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A century ago this October, Egyptologist Howard Carter and his colleagues opened the innermost coffin of the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus for the first time in almost 3250 years. Inside they discovered the boy king’s mummy wearing an incredible mask fashioned from gold and semi-precious stones.

Tutankhamun’s fame today stems largely from the discovery of his tomb, which was filled with lavish goods – not only the magnificent funerary mask, but chariots, statues and even a dagger crafted using iron from a meteorite. In truth, though, he was a relatively insignificant pharaoh with, in turn, a presumably austere burial. That he was interred with such riches raises an intriguing question: What treasures might a truly important pharaoh have taken to their grave?

Carter wondered this, too. “How great must have been the wealth buried with those [other] ancient Pharaohs!” he would later write. Sadly, this is something we still don’t know for sure, as almost all other royal tombs were plundered and their grave goods lost.

But now, one Egyptologist has put forward a surprising explanation for the conundrum of the opulence of Tutankhamun’s interment. According to , thanks to an intriguing combination of factors, this obscure king’s tomb may actually be the richest of any pharaoh’s in ancient Egypt’s 3000-year-long existence. “Even King Khufu in the Great Pyramid of Giza would never have had anything approaching the quantity of material in Tutankhamun’s tomb,” he says.

Putting this idea to the ultimate test would require comparing the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb with those of another pharaoh who reigned at about the same time. Remarkably, such a comparison might soon be possible: researchers could be poised to unearth an untouched royal tomb purportedly belonging to Tutankhamun’s great-great-great-great grandfather, Thutmose II.

It was on 28 October 1925 – three years after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb – that Carter and his colleagues were finally ready to . Carter was clearly impressed by the richly adorned mummy he found within. “Time… seemed to lose its common perspectives before a spectacle so vividly recalling the solemn religious rites of a vanished civilisation,” he wrote.

All the same, it is easy to understand why Carter harboured suspicions that many other pharaohs had enjoyed even wealthier burials. Tutankhamun reigned for less than 10 years, dying in his teens before he could commission grand monuments or make his mark militarily. at Yale University says this means he “ranks down near the bottom of the list” of pharaohs in his particular branch of the royal family – known as the 18th dynasty, whose members ruled ancient Egypt from the mid-16th to the early 13th century BC. In line with this, he has one of the smallest tombs in the Valley of the Kings, near modern Luxor, measuring only about 110 square metres.

This is in stark contrast with the vast tombs of the kings known as the Ramessides, who reigned in the centuries after the 18th-dynasty pharaohs. The tomb of Ramesses III in the Valley of the Kings, for instance, has more than four times the footprint of Tutankhamun’s. However, Lacovara suggests that this tomb, despite its size, may never have contained as many grave goods as Tutankhamun’s.

Egyptology insights

Tombs like Ramesses III’s had grand entrances. “They were visibly on show,” says Lacovara, who is the director of The Ancient Egyptian Archaeology and Heritage Fund, a US-based non-profit organisation. He suspects this is because these tombs – unlike Tutankhamun’s – were , probably by priests who would continue to honour the pharaoh even in death. As such, he argues that these tombs were unlikely to have housed many treasures because they would have been an easy target for thieves; Tutankhamun’s treasure-filled tomb, meanwhile, was sealed and carefully hidden. “Certainly, the 18th-dynasty tombs were better hidden than their later Ramesside counterparts,” says at the University of York, UK.

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Nevertheless, we know Carter was correct to suspect that many other royal tombs contained impressive artefacts. While most of those tombs were plundered in antiquity, a few escaped the attention of ancient robbers.

For instance, back in 1925 – just months before Carter and his colleagues opened Tutankhamun’s gold coffin – a team of researchers working in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza discovered a cache of royal , a 27th-century BC royal and Khufu’s mother.

Hetepheres’s treasures include finely made and a gold-covered box. “They are quite beautiful,” says at the University of Pennsylvania.

