At the time of the discovery, archaeologists believed that all the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, across the river from ancient Thebes, had already been cleared. Within a few generations, the tomb’s entrance had been clogged with stone debris, built over by workmen’s huts and forgotten.īy the time he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter had been excavating Egyptian antiquities for three decades. The pharaohs who followed Tut chose to ignore his reign, as despite his work restoring Amun, he was tainted by the connection to his father’s religious upheavals. The entrance corridor was apparently looted soon after the burial, but the inner rooms remained sealed. The tomb’s antechambers were packed to the ceiling with more than 5,000 artifacts, including furniture, chariots, clothes, weapons and 130 of the lame king’s walking sticks.
Embalmers removed his organs and wrapped him in resin-soaked bandages, a 24-pound solid gold portrait mask was placed over his head and shoulders and he was laid in a series of nested containers-three golden coffins, a granite sarcophagus and four gilded wooden shrines, the largest of which barely fit into the tomb’s burial chamber.īecause of his tomb’s small size, historians suggest King Tut’s death must have been unexpected and his burial rushed by Ay, who succeeded him as pharaoh. After Akhenaten’s death, two intervening pharaohs briefly reigned before the 9-year-old prince, then called Tutankhaten, took the throne.Īfter he died, King Tut was mummified according to Egyptian religious tradition, which held that royal bodies should be preserved and provisioned for the afterlife. Akhenaten upended a centuries-old religious system to favor worship of a single deity, the sun god Aten, and moved Egypt’s religious capital from Thebes to Amarna.
Genetic testing has verified that King Tut was the grandson of the great pharaoh Amenhotep III, and almost certainly the son of Akhenaten, a controversial figure in the history of the 18th dynasty of Egypt’s New Kingdom (c.1550-1295 B.C.). The tomb’s vast hoard of artifacts and treasure, intended to accompany the king into the afterlife, revealed an incredible amount about royal life in ancient Egypt, and quickly made King Tut the world’s most famous pharaoh. He was barely known to the modern world until 1922, when British archaeologist Howard Carter chiseled through a doorway and entered the boy pharaoh’s tomb, which had remained sealed for more than 3,200 years.
Although his rule was notable for reversing the tumultuous religious reforms of his father, Pharaoh Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s legacy was largely negated by his successors. King Tutankhamun (or Tutankhamen) ruled Egypt as pharaoh for 10 years until his death at age 19, around 1324 B.C.