KV16

Before the colour, there is the descent. You leave the white glare of the Valley of the Kings behind you. The air changes on the steep stairs, warm and dry, with a faint smell of dust and old plaster. The light thins out. Your footsteps sound close and flat against the rock. Then, at the bottom, the walls open into a single painted chamber. The blue-grey background seems almost cool after the heat outside. This is KV16, and it is one of the shortest royal tombs in the valley.

The tomb belongs to Ramesses I. His name may sound familiar, because his grandson was Ramesses the Second, one of the most famous rulers Egypt ever had. But this first Ramesses is the quiet beginning of that story. He founded the Nineteenth Dynasty, the royal family that would rule Egypt through much of the thirteenth century before the common era. Everything that followed, the great temples and the long reigns, starts with the man buried here.

Ramesses I was not born a prince. He came from a military family, and historians believe his roots lay in the eastern Nile Delta, far to the north. Before he became king, he was known as Paramessu. He served as a senior officer and a high official under the pharaoh Horemheb. Horemheb had no son to follow him. So he chose this trusted commander as his heir. By the time Paramessu took the throne, he was already an older man, with a grown son ready to follow him.

His reign was short — most scholars think it lasted less than two years. And that short reign shaped the tomb you are standing in. Royal tombs in this valley were usually long projects. Workers cut deep corridors, chamber after chamber, over many years. Here, there was no time. When the king died, the builders had to stop and adapt. They turned what was planned as a corridor into the burial chamber itself. So the tomb carries a sense of urgency that you can still feel today.

Look at the shape of the space as you come down. The tomb drops steeply into the hillside through stairs and a sloping passage. There are no long decorated corridors on the way. The walls of the entrance passages are plain, cut rock. All of the decoration is saved for the final room. Compare this with the larger tombs nearby, where paintings start almost at the door. Here, the builders put all their effort into the one place that mattered most — the room where the king would rest.

And that room is worth the climb down. The walls are painted, not carved. In most grand tombs, artists first carved the figures into the stone and then painted them. Painting directly onto plaster was faster, and speed was the priority here. The result has a soft, bright quality. The figures stand out against that blue-grey ground in clear reds, yellows, and blacks. The colours have survived well, partly because the chamber stayed dry and sealed for many centuries.

Many of the scenes come from a text called the Book of Gates. This was a guide for the dead king's journey through the night. Ancient Egyptians believed the sun travelled through an underworld after sunset. It passed through twelve hours of darkness, each one guarded by a gate. The king hoped to join the sun on this journey and rise again at dawn. The Book of Gates was quite new in royal tombs at this time. It had appeared only shortly before, in the tomb of Horemheb.

Other scenes show the king himself. You will see Ramesses I standing before the gods, making offerings and being welcomed. Look for Osiris, the god of the dead, and for Anubis, with his black jackal head. One scene is especially lively. Kneeling figures with falcon heads and jackal heads raise one fist and beat their chest with the other. These are the Souls of Pe and Nekhen, spirits linked to ancient royal cities of Egypt. Their pose is a gesture of celebration, a cheer for the king.

In the centre of the chamber sits the granite sarcophagus, the stone box that once held the king's coffins. Look closely at its decoration. Like the walls, it is painted rather than carved, in yellow on the dark stone. This is unusual for a royal sarcophagus, and it is another sign of haste. The stone was cut and set in place, but there was no time to carve it. The paint was the quickest way to finish the job before the burial.

The modern story of this tomb begins in October 1817. The Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni was working in the valley at that time. He was a former circus strongman who had become one of the first excavators of Egyptian tombs. He found the entrance to KV16 and went inside. Here is the surprise. In the same month, nearby, Belzoni also found the tomb of Seti I, the son of Ramesses I. That tomb is long and full of carved decoration. Father and son were discovered within days of each other.

The king's body has its own long journey. In ancient times, tomb robbing was a serious problem in this valley. Priests moved many royal mummies to safer hiding places. Coffins belonging to Ramesses I were later found in a famous hidden cache of royal mummies near Deir el-Bahari. But the body itself took a stranger path. A mummy sold in the nineteenth century ended up in a small museum at Niagara Falls in North America. It was later bought by a museum in Atlanta, which studied it carefully.

Some researchers believed this mummy could be Ramesses I. Its arms were crossed over the chest, a pose linked with royalty. The museum in Atlanta returned it to Egypt in 2003, as a gesture of respect. It is now in Luxor. Still, experts do not fully agree on the identification. So the honest answer is this: it may be the king, but no one can say for certain. It is a reminder that even in the best-known valley, some questions stay open.

Think about what this small tomb started. Ramesses I ruled only briefly. Yet his son Seti I built some of the finest tombs and temples in Egypt. His grandson Ramesses II ruled for decades and filled the country with monuments. Walk through the larger tombs here and you are seeing the family's later ambition. This chamber is the first page. It is modest, rushed, and unfinished in places. But it holds the same hopes for eternal life as the great tombs around it.

Before you climb back up, stand still for a moment in the burial chamber. Look at the kneeling figures, still cheering after more than three thousand years. Notice how close the walls are, and how the paint catches the light. Then turn toward the stairs. As you rise, the heat and the brightness return, step by step. Outside, look across the valley at the other tomb entrances cut into the cliffs. Somewhere among them is the tomb of his son, found in the same autumn, just a short walk away.