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KV62 is the standard Egyptological designation for the tomb of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, now renowned for the wealth of valuable antiquities it contained.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Tutankhamun )〕 The tomb was discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter, underneath the remains of workmen's huts built during the Ramesside Period; this explains why it was largely spared from desecration and from the tomb clearances at the end of the 20th Dynasty, although the tomb was robbed and resealed twice in the period after its completion. The tomb was densely packed with items in great disarray, partly due to its small size, the two robberies, and the apparently hurried nature of its completion. Due to the state of the tomb, and to Carter's meticulous recording technique, the tomb took eight years to empty, the contents all being transported to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Tutankhamun's tomb had been entered at least twice, not long after he was buried and well before Carter's discovery. The outermost doors of the shrines enclosing the king's nested coffins were unsealed, though the inner two shrines (three and four) remained intact and sealed. == Discovery of the tomb == In 1907, just before his discovery of the tomb of Horemheb, Theodore M. Davis's team uncovered a small site containing funerary artifacts with Tutankhamun's name and some embalming parts. Assuming that this site, numbered finally as KV54, was Tutankhamun's complete tomb, Davis concluded the dig. The details of both findings are documented in Davis's 1912 publication, ''The Tombs of Harmhabi and Touatânkhamanou''; the book closes with the comment, "I fear that the Valley of the Kings is now exhausted." But Davis was to be proven spectacularly wrong. The British Egyptologist Howard Carter (employed by Lord Carnarvon) hired a crew to help him excavate at the site of KV62. Carter went back to a line of huts that he had abandoned a few seasons earlier. After clearance of the huts and rock debris beneath, they found a stone step cut into the bedrock. A flight of steps was partially uncovered, leading to the top of a mud-plastered doorway stamped with indistinct oval seals, called cartouches. Carter ordered the staircase to be refilled, and sent a telegram to Carnarvon, who arrived two-and-a-half weeks later on 23rd November along with his 21-year-old daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert. The excavators cleared the stairway completely, which allowed clearer seals lower down on the door to be read, seals bearing the name of Tutankhamun. However, further examination showed that the door blocking had been breached and resealed on at least two occasions. Clearing the blocking led to a downward corridor that was completely blocked with packed limestone chippings, through which a robbers' tunnel had been excavated and anciently refilled. At the end of the tunnel was a second sealed door that had been breached and re-sealed in antiquity. Carter then made a hole in the door, and used a candle to check for foul gases, before looking inside. ‘At first I could see nothing,’ he would later write, ‘the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold - everywhere the glint of gold’.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The Tombs of Tutankhamun and his Predecessor )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「KV62」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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