The tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun was one of the few royal tombs to survive ancient looting substantially intact. Who found it, and when?
Carter — financed by his patron Lord Carnarvon — had been excavating in the Valley of the Kings for five years without major success when one of his Egyptian workers found a stone step at the foot of an earlier tomb on 4 November 1922. The tomb was the substantially-intact burial of Tutankhamun (reigned c. 1332–1323 BC), a minor 18th-dynasty pharaoh who had been almost completely forgotten. Schliemann excavated Troy (in modern Turkey, not Egypt). Champollion decoded hieroglyphics. Petrie was an Egyptologist of an earlier generation but did not find Tut.
Read the full facts →Ancient Egypt was a civilisation along the Nile River that lasted from approximately 3100 BC, when Upper and Lower Egypt were unified under the first pharaoh, until the Roman conquest in 30 BC. It is one of the longest-continuous civilisations in human history.
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