When Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon broke through the sealed doorway of Tutankhamun’s tomb in November 1922, they stepped into a space that had been undisturbed for over 3,000 years. The Valley of the Kings had already given up many of its secrets by then, but nothing had prepared the archaeological world for what lay inside KV62. The sheer volume of objects — furniture, chariots, statues, jewelry, golden shrines — was staggering. To document every detail of the discovery, Carter brought in photographer Harry Burton, whose black and white images became the definitive visual record of the excavation. Decades later, the colorization studio Dynamichrome worked from original negatives and photographs held at the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford, to produce a digitally colorized selection of Burton’s work. The result brings the ancient tomb and the people who excavated it into sharp, almost startling focus.
Lord Carnarvon, the British aristocrat who funded Carter’s years of searching in the Valley of the Kings, was a constant presence during the early stages of the excavation. He was photographed at Carter’s home — known as “Castle Carter” — located at Elwat el-Dibbân on the Theban West Bank.
The first room excavators entered was the Antechamber — a rectangular space packed floor to ceiling with objects. Sealed alabaster vases sat between elaborately carved animal couches. Against the west wall, a cow-headed couch towered over boxes that still contained joints of meat. The room had been robbed in antiquity, and ancient officials had hastily restacked many of the items after the intrusion, creating a dense, chaotic jumble that Burton photographed methodically from every angle.
Beneath the lion couch, excavators found a remarkable collection of objects: an ivory and ebony chest, black shrine-shaped boxes, and a small ebony chair made for a child. In front of that same couch sat a large rectangular white box that held linen garments — shirts, shawls, and loin cloths — along with 18 sticks, 69 arrows, and a trumpet.
Standing guard at the sealed doorway leading to the Burial Chamber were two life-sized wooden statues of Tutankhamun, positioned one on each side of the entrance. Each figure showed the king wearing the nemes headdress, a kilt, and sandals, and carrying a mace and a staff. Before these statues could be moved to the makeshift conservation laboratory set up in the nearby tomb of Sethos II (KV 15), they had to be carefully wrapped for transport.
Once at KV 15, conservators Arthur Mace and Alfred Lucas took over the painstaking work of stabilizing and cleaning the objects. Among the items they worked on were the two sentinel statues and several state chariots recovered from the Antechamber. These chariots had been dismantled in ancient times to fit through the tomb’s narrow doorways, and their gilded surfaces required careful treatment before any further study could take place.
Behind the Antechamber lay the Burial Chamber, where the focus shifted to the four enormous gilded wooden shrines that nested one inside another around the sarcophagus. In December 1923, Carter and his team began the enormous task of removing the wall between the Antechamber and the Burial Chamber to create enough space to dismantle the shrines. The outermost shrine alone was built from twenty separate oak sections and shaped like a sed festival pavilion, with a double sloping roof.
Stretched between the first and second shrines hung a linen pall studded with bronze rosettes. On December 30, 1923, Carter, Mace, and an Egyptian workman climbed scaffolding to carefully roll the fragile fabric back. Lifting the roof sections of the outermost shrine required the combined effort of Carter, Arthur Callender, and a team of workmen.
Once the shrines were dismantled and their doors opened, the team could see through to the quartzite sarcophagus at the center of the chamber. Inside the sarcophagus rested a set of nested coffins. Carter worked on the second coffin in October 1925, carefully separating it from the outermost case. The innermost coffin, which he examined alongside an Egyptian workman, was made entirely of solid gold.
Inside the solid gold coffin, the king’s mummy lay wearing the now-iconic gold mask. Burton photographed the mask on October 30, 1925, still resting in place on the mummy’s face inside the innermost coffin — exactly as it had been placed by ancient embalmers more than three thousand years earlier.
Adjacent to the Burial Chamber was the Treasury, a smaller room that held some of the most sacred objects in the tomb. At the entrance stood the Anubis shrine — a crouching jackal figure draped in a linen shirt inscribed with the cartouche of Akhenaten. Beyond it, a line of chests ran down the center of the room, ending with the canopic chest, which housed the king’s linen-wrapped stomach, intestines, liver, and lungs, each stored in a miniature gold coffin inside an alabaster canopic box.
Three wooden chests on the Treasury floor — one shaped like a cartouche — held earrings, sandals, and a wax model of a heron. Along the southern wall, numerous model boats were stacked together, part of the extensive funerary equipment intended to serve the king in the afterlife.
Burton’s original photographs gave the world its first look at the contents of the tomb. His systematic approach — room by room, object by object — created a visual archive that researchers still rely on today. The colorized versions produced by Dynamichrome from the original negatives at the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford, add a new dimension to that archive. Colors that had been locked inside black and white tones for a century are now visible, pulling the 1920s excavation and the ancient Egyptian world it uncovered into a clarity that feels immediate and real.
