Valley of the Kings

The pyramids had been robbed within a few centuries. New Kingdom pharaohs chose a different strategy: tombs cut deep into a remote valley under a natural pyramid-shaped peak, al-Qurn, with the temples for their cult built separately at the edge of the fields. Workmen from the village of Deir el-Medina dug and decorated the tombs, and their records survive on thousands of limestone flakes.

Tomb walls are covered with religious books such as the Amduat and the Book of Gates, describing the sun god's journey through the twelve hours of night. The king, joined with the sun, would pass the same dangers and be reborn at dawn. Seti I's tomb is the longest and most finely decorated in the valley.

Almost every tomb was robbed in antiquity. Tutankhamun's small tomb survived largely intact because it was buried under debris from later tomb-building. Howard Carter found it in November 1922, working for Lord Carnarvon. The king's mummy still lies in the tomb.

KV5, the tomb of the sons of Ramses II, is the largest in the valley: since 1995 Kent Weeks's team has mapped well over a hundred corridors and chambers. Across the hills, the Valley of the Queens holds the tomb of Nefertari, Ramses II's chief wife, often called the most beautiful in Egypt for its painted walls (visited on a separate, limited ticket).

The craftsmen who cut and painted the royal tombs lived at Deir el-Medina, a walled village in a nearby valley. Their houses, chapels and small, brilliantly painted family tombs survive, and thousands of their notes on limestone flakes and papyri record wages, absences, loans, quarrels and even a strike — one of the first recorded in history, under Ramses III.