Tomb KV54 is located in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Edward R. Ayrton originally excavated it on behalf of the American lawyer Theodore M. Davis, who funded the work.
History of Tomb KV54
It was not so much a tomb but a small pit near the tomb of Seti I (KV17) that contained about a dozen sizeable sealed storage jars. Within the jars were contained assorted equipment and objects that had been carefully packed. It contained pottery, dishes, bags of natron, animal bones, floral collars and linen containing text dated to the final years of the then (1907) little-known pharaoh Tutankhamun.
In 1909, Davis donated the finds he was allowed to take out of Egypt (the contents of six storage jars), which were of little intrinsic value, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where they currently reside and are on display. Davis declared to the press that he had found the tomb of Tutankhamun, and he published his findings in a book called The Tombs of Harmhabi and Touatankhamanou (using the then-current French spellings for the pharaohs Horemheb and Tutankhamun respectively) in 1912.
One of the critical finds from KV54 was a piece of linen marked with hieratic text saying, “The good god, Lord of the Two Lands, Nebkheperure [the prenomen of Tutankhamun], beloved of Min. The linen of year 6.” Recognizing that KV54 did not represent Tutankhamun’s actual tomb and that it did signal the existence of a yet-to-be-discovered tomb, archaeologist Howard Carter, who would eventually find the actual Tomb of Tutankhamun, corresponded with the Metropolitan’s Egyptological Director Herbert Winlock on this subject in 1915.
In 1923, Winlock, who had found similar contents in other excavations throughout the Theban Necropolis, instead identified the contents of KV54 not as an actual tomb but an embalming cache, representing the refuse left over from the mummification of the pharaoh rather than his “tomb”. The food and related items likely came from a funerary banquet at the pharaoh’s interment. He estimated that there had been a total of eight official mourners who had attended the burial.
When Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered in 1922, similar items were found in the entrance corridor. The corridor was filled with rocky debris to stop any future robbery attempts. It is thought that after the first robbery attempt on the tomb, the embalming cache material was moved to the pit that was KV54.
