- Time needed
- 2–3 hours
- Heat exposure
- High
- Shade
- Low
- Stairs
- Every tomb is entered by a descent, and there is no other way out — a flight of steps, a long ramp, or both. The longer tombs run well over a hundred metres into the rock and drop steeply as they go
The tombs vary in length, depth and plan. Earlier royal examples often change direction; many later tombs follow straighter axes. Side chambers, unfinished sections and changes of design are part of the story.
- 1The peak that is shaped like a pyramid
Look up and south-west from the valley floor, above the tomb entrances
- 2Walls where the work stopped mid-scene
In several tombs, in the chambers nearest the burial chamber
- 3These walls carry books, not biographies
The corridor walls of any decorated royal tomb
- 4Graffiti left by ancient visitors
The entrance corridors of the tombs that stood open in antiquity — most of all KV9
1The peak that is shaped like a pyramid
Al-Qurn, “the horn”: a natural limestone peak that rises over the valley in a near-perfect pyramid, and is visible from almost everywhere in it.
Fact — the peak and its shape, and that it dominates the valley. Interpretation — that the shape influenced the choice of burial ground.
2Walls where the work stopped mid-scene
Look for a wall carrying red grid lines and a draughtsman’s outline with no colour in it, or smooth plaster laid ready and never carved. Sometimes the finished decoration and the bare outline meet in the middle of the same figure.
3These walls carry books, not biographies
Registers of dense text with small figures worked into them — serpents, barques (a ceremonial boat carrying a sacred image), gateways, ram-headed and mummiform forms of the sun — and almost nothing of banquets, hunting, farming or family.
4Graffiti left by ancient visitors
Names, dates and short lines scratched into the plaster and the stone in Greek, Latin and Coptic, sometimes in careful lettering, sometimes not.
The valley floor is compacted stone and grit, broadly level but loose and dusty in places; inside a tomb the floor is a ramp, a stair, or a modern boarded walkway over both Every tomb is entered by a descent, and there is no other way out — a flight of steps, a long ramp, or both. The longer tombs run well over a hundred metres into the rock and drop steeply as they go
Visit mode keeps the sequence, the details and the facilities. The history, the figures and the related reading are in plan mode.