The name overpromises. Despite "Valley of the Kings," only about twenty of its more than sixty tombs actually hold a pharaoh. The rest belonged to favored nobles, to royal wives and children, or were embalming caches and unmarked pits. At the dynasty's start, kings alone got the great rock-cut tombs, and a non-royal servant might be tucked into a small chamber near the master he had served. That changed when powerful nobles like Yuya and Thuya, the parents of Queen Tiye, were granted burials of their own among the rulers. Later kings turned the valley into something like a royal family complex: Ramesses II and Ramesses III each cut sprawling tombs to hold not themselves but their many sons. KV5, the tomb of Ramesses II's sons, has more than 120 known rooms and is probably the largest of all.

The tombs did not carve themselves, and we know the people who did the work better than almost any other laborers in the ancient world. They lived in a purpose-built village called Deir el-Medina, in a small wadi between this valley and the Valley of the Queens, and they were skilled craftsmen: stonecutters, plasterers and painters who hiked the Theban hills to their work and left behind a remarkable paper trail of their daily lives. Among those records is something extraordinary. In the twenty-ninth year of Ramesses III, around 1155 BC, the workers went unpaid for their rations, waited eighteen days past their due date, then laid down their tools and marched on the temples, shouting that they were hungry. The Turin Strike Papyrus that records it is the first labor strike documented anywhere in human history.

These were not bare graves but illustrated guidebooks to the afterlife. The walls were covered with religious texts and images designed to carry the dead king through the perils of the underworld. The earliest tombs drew on the Amduat, "That Which Is in the Underworld," which maps the sun god's passage through the twelve hours of the night. From the time of Horemheb came the Book of Gates, in which the sun crosses twelve guarded gates dividing the darkness. Burial chambers were crowned with painted skies. The architecture evolved alongside the art: the earliest tombs bent sharply on a "bent axis," then straightened over the centuries into the long, gently descending corridors of the later dynasties, the slopes flattening until they almost vanished. To read a tomb's shape is to read its date.

The valley's gamble ultimately lost. As the New Kingdom collapsed into economic decline, robbery became epidemic, and surviving papyri record the trials of the thieves. In one confession, a robber describes spending four days breaking into the tomb of Ramesses VI, then quarreling with his accomplices over how to split the haul. Eventually the priests of Amun gave up defending individual tombs. They opened nearly all of them, stripped the valuables, and gathered the royal mummies into hidden caches, most famously the cliff tomb at Deir el-Bahari, where some forty kings and queens were stacked together, several still unidentified. Almost everything was looted. The great exceptions, the tombs whose locations had simply been lost and forgotten, were KV62 and KV46, which is precisely why their discovery in the twentieth century stunned the world. Today some four to five thousand visitors a day walk where the pharaohs hoped no one ever would.