Untouched mummies

Then there is an intact royal tomb discovered in northern Egypt in the late 1930s, containing the untouched mummies of three pharaohs from the 11th, 10th and 9th centuries BC. The of one of these pharaohs – Psusennes I – bears a striking resemblance to the famous mask of Tutankhamun.

Treasures like these offer a priceless window into the artisanal skills and belief systems of ancient Egyptians. But they also suggest the objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb are among the finest the civilisation ever produced.

Take Tutankhamun’s iconic gold burial mask. A decade ago, and at the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology in Germany and their colleagues, all specialists in ancient manufacturing techniques, were given the opportunity to study the artefact as part of a restoration project. The researchers, who , gained a deep appreciation of the work that went into the mask’s production. “The funerary mask of Tut is made of approximately 1230 individual pieces including inlays and attachments,” says Eckmann. In contrast, Psusennes I’s superficially similar mask “seems to be basically made of two pieces of sheet gold with only a few inlays for the eyes, eyebrows and so on”, he says.

“The artistic excellence reflected in Tutankhamun’s tomb is indeed a zenith,” says , head of the , a UK-based archaeological research team. That, in part, reflects a broad trend in ancient Egyptian politics.

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Down the centuries, ancient Egypt swung from periods of political stability and prosperity to periods of instability. The 18th-dynasty pharaohs ruled at the start of arguably the most stable and economically prosperous period of all, a golden age known as the New Kingdom. Exactly why the New Kingdom was so prosperous is still something of a mystery. In yet-to-be published work, Litherland and his colleagues have found evidence that the climate became wetter at the dawn of the New Kingdom, which might have made farming and hunting easier and provided an economic boost that helped the 18th-dynasty pharaohs become richer. Lacovara, however, is sceptical about this, and instead thinks the prosperity of the dynasty was due to the fact these pharaohs made wise trading decisions and had the good fortune to win territory after successfully battling their neighbours.

Either way, the dynasty reached the peak of its prosperity under the rule of Amenhotep III, Tutankhamun’s grandfather. At that point, the economy was strong enough to provide ample employment opportunities for artists and goldsmiths, explaining why the treasures in Tutankhamun’s tomb are so finely made. “The superb symmetry and refinement of his jewellery and statuary reflect the growing wealth of the dynasty,” says Litherland.

But it isn’t just the quality of Tutankhamun’s treasures; it’s their quantity. Inside the young king’s tomb, Carter and his colleagues found about 5400 items. “It was crowded with objects,” says Lacovara.

The from his tomb offers some clues as to why he was buried with so much. It reveals, for instance, that there were several sumptuously decorated wooden beds and chairs.

There is general agreement among Egyptologists about why that was the case: “Tutankhamun had his own funerary furniture, but also a lot of other objects that seem to have been intended for the pharaohs who immediately preceded him,” says Lacovara. Such grave goods may have been kept from the tombs of those preceding pharaohs because those rulers were considered heretics. For most of ancient Egyptian history – up to and including the reign of Tutankhamun’s grandfather Amenhotep III – pharaohs were keen to acknowledge the state’s many gods by building great temples in their honour. But Tutankhamun’s father – the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who later took the name Akhenaten – had a radically different approach. He closed many temples as part of his vision to replace the state’s traditional polytheistic faith with one based on the worship of the sun disc, represented by a single god: the Aten.

Religious revival

Akhenaten’s bold, monotheistic religious plan was, however, a failure. Atenism seems to have remained in place for just a couple of years after his death, an obscure period of ancient Egyptian history in which two more pharaohs may have briefly reigned before Tutankhamun ascended the throne, although we can’t say for sure because later ancient Egyptians tried to erase all records of Atenism from their history. When Tutankhamun became pharaoh as a young boy, his adult advisors evidently saw an opportunity to restore the traditional faith and reopen the temples. “In that sense, Tutankhamun really is a pivotal figure,” says Lacovara.

