Tutankhamun's Tomb: The Step in the Sand That Led to 'Wonderful Things'

On the morning of 4 November 1922, Howard Carter arrived at his dig in the Valley of the Kings to an unusual silence. His workmen had stopped. Beneath the remains of some ancient huts, they had uncovered a step cut into the rock.

By the next afternoon the team had cleared a whole staircase, leading down to a doorway blocked with plaster and stamped with seals. Carter had spent years searching this valley and finding almost nothing. He covered the staircase back up and sent a telegram to England.

The last season

Howard Carter was 48 and had worked in Egypt since he was 17, first as an artist copying tomb paintings, then as an inspector of antiquities. His patron was George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, a wealthy collector who had taken over the permit to dig in the Valley of the Kings in 1914.

Many experts believed the valley was exhausted. Carter was convinced that one king, the little-known Tutankhamun, was still missing. Clearing down to bedrock from 1917 onwards produced little of value, and by 1922 Carnarvon was ready to stop paying. Carter persuaded him to fund one more season.

Work began on 1 November, earlier than usual, in a spot near the tomb of Ramesses VI that had been left alone because tourists walked there. Three days later came the step.

Who exactly found it is not certain. Carter's published account credits his workmen. Later stories say a boy carrying water jars scraped away the sand and found it. Several different names have been put forward for him, and historians think more than one account may have been blended over time.

"Can you see anything?"

Carnarvon reached Luxor with his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, around 23 November. The staircase was cleared again, and the first doorway was opened. Behind it was a sloping passage filled with rubble, and at its end a second sealed doorway.

On 26 November, Carter made a small hole in the top corner and held up a candle. Hot air escaping from the room made the flame flicker. Then his eyes adjusted to the dark, and he saw strange animals, statues and the glint of gold everywhere.

Carnarvon asked whether he could see anything. In Carter's best-selling book, he replies that he can see "wonderful things". Carter's own notes are plainer: "Yes, it is wonderful". Carnarvon's account in The Times used different words again. The famous line may have been polished for publication, possibly by Carter's colleague Arthur Mace.

There was also a problem. The doorway showed signs of having been opened and resealed. Robbers had broken in, probably soon after the burial, at least twice. But they had been caught or disturbed, and the tomb had been tidied and closed again.

A small tomb crammed with treasure

The tomb, later numbered KV62, is surprisingly small for a pharaoh: four rooms, all crowded with objects. The first room, the antechamber, held gilded couches in the shapes of animals, chariots taken apart to fit, chests, and two life-size statues of the king guarding a further sealed doorway.

The burial chamber was officially opened on 16 February 1923, in front of officials and guests. Almost the whole room was filled by a gilded wooden shrine. Inside it were three more shrines, nested like boxes, and inside those a stone sarcophagus.

The work was painfully slow, because Carter insisted on recording everything. The photographer Harry Burton, lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, made a glass-plate photograph of almost every object where it lay. Each item was numbered, drawn and described before it was moved, and fragile pieces were treated in a makeshift laboratory in a nearby empty tomb. In all, 5,398 objects were catalogued.

The boy behind the mask

Inside the sarcophagus were three coffins, one inside the other. The outer two were gilded wood. When the team reached the third in October 1925, it turned out to be solid gold and extremely heavy.

On 28 October 1925 its lid was lifted. The king's mummy lay inside, its head and shoulders covered by a mask of gold inlaid with blue glass and semi-precious stones. It is now the most recognisable object from ancient Egypt.

The king himself was a much smaller figure in history. Tutankhamun came to the throne as a child and reigned for about ten years, roughly 1332 to 1323 BC, during the 18th Dynasty. He took the throne after the religious upheaval of Akhenaten, probably his father, and restored the worship of the old gods. He died at about 19, and was buried in a tomb that may have been prepared in a hurry.

How he died is still argued about. A 2010 study using CT scans and DNA concluded that he had malaria and a bone disorder in one foot. Other researchers have proposed an accident or other illnesses. There is no agreed answer.

A death in Cairo, and a curse

Lord Carnarvon never saw the gold coffin. In March 1923 he cut a mosquito bite while shaving. It became infected, and he died in Cairo on 5 April 1923 of blood poisoning and pneumonia.

The world's press had been following the find closely, and his death set off a wave of stories about a pharaoh's revenge. The novelist Marie Corelli claimed she had warned of danger. Tales of cursed mummies were already popular in fiction, and the idea spread quickly. Later versions added a written curse over the door, which has never been documented.

The evidence does not support any curse. Carter worked in the tomb for a decade and died in London in 1939, aged 64. Lady Evelyn lived until 1980. A 2002 study in the BMJ compared Westerners known to have been present at key openings with others in Egypt at the time and found no meaningful difference in how long they lived.

Where the treasures are now

The last objects left the tomb in 1932, ten years after the first step was found. Most went to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In 2025 the complete collection, including the gold mask, was put on display together for the first time at the new Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza.

Tutankhamun himself is still in the Valley of the Kings. His mummy lies in a climate-controlled case inside KV62, in the tomb where he was buried more than 3,300 years ago.

Carter's records survive too. His notes, drawings and Burton's photographs are kept at the Griffith Institute in Oxford, and much of the archive is available online. They show the find as it really was: not a single moment of discovery, but ten years of patient work by a large team, much of it done by Egyptian workers whose names were rarely written down.