Egyptian-English Team Discovers Tomb of Thutmose II Near Luxor
Mar 10, 2025
One of archeology’s most important regions surrounds the ancient Egyptian city of Luxor. Located on the Nile River’s east bank in Upper Egypt, Luxor was known as Thebes in ancient times and was Egypt’s capital during the New Kingdom period, from 1550 to 1070 BC. A center of worship, it was dedicated to the sun and air god Amun-Ra. Following Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt in 332 BC, Luxor came under Greek and then Roman rule, and the city offers an unparalleled mix of ancient architectural styles.
Some 420 miles south of Cairo, the city stands across the river from the west bank’s Valley of the Kings, which housed pharaohs and nobles in elaborate tombs. The Valley of the Queens housed royal and noble women, along with their children. Sites in this area continue to yield remarkable archeological finds.
In February 2025, Archaeology News reported that an Egyptian-English team had discovered Thutmose II’s lost tomb. The researchers from University of Cambridge’s New Kingdom Research Foundation and Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities were working together in excavating tomb C4 in the Western Wadis. Discovered in October 2022, they believed it to house a royal consort. Instead, it holds the remains of Thutmose II, one of the less prominent pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty.
The tomb’s main corridor and entrance was found at Wadi Gabbanat el-Qurud, a little more than a mile west of the Valley of the Kings. Its location near Queen Hatshepsut and Thutmose III’s wives’ burial spots seemed to indicate a queen’s tomb. However, the inscriptions found on alabaster vessels point to a “deceased king” and reference Hatshepsut, Thutmose II’s wife.
Dr. Mohamed Ismail Khaled, the Supreme Council of Antiquities’ secretary-general, describes this as one of the most significant discoveries in Egypt in years, as no funeral furniture connected with Thutmose II has existed in museums up to this point. The son of Thutmose I and Mutnofret (his lesser wife), Thutmose II only held power for a brief time before Hatshepsut, his wife and half sister, ascended to the throne. Even during his rule Hatshepsut seems to have held much of the power, and it is her name that survives on monuments of the era.
The tomb has a simple design, with a corridor leading to a burial chamber placed several feet above the passageway’s floor. Unfortunately, ancient floods left the tomb in a degraded condition, as water penetrated just after the king’s burial, compromising its structural integrity. The raised burial chamber did allow workers to transfer Thutmose II’s remains, as well as funerary items, to a new location following the flood. This is the Royal Cache (TT320) in the vicinity of Deir el-Bahari, where Thutmose II’s mummy was discovered in the 19th century, alongside other 18th and 19th Dynasty rulers.
Among the items recovered from the site are fallen plaster fragments, many of which contain yellow stars and blue inscriptions, as well as passages from the funerary text “Book of the Amduat.” The layout of the tomb points to it serving as a model for subsequent 18th Dynasty burial places. Interestingly, this is the first such pharaonic burial site discovered since Howard Carter’s 1922 finding of the magnificent tomb of King Tutankhamun.