Tutankhamun took the throne as a child, around 1332 BC, in the wreckage left by his probable father, the heretic king Akhenaten, who had tried to abolish Egypt's many gods in favor of a single sun disc called the Aten. The boy reversed it. He even changed his own name from Tutankhaten, honoring the Aten, to Tutankhamun, honoring Amun, the great traditional god he was bringing back. Then he died, perhaps around the age of eighteen, before he could finish the proper royal tomb he had commissioned. His successor Ay, an elderly advisor, buried him instead in a small chamber labeled KV62 and seems to have taken the grander tomb for himself. Within a few years the kings who followed were busy erasing Akhenaten's whole family from the record, Tutankhamun included. Forgotten was exactly what saved him.

KV62 was cut low, into the very floor of the valley, and that proved decisive. A flash flood washed a thick layer of debris over its entrance. More than a century later, workers cutting the tomb of Ramesses VI piled their rubble on top, then built their stone huts atop the rubble. Robbers had actually broken into Tutankhamun's tomb twice in the years right after burial, snatching portable valuables and oils, but each time officials resealed it, and then the debris swallowed the doorway entirely. While the priests of later dynasties systematically stripped every other royal tomb in the valley and carried off the mummies, one small king lay sealed beneath the workmen's huts, unseen and unsuspected, his gold untouched.

The tomb held 5,398 objects, packed into four cramped chambers with almost no room to spare. There were dismantled chariots, beds, board games, a foldable camp bed found nowhere else from ancient Egypt, weapons including a dagger of rare iron, trumpets, hundreds of pieces of jewelry, and 413 servant figures meant to do the king's labor in the afterlife. Carter and his team spent ten seasons emptying and recording it. The conservation problems were brutal: moisture had reduced leather to a black pitch and the finest textiles to powder. At the heart of it all, inside a stone sarcophagus and three nested coffins, lay the king. The innermost coffin alone was made of 110 kilograms of solid gold. Over his face rested the golden funerary mask that has become, more than any pyramid, the face of ancient Egypt.

The discovery detonated a global craze. Newspapers chased every shipment of artifacts down the little railway to the Nile; fashion, architecture and advertising filled with Egyptian motifs in a frenzy nicknamed "Tutmania." The boy-king became, absurdly, a celebrity, known affectionately as King Tut. When Carnarvon died of an infected mosquito bite in April 1923, the press needed no encouragement to invent a pharaoh's curse, and every later death tied loosely to the tomb was folded into the legend. In Egypt the find meant something deeper: it landed just as the country was winning a measure of independence from Britain, and it became a banner for a nation reclaiming its own ancient greatness. A century on, Tutankhamun's treasures now anchor the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, while his mummy still rests in KV62, in the small tomb that almost no one was ever supposed to find.