An intact pharaoh's tomb was unheard of.
Archeology was still a young science when Carter and Lord Carnarvon made their find. Very little digging had been done until Napoleon's time, and most of that amounted to disorganized looting until the mid-1800s when Auguste Mariette (1821-1881), on behalf of the Service des Antiquités, began to establish rules to organize excavations. Even then, there was a constant competition between treasure hunting and science.
Emile Brugsch Bey experienced such a case in 1881. A local family had managed to make a good living for six years by selling artifacts from a major site they had discovered, the tomb of Queen Astemkheb. When their secret was uncovered, Bey discovered that the site contained the mummies of 40 pharaohs, including Ramses II, believed to have been the pharaoh who contended with Moses in the biblical book of Exodus.
There was another major find in 1905—not of a pharaoh, but of a high government official, Prince Yuaa, and his wife. Although the tomb had been rifled, many artifacts were untouched, still fresh from millennia before. It was the richest find to date, and provided the most complete single view of ancient Egypt.
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