Egyptologists have discovered the first tomb of a pharaoh since Tutankhamun’s was uncovered over a century ago.
King Thutmose II’s tomb was the last undiscovered royal tomb of the 18th Egyptian dynasty.
A British-Egyptian team has located it in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropolis near the city of Luxor. Researchers had thought the burial chambers of the 18th dynasty pharaohs were more than 2km away, closer to the Valley of the Kings.
The crew found it in an area associated with the resting places of royal women, but when they got into the burial chamber they found it decorated – the sign of a pharaoh.
“Part of the ceiling was still intact: a blue-painted ceiling with yellow stars on it. And blue-painted ceilings with yellow stars are only found in kings’ tombs,” said the field director of the mission Dr Piers Litherland.
He told the BBC’s Newshour programme he felt overwhelmed in the moment.
“The emotion of getting into these things is just one of extraordinary bewilderment because when you come across something you’re not expecting to find, it’s emotionally extremely turbulent really,” he said.
“And when I came out, my wife was waiting outside and the only thing I could do was burst into tears.”
Dr Litherland said the discovery solved the mystery of where the tombs of early 18th dynasty kings are located.
Researchers found Thutmose II’s mummified remains two centuries ago but its original burial site had never been located.
Thutmose II was an ancestor of Tutankhamun, whose reign is believed to have been from about 1493 to 1479 BC. Tutankhamun’s tomb was found by British archaeologists in 1922.
Thutmose II is best known for being the husband of Queen Hatshepsut, regarded as one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs and one of the few female pharaohs who ruled in her own right.
Dr Litherland said the “large staircase and a very large descending corridor” of the tomb suggested grandeur.
“It took us a very long time to get through all that,” he said, noting it was blocked by flood debris and the ceilings had collapsed.
“It was only after crawling through a 10m (32ft) passageway that had a small 40cm gap at the top that we got into the burial chamber.”
There they discovered the blue ceiling and decorations of scenes from the Amduat, a religious text which was reserved for kings. That was another key sign they had found a king’s tomb, Dr Litherland said.
They set to work clearing the debris – expecting that they would find the crushed remains of a burial underneath.
But “the tomb turned out to be completely empty”, said Dr Litherland. “Not because it was robbed but because it had been deliberately emptied.”
They then worked out that the tomb had been flooded – “it had been built underneath a waterfall” – just a few years after the king’s burial and the contents moved to another location in ancient times.
It was through sifting through tonnes of limestone in the chamber that they found fragments of alabaster jars, which bore the inscriptions of the names of Thutmose II and Hatshepsut.
These fragments of alabaster “had probably broken when the tomb was being moved,” said Dr Litherland.
“And thank goodness they actually did break one or two things because that’s how we found out whose tomb it was.”
The artefacts are the first objects to be found associated with Thutmose II’s burial.
Dr Litherland’s said his team had a rough idea of where the second tomb was, and it could still be intact with treasures.
The discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb caps off more than 12 years of work by the joint team from Dr Litherland’s New Kingdom Research Foundation and Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
