KV20, Tomb of Hatshepsut

Stand still for a moment and listen. The valley floor crunches underfoot, a dry mix of limestone chips and fine pale dust. The cliffs rise on every side, tan and grey, cut by long vertical cracks. Heat comes off the rock even in the early morning. Somewhere behind you, tour groups move between the open tombs. But here, at the mouth of KV20, it is quieter. This is one of the oldest royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and one of the strangest.

First, the name. KV simply means Kings' Valley. The number twenty comes from the order in which modern explorers listed the tombs, not from the order in which they were built. In fact, this tomb is probably far older than most of its higher-numbered neighbours. Many Egyptologists think it may be among the very first tombs cut in this valley, at the start of the New Kingdom, more than three thousand years ago.

The tomb is linked with one of the most remarkable rulers in Egyptian history. Hatshepsut was a woman who ruled as pharaoh during the eighteenth dynasty, in the fifteenth century before Christ. She did not rule as a queen beside a king. She took the full titles of a king. In some statues and reliefs she appears in the royal kilt and the false ceremonial beard, the formal image of male kingship.

Scholars still debate who started this tomb. One view holds that it was first cut for her father, the pharaoh Thutmose the First. Another view holds that Hatshepsut ordered it for herself from the beginning. What is clear is the result. Inside, she prepared a burial place not only for herself, but also for her father. She seems to have moved his body here, so that father and daughter would rest together.

Now, here is the first surprise. KV20 is not a straight shaft or a simple sequence of rooms. It is a long corridor that curves and spirals down into the mountain. It runs for more than two hundred metres and drops very deep below the valley floor. That makes it one of the longest and deepest tombs in the whole valley. The ancient workers kept digging, turning as they went, through rock that was working against them.

And that rock is the second surprise. The good limestone of the upper cliffs gives way, lower down, to a soft and crumbling layer of shale. It cracks. It flakes. It swells and breaks apart when moisture reaches it. For the builders, this was a serious problem. The walls of the deeper chambers could not hold carved or painted decoration. Over the centuries, parts of the corridors collapsed, and floodwater carried debris deep inside.

So the builders found another solution. Instead of painting the walls, they wrote sacred texts on slabs of limestone, in red and black ink, and placed them in the burial chamber. The texts came from the Amduat, a funerary book whose name means roughly what is in the underworld. It describes the sun's journey through the twelve hours of night, a journey the dead king hoped to share. Those slabs were later removed and taken to Cairo.

The modern clearance of the tomb came in 1903 and 1904. The work was led by Howard Carter, the archaeologist who, nearly two decades later, would find the tomb of Tutankhamun. The sponsor was the American lawyer Theodore Davis. Carter's team found the passages packed with rubble, almost to the ceiling in places. The air deep inside was hot and stale, and candles struggled to burn. Workers had to clear the debris by hand, basket by basket.

At the bottom, in the burial chamber, they found two stone sarcophagi of yellow quartzite, but no royal mummy. One sarcophagus had been made for Hatshepsut. It appears that a second one, first prepared for her, was later re-cut and re-inscribed for her father. Today, one of them is displayed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The sarcophagus of Thutmose the First travelled much further. It is now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Where, then, did the bodies go? Thutmose the First may have been moved again in later centuries, when priests gathered royal mummies to protect them from robbers. As for Hatshepsut, the story has a modern ending. In 2007, Egyptian researchers announced that a mummy from a much smaller tomb nearby, known as KV60, was most likely her. A single tooth, found in a small box bearing her name, helped support the identification. Some scholars still treat the match with caution.

One more idea is worth knowing, though it remains a theory. Look up at the cliffs and picture the far side of this mountain. Just over that ridge stands Hatshepsut's mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari, with its long, stepped terraces. Some researchers suggest the corridor of KV20 was aimed toward that temple, as if to bring her tomb and her temple closer together through the rock. The rock itself may have stopped the plan.

Today, the interior of KV20 is generally not part of the standard visitor route. The tomb is fragile, deep, and difficult, and conditions underground are hard on both people and stone. What you can usually see is the setting itself: the entrance, the cliff face above it, and the way it sits close to the base of the rock. Ask the site staff about current access, because arrangements in the valley change from season to season.

Before you move on, look again at the cliff. Notice the pale upper layers and the darker, broken stone lower down. That simple line in the rock shaped this entire tomb. Feel the heat on your face, and hear the dust shift under your shoes. Somewhere beneath where you stand, a long corridor turns into the dark, cut by hands that worked for a woman who called herself king. As you walk on, the valley will look a little different.