Tutankhamun: An Intact Tomb or an Identity Reassembled After a Purge?

On November 4, 1922, Howard Carter's team found a step beneath the sand in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, and three weeks later Carter cut a small hole in the sealed door of the tomb and looked into a room filled with chariots, a throne, ceremonial beds, and gilded statues. Inside lay about 5,000 objects, presented to the world as the nearly intact treasure of Tutankhamun, the young pharaoh who took the throne as a child and died in the fourteenth century BCE after a reign of barely ten years.

What KV62 holds does not read like a burial set ordered for a single king. Many objects carry an older name that was scraped away and carved over with Tutankhamun's. The coffins, the gold mask, and the canopic equipment show signs of having been made for a woman or for an earlier royal figure. The tomb is small, the burial chamber breaks with the plan royal tombs usually follow, and the mummy was burned when oil and linen reacted inside the closed coffin.