KV43

Listen for a moment before you go down. The wind moves dust across the limestone. Somewhere behind you, a guard calls to a colleague. Then you step into the cut, and the air changes. It becomes still, warm, and slightly dry against your skin. The rock walls close in, pale and chalky, and the light from the valley floor fades with every step. This is KV43, the tomb of the pharaoh Thutmose the Fourth, carved deep into the Valley of the Kings.

The name sounds like a catalogue number, and it is one. KV stands for Kings' Valley. The number forty-three marks the order in which the tombs here were recorded. Behind that dry label is a king who ruled Egypt during the Eighteenth Dynasty. That was the long and wealthy era that also produced Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, and Tutankhamun. Thutmose the Fourth sits in the middle of that family story. He was the son of Amenhotep the Second and the father of Amenhotep the Third, one of the richest rulers Egypt ever knew.

His reign was fairly short, and he is not a household name today. But one story keeps his memory alive, and it is not here in Luxor. It stands hundreds of kilometres to the north, between the paws of the Great Sphinx at Giza. There, a granite slab called the Dream Stele tells a tale from his youth. The young prince fell asleep in the shadow of the Sphinx after a hunt. In a dream, the great statue spoke to him. It promised him the throne if he would clear away the sand that buried its body.

Historians treat this story with care. It may be a real memory, or it may be political theatre — a way to show that the gods chose him, perhaps over older brothers. Either way, the stele is a reminder that this king cared about how he would be remembered. And this tomb was part of that plan. It was meant to carry his body, and his name, safely into eternity.

As you walk, notice the shape of the descent. The tomb does not run in one straight line. It goes down through steep stairways and sloping corridors, and then the passage turns. This bent axis is typical of royal tombs from this period. The builders cut downward and inward, following a layout that was full of religious meaning. Each section stood for a stage on the dead king's journey through the underworld, toward rebirth with the sun.

Partway down, you reach a deep shaft, often called the well. It had more than one purpose. It may have caught the rare but violent floodwater that sometimes rushes through the valley after a storm. It may also have slowed down robbers. And it held a symbolic role, as a kind of entrance to the realm of the dead. Here comes the first surprise. This is one of the first places in the tomb where you see colour.

Most of the long corridors are bare rock. The painted decoration appears only in a few chosen spaces, mainly around the well and in the antechamber beyond it. Look at the scenes there. The king stands before the gods, one after another. You can see deities such as Hathor, Osiris, and Anubis receiving him. The figures are crisp and graceful, set against a warm yellow background. That yellow was common in tombs of this era, and it may have suggested gold, the flesh of the gods.

The second surprise is not ancient Egyptian art at all. It is handwriting. On a wall in the antechamber, there is a short inscription in hieratic, the flowing cursive script that scribes used for everyday writing. It dates from the reign of a later pharaoh, Horemheb. It records that officials came into this tomb to restore the burial. In other words, someone had already broken in. Within a few decades of the king's funeral, robbers had been here, and the state sent men to tidy up the damage.

Pause on that for a moment. We often imagine tomb robbing as a modern crime, or something from the age of explorers. But this note shows that it began almost immediately. The officials who wrote it were doing a sort of ancient conservation work. Their few lines of ink have survived for more than three thousand years, on the very wall they were written on.

Further down, the tomb opens into a pillared burial chamber. Here the walls stay plain. The decoration was never finished, which happened often when a king died sooner than expected. But the chamber is not empty. A massive stone sarcophagus still rests here, carved from hard quartzite and covered with inscriptions. It was simply too heavy for robbers to take, and too heavy for later excavators to move easily. Stand near it and notice the polish of the stone and the depth of the cut signs.

The modern discovery came in 1903. Howard Carter excavated the tomb, with funding from the American lawyer Theodore Davis. This was nearly twenty years before Carter found Tutankhamun. Inside, the team found broken burial goods scattered across the floors. Among them was the body of a royal chariot, decorated with carved scenes of battle. It now belongs to the collections in Cairo. The king himself was not here. His mummy had been moved in ancient times, and it was found in 1898 among the royal mummies hidden in the tomb of his father.

It is worth remembering how much international contact this reign saw. Thutmose the Fourth made peace with Mitanni, a powerful kingdom in what is now northern Syria. A Mitanni princess came to Egypt as one of his wives. So the man buried here was not only a figure of dreams and gods. He was also a careful diplomat who helped build the calm, wealthy world his son inherited.

As you climb back toward the light, take your time on the stairs. The ceilings are low in places, and the air grows warmer near the entrance. Watch how the pale rock turns brighter, then almost white, as the sun reaches in. The silence below gives way to footsteps and voices and the dry sound of the wind again.

When you step outside, look up at the cliffs around you. Somewhere in that rock, workers once cut this passage by hand, by the light of lamps. Robbers followed them, and then scribes, and then Carter. Now it is your turn. Before you walk on, stand still for a moment, and feel the sun on your face — the same sun this king hoped to rise with, every morning, forever.