KV9: The Tomb of Ramesses V and Ramesses VI

The air changes the moment you step inside. Outside, the Valley of the Kings is all glare and pale limestone, with heat rising off the path. Here, the light drops to a soft amber glow. The corridor slopes gently downward, and the walls close in around you. They are covered in colour from floor to ceiling. Blue, yellow, red and black figures march beside you into the hillside. Take a breath, and let your eyes adjust.

This is KV9. The letters stand for Kings' Valley, and the number comes from the order in which modern explorers catalogued the tombs. But this tomb has a more complicated story than most. It was begun for one pharaoh, Ramesses V, and finished for another, Ramesses VI. Both kings belonged to the Twentieth Dynasty, in the twelfth century before the Common Era. That was a late and troubled period for the New Kingdom, the age of Egypt's great empire.

Ramesses V reigned for only a short time. When he died, his tomb was still under construction. His successor, Ramesses VI, took over the work. He extended the corridors and completed the decoration in his own name. Egyptologists still debate whether Ramesses V was ever actually buried here, or whether his burial was moved somewhere else. What is clear is that the tomb you see today mostly belongs to Ramesses VI. His names fill the cartouches, the oval frames that enclose a royal name.

Notice how straight this tomb is. Earlier royal tombs in the valley often bend or turn sharply. By this period, builders cut a single long axis directly into the rock. The design is simple and powerful. You walk in one direction, down and down, from the bright world above toward the burial chamber at the end. Ancient Egyptians imagined the dead king travelling the same way, into the underworld, and then rising again with the sun.

That journey is what the walls describe. They are not decoration for its own sake. They are texts and images from the great funerary books, guides that helped the king survive the night. Here you will find scenes from the Book of Gates, where the sun passes through a series of guarded doorways. There is also the Book of Caverns, with its dark underground chambers. These texts were meant to work like a map, and also like a set of instructions.

Look carefully at the figures along the corridor. Some are serpents, some are gods with animal heads, and some are rows of small human figures. Many of the punished enemies of the sun god appear upside down or bound. The painters worked with a limited palette. They mixed mineral pigments, and the colours have lasted remarkably well. Part of the reason is the dry desert air. Part of it is simply that this tomb was cut into good, solid rock.

Here is the first surprise. This tomb has been open since antiquity. Long before modern archaeology, travellers in the Greek and Roman period walked down this same corridor. And they left their names. On the walls you can still find graffiti in ancient Greek, and some in Latin, scratched or written in ink. These visitors believed this was the tomb of Memnon, a hero from Greek legend. In other words, you are a tourist in a place that had tourists two thousand years ago.

The second surprise is connected to a far more famous tomb. Just nearby lies the small tomb of Tutankhamun. When workers dug KV9, they dumped stone chips and debris down the slope. They also built simple huts for themselves in the area. All of this covered the entrance to Tutankhamun's tomb. That covering helped hide it from robbers for centuries. When Howard Carter excavated in the 1920s, he had to clear away those workmen's huts first.

Now continue down toward the burial chamber. As you enter, raise your eyes. The ceiling is the high point of this tomb. Stretched across it, twice, is the sky goddess Nut. Her long body arches from one end of the chamber to the other. One image shows the Book of the Day, the other the Book of the Night. In Egyptian belief, Nut swallowed the sun each evening and gave birth to it again each morning.

Take a moment to follow the small sun discs along her body. You can trace the sun's path as it travels through her. The background is a deep blue, and the goddess is drawn in gold and yellow tones. Around the walls of the chamber are scenes from the Book of the Earth. This book describes the sun moving through the depths of the earth, protected by gods, before it rises again.

In the middle of the chamber you will see the remains of the stone sarcophagus. It was once a massive container for the royal coffin. Today it survives in broken pieces. Robbers likely smashed it in ancient times, searching for gold and treasure. The face of the king from the lid has been reassembled from fragments. Even damaged, it gives you a sense of the scale and weight of a royal burial in this valley.

And what happened to the king himself? Ancient priests, worried about tomb robbers, gathered many royal mummies together and hid them. In 1898, archaeologists found a group of these mummies in the tomb of an earlier pharaoh, Amenhotep II. Among them were the bodies of both Ramesses V and Ramesses VI. So the two kings who shared this tomb in life were also found together, far from it, in death.

Before you leave, stand still for a minute in the burial chamber. Listen to the quiet hum of the ventilation and the soft footsteps of other visitors. Look up once more at Nut, holding the night sky over your head. Then turn and walk back up the long corridor. Watch the daylight grow ahead of you, bright and white at the entrance. In a small way, you are making the same journey the king hoped to make... out of the darkness, and back into the sun.