Tomb directory

A sarcophagus that fills the view

Where: The burial chamber, at the bottom of the straight descent

Compare the large stone sarcophagus with the chamber around it. Its scale is striking; view it from the permitted route without attempting to pass into restricted space.

The proportions make the sarcophagus a focal point of the room. Its apparent size does not establish the sequence in which the stone and chamber were prepared.

Interpretation: the visual effect of the sarcophagus in the chamber. No construction sequence is inferred from its apparent size.

The visitors who came before you, and signed

Where: Near the entrance and along the first corridor

Lines of scratched and cut Greek lettering, and later Coptic, layered over the Egyptian decoration at head height and below.

This tomb has been a visitor attraction for longer than it was a tomb. The people who wrote on these walls were tourists in a place already ancient to them — and it is worth a moment to notice that you are the latest of a very long queue.

The sky drawn twice, end to end

Where: The burial chamber ceiling, at the bottom of the tomb

An elongated female figure stretched the full length of the vault, arched over on fingertips and toes, with rows of small figures, discs and stars running along her body — and then the whole thing again, mirrored, beside it.

She is the sky, and the two figures are the day and the night. The sun is swallowed at one end and born at the other, and the whole cycle is drawn as a single body — which is a way of thinking about time that no amount of reading conveys as directly as looking up at it.

The spoil heap that hid Tutankhamun

Where: Outside, on the slope in front of the entrance — look downhill towards KV62

The ground immediately below this tomb’s doorway, and the low entrance of KV62 just beyond it. The two are extremely close together.

Construction debris and later activity helped obscure the entrance below. Concealment contributed to the preservation of KV62, but its survival cannot be reduced to a spoil heap alone.

Rooms full of ordinary things

Where: The small chambers opening off the upper corridors, before the tomb turns

From the permitted viewing route, look into the subsidiary scenes for boats, stored goods, craft work and equipment. Do not enter a side chamber unless it is explicitly open to visitors.

Familiar activities and provisions have a place in funerary imagery too. These scenes broaden the tomb’s programme without turning it into a neutral record of daily life.

Fact — the chambers and their subjects. Uncertain — why a royal tomb was decorated this way; no explanation is established.

The point where the tomb hit another tomb

Where: Part-way down, where the corridor shifts sideways before continuing

A visible step in the line of the corridor: the axis moves a few metres to one side and then resumes in the original direction.

The workmen cutting downwards broke through into a neighbouring tomb, stopped, and started again alongside. More than sixty tombs and pits were cut into one small valley by crews who could not see what was already inside the rock. This is what that looks like when it goes wrong.

A wall caught halfway through being made

Where: The unfinished chamber, beyond the decorated halls

Red squares ruled across the wall, figures drawn freehand inside them in red, a heavier black line laid over the red where a senior hand corrected the proportions, and in one place the sculptor’s chisel has started cutting the outline and then stopped.

Every finished wall in Egypt went through these stages and almost none of them shows it. Here the process is stopped mid-sentence: grid, drawing, correction, carving. You are looking at the working method of an entire civilisation, left visible because a king died before the room was done.

Relief that stands out of the wall, not into it

Where: The decorated corridors and halls, anywhere the surface is intact

Run your eye along a figure at a low angle. The background has been cut away and the figure left standing proud of it, with the modelling of the face, the shoulder and the hand worked in the round.

Raised relief leaves the figures standing above a cut-back background. Comparing this work with decoration made for Seti I at Karnak helps you notice the technique without assuming that cost alone explains later choices.

The gaps where the walls went to Europe

Where: Throughout the decorated sections — look for clean rectangular losses

Blank rectangles cut out of otherwise continuous scenes, with straight sawn edges rather than the ragged breaks that flooding and salt leave.

Those sections were removed in the nineteenth century and are now in museum collections in Europe. The sarcophagus went the same way. It is worth knowing while you are standing here that the tomb you are in is not the tomb Belzoni found, and that a good deal of what he described is elsewhere.

A book copied onto a wall

Where: The burial chamber, all the way round

Look for flowing hieroglyphic text, red and black details and economical outline figures. This is painted decoration with a distinctive graphic style, not carved relief.

