Tutankhamun: The Tomb, the Treasure and the 'Curse'

Tutankhamun is the most famous pharaoh in the world, and almost everything that made him a king was unremarkable. He took the throne as a child, ruled for less than a decade, changed little, and died young. By the standards of Ramesses II or Thutmose III he barely registers. And yet his golden face is the symbol of Ancient Egypt — for one reason: his tomb is the only royal burial ever found nearly intact.

The boy who became king

Tutankhamun was born around 1342 BC, in the most turbulent reign of the New Kingdom. His father was almost certainly Akhenaten, the "heretic pharaoh" who had tried to sweep away Egypt's gods and replace them with a single sun-disc, the Aten, even abandoning the old capitals for a brand-new desert city.

When Akhenaten died, the country was in religious chaos. The boy-king — first named Tutankhaten, "living image of the Aten" — came to the throne around the age of nine. Within a few years his advisers reversed the revolution: the old gods were restored, the priesthood of Amun regained its power, and the king changed his name to Tutankhamun, "living image of Amun", to make the point.

He died around 1323 BC, aged roughly eighteen or nineteen. CT scans of his mummy suggest a frail young man — a club foot, evidence of malaria, and a broken leg that may have turned fatal. He left no surviving children. Later pharaohs, embarrassed by his father's heresy, scrubbed his family from the official record. Within a couple of generations, Tutankhamun was effectively forgotten — which is exactly why he survived.

Why the tomb survived

Almost every other royal tomb in Egypt was robbed in antiquity, often within years of the burial. Tutankhamun's tomb (catalogued KV62) was robbed too — twice, soon after his death — but the thieves were interrupted, the entrances resealed, and then history buried the evidence. Debris from cutting a later tomb above covered the entrance, and workers' huts were built on top. For over 3,000 years nobody knew it was there.

The tomb itself is strikingly small for a king, hastily decorated, probably because Tutankhamun died unexpectedly young and a non-royal tomb had to be pressed into service. That small size is part of the miracle: a modest tomb, overlooked and buried, kept its contents while grander ones were stripped bare.

1922: "wonderful things"

By the early 1920s most experts believed the Valley of the Kings was exhausted. The English archaeologist Howard Carter, backed financially by Lord Carnarvon, was given one last season to prove otherwise.

On 4 November 1922, his team uncovered a step cut into the valley floor, then a sealed doorway. When Carter made a small hole and held a candle to it, Carnarvon asked if he could see anything. Carter's reply became legendary:

"Yes — wonderful things."

Beyond the door lay four rooms packed floor to ceiling with more than 5,000 objects: gilded chariots, thrones, beds, statues, weapons, board games, jars of perfume, the king's clothing — and, nested inside a series of shrines and coffins, the mummy of the king himself wearing the solid-gold funerary mask that is now Egypt's national emblem. Cataloguing it all took Carter and his team ten years.

The treasure, and where it is now

The most famous pieces are objects most visitors recognise instantly:

• The gold funerary mask, around 10 kg of solid gold inlaid with lapis lazuli and coloured glass.
• The innermost coffin, also of solid gold.
• The golden throne, its backrest showing the young king and his wife Ankhesenamun in tender detail.
• Thousands of everyday and ritual objects that, together, are our richest single window into what a pharaoh actually took to the afterlife.

For decades the collection was the highlight of the old Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square. It has now moved, in full, to the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) beside the Giza pyramids — the first time in history the entire find is displayed together, exactly as Carter recorded it. The king's mummy, by contrast, remains in his original tomb in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor.

The "curse of the pharaohs"

A few months after the tomb opened, Lord Carnarvon died in Cairo from blood poisoning after nicking an infected mosquito bite while shaving. The world's newspapers, hungry for drama, invented the "curse of the pharaohs" — the idea that disturbing the tomb brought death.

It makes a great story and a worse fact. There is no curse inscription in the tomb. Of the dozens of people present at the opening, most lived long, ordinary lives; Howard Carter himself died in 1939, sixteen years later, of natural causes. Statistical studies of those involved found no unusual death rate. The "curse" tells us far more about 1920s journalism than about Ancient Egypt.

What Tutankhamun actually teaches us

The irony of Tutankhamun is that his importance is accidental. He matters not for what he did but for what survived. His tomb is a complete, undisturbed snapshot of royal burial in the New Kingdom — the closest thing we have to a time capsule from the age of the great pharaohs. Every grander king was robbed; this minor one, forgotten and buried, kept everything.

That is why, when you stand in front of the gold mask today, you're not really looking at a powerful ruler. You're looking at the one that got away from the tomb robbers — and through that single stroke of luck, at the whole vanished world of pharaonic Egypt.

Where to see it on a Cairo trip

The full Tutankhamun collection is now at the Grand Egyptian Museum next to the Giza pyramids, so you can combine the pyramids and the treasure in a single day. Basing yourself in Giza / Al Haram puts you minutes from both; staying Downtown keeps you close to the original Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square, still well worth a visit for the Narmer Palette (the royal mummies are now at the NMEC in Fustat).