KV54

Tomb KV54 is located in the Valley of the Kings, in Egypt. It was originally excavated by Edward R. Ayrton on behalf of the American lawyer Theodore M. Davis, who funded the work.

History

Not as much a tomb as a small pit located near the tomb of Seti I, it contained about a dozen large sealed storage jars. Within the jars were equipment and objects that had been carefully packed. It contained pottery, dishes, bags of natron, animal bones, floral collars and linen containing text dated to the final years of the then (1907) little-known pharaoh Tutankhamun.

In 1909, Davis donated the finds he was allowed to take out of Egypt (the contents of six of the storage jars),¹ which were of little intrinsic value, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City,² where they now reside on display. Davis declared to the press that he had found the tomb of Tutankhamun, and he published his findings in a book called The Tombs of Harmhabi and Touatankhamanou (using the then-current French spellings for the pharaohs Horemheb and Tutankhamun respectively) in 1912.

One of the critical finds from KV54 was a piece of linen marked with hieratic text saying "The good god, Lord of the Two Lands, Nebkheperure [the prenomen of Tutankhamun], beloved of Min. Linen of year 6."³ Recognizing that KV54 did not represent Tutankhamun's actual tomb, and that it did signal the existence of a yet-to-be discovered tomb, archaeologist Howard Carter, who would eventually find the real Tomb of Tutankhamun, corresponded with the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptological Director Herbert Winlock on this subject in 1915.