Valley of the Kings

A dry limestone valley behind the Theban cliffs, chosen because a natural pyramid-shaped peak — el-Qurn — rises above it, and because it was hidden. For roughly five hundred years the pharaohs of the New Kingdom cut their tombs into its walls rather than building monuments that advertised where their gold lay.

More than sixty tombs and chambers have been found. A standard ticket admits you to three; the rest rotate open and closed so the painted plaster gets time to recover from visitors' breath.

Go early. The valley is a stone bowl that concentrates heat, and there is almost no shade between the tomb entrances.

The tombs were dug by a village of specialists at Deir el-Medina, just over the ridge — draughtsmen, plasterers and stonecutters who worked in eight-day shifts and lived on rations of grain, fish and beer. Their own rubbish heap has made them the best-documented workforce of the ancient world: we have their pay disputes, their sick notes, their laundry lists, and the record of the first recorded labour strike in history, when rations arrived late under Ramesses III.

The tomb that survived

Nearly every tomb here was robbed in antiquity, often within a generation of the burial. Howard Carter spent six seasons finding nothing before, in November 1922, a water-boy's stumble uncovered a step cut into the valley floor. Behind it lay Tutankhamun — a minor king, dead at about nineteen, in the smallest royal tomb in the valley, and the only one to reach the modern world with its contents essentially intact.

And the one found last

In February 2025 Egypt announced the tomb of Thutmose II, husband and half-brother of Hatshepsut, found in Wadi Gabbanat el-Qurud about 2.4 kilometres west of the valley proper. It is the first royal tomb identified since Carter's — and it was empty, flooded soon after the burial, its contents moved out in antiquity.