Earlier this year, Brown published a study in which he identified hints that Tutankhamun – or his advisors – actually invented some new ceremonies as part of this religious restoration, again demonstrating Tutankhamun’s importance. The evidence for this comes from four clay trays and wooden staves found in his tomb, which Brown thinks were the earliest example of a funerary ritual known as the Awakening of Osiris. The ritual is represented in ancient Egyptian artwork dating to several decades after Tutankhamun’s reign.

The outcome was that, when the young pharaoh died in the ninth year of his reign, the traditional polytheistic religion was securely back in place. At that point, a decision seems to have been made to bury Tutankhamun not just with his own personal possessions, but with those of his out-of-favour, Aten-worshiping predecessors. We can see evidence of this in photos from Carter’s excavations a century ago: Tutankhamun’s tomb contained stacked side by side, giving it the appearance of a well-stocked department store.

Tutankhamun’s tomb conundrum

Exactly why that decision was made is unclear. Some researchers, such as Fletcher, have suggested that the treasures of the Aten-worshippers were considered tainted, so they were buried with Tutankhamun to get rid of them. Brown thinks an alternative is possible: that Tutankhamun was buried with so much treasure as a mark of gratitude for his role in restoring the traditional faith. This might help explain why his tomb contains heavily gilded statues that, going on the evidence of the later pharaoh Horemheb’s tomb, were usually given a simpler, black-resin finish, says Brown. “The amount of gold in Tutankhamun’s tomb is a conundrum,” he says.

Whatever the explanation, says Lacovara, the main message is clear: Tutankhamun had an unusual funeral because he wasn’t simply buried with grave goods fit for a king, but with grave goods fit for several kings. “I don’t know that there’s anything more out there that would add to this,” he says. But there may, in fact, be a way to further strengthen the case.

Earlier this year, Litherland and his colleagues unearthed an ancient Egyptian royal , Tutankhamun’s great-great-great-great grandfather. Like Tutankhamun, Thutmose II was an 18th-dynasty pharaoh – but his reign came early in the dynasty, before it had reached its economic and artistic peak. As such, Litherland speculates it is likely that the treasures Thutmose II was buried with were modest compared with Tutankhamun’s. Sadly, we can’t say for sure because the tomb was found empty.

However, Litherland suspects that Thutmose II’s tomb was barren because its contents were moved to a new location by the ancient Egyptian authorities, possibly because the tomb flooded shortly after Thutmose II’s interment. This would explain why there was no tell-tale evidence that grave robbers had plundered the tomb – no bundles of linen bandages, broken mummy remains or smashed clay vessels.

Undiscovered riches?

“The burial had to be moved somewhere,” says Litherland – and he thinks he knows where that is. Close to the empty tomb, he and his colleagues have discovered an enormous debris pile, including layers of human-made mud plaster, which they think conceals the entrance to a second tomb into which the king and his treasures were moved – and where they may remain even today. The researchers will resume their search for this hypothetical untouched tomb later this year.

“My expectation, if we find the tomb, is that we will find a much smaller range of objects than were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, and that the artistry will be, in some cases, cruder,” says Litherland.

Lacovara agrees. “Even when it was intact… the grave goods it contained would be much less lavish and far smaller in number than those found in the tomb of Tutankhamun,” he says. However, he doubts Litherland will make such a discovery. “I’m afraid there is no chance of finding an intact tomb for Thutmose II,” says Lacovara. This is because Thutmose II’s mummy seems to have already been found among a stash of royal mummies in a tomb near the Valley of the Kings, apparently moved there for safekeeping by the ancient Egyptians. One of these mummies was labelled as being that of Thutmose II, though Litherland suspects it isn’t – particularly since it belonged to a man who died at about 30 years of age, when many suspect that Thutmose II died in his late teens or early 20s.

But even without clues from Thutmose II’s tomb, the evidence points to Carter being luckier than he realised, says Lacovara, to have stumbled across possibly the most spectacularly stocked royal burial in ancient Egypt’s sprawling existence.

“It’s an incredibly wealthy tomb,” he says. “And it’s a miracle that it survived more or less intact.”

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