Howard Carter finds a pharaoh no one had touched
What happened
By the summer of 1922, financial backer Lord Carnarvon had grown tired of funding archaeologist Howard Carter's years of fruitless digging in the Valley of the Kings and was ready to stop. Carter convinced him to fund one final season. On 4 November 1922, Carter's workmen uncovered a step cut into the bedrock beneath ancient workers' huts, huts that had sat undisturbed since at least the second millennium BCE, meaning nothing had reached the layer below since then. Digging further revealed a sealed doorway stamped with royal necropolis seals. On 26 November, with Carnarvon, his daughter Lady Evelyn, and assistant Arthur Callender present, Carter chiseled a small breach in the door's upper corner and held a candle to the gap. Nearly every other pharaoh's tomb in the Valley had been broken into and stripped by robbers within decades of burial. Tutankhamun's had not.
Why it matters
Tutankhamun's tomb remains the only nearly intact royal burial ever found from ancient Egypt, complete with the golden mask, furniture, chariots, and food offerings sealed inside for a minor, otherwise historically unremarkable pharaoh. Its survival is what let modern archaeology see, for the first time, roughly what a pharaoh's burial actually looked like when robbers never got the chance to empty it.
How we know
Carter kept meticulous excavation diaries and photographic records throughout the dig, preserved today by Oxford's Griffith Institute, documenting the sealed doorway, the undisturbed debris layer above it, and the tomb's contents item by item as they were uncovered, an unusually thorough contemporary record for an excavation of this era.
Sources
- Smithsonian Magazine. How Howard Carter Discovered King Tut's Golden Tomb · Reputable sourcesmithsonianmag.com · The domain "smithsonianmag.com" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineAncient Egypt26 events · Three thousand years of pharaohs, from the first unification of the Nile valley to Cleopatra's death, and the two nineteenth and twentieth-century discoveries that let the modern world read and see it all again.View all →