The Tomb of Tutankhamun, 1922
In 1914, English Egyptologist Howard Carter began his search for the tomb of one of Egypt’s young kings, Tutankhamun. He searched in the Valley of the Kings each year for seven seasons, and was unsuccessful. Most Egyptologists, by that time, believed that all of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings had already been discovered.
By the digging season of 1922, his patron in England, Lord Carnarvon, had indicated that this would be the last season. In November, 1922, at long last, Carter’s team of Egyptian diggers found a door. By November 26, 1922, Carter and Carnarvon had reached the second door into the tomb. When the second door was opened and Carter peered inside, when asked what he saw, he said, “wonderful things.”
Over the next two and one-half months, they excavated the antechamber and annex, but had not yet found the tomb of Tutankhamun. The team opened the door to the burial chamber on February 16, 1915.
While most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been looted centuries earlier, the tomb of Tutankhamun was largely intact, and provided some of the richest artifacts of the New Kingdom found to this date, including some nearly 5,400 individual items, ranging from a solid gold sarcophagus and face mask to linen underwear. Many of these artifacts, including wood and textiles, were remarkably well-preserved by the sealed tomb and dry climate of Egypt, and today, the artifacts of ancient Egypt found in Tutankhamun’s tomb are the most-exhibited of all objects from ancient Egypt.