British backer Lord Carnarvon had searched for the lost tomb of Tutankhamun for an uneventful six years.
He was just about to call off the search when archaeologist Howard Carter convinced him to stick it out for one more season.
On November 1, 1922, Carter resumed digging in the Valley of the Kings.
On November 4, they found a rubble-filled stairway.
They cleared the debris from the stairs, which revealed the top of a doorway, sealed with plaster.
Upon it were the undisturbed seals of the royal necropolis.
After ordering the staircase filled in, Carter sent a cable to his patron, Lord Carnarvon.
“At last have made wonderful discovery in valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact.”
Carnarvon hurried to Egypt to witness the opening of the tomb.
As Carter and his team re-cleared the staircase to continue their work, the entire door was exposed, and the seals were revealed.
It appeared to be the tomb of Tutankhamun.
The door bore signs of damage and repair.
The next day, on November 26, 1922, Carnarvon and other observers looking on, Carter drilled a small hole in the top corner of the doorway and placed a candle inside.
The candle flickered, and Carter peered in.
Carnarvon asked
“Can you see anything?”
Cater replied
“Yes,Wonderful things.
Wonderful things!”
The Antechamber
There were strange animals, statues and everywhere, the glint of gold.
When Carter and Carnarvon entered the tomb’s interior chambers , they were thrilled to find it virtually intact.
Its treasures were untouched after more than 3,000 years.
When the door came down, the wall opposite the entrance wall was piled nearly to the ceiling with boxes, chairs, couches, most of them gold, in an "organized chaos."
On the right wall stood two life-size statues of the king, facing each other.
There was a sealed entrance that was between them.
This sealed door also showed signs of being broken into and resealed.
To the left of the door from the passageway lay a tangle of parts from several dismantled chariots.
There was another sealed door behind the couches on the far wall. This sealed door also had a hole in it, but unlike the others, the hole had not been resealed.
Carefully, they crawled under the couch and shone their light.
In this room everything was in disarray.
The items in the Antechamber needed to be removed or risk damage to them from flying debris, dust, and movement.
So many of the items were in extremely delicate states.
It took Carter and his team seven weeks to clear the Antechamber.
The Burial Chamber
On February 17, 1923, Carter opened the door to the last chamber.
The inside was almost completely filled with a large shrine over 16 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 9 feet tall.
The walls of the shrine were made of gilded wood inlaid with a brilliant blue porcelain.
The walls of the Burial Chamber (excluding the ceiling) were covered with a gypsum plaster and painted yellow.
Upon the yellow walls were painted funerary scenes.
On the ground around the shrine were portions of two broken necklaces that looked as if they had been dropped by robbers and magic oars to ferry the king's boat across the waters of the Nether World.
As Carter and his team worked to disassemble the shrine they found that this was merely the outer shrine, with four shrines in total.
Each section of the shrines weighed up to half a ton.
When the fourth shrine was disassembled, the king's sarcophagus was revealed.
The sarcophagus was yellow in color and made out of a single block of quartzite.
The lid did not match the rest of the sarcophagus and had been cracked in the middle.
When the heavy lid was lifted, a gilded wooden coffin was revealed.
The coffin was in a distinctly human shape and was 7 feet 4 inches in length.
When they lifted the lid of the coffin, they found another, smaller coffin.
When they lifted the lid of that coffin, it revealed the last coffin, made of solid gold.
On top of this third, and final, coffin was a dark material that had once been liquid and poured over the coffin from the hands to the ankles.
The liquid had hardened over the years and firmly stuck the third coffin to the bottom of the second.
After the thick residue had to be removed the lid of the third coffin was raised.
The royal mummy of Tutankhamun was revealed.
The clothing and the perfectly preserved mummy was the most valuable, as it was the first one ever to be discovered.
The liquid poured on the mummy had done a great deal of damage. The linen wrappings of the mummy could not be unwrapped as hoped, but instead had to be removed in large chunks.
The autopsy revealed that Tutankhamun had been about 5 feet 5 1/8 inches tall and had died around the age of 18.
Certain evidence also attributed Tutankhamun's death to murder.
The Treasury
On the right wall of the Burial Chamber was an entrance into the treasury.
The Treasury was filled with items including many boxes and model boats.
There was the large gilded canopic shrine.
Inside the gilded shrine was the canopic chest made out of a single block of calcite.
Inside the canopic chest were the four canopic jars, each in the shape of an Egyptian coffin and elaborately decorated, holding the pharaoh's embalmed liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines.
Also discovered in the Treasury were two small coffins found in a simple, undecorated wooden box.
Inside these two coffins were the mummies of two premature fetuses, possibly his children.
There were rumors that a curse would befall anyone who disturbed the tomb.
This curse was fueled when Lord Carnarvon became suddenly ill from an infected mosquito bite on his cheek that he had accidentally aggravated while shaving.
On April 5, 1923, just a week after the bite, Lord Carnarvon died.
Despite his, the tomb's treasures were carefully catalogued, removed and included in a famous traveling exhibition called the “Treasures of Tutankhamen.”
The exhibition’s permanent home is the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The Hidden Chamber
As of March 2016, radar scans indicated that there may yet be hidden chambers not yet opened within King Tut's tomb.
