After King Tut’s tomb was discovered, everyone thought there were no more tombs to be found in the Valley of the Kings.  But in 2006, we made an amazing discovery, the shaft of an unknown tomb.  When I first saw the shaft, I thought that the tomb underneath would be robbed, that there was no way there could be anything inside.

But when we began to excavate, we found many coffins and pottery jars and other materials.  Now I believe it is a storage area for mummification materials for the Valley of the Kings.

Clearing the tomb presented many difficulties.  The coffins were very badly deteriorated and were too fragile to move.  I brought in an Egyptian conservation team, led by Nadia Lukma, to preserve the wood and save the coffins.  They did very good work, and once the wood was strong enough to be moved, we began to take them out.  Moving the coffins was very difficult, because of the small space of the tomb and how they were stacked on top of each other.  The top coffin was very heavy, and one wrong step while moving it would bring it crashing down on those below.

After we were finally able to remove all of the coffins from the tomb, we opened them and found that there were no mummies inside.  Instead, we found something even more valuable, because it is a unique find.  The coffins were full of embalming materials, used in mummification.  

We had a great moment when we opened coffin 6, because inside we found six pillows that seemed to have been used before being placed in the coffin.  We wondered why the ancient Egyptians would put pillows with the embalming materials.  Perhaps they put pillows under the head of the deceased during the mummification process.  But we had never read anything about that in ancient Egyptian literature, so we knew that could not be true.  Perhaps they were used in daily life before being placed with the original owner of the tomb before it was turned into an embalming cache.

In my opinion, this was originally a tomb and then robbed and later used as a storage area for embalming materials.  The workshop for mummification should have been at the mouth of the Valley at this time, but they would have needed places to store materials in the Valley.

The original owner of KV 63 remains a mystery until now.  It is a small tomb, I think the workmen from Deir el-Medina could have cut it in a few days, but I personally think it could have been for Kiya, who may have been the mother of King Tut who died while delivering him.  This is just a theory, but it makes a very nice story, that he would want to be buried near her in the Valley of the Kings.