Dr. Piers Litherland had been searching for more than a decade. The Scottish archaeologist and his team from the New Kingdom Research Foundation had been working through the Western Wadis, the remote desert valleys west of Luxor, convinced that at least one royal tomb of the 18th Dynasty remained undiscovered. In October 2022, they found an entrance. A corridor. The beginning of something. But they did not know what.
The tomb was in the wrong place. It sat in Wadi Gabbanat el-Qurud, approximately 2.4 kilometers west of the Valley of the Kings, closer in location to where queens and royal wives were buried. The proximity to the tombs of Thutmose III’s wives, and to the early tomb prepared for Hatshepsut before she became pharaoh, pointed toward a queen. That is what the team assumed. They kept excavating. They kept reading the walls. They kept analyzing the fragments pulled from the debris that had packed the corridors to a concrete-like density after repeated flooding.
Then the alabaster jar fragments came out of the rubble with the name of Thutmose II inscribed on them. Not a queen. A king. Specifically: the king whose tomb had been missing for over a century, the last unlocated burial of the rulers of the 18th Dynasty, the pharaoh who was the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Tutankhamun. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery on February 18, 2025. It was the first royal Egyptian tomb found since Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun’s burial chamber in 1922.
The 103-Year Gap
The Valley of the Kings is one of the most excavated archaeological sites on earth. Generations of Egyptologists have walked its floor, mapped its corridors, numbered its chambers. By the time Howard Carter’s team broke through into Tutankhamun’s tomb on November 4, 1922, the Valley had already yielded most of its secrets. Dozens of royal and noble tombs had been catalogued. The assumption after Carter’s discovery, which stunned the world with its intact treasures, was that the Valley had given up what it had to give.
For 103 years, that assumption held. No royal tomb of a pharaoh was found. Scholars knew Thutmose II was missing. His mummy had been identified in the Deir el-Bahari cache, a collection of royal mummies that had been moved in antiquity from damaged tombs to a single location for protection. The body was there. The tomb was not. It had to exist somewhere. Nobody could find it. The ancient world keeps producing discoveries that force scholars to revise what they thought was settled — ancient tablets found in Iraq that confirmed new evidence of a real Gilgamesh are one example of how much the archaeological record still has to offer.
Egypt’s Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Sherif Fathy, confirmed in the official announcement that the Thutmose II tomb is the first royal burial site discovered since Howard Carter’s legendary discovery in 1922. Dr. Mohamed Ismail Khaled, Secretary-General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, described it as “one of the most significant archaeological finds in recent years.” These are officials who have seen a great deal. They are not given to overstatement.
Why It Was in the Wrong Place
The 18th Dynasty, which ruled Egypt between approximately 1550 and 1292 BC, was the most celebrated royal line of the New Kingdom. Its pharaohs built Karnak and Luxor, conquered an empire stretching into Nubia and the Levant, and produced some of the most famous figures in ancient history: Hatshepsut, the woman who ruled as pharaoh. Amenhotep III was the builder of temples on a scale that astonished even ancient visitors. Akhenaten, the heretic king who abolished the gods. Tutankhamun, the boy whose tomb became the most famous archaeological discovery of the twentieth century.
Thutmose II was not the dynasty’s most celebrated figure. He ruled for approximately 13 years, from roughly 1492 to 1479 BC. His military campaigns were conducted by his generals, not by him personally. He was physically weak, according to the evidence of his mummy. His great achievement, if it can be called that, was surviving long enough to produce an heir.
What makes his tomb significant is not what he accomplished but what it reveals about the dynasty he belonged to and the woman he was married to. Hatshepsut was both his wife and his half-sister, a common arrangement in the royal family of the period. She was the daughter of Thutmose I by his principal queen. He was the son of Thutmose I by a secondary wife. She was more royal than he was. When he died, she arranged his burial and eventually succeeded him, first as regent for his son Thutmose III, then as pharaoh in her own right. The inscriptions found in tomb C4 confirm this: alabaster vessel fragments bearing the name of Thutmose II as the “deceased king,” alongside inscriptions bearing the name of Hatshepsut, confirm both the tomb’s owner and the fact that Hatshepsut oversaw his burial rites.
The tomb was not in the Valley of the Kings because Thutmose II and Hatshepsut appear to have chosen a different location, farther from the settled areas, beneath a Theban mountain waterfall. The architect Ineni, who oversaw Thutmose I’s burial, left an inscription describing the requirement for royal tombs: “alone, no one seeing, no one hearing.” The Western Wadis were more remote. The choice turned out to be a mistake. The waterfall that made it secluded also sent floodwater through the tomb repeatedly after the king’s death.
What the Floods Did and What Was Saved
The tomb’s interior tells the story of the damage in layers. The flooding occurred shortly after Thutmose II’s death. The water carried debris down the corridors and packed it so densely that, by the time Litherland’s team reached it 3,500 years later, the material had hardened to a consistency described as concrete. The ceilings had partially collapsed under structural strain. The contents of the burial chamber had already been removed in antiquity, almost certainly in response to the flooding, and transferred to the Deir el-Bahari cache along with the king’s mummy.
What the flooding preserved, paradoxically, is the decoration. The physical record of the ancient world survives in fragments that keep reshaping what we thought we knew — a fossil discovery that rewrote what scientists understood about the origins of human intelligence is another case where the ground gave up something nobody expected. The walls of the tomb contain scenes from the Book of the Amduat, the ancient Egyptian funerary text that describes the journey of the sun god through the twelve hours of the night and the dangers the deceased king must navigate to achieve rebirth. These are among the earliest known instances of the Book of the Amduat used in a royal context. The preservation of the painted walls beneath the hardened debris provides material that scholars had not previously been able to study in this condition.
