This article was originally published on September 15, 2022.
In 1922, a British archaeologist stood in the Valley of the Kings in the cliffs behind Luxor, Egypt. In the previous decades, more than 60 ancient tombs had been investigated and exhumed. Many Egyptologists believed all the tombs had been identified and there was nothing left to unearth. The archaeologist, Howard Carter, sensed otherwise.
Carter was right, and he soon identified a single stair leading down to a tomb entrance. After years of excavation, his team reached the inner chambers and found a mummified pharaoh. At the time, scholars didn’t know much about King Tutankhamun (King Tut), the boy king who ruled for about a decade.
King Tut wasn’t a pharaoh that many historians considered important. But his death chambers included more than 5,000 artifacts including a stunning funerary mask. In the past century, King Tut’s death mask and other artifacts have made him one of the most famous ancient pharaohs in modern history.
