Medina, organized in two gangs under foremen and scribes	Tens of thousands of ostraca and papyri from the village, including wage, absence, and legal records
Decoration	Underworld funerary books and solar and astronomical scenes guiding the king’s rebirth with the sun	The painted and carved walls and ceilings of the tombs, read against the known funerary texts
Robbery	Near-total plundering in antiquity, often within a few generations of burial	The empty tombs, the damaged royal mummies, and the tomb robbery investigation papyri
Aftermath	The violated royal mummies gathered and rehidden in group caches by later priests	The Deir el-Bahari cache found in 1881 and the KV35 cache found in 1898

This summary carries the namable framework at the center of the guide, the hidden-tomb thesis, which holds that the valley traded the pyramid’s monumentality for concealment as a rational response to robbery, and that the trade, for all its artistic and engineering success, failed to keep the kings safe. A reader who grasps the table grasps the argument: purpose, place, and builders explain how the concealment was achieved, while robbery and aftermath explain why it did not work.

The Valley as a Graph of the New Kingdom

One of the most useful ways to read the Valley of the Kings is as a physical record of the rise, peak, and decline of the New Kingdom state, because the tombs track the fortunes of the empire almost line for line. In the early Eighteenth Dynasty, when the reunified kingdom was building its power, the tombs are careful, defensive, and comparatively modest, their bent axes and protective shafts expressing an age still preoccupied with security and not yet confident enough to build for grandeur. As the empire reached its height under the great warrior and building kings, the tombs grow in scale and ambition, their corridors lengthening and their decoration expanding into the full cosmological programs, matching the wealth that conquest and tribute poured into the treasury. The confidence of the imperial peak is written in the straightening axes and widening halls of the middle phase, tombs built by a state that could command vast resources and expected to command them indefinitely.

Then the graph turns down. The later Twentieth Dynasty tombs are smaller, hastier, and less finely finished, the work of a state whose grip was loosening, whose treasuries were strained, and whose control of the Theban west bank was slipping toward the disorder documented in the robbery investigations. The very last royal tomb attempted in the valley, that of Ramesses XI, was left unfinished and unused, an apt monument to a dynasty that could no longer complete the burial of its own kings. The decline of the tombs and the decline of the state are the same decline, and a walk through the valley in chronological order is a walk down the arc of an empire, from the cautious ambition of its founding through the confident grandeur of its peak to the failing effort of its end. The fragmentation that followed, when Egypt split and the capital of royal burial moved north, is treated in the account of how Egypt split after the New Kingdom, and the valley’s abandonment is the funerary chapter of that larger political collapse.

This reading turns the necropolis into an instrument for understanding rather than a gallery of wonders. The size of a tomb measures a reign; the quality of its finish measures the resources of a moment; the presence or absence of robbery measures the strength of the state’s control; and the shift from individual hidden tombs to collective priestly caches measures the final surrender of the whole concealment strategy. Read this way, the Valley of the Kings is not a static set of monuments but a dynamic record of a state’s capacity over five centuries, and it rewards the reader who approaches it with the questions of a historian, asking what each tomb reveals about the moment that produced it, rather than the reader who approaches it only with the camera of a tourist. That shift, from wonder to understanding, from description to causation and evidence, is what turns the valley from a spectacle into a source. Readers ready to test that understanding, to check themselves on the dates, the kings, the tombs, and the reasons behind the necropolis, can carry the material further as structured study, and the guide closes with the questions most often asked about the valley.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the Valley of the Kings and who is buried there?

The Valley of the Kings is the royal necropolis of the New Kingdom, a system of desert wadis on the Theban west bank across the Nile from Luxor, where Egyptian pharaohs cut hidden rock tombs into the limestone instead of building pyramids. More than sixty tombs lie there. Its occupants are chiefly the kings of the Eighteenth through Twentieth Dynasties, among them Thutmose I and III, Amenhotep II, the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, Tutankhamun, Seti I, and a long line of Ramesside rulers, along with a select group of queens, princes, and favored officials. The valley was chosen so the royal dead could be hidden from the robbers who had emptied the visible pyramids, though most of the tombs were plundered in antiquity regardless.

Q: Why were pharaohs buried in the Valley of the Kings instead of pyramids?