Live Science’s reporting on the discovery noted that the pottery analysis, which confirmed the tomb’s identity, was completed during the late 2024 and early 2025 excavation season, after the entrance had first been found in October 2022. Three years of excavation separated the discovery of the corridor from the identification of the king. That is how archaeology works. The sensational announcement obscures the methodical years of clearing debris by hand, cataloguing fragments, reading inscriptions, and building an evidentiary case before making any claim.
The Dynasty of Thutmose II Started
To understand why this tomb matters, it helps to trace the line that runs forward from Thutmose II to the boy king whose face is known to everyone.
Thutmose II’s son, born to a secondary wife named Iset, became Thutmose III, perhaps the greatest military pharaoh Egypt ever produced. He fought seventeen campaigns, extended Egypt’s empire to its largest territorial extent, and built more temples than almost any pharaoh before or after him. Thutmose III’s son became Amenhotep II, known for his athletic ability and the brutality of his military campaigns. Amenhotep II’s son became Thutmose IV, who had the Great Sphinx of Giza cleared of sand and erected the Dream Stele between its paws. Thutmose IV’s son became Amenhotep III, who built the Colossi of Memnon and transformed Luxor into one of the architectural wonders of the ancient world. Amenhotep III’s son became Akhenaten, who abolished the traditional Egyptian gods, moved the capital to a new city, and triggered a religious revolution that the Egyptian state worked to erase after his death. Akhenaten’s son became Tutankhamun.
Six generations. From the weak king buried hastily beneath a waterfall after floods destroyed his tomb, to the boy whose burial chamber had been sealed so perfectly that it remained intact for three thousand years until a British archaeologist pushed a candle through a hole in the wall and saw, as he described it, “wonderful things.”
Tutankhamun is the end of the direct line. He died at approximately 19 years old, leaving no living heir. The dynasty ended with him. Thutmose II is where, in the direct paternal line, it effectively began for the period that produced the New Kingdom’s most celebrated rulers.
The Skeptics and What They Have Right
The announcement was received with genuine excitement by archaeologists, but several scholars were quick to note the limitations of what has actually been confirmed.
The tomb was thoroughly looted in antiquity. The mummy of Thutmose II, now in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo, was found not in this tomb but in the Deir el-Bahari cache, where it had been moved at some point during the Third Intermediate Period, when tomb robbing was endemic and priests gathered threatened royal mummies for safekeeping. The identification of tomb C4 as Thutmose II’s original burial place rests on the inscribed alabaster fragments and the wall decorations rather than on finding the king in situ.
That identification is considered secure by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities and the New Kingdom Research Foundation. The inscriptions are specific and unambiguous. But some scholars have noted that the tomb’s physical condition makes a comprehensive study difficult, that the structural collapses limit access to some areas, and that much of what the original burial contained has been lost to the floods and the subsequent removal of the contents.
These are fair caveats. An intact royal tomb reveals what was placed there at burial. A stripped and flooded one reveals the architecture, the wall texts, and what debris analysis can reconstruct. Both are valuable. They are not the same thing. The significance of the discovery does not require pretending otherwise.
What Litherland Found That Nobody Else Had
Litherland’s team succeeded where generations of Egyptologists had not, for a reason that is, in retrospect, almost obvious: they looked in the right place.
The Valley of the Kings had been searched extensively. The surrounding areas had not received the same systematic attention. The Western Wadis, more remote and less accessible, had not been subjected to the kind of methodical ground survey that Litherland and his team conducted over more than a decade. The assumption that the Valley of the Kings contained all the royal tombs turned out to be an assumption rather than a conclusion.
The search for Thutmose II’s tomb connects to questions that have interested Egyptologists for a long time about the choices pharaohs and their architects made when selecting burial sites. Thutmose I’s architect, Ineni, described the secrecy requirements. The Western Wadis were secret. They were also difficult. The flooding that destroyed the tomb’s contents and preserved its walls was a consequence of the location that was chosen precisely because it was isolated and remote. The tomb ended up hidden for 3,500 years, partly because the place selected to hide it was so inaccessible that even systematic searches missed it.
The same impulse that drives the search for lost things, the conviction that what is missing must be somewhere, that the record is incomplete and the gaps are not permanent, is what kept Litherland working through the Western Wadis for over a decade while the rest of the archaeological world proceeded on the assumption that the royal tombs of the 18th Dynasty had all been accounted for.
They had not. One remained. It was 2.4 kilometers west of where everyone was looking, packed with debris hardened to concrete, its ceilings partially collapsed, its contents removed thousands of years ago by priests trying to protect a king’s mummy from the robbers that had already found the gold.
What it still contained was the name. Carved into alabaster, readable after 3,500 years. Thutmose II. Deceased king. Husband of Hatshepsut. The father of the pharaoh who built the largest empire Egypt ever had. Great-great-great-great-grandfather of the boy king whose face is on posters in museums on every continent.
103 years between discoveries. The next one is still out there. The pace of scientific discovery across every field suggests it may not take another century — the cancer breakthroughs arriving faster than anyone predicted are one sign of how quickly the gaps in human knowledge can close when the right tools reach the right place.
