 The Valley of the Kings, situated some 5 kilometres to the west of modern Luxor and on the opposite bank of the Nile, was the burial ground of most of the kings, and a scattering of other exalted personages, of Egypt`s 18th, 19th and 20th dynasties (c.1567-1085 ). Excavations within the necropolis - which is in fact made up not of one but of two wadis, the Valley of the Kings proper and an annexe known as the West Valley - have to date brought to light more than 80 tombs and pits.
The first king to be buried in the Valley was Tuthmosis I, within a tomb (no. 20) later enlarged to receive the burial of his daughter, the ruling Queen Hatshepsut; the last was probably Ramesses X (in tomb no. 18). His successor, Ramesses XI, though commencing work on a tomb for himself (no. 4), appears to have opted for burial elsewhere. Shortly after the decision was made to abandon the Valley, a start was made on dismantling the burials, relieving the occupants of their valuables, and transferring the royal mummies for reburial in a small number of easily guarded hiding places or `caches`. The best-known of these caches were brought to light in 1881, at Deir el-Bahri, and in 1898, in the Valley of the Kings tomb of Amenophis II (no. 35).
No intact tombs have yet been brought to light in the Valley: all had been plundered in antiquity, either by robbers or by those whose job it was to safeguard the removal of the mummies. The well-known burial of Tutankhamun, while it escaped the attentions of the reburial parties, had been robbed on at least two occasions; while the small, private tombs of the Nubian fan-bearer Maiherpri (tomb no. 36) and that of Yuya and Tjuyu (no. 46), parents of Queen Tiye, had also been entered and robbed, if selectively, in ancient times.
Fortunately, the robbers were primarily interested in objects which were inconspicuous or recyclable - bed-linen, precious oils, metals and glass; the officials later involved in dismantling the Valley burials took away only what they considered worthy of salvage - primarily metals. Much was left behind, to be brought to light by Napoleon`s Egyptian expedition, by the the one-time circus-strongman Giovanni Battista Belzoni digging on behalf of the British Consul-General, Henry Salt, in the early years of the 19th century, and by later excavators such as Victor Loret, Theodore M. Davis, and Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter.
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Although the British Museum itself has never undertaken fieldwork in the Valley of the Kings, its collecticns contaln a wide range of objects from the site, from all periods of its excavational history. A good proportion of the material recovered by the pioneer excavators of the early 19th century found its way to the British Museum with the first Salt collection in 1823. The Salt material includes a mass of shabti figures, royal and divine statuettes, and ostraca (limestone flakes, employed in antiquity as a convenient writing surface), salvaged from the tombs of Sethos I (no. 17), Ramesses I (no. 16), and apparently Ramesses VI (no. 9) also. A painted stone coffin of 18th-dynasty date, discovered by Lord Belmore under Belzoni`s guidance in a private tomb in the West Valley, may also be noted. Among a series of `stray` objects which may ultimately be traced back to the excavations of the American amateur archaeologist Theodore M. Davis are a model papyrus roll from the tomb of Tuthmosis IV (no. 43), several resin-coated wooden figures and other fragments from the tomb of Horemheb (no. 57) (not dissimilar to those found by Belzoni for Salt), and a fine gold earring, the `missing` pair to that recovered by Davis in 1908 from the water-decayed burial of a child of Sethos II and Tawosret within tomb no. 56.
From the Carnarvon-Carter seasons in the Valley come an ostracon bearing an early representation of a red jungle fowl, and two calcite jars from a group of thirteen originally containing precious oils for the king`s embalming which were found outside the entrance to the tomb of Merenptah (no. 8), in 1920. The most recent acquisition of material from the Carnarvon-Carter seasons, presented from the recent `Highclere finer by the present Lord Carnarvon in 1989, is a small group of objects from the 1915 clearance of the tomb of Amenophis III (no. 22) in the West Valley: these gifts include a fragmentary wooden shabti face and foot, and small pieces from the deposits placed at the entrance when work on the tomb first began. Other minor objects from this tomb, which is currently being re-cleared by Prof. Sakuji Yoshimura of Waseda University, have been in the British Museum collection since the last century.
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