Valley Of The Kings

In 1881 Egyptian officials climbed down a shaft in the cliffs opposite Luxor and found about forty dead kings stacked in a corridor. Ramesses II was there. So were Seti I, Thutmose III, and Ahmose I, along with queens, priests, and a good deal of reused funerary furniture. A local family had found the shaft roughly a decade earlier and had been quietly selling its contents on the antiquities market until the pattern of objects appearing in Luxor gave them away.

The kings had not been buried there. Three thousand years earlier, priests had gone tomb to tomb, taken each mummy out of its own carefully hidden chamber, repaired the wrappings, written a label saying who it was, and moved the lot into a hole in the rock. The most secretive burial project in history had failed, and the people running it knew it.

Why They Stopped Building Pyramids

By the sixteenth century BC, Egyptian kings had drawn an obvious conclusion from the previous thousand years: a pyramid is an advertisement. It is visible from a day's walk away, the entrance is findable, and everyone knows there is gold inside. So the New Kingdom rulers moved to the west bank at Thebes and started cutting their tombs into a dry gully behind a ridge, out of sight, with the entrances backfilled and disguised.

The site was not chosen at random. A natural peak called el-Qurn stands over the valley, and it happens to be shaped like a pyramid. The kings did not give up the pyramid. They gave up building one and moved in under a pyramid that was already there.

The tombs themselves are long corridors driven into limestone, some plunging straight down, some bending sharply. The walls are covered with maps of the underworld: the gates the sun passes through each night, the guardians at each gate, and the words to say to them. This is not decoration, it is routing instructions. Sixty-some tombs are numbered in the valley today, and not all of them held kings; princes, viziers, and court officials got space too.

The Village That Wrote Everything Down

The men who cut these tombs lived with their families in a walled village called, in their own language, the Place of Truth. They were paid in grain, fish, beer, oil, and cloth, and they were doing a job they were not supposed to describe to anyone.

Their real legacy is their rubbish. They wrote on broken pottery and flakes of limestone, and thousands of those flakes survive: attendance registers, loan agreements, court verdicts, complaints, love poems, and sketches. One foreman's absence list gives reasons — this man is ill, this one is burying his mother, this one is brewing beer. The most detailed record of ordinary life in ancient Egypt comes from the workforce of its most classified project.

And around 1157 BC, when the grain rations ran late, they walked off the job. They left the village, sat down at the mortuary temples on the plain, and refused to move until they were fed. A scribe wrote the whole episode down, including what the officials said back. It is generally counted as the first recorded strike anywhere.

Confessions

Secrecy did not hold for long. By the end of the twentieth dynasty, robbery was widespread enough that the state opened formal investigations, and the transcripts survive. A stonemason describes the method to the court: tunnel in, torches, burn the wrappings off to get at the metal, split the take eight ways. The tone is less remorseful than administrative. That wave of looting is exactly why the priests eventually gave up and gathered the kings into shafts.

The One They Missed

By the early twentieth century the consensus was that the valley was exhausted. Howard Carter disagreed and spent six fruitless seasons proving nothing. In November 1922 his workmen found a step under a row of ancient workmen's huts, and the stairway below it ended at a sealed door. Carter made a small hole in the corner, put a candle to it, and Lord Carnarvon asked whether he could see anything. The answer was yes, wonderful things.

Tutankhamun was a minor king and his tomb is one of the smallest in the valley. It still produced over five thousand objects and took a decade to empty. That is a measurement of what the other sixty tombs lost.

Now

The valley has been a World Heritage Site since 1979, and it has not stopped producing; new chambers turned up in 2005 and 2011, and the enormous tomb built for the sons of Ramesses II has been under clearance since the 1990s.

The biggest threat is water. The gully is the drain for a wide desert catchment, and the rare violent storm sends flash floods straight down the corridors. The second is breath. Visitors leave humidity and salt behind the painted plaster. A full-scale facsimile of Tutankhamun's tomb opened near the valley entrance in 2014, on the theory that the safest way to show the room is not to stand in it.