The arrangement resembles writing and drawing on papyrus. That visual comparison does not prove that a particular papyrus roll was copied onto these walls; later tombs also vary in their choice and presentation of funerary texts.

A room cut in the shape of a name

Where: The burial chamber — look at the plan of the room, not the walls

The chamber is not rectangular. Its ends are rounded and its sides are straight, so the floor plan is a long oval with flat sides.

That is the shape of a cartouche — the loop of rope drawn around a royal name to protect it. The burial chamber is the king’s name, at the scale of a room, with the king inside it.

Fact — the shape of the chamber. Interpretation — that the shape was chosen to represent a cartouche, which is the standard reading and is not stated anywhere in the tomb.

The man performing the funeral is wearing a crown

Where: The north wall of the burial chamber

A figure in a leopard skin holding a forked implement up to the face of the upright mummy. Look at his head: he is wearing the blue royal crown, and his name is written in a cartouche.

Ay appears as king performing a funerary rite for his predecessor. The image connects succession with ritual duty; it does not mean that an heir would normally wait until after the funeral to become king.

Fact — the scene, the crown and the cartouche. Uncertain — what it was meant to assert. That it was a claim to legitimacy is a reading, not a statement.

Notice how small it is

Where: Everywhere — compare it with any other tomb you have entered today

A compact group of rooms reached by a short corridor, with painted decoration confined to the burial chamber. Compare its plan with the longer royal tombs nearby.

The small plan and choices of decoration have prompted interpretations of hurried preparation and adaptation. The precise sequence remains a matter for evidence, rather than a story to infer from the king’s age alone.

Fact — the size, the plan and the single decorated room. Interpretation — that the tomb was not originally cut for a king. That is the common reading and it is not established.

The brown spots are older than the discovery

Where: Across the painted surface of the burial chamber

Small dark brown blotches scattered over the yellow ground and across the figures, dense in places, more or less everywhere.

Historic photographs from 1923 show the spots were already present. Conservation research identified old, inactive microbial traces; removal would risk damaging the painted surface.

The spots’ historic presence and inactive microbial character are supported by conservation research. The precise conditions that first caused their growth remain a separate interpretive question.

Painted surfaces over prepared walls

Where: From a permitted viewing point, focus on one figure.

Look at the edge of an arm or a headdress. The relief is shallow and soft, modelled in a plaster skin laid over the wall rather than cut down into the stone, and the colour sits on that skin.

Prepared plaster provided a surface for the decoration. Its survival depends on the bond between layers as well as the condition of the rock; salt movement and detachment have been important conservation concerns.

The blank patches were left blank on purpose

Where: Throughout — the gaps in otherwise complete scenes

Areas of bare, neutral fill where the painted plaster has gone, set flush with the surface around them but not painted in.

Visible losses help distinguish surviving decoration from missing areas. Conservation can stabilise fragile materials without recreating an imagined complete painting; vivid colour does not mean every surface is untouched.

A queen playing a board game against nobody

Where: The upper level, in the first rooms you enter

Nefertari seated on a low chair before a small table carrying a grid of squares, one hand raised over a piece. There is no opponent in the picture.

Senet imagery connects a familiar board game with passage and renewal in the afterlife. The scene’s funerary meaning should not be treated as a complete account of the ancient game’s rules or outcome.

Fact — the scene and the game. Interpretation — the reading of the game as the passage to the afterlife, which is the standard one and is drawn from the funerary texts rather than stated on this wall.

Three musicians, painted with unusual life

Where: The banquet scene in the chapel

Three women playing music at a feast — one of them a harpist — arranged with real attention to individual pose and to the drape of their linen, rather than repeated as identical figures.

Banquet scenes with musicians are common in Theban private tombs, but this one is singled out again and again in books on Egyptian painting for the liveliness of the figures — proof that a small chapel with a modest owner could still be given real artistic ambition.

A sky full of birds, painted as a single mass

Where: The hunting and fowling register in the chapel

Birds rising together out of a papyrus thicket, wings overlapping, rather than drawn as separate, evenly spaced individuals.

