The Dangerous System Behind Egypt’s Royal Tombs

In ancient Egypt, people didn't consider death to be the end of their story. They saw it as a problem to be solved, with great care, with repetition, and often at enormous cost. Pharaohs didn't just want to be remembered, they wanted to continue existing forever, in a cosmos they believed was fragile. That's why Egypt built an entire system to manage death, a system in which bodies were hidden away, rituals were controlled by priests, and knowledge was tightly guarded. But that system was never as stable as it looked. Today we're exploring the world of the dead in Egypt's empire period, in places where the effort to prepare for death was concentrated, and where eternity was constantly at risk. Everything we're about to show you lies on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor, the side associated with death, burial, and the setting sun. We'll start in the Valley of the Kings, where Egypt tried to secure royal eternity by hiding it, cutting tombs deep into the cliffs, and sealing them away from the living world. We'll talk about why that is. Then we'll move to the Valley of the Queens, where that same system begins to show strain, changing priorities, uneven investment, and signs that not everyone was protected equally. And finally we'll go to Deir el-Medina, the village where the people who constructed royal eternity actually lived. Because once you understand who made these tombs, how they were paid, and what happened when the system faltered, the valleys will stop feeling timeless and feel far more precarious. The Valley of the Kings sits in a bowl of cliffs, and above it that unmistakable pyramid-shaped peak, al-Qurn, meaning the horn. The ancient Egyptians called it simply the Peak. The tombs are cut through layers of limestone, with weaker bands, marl and shale, that can crack, crumble, and behave unpredictably. That's one reason tomb plans sometimes change their mind mid-excavation. And even though this is desert, the valley is vulnerable to flash floods that can dump debris into entrances and chambers. Chronologically, this is the Royal Cemetery of the New Kingdom, used for roughly five centuries, about 1539 to 1075 BCE, covering the 18th, 19th, and 20th dynasties. After the long history of pyramid robberies, kings decided to move their final resting places underground. Concealment became part of the funerary strategy. This, by the way, is a great example of how doing archaeology properly gives you great rewards. Before this, it was very common, especially in the valley here, for people to just dig anywhere, trying to find whatever they could find. When Howard Carter was hired, a Lord Carnarvon, a very rich aristocrat from Britain, hired him. Howard Carter was saying, I think there's an intact royal tomb here in the valley. We haven't found Tutankhamun yet. I think it's here. I'm going to warn you right now, he tells Carnarvon, it's going to be slow. It could take years to find it. And basically drew a grid over the area that he thought you should look, write it up, and just one square at a time, he'd have the men work, just cover every inch to make sure that they didn't miss it. And it took years. They started before World War I. They had to take a break during the war before they could come back again. And it wasn't until 1922 when they actually found it. So this is many years later, but using his method, they did that. And then when they did find it, nobody touched anything, he says. We're going to catalog every find. We're not going to move it from the tomb until we take all of our photographs. We catalog everything. It all has to be done right. Everybody wanted to go into the crypt where the actual coffin was. No, no, we're going to do the outer chamber first. Every piece, but he made them do it the right way. And that's how we do archaeology today. Slowly, methodically, keeping track of everything. Because once you take it out, once you move it, it's destroyed. Tutankhamun's tomb is small by royal standards. It has only a few rooms, and the decoration is limited mostly to the burial chamber. A bright yellow background with scenes that feel almost compressed, as if the job had to be finished fast. On the north wall, you get one of the most historically loaded images in the entire valley. The successor, Ai, performing the opening-of-the-mouth ritual on Tutankhamun. It's purposely showing that the transition of power is legitimate. The many treasures that were found here are now in museums, but the king's mummy is still here in the tomb, protected in a climate-controlled glass case for preservation. Tutankhamun died around the year 1323 BCE. It costs about 40 bucks extra, but the tomb of Seti I is definitely worth seeing. It's generally considered the greatest of the tombs in the valley. Seti I, in case you didn't know, was a great conqueror. He was the father of Ramses the Great, and he has the longest