No one expected anything here. The site was a narrow gap between two known tombs, KV3 and KV4, buried under a great bank of stone chips that looked entirely untouched. Davis called the location "most unpromising" and admitted he dug it mainly for the satisfaction of knowing the whole valley, even if it yielded nothing. James Quibell, working for Davis, suspected the artificial mound might hide something older. It did. The first step of a cut staircase appeared in early February, and by the twelfth the doorway stood fully exposed, its top course of blocking broken away. Someone had been inside long ago. The men peering through the gap saw a steep corridor and, just inside, a walking cane lying on the floor where it had rested for three thousand years.

Yuya and Thuya were not royalty. They came from Akhmim in Upper Egypt and held priestly titles tied to the local god Min. What lifted them into the Valley of the Kings was their daughter. Tiye became the Great Royal Wife of the powerful pharaoh Amenhotep III, which made this elderly provincial couple the grandparents of the heretic king Akhenaten and the great-grandparents of Tutankhamun himself. Their burial among kings was an extraordinary honor for commoners, and the goods their royal descendants supplied show it. Three gilded chairs, including a small throne made for their granddaughter Princess Sitamun, stood in the chamber. Their nested, gold-covered coffins filled most of the room. A copy of the Book of the Dead, nearly ten meters long, had been written out to guide Yuya into the afterlife.

Among the most astonishing survivals was Yuya's chariot, found almost perfect: a thin wooden body decorated in gilded plaster with a tree of life and browsing goats, its red leather tyres barely worn, suggesting it had rolled only once, in the funeral procession. The tomb's everyday intimacy charmed everyone who entered. Weigall said stepping inside felt like "entering a town house which had been closed for the summer." That domestic ease produced one unforgettable scene during the clearance. A visiting woman, unknown to the excavators but in fact the exiled Empress Eugenie of France, asked to hear about the discovery. Apologizing that he could offer her no chair, Quibell watched in horror as she stepped down into the chamber and calmly seated herself in the throne of Princess Sitamun. The ancient strung seat held. The two men were too embarrassed to ask her to stand.

Robbers had been here in antiquity, probably more than once, and they had disturbed both bodies, unwrapping torsos in search of jewelry and snapping a gold-and-lapis necklace from behind Yuya's neck. Yet they left the couple themselves remarkably intact, and someone in ancient times had even made a small effort to set things right, draping Thuya's body with a fresh shroud. The anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith, who examined them, called both "perfect" examples of the embalmer's art. Yuya was a tall old man with white wavy hair; Thuya a small elderly woman, her white hair still in place, wearing gold foil sandals on her feet. Later CT scans put both in their fifties or sixties at death and found Thuya had lived with a mild curvature of the spine. After three thousand years in the dark, two ordinary people who happened to be a queen's parents had kept their dignity, and very nearly their faces.