Decoding Tutankhamun: Understanding the Tomb and its Treasures

November 2022 | Vol. 10.11

By Peter Lacovara

As the world celebrates the centennial of Howard Carter’s discovery in the Valley of the Kings, one often repeated observation is, in fact, quite untrue. The misconstrued remark goes, “Tutankhamun was just a minor king, think of the great wealth that must have been in the tombs of Rameses II and the other great pharaohs.” In fact, as luck would have it, Tutankhamun’s burial was probably the richest one ever deposited for several reasons.

The outer coffin of Tutankhamun is of unusual form and the features of the face do not seem to match the other coffins and that has suggested to some scholars that it may have originally been constructed for someone else. Enhanced historic postcard image, author’s collection.

Tourists crowd around the retaining wall surrounding the pit containing the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb (KV62) in the Valley of the Kings, during the period in late February 1923 when the tomb was first opened for public viewing. From the magazine article “At the Tomb of Tutankhamen” by Maynard Owen Williams in the May 1923 issue of National Geographic. Public Domain.

First, the late Eighteenth Dynasty saw what was probably Egypt’s greatest period of prosperity, with wealth flowing in from its now large empire and greater sphere of influence combined with several decades of relative peace. The reign of Amenhotep III (ca. 1390-1353 BCE) Tutankhamun’s grandfather and his immediate successors saw unrivalled spending on lavish goods for the royal court.

As the penultimate heir to the Amarna age he inherited many of the burial goods intended for other members of the disgraced family. His father, the infamous ‘heretic pharaoh’ Akhenaten (ca. 1353-1336 BCE), had changed the traditional polytheistic religion of Egypt to the worship of a single god, the Aten and had created a new capital at the site of Tell el-Amarna.

After Akhenaten’s death, the old religion was re-instated and the court moved back to Thebes Amarna under his shadowy successors hat may have included his queen, Nefertiti. The grave goods that had been assembled and in some cases, perhaps placed in the tombs at Amarna were brought back to Thebes and many ultimately interred with the boy king. As a result, Tutankhamun (ca. 1333-1324 BCE) possessed multiple sets of funerary furniture.

Panoramic view of the antechamber of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Ovedc / CC BY-SA 4.0.

The number of duplicate ritual figures in the tomb of Tutankhamun suggest he included additional sets made originally for other members of the Amarna royal family. Reproduced with permission of the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford.

The tomb of Kha and Merit in Deir el-Medina from the Eighteenth Dynasty was packed with furniture, daily life objects and ritual objects. Reconstruction courtesy of Francesco Gabellone.

In addition to this, the late 18th Dynasty was an age of conspicuous consumption in life as well as in death. Both royal and private tombs of the period were stocked with both daily life goods and ritual objects, a pattern is that is not found later, or for that matter, earlier. For example, if one compares the tombs of the noble Yuya and his wife Tuya, the only other substantially intact burial from the Valley of the Kings, or that of the overseer Kha and his wife Merit at Deir el-Medina, with later 19th and 20th Dynasty tombs, such as that of the Sennedjim family at Deir el-Medina which has elaborate coffins and shabtis and boxes, there is little else. While some of this may be due to their relatively elevated status, it is a pattern repeated throughout Thebes and the rest of Egypt when comparing Ramesside private tombs with their earlier New Kingdom predecessors.

Of course, the 19th and 20th Dynasty royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings were all plundered, but we can get a sense of what they contained by the representations of funerary goods decorating the walls of the tombs, and also by the layout. These tombs are all long, narrow corridors with few spaces for storing objects. They often have just small side chambers and while the burial chambers are often large and impressive, much of that space would be taken up by the massive sarcophagi popular in the period.

As with most of royal the tombs of the 19th and 20th dynasties, the tomb of Rameses III (KV11) is a long, narrow corridor with little storage space. Image by R Prazeres. CC BY-SA 4.0.

So even the treasures interred with Rameses the Great (ca. 1227-1213 BCE) would not have been anywhere near the riches found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Likewise even Khufu and the other kings of the Old and Middle Kingdoms would not have taken with them nearly as much as the boy king managed to stuff into his tomb.

Peter Lacovara is Director of The Ancient Egyptian Archaeology and Heritage Fund.

Further Reading:

Cooney, M. 2007. The Cost of Death: The Social and Economic Value of Ancient Egyptian Funerary Art in the Ramesside Period, Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten.

Grajetzki, W. 2003. Burial Customs in Ancient Egypt, London: Duckworth, 84- 93.

Eaton-Krauss, M. 2015. The Unknown Tutankhamun, London: Bloomsbury.

How to cite this article

Lacovara, P. 2022. “Decoding Tutankhamun: Understanding the Tomb and its Treasures.” The Ancient Near East Today 10.11. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/lacovara-decoding-tutankhamun/.