passage in his tomb, the largest tomb, the most artwork. It's definitely magnificent, and I can't wait to see it. Early New Kingdom tombs, 18th dynasty, often used a bent axis or jogged layout, turns and changes of direction. Then later Ramseid tombs, such as this one, trend toward a more straight axis plan, long corridors, descending in a clear line toward a burial chamber. Seti I's tomb is about 137 meters long, and the walls are covered with funerary compositions, guides to the underworld and renewal, like the Amduat and the Book of Gates, the Litany of Ra, etc. Don't think of these as mere decorations. They are closer to a set of operating instructions, what the king must know, say, and pass through to be reborn like the sun. That's why tombs like this can feel ominous. You're walking through a place built for a single purpose, making sure a person doesn't stay dead. For the historian, it's basically an illustrated library of royal afterlife theology. This is a huge pit. There would have been no bridge over the top, and this is to prevent people from getting any further in. It may have been even covered over to look like it was a passageway, so that when robbers tried to come in, boom, they would fall to the bottom and most likely die. This well chamber, as it's called, would make it extremely difficult for robbers to move heavy objects out of the tomb, but it also probably served to keep damaging rainwater out of the tomb. And interpreters say it may also have symbolic meaning, representing the tunnel through which the sun god travels to the underworld at night, and maybe the journey of the pharaoh himself. This is one of the most interesting chambers in the tomb. It's unfinished, but that's what makes it so cool. Yes, it lacks the paint, the colors, the carving, but you can see the draft. It's still here, the draft, the artwork as it was being prepared. You can see the lines and the corrections and what it would eventually be, but it gives you an idea of how the artists worked when you don't see the finished product, when you see it in process. I think it's so fascinating to see the art in progress. And they're doing this under torchlight, you know, for no one to see. Well, the gods will see. Seti will see in the next life. This tomb was discovered by Giovanni Belzoni on October 16, 1817, back in the days when archaeology and adventure were still hopelessly entangled. This room here off to the side is the tomb of a family. It's dedicated to the family of Seti. So his wife and children, and they just let us in here. They don't normally allow people in here, but let's take a look around. Here we are in the final room, the main chamber. Look at the amazing, colorful artwork that's still on the walls and the beautiful blue sky up above. Absolutely magnificent. Amazing. The whole ceiling here is representing the heavens. You can see the various star signs. So the lion there, you might say, wait a minute, did the Egyptians have the constellation of Leo? Not called Leo, but they might have had a lion constellation. Bull, equivalent to Taurus and so forth. But we're looking at stars, the constellations of the heavens. Blue is still quite deep. I'm not sure even what all these are. Seti very prominent all around. You can see him there with Osiris, over there with Horus. Seti died around 1279 BCE. His sarcophagus has its own afterlife. Note, it's not here. The famous alabaster piece is now in Sir John Soane's museum in London. This seems to be new. They destroyed this probably to get in here, and so this is all new. That also is newer. Not part of the original tomb in this. This tomb shows what the state could do at full capacity, with skilled labor, a stable ideology, high resources, and a coherent decorative program. It's the gold standard that makes later strain on the system easier to see. We're now walking up towards the tomb of Merneptah, sometimes known as Merneptah. He was one of the sons of Ramses. He ruled not for a super long time because he was old. But anyway, he's the one who lived right around the same time as the Trojan War, and he fought against the Sea Peoples. Anyway, let's check it out. There he is, with Horus, Merneptah. Ooh, look at the hieroglyphs all over the walls. Merneptah died around 1203 BCE. Decoratively, the walls are covered in prime Ramsite underworld literature, Book of Gates, Book of Caverns, and related compositions. By the early 12th century BCE, the tombs can feel more standardized and planned than the 18th Dynasty experiments. But they're not spiritually simpler. If anything, the cosmic machinery gets more elaborate. More gates, more regions, more guardians, more things that can go wrong. Look at this. Sarcophagus lid is gigantic. Look at this. Aswan granite. This has to weigh quite a bit. This is massive. Aswan granite sarcophagus. Bigger than any Old Kingdom sarcophagus that I've ever seen. It's huge. It's the outer coffin for