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Heat filled the valley. It radiated from the metallic sky and the tormented rocks, hammering the men descending the slope with all the unbearable weight of summer in Upper Egypt. Stumbling over sand and scree, the men came to the base of a jagged limestone spire. There, as the guide had promised, was the pit. A palm log was laid across the opening and a rope let down. One by one, the men descended. At the bottom, 40 ft below the surface, a low tunnel led into darkness.
Dropping to their hands and knees, the men crawled inside. Almost immediately, a huge white coffin blocked half the corridor. There was another coffin beyond it and another and another, as far as the light of their candles could reach. The floor of the passageway gleamed with blue glazed ushabti figurines and canopic jars for the organs of the dead. Here and there were withered garlands woven 3,000 years before. The row of coffins went on and on, ending in a chamber piled with mummy cases.
Squinting in the candlelight, the group's leader read the hieroglyphs on the coffins. His eyes widened. Here were the names of the most famous pharaohs in Egyptian history. Thutmose the third, Seti the first, Ramses the second. These men had ruled over an empire that stretched from Damascus to Khartoum. They had been buried with treasures beyond imagining in the Valley of the Kings. So, how had their mummies come to this remote place?
The answer to that question would reveal how the richest tombs in history were systematically pillaged by their own guardians. The Valley of the Kings, or as the Egyptians called it, the Great and Noble Necropolis of millions of years, was the burial place of the pharaohs for half a millennium. It was located on the west bank of the Nile, across from the city and temples of Thebes. Beyond the strip of cultivated land along the river was a serrated wall of cliffs.
The royal necropolis lay behind that rampart in the shadow of a pyramidal peak. The Valley of the Kings is a wadi cut by millennia of erosion. Occasional cloudbursts sent torrents freighted with boulders and tons of debris roaring down slope. Between these storms, rain seldom falls. The landscape has the muted colors of the high desert, sand and stone and sky. Over the course of the New Kingdom, between, in other words, about 1570 and 1070 BC, more than 60 tombs were cut into the valley's limestone walls.
About a third contained the remains of pharaohs. The design of the tombs changed over time. The oldest, hidden among inaccessible crags, twisted as they plunged into the hills, their chambers and passageways mimicking the topography of the underworld. The last tombs had monumental entrances at the level of the valley floor and a single straight corridor culminating in the burial chamber. The walls and ceilings of the tombs were richly painted. Alongside such funerary texts as the Book of Gates and the Litany of Ra, they showed elaborate scenes of the cosmos.
The rooms and corridors contained everything that a god king would need in the underworld. The treasures found with Tutankhamun, a minor pharaoh hastily interred, only hint at the scale of the riches that were buried with a great ruler like Ramses the second. We'll explore the fate of those treasures after a brief word about this video's sponsor. This coin was struck more than 2,000 years ago. For all its beauty, it was designed to circulate, to pass from hand to hand. It was never intended to be locked away. Joost van Rossum, the owner of Peregrine Pendants, understands that ancient coins are a unique kind of artifact meant to be held and touched.
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Returning to our topic. In theory, no pious Egyptian would dream of robbing a royal tomb. Only an undisturbed burial could ensure the king's rebirth in the afterlife, where he would uphold the order that preserved all things. As a more practical deterrent, guards were posted on the cliffs above the valley listening for the telltale tap of copper chisels. The narrow entrance of the valley was closely watched. So was the gate of the village in which the necropolis workers lived.
Through the end of the New Kingdom, thefts were infrequent and opportunistic. The tomb of Tutankhamun was robbed twice soon after it was closed. The tomb of Yuya and Thuya, father and mother-in-law of Amenhotep the third, was robbed three times. Once shortly after it was completed, then twice later centuries when workmen accidentally tunneled into it. In each case, the robbers targeted small, valuable items. But, as royal authority broke down, tomb robbing became an epidemic. A series of papyri record the interrogations of robbers in the reigns of Ramses the ninth and Ramses the eleventh. In one of these, a robber describes how
he despoiled the tomb of a pharaoh. We found the noble mummy of the king equipped like a warrior. Sacred eye amulets and ornaments of gold were at his neck and he wore a golden headpiece. The noble mummy was all covered with gold and the inner coffins were decorated with gold and silver inside and out. We took the gold that we found on the mummy. We found the royal wife arrayed the same way and we took all that we found on her. We set fire to their inner coffins. We stole the treasures and divided them among ourselves.
Late in the reign of Ramses the eleventh, Piankh, high priest of Amun at Thebes, effectively seized control of Upper Egypt. To subsidize his regime, which was plagued by conflict with a rogue general based in Nubia, Piankh authorized the unthinkable, the opening of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The high priest's chief agents were the scribes of the necropolis, Djehutmose and his son Bud Amun. Bud Amun alone left more than 130 graffiti in and around the Valley of the Kings, apparently marking the locations of tombs to be pillaged.
Far from concealing his role, he assumed the title opener of the gates of the underworld. The doors of the royal tombs were broken. Precious metals were especially targeted. Even the gilding on wooden coffins was scraped away. If the burial was recent, the oils and cosmetics were taken. So were fine linen, cedar planks, and anything else that could be reused. The mummies were searched for valuable amulets. The plunder continued for more than a century. After the Valley of the Kings had been emptied, a salvage teams scoured the rest of the Theban necropolis.
The treasures of the pharaohs and their nobles found their way into the palaces and temples of the high priests of Amun. One of Piankh's successors had himself buried in a repurposed pharaonic sarcophagus. Much of the jewelry found in the 21st dynasty tombs at Tanis seems to have been recycled from the Valley of the Kings. The royal mummies were stripped and battered. Several were found with gaping wounds in their torsos left by workmen hacking away their bandages with adzes.
The mummies were moved repeatedly before being consolidated into three caches. The largest, in the hills above Deir el-Bahari, was found in 1882, the episode with which this video began. With the exception of those buried with Tutankhamun, the treasures of the New Kingdom pharaohs are gone. Their mummies, however, are displayed in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization and anyone who visits Luxor can still descend into the echoing tombs where Egypt's god kings were laid to rest. My Roman Egypt tour is full, but spots are still available on my other tours. In April 2026, I'm exploring the Roman ruins of Spain. In May, I'm headed to Turkey. And in November, I'm bringing a group to Pompeii, Naples, and Capri.
You'll find links for all three tours in the description. On the Toldinstone Patreon, I'll soon be releasing the next episode of Rome in Review, my series exploring movies and shows about the Romans. There are several new interviews up on the Toldinstone podcast, and one coming soon about the Valley of the Kings. New videos on the ancient sites of Greece have been posted at Scenic Routes of the Past, and they're all linked, along with everything else, in the description. Thanks for watching.
