Tomb KV1, located in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, was used to bury Pharaoh Ramesses VII of the Twentieth Dynasty. The single corridor tomb is situated in Luxor’s West Bank and is small compared to other tombs of the Twentieth Dynasty. Although it has been open since antiquity, it was only properly investigated and cleared by Edwin Brock in 1984 and 1985.
Tomb layout
Typical tombs from this period, KV1, are laid out along a straight axis. There are four major parts: the entrance, a passageway, the burial chamber containing the sarcophagus, and a final smaller room at the end.
The successors of Ramesses III constructed tombs that followed this pattern and were decorated similarly. It was in the seventh year of his reign when he died. There is evidence that the room that ended up being the burial chamber was expanded from its original design as a corridor, and work on the next room at the end of the tomb was halted.
The burial chamber’s walls are decorated with extracts from the Book of the Earth. Regarding style and themes, it closely follows its immediate predecessor, Ramesses VI’s KV9. The decoration within the passageway of the tomb contains illustrations from the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, and the Book of the Earth. However, the ceiling within the burial chamber includes a double image of the sky goddess Nut, reflecting a style used in tomb paintings used by pharaohs of the previous dynasty.
This is the last known example of a coffin placed in a royal tomb; all subsequent burials of more bottomless pits covered by a lid. Within the burial chamber, a depression has been cut into the rock, with an inverted box of stone shaped roughly like a cartouche. The tomb was robbed in antiquity, and the mummy was presumably lost, though four cups inscribed with the pharaoh’s name were found in the “royal cache” in DB320, along with the remains of other pharaohs.
Visits in antiquity
The tomb was one of at least eleven open tombs to early travellers. As evidence, 132 individual graffitis left by Ancient Greek and Roman visitors have been counted throughout KV1. Later, the tomb was used as a dwelling by Coptic monks.
Early European visitors to the area included Richard Pococke, who visited KV1 and designated it “Tomb A” in his Observations of Egypt, published in 1743.
The savants accompanying Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt surveyed the Valley of the Kings and designated KV1 as “1er Tombeau” (“1st Tomb”) in their list.
Recent archaeological work
Though not documented, the tomb was cleared in the 1950s. Starting in 1983, funded by the Royal Ontario Museum, Edwin Brock did a thorough excavation of the burial chamber floor, followed a decade later by excavating the tomb’s entrance. In 1994, the Supreme Council of Antiquities cleaned the walls and repaired cracks with plaster. In doing so, they covered graffiti left there in ancient times.
Some of Brock’s findings included fragments of wood, calcite and faience shabtis, ostraca decorated with sketches presumably by the tomb’s artists, a floral garland and numerous contemporaneous pottery shards.