Merneptah. But bigger, heavier than anything from the Old Kingdom. See the goddess Mut there. The tomb tunnel runs to a burial chamber at the end of roughly 160 meters of corridor. And it once held four nested sarcophagi, so large that parts of doorways had to be demolished and rebuilt just to move the outer one into place. As you can see, the outer sarcophagus was broken and has been restored. A smaller one with an anthropomorphic lid sits off to the left. Wow, this is a huge granite sarcophagus. Just look at this. It's more like just a giant box. It's made of Aswan granite. Do you know how much this must have weighed? Couldn't have done it. Now, those primitive loincloth-wearing savages could not possibly have moved something like this. Impossible. Well, they did it. And I would gather this has got to weigh at least 50 tons, if not more. You hear the name Valley of the Kings and imagine confidence, power, monuments meant to dominate the landscape. But being here, what I feel isn't a sense of triumph. It's a sense of anxiety. For centuries before this, Egyptian kings built tombs meant to be seen, pyramids that stood boldly on the horizon. And they failed. This valley feels like the moment when that confidence finally broke. Everything here is defensive. Tombs cut deeper, corridors twisted, entrances hidden. The landscape itself recruited as protection. Nothing announces what's here, and that's on purpose. We are at the tomb of Setnakt. He usurped this tomb. He didn't last very long, so he had to take over somebody else's tomb. This had belonged to Tausert before him. So we're going to see how he changed it and what he did to it. So this was Queen Tausert's tomb, and this is her. This is the only picture of her in it. This is what Setnakt kept. And the rest he changed to be for himself. He didn't last long enough to make a tomb. The one he was making, Ramses III took over. So let's see how he altered Tausert's tomb. This is one of the lesser-known but most revealing tombs in the valley because it's literally a record of political turnover written onto stone. It's one of my favorites. This is a tomb that admits instability. The afterlife is supposed to be permanent. The politics around it often aren't. Queen Tausert, also pronounced Tausret, was the last ruler of the 19th dynasty, who died around 1188 BCE. Setnakt, the founder of the 20th dynasty, basically erased her legitimacy by usurping this tomb. Or perhaps I should say his administration did. When he died in 1186, they had nowhere to put him. So why not just take this one? It was only a woman's after all. But the decorative program was altered. You can see evidence here that this tomb had once belonged to Queen Tausert because some of the imagery here you see along the bottom, this domestic imagery, it has things like the makeup that she used, the dressing room, basically women's things around the edges, which Setnakt, I guess, didn't change. He figured, all right, we'll just keep it. These are mirrors, I think, here, right? Are those mirrors? And did he say what that was? What are these things? Dressers? I guess they could be dressers, dressing tables. The tomb ends up with two burial chambers and a total length of 112 meters, putting it among the longest royal tombs here. Another granite sarcophagus. Look at the size of that thing. That sarcophagus had to be brought all the way down here. The sarcophagus is reconstructed from broken pieces, but the lid is in decent condition. It carries Setnakt's royal image and inscriptions and hieroglyphs that give his titularity. The image presents the king in an idealized, eternally intact form, and the writing fixes his name so that it can be spoken, recognized, and protected in perpetuity. This is the tomb of Ramses III, probably the last great Ramses. He was assassinated, and this is where he is interred. He's very famous also for fighting the Sea Peoples and for many great exploits, so we're going to take a look inside. Oh, so Ramses III took this from his father, Setnakt. It's always easier when you can just build upon what somebody else did. Oh, this one goes on for quite a ways. All right, let's go down. Look at all these hieroglyphs all along the walls. Ramses III is the last pharaoh of the new kingdom to wield substantial power, and his tomb has a personality to match. This is late in the valley's life. The state is still capable of monumental feats, but the wider world is harsher. Economic strain, internal threats, and instability shows up not only in text, but in construction decisions too. You see the beginning of that here, starting with the fact that Ramses III just continued another tomb that had already been started. This has got to be my favorite room so far. Still a lot of it is here. I'm standing here right next to Ramses III. It's amazing. There's a room in here I want to show you. This tomb has the expected sacred repertoire, litany of ra gates and hours of night, but