Tomb of Thutmose II

Listen first. Out here in the western wadis of Thebes, the city noise is gone. There is the crunch of limestone grit under your shoes, the dry tick of heat coming off the cliffs, and perhaps the call of a bird somewhere above you. The rock is pale and cream-coloured, and in the low sun it turns the colour of honey. This quiet, empty valley held a secret for about three and a half thousand years.

Let us get our bearings. You are on the west bank of the Nile, across the river from modern Luxor. The ancient Egyptians called the whole city Waset. The Greeks later called it Thebes. The east bank was for the living, with its great temples to the god Amun. The west bank, where the sun sets, was for the dead. Just a few kilometres from here lies the Valley of the Kings, the royal cemetery of the New Kingdom.

These side valleys, known today as the Western Wadis, were less well known. Archaeologists long linked them with the burials of royal women... queens, princesses, and members of the court. So when a team began to clear a buried tomb here, nobody expected to find a king. And that expectation is where our story becomes interesting.

The king in question is Thutmose II. He belonged to the Eighteenth Dynasty, the family of rulers who made Egypt an imperial power in the fifteenth century before Christ. He was the son of Thutmose I. Following a royal custom of the time, he married his half-sister, Hatshepsut. His reign was short, and he probably died fairly young. He left behind few large monuments, and for a long time he stayed in the background of Egyptian history.

That background position is the reason his tomb was such a puzzle. Two famous figures stand on either side of him. Before him came his father, a strong warrior king. After him came Hatshepsut, who later ruled as pharaoh in her own right, and then Thutmose III, one of Egypt's great military leaders. Scholars argued for generations about where Thutmose II was buried. Several candidate tombs were proposed, but none gave a clear answer.

The answer came from this valley. A joint mission of Egyptian and British archaeologists, working with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, located the entrance and a descending corridor in 2022. The passage was choked with debris. Much of it was hardened flood material, packed in over the centuries. At first, the team believed they had found the tomb of a royal wife. The location fitted that idea well.

Then came the first real surprise. As the team cleared the burial chamber, they found fragments of plaster on the ceiling. The plaster was painted blue and decorated with yellow stars. In the royal tombs of this period, a starry ceiling like this marked the resting place of a king. The team also found pieces of text from the Amduat. This is a sacred funerary book that describes the journey of the sun god through the underworld during the twelve hours of the night.

The final proof came from small objects. Among the debris, the excavators found fragments of alabaster jars. Some carried inscriptions naming Thutmose II as the deceased king, and Hatshepsut as his royal wife. In February 2025, the discovery was announced to the world. It was described as the first royal tomb found in Egypt since Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. A century of searching, and the answer was in a valley everyone had overlooked.

Here is the second surprise. The tomb was almost empty. The evidence suggests that water entered the tomb not long after the burial. Floods in this desert are rare, but when they come, they are violent. Rainwater runs off the bare rock and pours down these narrow valleys. Inside the tomb, the plaster fell from the walls and ceiling. It seems the ancient Egyptians themselves removed the king and his belongings, probably soon after the damage.

So where is the king now? His mummy was found in the nineteenth century, far from here. It was part of the royal cache at Deir el-Bahari, a hidden shaft where priests gathered and reburied many royal mummies to protect them from robbers. Today his body rests in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo. As for his original burial goods, the excavators have suggested they may have been moved to a second location. That idea remains a hypothesis, and the search continues.

There is a human thread in all of this. When Thutmose II died, Hatshepsut was his widow and the senior royal woman. It is very likely that she oversaw his funeral and his burial in this tomb. Within a few years, she took the titles of pharaoh herself. Her great terraced temple stands at Deir el-Bahari, on the other side of these same cliffs. The two monuments sit close together in the same limestone hills.

It is worth knowing what kind of place you are standing in. This is a working archaeological site, not a decorated tomb on the standard visitor circuit. The work here is slow and careful. Excavators sift the flood debris by hand, recover tiny fragments of painted plaster, and record each piece before it can be studied. Much of what we know about this king will come from fragments smaller than your palm. Access may be limited, so you may be viewing the area from a distance.

Before you leave, look around once more. Look at the clean, steep cliffs and the dry channels cut into the rock by ancient floods. These are the same forces that emptied the tomb, long ago. Above the hills rises a peak shaped almost like a pyramid, the same summit that watched over the royal burials. Somewhere beneath this pale stone, a forgotten king's story was waiting. As you walk back along the valley floor, listen again to the quiet. It held its secret for a very long time.