Pharaohs abandoned the pyramid because it had failed as a security device. A pyramid announced exactly where a king lay and concentrated all its defenses on making the burial chamber hard to reach rather than hard to find, and over the centuries robbers emptied nearly every one. The New Kingdom kings inverted the strategy: hide the tomb instead of advertising it. They cut concealed rock tombs into a remote desert valley and, crucially, separated the memorial temple, built in public view on the desert edge, from the hidden grave, so honoring a king no longer meant revealing his burial. The pyramid-shaped peak of al-Qurn let them keep the solar symbolism without building the target. The reasoning was sound, though the concealment ultimately failed to stop the robbers.

Q: How many tombs are in the Valley of the Kings?

The valley contains more than sixty known tombs, numbered in a KV series, for Kings’ Valley, that runs past sixty. Not all belonged to kings; the total includes tombs of queens, princes, nobles, and officials, along with shafts used for storage or left unfinished. The KV numbers were assigned in order of discovery, beginning with John Gardner Wilkinson in 1827, rather than by date or importance, which is why a low number can sit beside a high one on the map. New tombs and chambers have continued to come to light in the modern era, so the count is best treated as open rather than fixed. The number should be understood as the running total of what exploration has revealed, not a closed and final figure.

Q: Where is the Valley of the Kings?

The Valley of the Kings lies on the west bank of the Nile in southern Egypt, opposite the ancient city of Thebes, beneath the modern town of Luxor. It is not a single ravine but a set of dry desert watercourses folded into the cliffs behind the cultivated strip, dominated by a natural pyramid-shaped peak called al-Qurn. The choice of the west bank was theological, since in Egyptian belief the land of the dead lay where the sun set, while the temples of the living gods stood on the east bank at Karnak and Luxor. Within the west bank, the specific valley offered concealment: a natural amphitheater reached through a narrow, easily watched entrance gorge, screened from the fields and controllable along a few paths, which suited a necropolis built on secrecy.

Q: Which pharaohs are buried in the Valley of the Kings?

The valley holds the kings of the New Kingdom, from the Eighteenth through the Twentieth Dynasties. Eighteenth Dynasty occupants include Thutmose I, Thutmose III and his son Amenhotep II, the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, and the boy king Tutankhamun. The Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties add the Ramesside kings, above all Seti I, whose tomb is the finest in the valley, Ramesses II in KV7 with his many sons buried nearby in KV5, and Ramesses III in the richly decorated KV11, down through the later and weaker Ramesses kings whose tombs shrink as the dynasty declines. Beyond the kings, the valley admitted certain queens, princes, and a few exceptionally favored officials, such as Yuya and Thuya, whose nearly intact burial was among the richest found before Tutankhamun.

Q: How were the tombs in the Valley of the Kings decorated?

The tombs were decorated with religious texts and scenes that functioned as a guide for the dead king’s journey through the underworld, not as ornament. Walls carried the great funerary books, the Amduat, the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, the Litany of Re, and passages from the Book of the Dead, mapping the twelve hours and guarded gates of the night through which the sun god and the king travel toward rebirth. Ceilings bore astronomical maps and the arched sky goddess Nut. The work was applied in stages: the rock was plastered, laid out on a red grid, drawn and corrected by outline scribes, then carved in relief or painted directly in mineral pigments. Sealed in the dry, closed tombs, these colors have kept their intensity across three thousand years in the best-preserved chambers.

Q: Were the Valley of the Kings tombs robbed?

Yes. The great majority of the royal tombs were plundered in antiquity, many within a few generations of the burial and some almost immediately, and the treasure buried with the kings was precisely what made the concealment fail. The robberies are documented in the Egyptians’ own records: a group of tomb robbery papyri from around the reign of Ramesses IX preserves official inspections, arrests, interrogations under beating, and confessions describing how gangs stripped the gold from royal coffins and mummies. The corruption reached into the administration meant to protect the tombs. So complete was the failure that later priests of the Twenty-first Dynasty gathered the violated royal mummies and hid them together in secret caches, an admission that the individual hidden tomb could no longer keep the kings safe.

Q: When was the Valley of the Kings used?

The valley was used as the royal burial ground for roughly five centuries, from the early Eighteenth Dynasty around 1500 BCE to the end of the Twentieth Dynasty a little after 1070 BCE. Royal burials began in the opening phase of the New Kingdom, with Thutmose I most often named as the first king interred there, though some trace the choice to a predecessor. Use continued through the imperial peak and into the dynasty’s decline, with the last royal tomb generally attributed to Ramesses XI, though that tomb appears never to have received his burial. After the New Kingdom fragmented, the valley was abandoned as a royal cemetery and later kings were buried elsewhere, notably at Tanis in the delta, judged safer than the by then thoroughly plundered Theban hills.