it's also famous for something rare in royal tombs, secular side chambers with scenes of foreign tribute and material culture, including famously detailed depictions that have been linked to imported Aegean objects and the Harper's imagery that gives the tomb one of its nicknames. So this is what we're looking at. This is Ramses right here, Ramses III, and he is making an offering to Osiris over here. And then on this side, we have Ramses. Here he is taken under the protection of Rahorakhti and Thoth over there. They are taking him by the hand. I don't know what happened to his eyes. That's the king, King Ramses. That's his name right there. Alas, we can't go any further. The tomb actually does go a ways further. It's a long tomb, but we've got people working on conservation here from Humboldt University in Berlin, and they're protecting the tomb and making sure it's preserved well. So that conservation project is keeping us from going in any further. But if you come here, maybe it will be done and you can go all the way through. The more tombs you enter, the more the valley stops feeling like a set of individual monuments and starts feeling like one long experiment, 500 years of trying to make death manageable. The layouts may change. The texts may expand. The security strategies may shift. But the underlying fear never leaves. The fear that eternity can be interrupted by something as ordinary as a thief, a flood, a political collapse, or a missed payment. Now we're off to the Valley of the Queens. In antiquity, it was called Taset Neferu, a name that can mean the place of beauty or the place of the royal children. Like the Valley of the Kings, this valley was also used throughout the New Kingdom from the 18th through the 20th dynasties. Early on, it housed mainly royal women and lower-ranking royals. Later, especially in the 19th and 20th dynasties, it became the primary burial ground for queens of the highest rank and eventually for royal sons as well. If the Valley of the Kings was challenging geologically, the Valley of the Queens is worse. Water infiltration brings dissolved salts into the plaster, which then recrystallize and lift paint from the walls. You want to know why so many tombs are restricted in these two valleys? That's why they require extreme conservation control. The finest painted tomb in all of Egypt can be found here, that of Nefertari, wife of Ramses II. But at the time we came, the tomb was closed. But there are other tombs here worth seeing. Queen Titi, wife of Ramses III, has one of the most intellectually rich tombs in the valley. She carried an extraordinary collection of official titles. King's daughter, king's sister, king's wife, king's mother. Very few individuals in Egyptian history can claim all 4. We're here in the tomb of Titi. She was the wife and sister of Ramses III, and also possibly the mother of Ramses IV. So we're talking about 20th dynasty here. And it's probably the 2nd best of the queen's tombs here in the valley. And you can see on the wall, the color is still very well preserved on these reliefs, and very bright still. There's glass covering everything to keep it all intact. They don't want people touching it. But you get pretty close to it. Along the wall here, you can see important figures here. This is like the central mural of the tomb. You've got Jehuti over here. This is kind of broken here, but this looks like it's 2 figures, Isis and Nebhet. And then you've got Osiris on his throne over here with her name. You've got Titi herself. And then over here, the goddess Selketh on the right. By the 20th dynasty, they started burying royal sons here. Prince Kamwasit was Ramses III's son. His tomb was discovered in 1903. It had been heavily reused in later periods, at one point containing dozens of intrusive burials. But its original decorative program survives enough to be read. Like the other royal sons' tombs, it depicts the prince being presented to the gods by his father, Ramses III. He wears the sidelock of youth, marking him as a prince who died before reaching adulthood. The theology here mirrors that of adult kings, but with one crucial difference. The prince's legitimacy in the afterlife is mediated through his father. Ramses III appears repeatedly in the art as guarantor, guide, and protector. These tombs illustrate a brutal reality of the new kingdom. Many royal children didn't survive to rule, and the system had to account for that loss. It was a system that had to account for the whole family, and the more people it had to include, the more fragile it became. What sticks with me is how clearly priorities reveal themselves when resources are limited. Queens and royal children mattered. They were essential to lineage, legitimacy, and continuity. But the protection they received was never absolute. You can see the system tightening here. Some things don't get finished. That doesn't signify a failure of belief. The