The Last Pharaoh Tomb Was Found in 1922. The Next One Took a Century.

A flooded tomb in a valley everyone assumed belonged to queens turned out to hold the last missing king of the 18th Dynasty. Almost nothing was left inside.

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In October 2022 a joint Egyptian-British team working in the Western Wadis, about 2.4 kilometres west of the Valley of the Kings, found an entrance and a corridor leading into rock.

They labelled it Tomb C-4 and assumed they knew roughly what it was. The area is where royal wives were buried. Nearby lie the tombs of the wives of Thutmose III, and Queen Hatshepsut's own burial. A tomb in this valley was, by every reasonable expectation, a queen's tomb.

It took another two years of excavation to establish that it was not.

The tomb had flooded, apparently not long after the burial.

Water had driven debris down the main axis and packed it so hard that it had set to something close to the consistency of concrete. The flooding had also compromised the ceilings, which had partially collapsed. Before the team could read the tomb, they had to dig out the fill and recover fragments of fallen plaster, piece by piece.

What survived on that plaster was a ceiling painted deep blue and scattered with yellow stars, along with passages from the Book of the Amduat, the funerary text describing the sun's journey through the underworld. That decoration is royal.

The confirmation came from alabaster.

Among the recovered material were fragments of alabaster vessels inscribed with the name of Thutmose II, identified explicitly as the deceased king, alongside inscriptions naming Hatshepsut as his chief royal consort.

Mohamed Ismail Khaled, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, noted a detail that gives the find much of its value: before this, no funerary furniture belonging to Thutmose II existed in any museum in the world. Not one piece.

The discovery was announced on 19 February 2025. The mission was led by the Supreme Council of Antiquities together with the New Kingdom Research Foundation at the University of Cambridge, with Piers Litherland and Mohamed Abdel-Badie directing the work.

Howard Carter found Tutankhamun in 1922. Thutmose II's tomb was announced in February 2025.

That is 103 years, and it is the first royal tomb from the New Kingdom found in the interval. It also closes the set: Thutmose II's was the last missing tomb of the 18th Dynasty, which ruled Egypt from 1550 to 1292 BCE.

The rarity is worth stating precisely. Egyptian royal tombs are not found every decade. They are found roughly never, because the ones that were going to be found in the accessible valleys were found generations ago.

If you are picturing Carter's gold, stop.

The tomb was essentially empty. Preliminary study indicates that its original contents were moved elsewhere in antiquity, after the flooding. Thutmose II's mummy has been known since the nineteenth century, recovered from a cache where priests had relocated royal bodies to protect them from looters.

So this is not a treasure find. It is a location find, and in some ways a more useful one: it tells Egyptologists where a king was originally placed, which constrains everything from burial practice to the topography of the royal necropolis.

Thutmose II himself is a minor figure in the usual telling. He reigned roughly 1492 to 1479 BCE, he was an ancestor of Tutankhamun, and he is mostly remembered for who he married. Hatshepsut went on to rule as pharaoh in her own right and became one of the most consequential monarchs Egypt produced.

His tomb spent 3,500 years under a valley that archaeologists had written off as the wrong address.