How Howard Carter Found Tutankhamun's Sealed Tomb

On November 4, 1922, in the dusty heat of the Valley of the Kings, a team of Egyptian workmen cleared away the remains of ancient mud-brick huts and exposed something no one expected to find: the top step of a rock-cut staircase, sealed in plaster, heading down into the bedrock. It was the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun — and it was nearly intact after more than 3,200 years. Nothing like it had ever been seen. Every other royal tomb in the valley had been stripped by ancient looters centuries earlier. This one, designated KV62, still held almost 5,400 objects, from chariots and thrones to the king's linen underclothes, all arranged as the burial party had left them around 1320 BC.

Who were Carter and Carnarvon — and what were they even looking for?

The partnership behind the discovery was an unlikely one. Howard Carter was an artist-turned-excavator with almost no formal schooling, who had arrived in Egypt as a teenage tomb-copyist and worked his way into professional archaeology through sheer meticulousness. His financier was George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon — a wealthy English aristocrat with a passion for Egypt who had been backing Carter's work since 1907. Carnarvon held the coveted concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings, and from 1917 Carter searched it systematically for the tomb of one obscure pharaoh: Tutankhamun, a minor king of the 18th Dynasty who had reigned for barely a decade, around 1336 to 1327 BC. Fragments of pottery bearing the king's name, found years earlier, convinced Carter the tomb was still waiting. Five fruitless seasons passed. By 1922 Carnarvon was ready to stop paying — and Carter talked him into one final year of work. The stair appeared within days of the new season's start.

What did the discovery actually look like, day by day?

The first step led to a sealed, plastered doorway stamped with the necropolis seal — the jackal god Anubis crouched over bound captives. Carter covered the hole he had opened, guarded the site, and cabled Carnarvon in England with news of a superb find: a fine tomb in the Valley whose ancient seals were still unbroken.

Three weeks later Carnarvon arrived, and on November 26 the team cleared the sixteen steps down to a second sealed door. Carter chipped a small hole in its upper corner, waited for the foul ancient air to clear, and pushed a candle through. He stayed silent for a long moment, watching the flame's light move across glints of gold. Asked whether he could see anything, he answered in words that later became legend — though his own journal, written the next day, had the blander version: "it is wonderful." He polished the line when he published his book the following year, and the Egyptian foremen who stood beside him that afternoon were quietly written out of the story. What he had looked into was the antechamber: a room crammed with a jumble of chariots, couches, thrones, statues, and chests — the overflow of a royal funeral. Three months would pass before the team even entered the burial chamber, which lay behind a second sealed door guarded by two life-sized black-and-gilt statues of the king.

Why was the tomb still full — and who was the king inside?

The near-miraculous state of the tomb has a straightforward explanation. The death of the 19-year-old king was sudden, so he was buried in a hurry in a small tomb that had to be hastily adapted — steps were cut away and the doorway widened to fit his funerary equipment. Ancient robbers broke in at least twice soon after, stealing oils and unguents, but they never reached the burial chamber. Officials tidied up the outer rooms and resealed the tomb. Then rubble and the workmen's huts from the construction of the later, grander tomb of Ramses VI — dug directly above — buried the entrance so completely that it vanished for millennia. Inside, the burial chamber held its famous nested protection: four gilded wooden shrines, dismantled piece by piece; a stone sarcophagus; two gilded coffins; and finally a solid-gold coffin holding the mummy of the young king, the famous gold mask resting on his face. The mummy itself was not uncovered until October 1925, nearly three years after the discovery. Tutankhamun himself had been an unremarkable pharaoh, remembered mostly for restoring Egypt's traditional gods after his father Akhenaten's religious revolution. The tomb's fame was never about the king's achievements — it was about the accident of its survival, a sealed time capsule from the world of the New Kingdom.

Was there really a curse?

No — and the story of one tells us more about the newspapers than about the tomb. Carnarvon sold exclusive rights to the excavation's stories and photographs to The Times, which infuriated the rival press. When he died in Cairo in April 1923 from a blood infection after a mosquito bite turned septic, excluded journalists seized on the coincidence and spun it into a supernatural tale. The "curse of the pharaoh" was born in newsrooms, not in the tomb. The real aftermath was quieter and longer. Clearing the tomb was a decade of painstaking labor, finished only in 1932. The photographer Harry Burton, loaned from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, produced thousands of glass-plate images documenting every stage. Arthur Mace and Alfred Lucas set up a conservation laboratory inside a neighboring tomb — the tomb of Seti II — to clean and stabilize fragile objects, some so delicate that without their work almost nothing would have survived the journey to Cairo. Crucially, Egypt's new antiquities laws meant the treasures stayed in the country; they went to the Egyptian Museum, ending the colonial-era practice of shipping finds abroad. The Egyptian workforce — foremen and some fifty local laborers, plus children — did the heavy work of the excavation, though their names rarely made it into Carter's published accounts.

What remains of it now

Carter never finished the grand six-volume academic publication he planned; he died in 1939, and his niece donated his entire archive — journals, letters, plans, and record cards — to the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford in 1945, where scholars still work through it. The tomb itself, stripped of its contents, can be visited in the Valley of the Kings. The treasures moved on to the Grand Egyptian Museum near Giza, where for the first time the full collection can be seen together. The discovery did something larger than fill a museum. It gave the world its single most complete picture of an ancient Egyptian royal burial — and it turned a forgotten teenager into the most famous pharaoh of them all. Not because he was great, but because, by luck and mud and plaster, his tomb refused to disappear. The find still rewards a second look, much like the stone that unlocked Egypt's lost languages did a century earlier, and it remains the benchmark against which every buried-army find — including Qin Shi Huang's terracotta warriors — is measured. Even the modern mysteries of a murder preserved in Alpine ice owe something to the way Carter's team taught archaeology to document everything before it was moved.