ideas are still there. The rituals still matter. What's slipping is the ability to carry them out fully for everyone. Deir el-Medina was not a town that happened to exist near the royal tombs. It was a purpose-built, state-run settlement. Its ancient name, Setma'at, the place of truth or justice, was an official designation used in royal and administrative texts, and it framed how the workers understood their labor as sacred work carried out on behalf of the gods and the king. For nearly four centuries, roughly 1550 to 1080 BCE, this village housed the highly skilled artisans who cut, decorated, and sealed the tombs of the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. Ironically, the people whose job was to keep secrets left us some of the clearest evidence for daily life in ancient Egypt. So here we are at Deir el-Medina, the workman's village. This is where the workers lived who dug out the tombs and decorated the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. This has been in operation for quite some time. It was founded during the time of Thutmose I. Some people say it was his predecessor, Amenhotep I's idea, but Thutmose I really got it going. But this reached its peak during the Ramzai period. But this is where all the craftsmen lived. And they continued, of course, to work on the valley constantly because there's always a new tomb to be creating. And there were two main work groups, the workers on the left and the workers on the right, they were called. And we have to take that literally. A group of about 30, 40 people, it fluctuated. But the ones who worked on the left actually worked on the left sides of tombs and the ones on the right actually worked on the right sides of tombs. And that's how they divided up the labor. From what I understand, there was a secret path going over the mountain. We can't go over there now, but the workers would go through this path into the valley to go work. And rumor has it that because they didn't want them to remember where the tombs were, they would have them blindfolded when they took them across. If they had kids, the kids would go exploring. Well, all the tombs were robbed, so obviously they didn't keep it a secret very well. Deer El Medina was deliberately isolated. It sits in a small desert bowl enclosed by cliffs with no farmland and no independent water source. The workers were supplied entirely by the state, paid not in money but in monthly grain rations supplemented with beer, vegetables, and occasional meat. You can see that the village itself was enclosed by a mud brick wall. It was originally about six meters high, with controlled gates at the north and south ends. Movement in and out was monitored. This was a restricted area. Attendance, illness, absences, disputes, and supplies were recorded on ostraca. The system was under constant strain. An interesting incident occurred in 1156 BCE here, during the reign of Ramses III. Grain rations failed to arrive, and the workers laid down their tools and marched on Waset. This is the first documented labor strike in human history, preserved in the Turin Strike Papyrus. I find it interesting that they believed they were entitled to protest. When the state failed to uphold its obligations, the workers understood that Ma'at, cosmic order itself, had been violated. These are the tombs of Deer El Medina's western cemetery. This is where the workers buried themselves. We're now going to look at some of the workmen's tombs. These are actual tombs of people who worked here. I'm assuming that the nicer ones here were the more important workmen. This is the tomb of Amenacht. Amenacht held the title Chief Craftsman of the Lord of the Two Lands, that's the pharaoh, in Set Ma'at. That places him high in the village hierarchy, above ordinary workmen, among those responsible for coordinating labor and enforcing correct artistic and ritual tradition. Without people like him, the Valley of the Kings could not exist. They've done a little repair here, but I think this is the... I think it's the original paint. Look at Anubis here. That's a common image you see. Stylistically and institutionally, the tomb belongs to the Ramzide period, probably the late 19th dynasty, during or shortly after the reign of Ramses II, when Deer El Medina was at its peak. Inside the tomb, the decorative program mirrors royal contexts. Osiris enthroned, Anubis attending the deceased, and conventional funerary formulas. We also stepped into the tomb of Nebin Ma'at, the son of Amenacht. You can kind of see that the artwork is a little bit less refined, which is interesting because these are the workmen who worked on the king's tombs, but for their own tombs, it's just okay. There's no emphasis on career, rank, or achievement in here. Nebin Ma'at doesn't advertise what he did in life. The decoration focuses almost entirely on traditional funerary concerns. He emphasizes who he hopes to be judged as in