King Tutankhamun tomb: tickets, hours and how to visit

1. 01

   Cross to the West Bank

   The royal valley is on the West Bank, which Egypt's official tourism site says you reach by ferry.

2. 02

   Ride up to the valley

   Wikivoyage prefers a taxi or a bicycle for the trip into the hills behind the West Bank.

3. 03

   Buy tickets at the valley office

   The valley has its own ticket office. Pay by bank card: cash isn't accepted.

4. 04

   Queue at the tomb

   Expect at least 15–30 minutes in line at each tomb, the ticket office and the car park.

Wikivoyage calls it barely worth visiting, because it is much smaller and less decorated than most royal tombs². If painted walls matter more to you, the tomb of Seti I (KV17¹¹) is, in Wikivoyage’s words, the longest in the valley and one of the best decorated².

Short on time or budget? There are replicas too:

• A replica of the burial chamber was built nearby to reduce tourist pressure on the original tomb¹⁰.
• The grounds of Howard Carter’s House hold a replica of Tutankhamun’s tomb, made and donated by Factum Arte¹². Carter built the mudbrick house in 1910¹², handy for his digs in the valley.

For a smaller replica to take home, the Luxor souvenir shopping guide covers the stalls.

• a gilded wooden outer shrine¹ that took up most of the burial chamber;
• the innermost coffin, made mainly of 110.4 kg¹ of solid gold;
• two miniature coffins¹ holding the mummies of Tutankhamun’s stillborn daughters;
• the golden funerary mask¹⁰, among the best-known artworks from ancient Egypt.

Most of the tomb’s goods are now in the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza¹. Its galleries open 9AM–6PM most days and until 9PM on Wednesdays and Saturdays, with last entry one hour before closing¹⁵.

Closer to the tomb, the Luxor Museum shows selected artefacts from the tomb of King Tut¹⁶. Tutankhamun himself stayed put, while other royal mummies moved: Amenhotep III’s went from the Egyptian Museum, Cairo to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization¹⁷.

The Nefertiti theory

In 2015, Nicholas Reeves proposed that voids behind the tomb’s walls were the burial chamber of Nefertiti, the great royal wife of Akhenaten¹⁸. Later radar scans showed no hidden chambers¹⁸.

• The rest of the valley: see a picture of Valley of the Kings tombs and pick your other tombs.
• Valley of the Queens: its general ticket doesn’t cover Nefertari’s tomb, which needs its own ticket⁹, and other sources say the tomb is currently closed¹⁶.
• Deir el-Medina: the village of the artisans who built the royal tombs²¹.
• Hatshepsut’s temple: the queen who became pharaoh, at Deir al-Bahari²².
• Colossi of Memnon: two huge stone statues of Amenhotep III, free to see from the roadside⁹.

For the wider list, browse the other things to do around Luxor.

Questions people ask