Q: How long did it take to cut a tomb in the Valley of the Kings?

A royal tomb took years to excavate and could occupy much of a reign. Work generally began when a king took the throne and continued for as long as he lived, so a long reign produced a large, deep, richly decorated tomb, while a short reign left a small one. This link made the tomb, in effect, a clock measuring the king’s years on the throne. The vast, finely finished tomb of Seti I reflects a substantial reign and a well-funded operation, whereas the cramped tomb of Tutankhamun, who died young, is so small that many scholars suspect it was not originally cut for a king. When a pharaoh died with his tomb unfinished, the burial party plastered and painted the completed chambers and left the rest as bare rock, so a walk through the valley passes many interrupted projects.

Q: Who cut the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and where did they live?

The tombs were cut by a permanent, state-employed community of skilled workmen who lived in a walled village between the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens, a place the Egyptians called Set Maat, the Place of Truth, known as Deir el-Medina. The workforce was organized like a ship’s crew, split into a right and a left gang under foremen, with scribes keeping the records. The men worked eight-day stretches, sleeping in huts on the ridge above the valley, and returned to the village on their rest days. The trades passed down through families across generations. Because the villagers were unusually literate and the desert preserved their notes, Deir el-Medina has yielded tens of thousands of ostraca and papyri documenting wages, disputes, absences, and even an organized labor strike under Ramesses III, giving us the tomb-builders by name.

Q: What is KV5 and why is it the largest tomb in the Valley of the Kings?

KV5 is the largest tomb ever found in Egypt, a sprawling complex of well over a hundred chambers and corridors radiating from a central pillared hall. It is not a king’s tomb but a communal mausoleum built for the many sons of Ramesses II, the most prolific royal family of the New Kingdom. Early explorers knew of KV5 but dismissed it as small and choked with flood debris, and its true extent came to light only through the systematic re-examination of the necropolis by the Theban Mapping Project under Kent Weeks. Its rediscovery mattered beyond its record size: it showed the valley was not fully known even after two centuries of exploration, that debris-filled tombs written off by earlier diggers could conceal major finds, and that patient mapping outperformed the treasure hunting of earlier work.

Q: What is the difference between the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens?

The two are separate burial grounds on the Theban west bank with distinct functions. The Valley of the Kings held the pharaohs of the New Kingdom, while the nearby Valley of the Queens, which the Egyptians called Ta-Set-Neferu, the Place of Beauty, held queens, princesses, and royal children. Their tombs carry different designations, the KV series for the kings and the QV series for the queens. The kings’ tombs are generally larger and their decoration centers on the king’s identification with the sun god and his rebirth, while the queens’ tombs, though often smaller, include some of the finest painting in Egypt, above all the tomb of Nefertari, great royal wife of Ramesses II. Both valleys belonged to a single vast west-bank necropolis that also included the tombs of nobles and the workers’ cemetery, organized by rank.

Q: Can visitors enter the tombs in the Valley of the Kings?

Yes. A rotating selection of tombs in the valley is open to visitors, with a general ticket typically covering entry to several tombs and separate tickets required for the most famous, such as those of Tutankhamun and Seti I. Access is rotated and managed to protect the ancient paintings, because the greatest threats to the tombs are water, humidity, and human presence: the breath and body heat of visitors raise moisture on the walls and encourage the salts and microbes that lift and blister paint. The most fragile tombs are opened only under strict limits or experienced through precise facsimiles that spare the originals. The valley the kings built to be hidden and sealed has become one of the most visited archaeological sites in the world, and preserving it now means partly limiting the access its fame generates.

Q: Why did royal tomb building in the Valley of the Kings stop?

Royal tomb building in the valley ended at the close of the New Kingdom, and the reasons are inseparable from the collapse of the imperial state. As central authority weakened in the late Twentieth Dynasty, the Theban west bank fell into insecurity, tomb robbery became endemic, and the supply system at Deir el-Medina that had sustained the work for five centuries broke down along with the government that funded it. The last royal tomb attempted, generally attributed to Ramesses XI, was left unfinished and apparently never used for his burial. When Egypt then fragmented into a northern kingdom and a Theban priestly domain, the unified state that had run the valley ceased to exist. Later kings were buried elsewhere, notably at Tanis in the delta, where a tomb inside a walled temple was judged safer than a hidden desert tomb that had proven impossible to protect.