death. You can see Anubis here, the god of mummification. This tool was used for the opening of the mouth ceremony at the funerals of the deceased. Here's Rahorati and Sekhmet. I'm not sure who these people are. This is Isis and Osiris. Is this the deceased? I don't know. But it's a little bit more makeshift. The lines aren't as straight, and it's just painted instead of carved. If you want carving, you've got to pay extra. This is the tomb of the foreman, Inherqal, dated to the 20th dynasty. Its surviving decoration includes scenes and texts from the Book of Gates and the Book of the Dead, depictions of Inherqal and his son Harman, and royal-focused imagery. This is a famous mural of a harpist. It's always fun to unexpectedly find works of art you've seen online, in person. What a fascinating place this is. People lived here, raised families here, worried here, and every day they walked out to build immortality for someone else. All of these were homes. They lived in very cramped quarters, you can tell. All the neighbors probably knew what the other neighbors were doing. I wonder if some of the workmen here who were buried in these tombs died on the job. The archaeologists are still doing work here. These were among the most skilled craftsmen in Egypt, trusted with secrets no one else was allowed to know. And yet their lives were tightly controlled. This is the remains of a Ptolemaic-period temple, which means there were people still living here in Greco-Roman times. This was built by Ptolemy IV and VI. So that's the 3rd to 2nd century BCE. And the gods of the temple are Hathor, Maat, Amenhotep son of Habu, and Imhotep. The temple preserves the site's sacred reputation, even after its social function had vanished. In New Kingdom belief, Hathor was often imagined as emerging from the western mountain to welcome the deceased. Building her temple here is a deliberate act of theological continuity. Inside the temple you see traditional Egyptian iconography rendered in a late Hellenistic style, offerings to Hathor and associated deities, and royal figures participating in rituals that explicitly echo older pharaonic traditions. The Ptolemies were foreign rulers. They needed Egypt's past to accept them. By monumentalizing Deir el-Medina, they were anchoring themselves in Egypt's rich history. This here has got to be the most interesting room in the temple. You can see Osiris and Isis here. Here's Osiris again presiding over the judgment of the dead. This is probably the best preserved image I've seen of this. You can see the scales of Maat, the scales of justice here, where they weigh the heart of the individual here. You can see Horus and Anubis. On the other side of the scale is a feather. Your heart has to weigh less than the feather in order for you to be judged to be good. It's not an actual physical heart. It's your spiritual heart being weighed against it. The more evil you do, the heavier it will be. This is a representation of the 42 negative questions they ask you. Did you commit murder? Did you steal? All of these things, 42 questions, and you have to answer them correctly in order to be judged appropriately. If your heart is too heavy, this creature over here will eat your soul. But if you are judged to be good, your Aku, as it was called, will go on to the West, to the other life. This is actually the dead person right here. Here's both, taking down the measurements, of course. The scribal god. In the late Roman and early Christian periods, the temple was converted into a monastery. Christian symbols are carved into the walls. Pagan gods are overwritten, not violently erased, but just repurposed. One of the greatest things about Deir el-Medina is what they found over there in a pit. A whole bunch of written documents from the time of the period that the workers were working here. Letters, grocery lists, basically things that they were writing to each other. This is daily life activities kind of thing. You don't get that a lot for ancient Egypt. We have a lot of royal statements and hieroglyphs on monuments, but when you get actual letters and documents written by the regular people, the common folk, this is something that you do not find very often. So we learn a lot about daily life in Egypt from this workers' village because of the stash of documents that were found here. The afterlife was not guaranteed. It was all contingent, even for kings. Built on human labor, human patience, and the hope that the system held together one more day. If you like looking at ancient monuments like this, I've put together a free screensaver pack with images from my travels. If you'd like a small reminder of what it feels like to stand inside landscapes that have survived the ravages of time. In our next episode, we'll stay here on the West Bank, but shift our focus to the great temple of Ramses III, Medinet Habu, where he documents his victory over the Sea Peoples. See you then.