King Tut Day

What the day is

King Tut Day is observed on November 4. The date marks the moment in 1922 when Howard Carter's excavation team uncovered a single cut step in the Valley of the Kings, the first sign of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

It is worth being precise about the sequence, because accounts frequently compress it. The step was found on November 4. The stairway was cleared and the sealed outer doorway reached in late November. The burial chamber itself was not opened until February 1923, and clearing the tomb's contents took the best part of a decade.

Origin and background

Tutankhamun was a minor pharaoh by the standards of Egyptian history. He came to the throne as a child, ruled for roughly nine years in the fourteenth century BC, died around eighteen or nineteen, and was largely erased from later king lists because of his association with his predecessor's religious upheaval.

That obscurity is exactly why the tomb survived. It was small, quickly prepared, and its entrance was buried under debris from later construction, so it escaped the systematic robbery that emptied the grander tombs around it. What made the find extraordinary was not the king but the completeness: thousands of objects, including the nested coffins and the gold mask, left substantially as they were placed.

The cause of death remains unresolved. Imaging and genetic work have found evidence of malaria and of a bone condition, and a leg fracture shortly before death, but the murder theories that circulated for decades are not supported.

The curse of the pharaohs was a press invention following the death of the excavation's financial backer, and statistical reviews of those present at the opening found no unusual mortality.

How to take part

• Read Carter's own account of first looking through the hole in the doorway. It is one of archaeology's great passages.
• Look at the objects that are not the mask. The furniture, sandals and gloves say more about the period.
• Visit the collection in Cairo if you are ever near it, where the tomb's contents are now housed.
• Read about the Egyptians who did the excavating, whose contribution went largely uncredited for a century.