It is a genuinely observed piece of nature-drawing inside a very formal art tradition, and it is one of the reasons this small chapel is visited far more often than its owner’s modest rank would predict.

A ceiling left rough on purpose

Where: The burial chamber, below the chapel, at the foot of the descending stair

A deliberately uneven, dipping stone ceiling covered edge to edge with painted grape leaves and hanging bunches, continuing down the faces of the pillars that support it.

The vine decoration follows the irregular ceiling and gives the chamber the impression of an arbour. The visual effect helps explain its familiar “Tomb of the Vines” name; it does not make this the only non-flat tomb ceiling.

Fact — the uneven, rippled ceiling and the painted vine covering it, and the popular name the tomb has carried since travellers began describing it. Interpretation — reading the unevenness as a deliberate trick of the eye rather than simply the shape the rock happened to take; the effect is real and observable, the intent behind it is a reading.

The owner and his wife together

Where: Throughout the chapel and burial chamber

Sennefer and Merit painted together scene after scene: seated side by side at an offering table, standing together before a god, taking part in the funeral rites as a pair.

A private tomb like this one is built around named individuals rather than a text of the underworld, and the repeated pairing is the tomb saying, plainly, that the two of them expected to spend eternity as they had spent their lives — together.

Fact — the repeated paired scenes. Interpretation — reading the repetition as an expectation of a shared eternity rather than simply the standard convention for depicting a married tomb owner.

A job description carved on a wall

Where: In the chapel’s long columns of inscription; consult the site plan for the permitted viewing point.

Dense columns of hieroglyphic text running the width of the hall, setting out, case by case, how the vizier was to conduct his office — how petitions were to be heard, how records were to be kept, how he was to behave toward the king and toward petitioners.

This is one of the fullest surviving descriptions of how the ancient Egyptian state was actually meant to run, written not as a story or a prayer but as an instruction manual, and carved permanently into the office holder’s own tomb.

The known world, arriving with gifts

Where: In the chapel’s tribute processions; follow the permitted route and local identification signs.

Rows of foreign delegations, each group drawn with its own dress, hair and goods: Nubians with gold and exotic animals, people from the Near East with fine vessels and horses, and a group generally read as Aegean bringing distinctive metal vases.

Rekhmire’s office put him at the point where Egypt’s foreign relations became a physical, countable inventory, and the tomb records exactly that — a picture of how the eighteenth-dynasty state saw the wider world, sorted and labelled by where it came from.

Fact — the processions, the distinct groups and their goods. Interpretation — the identification of the exact region each group represents, which rests on dress, goods and inscribed labels and is not certain in every case, particularly for the group usually read as Aegean.

Watch the temple’s craftsmen at work

Where: The long inner hall, among the registers of production

Metalworkers at a furnace worked by foot bellows, sculptors finishing a standing statue, carpenters, jewellers and leatherworkers, each shown mid-task with the tools of the trade in hand.

These are the workshops Rekhmire administered, shown doing the actual work rather than standing for a formal portrait — one of the clearest visual records anywhere of how New Kingdom craft production was organised.

Heaven, and it is a farm

Where: The burial chamber, in the large multi-register scene

A man and a woman in fine white linen, ploughing behind oxen, cutting grain with sickles and pulling flax by hand, in a landscape of straight blue channels and date palms.

The agricultural scene presents the Field of Reeds as an ideal afterlife of abundance. It draws on familiar work without proving who painted it or describing the owner’s ordinary working day.

Fact — the scene and its subject, which follows a standard Book of the Dead chapter. Interpretation — reading it as this individual’s own expectation rather than a conventional formula.

Painted by the men who painted the kings’ tombs

Where: The quality of the line, anywhere in the chamber

Look at a single outline — a jaw, a hand, the curve of a headdress — and then think about the size of the room. The drawing is as confident as anything in the royal valleys, at a fraction of the scale and on a private budget.

The owner belonged to the community serving the royal tombs. That setting helps explain the artistic knowledge available here, but the individual painters of these walls are not established by the owner’s occupation.

Fact — the owner’s title and the village’s function, both documented in detail. Interpretation — that the same individuals painted both the royal tombs and their own, which is the standard and well-supported reading rather than a signed attribution.