Howard Carter opens Tutankhamun's burial chamber
On this day · 16 February 1923
After months clearing the antechamber, Carter breached the sealed wall and met the shrine of a pharaoh untouched for 3,000 years.
On February 16, 1923, archaeologist Howard Carter and his patron Lord Carnarvon broke through the plastered wall at the back of Tutankhamun’s antechamber, deep in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Carter had found the tomb itself in 1922, but the prize lay behind that wall: an intact royal burial chamber.
Beyond it stood a wall of gilded wood — the outermost of four nested shrines housing a stone sarcophagus and, within it, three coffins, the innermost of solid gold. The job of unpacking everything was vast. The tomb ultimately yielded more than 5,000 objects, many so fragile that conservation took the better part of a decade.
Carter and Carnarvon opened the sealed chamber before a crowd of officials, and the world’s press treated the moment as front-page news.
The find remains the best-preserved pharaonic burial ever recorded, and most of its treasures stayed in Egypt rather than being carted off abroad.
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