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.

Site history

Not so much a tomb but a small pit located near the tomb of Seti I, it contained about a dozen large sealed storage jars. Within the jars were contained assorted 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 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), which were of little intrinsic value, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where they currently reside and are 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.