Valley of the Kings

293 pp. An historical account of one of the world's richest archaeological sites. For more than 500 years, until about 1000 BC, the Valley of the Kings held a busy community of tomb workers, the limestone landscape white with the debris of fresh excavation and all the known pharaohs of the Egyptian New Kingdom lay in their great stone sarcophagi. The Valley itself was lost from the historical records for hundreds of years and existed only in the accounts and of the classical authors and the imaginations of scholars. This work tells how the debris of millennia was removed to uncover one of the great wonders of the world. It focuses on two fascinating stories: the first is about the tombs of the ancient Egyptian kings, queens and noblemen who were buried with pomp and extravagance between 1570 and 1085 BC; the second is the story of the archaeologists and their hunt for the site.