It has long been speculated, as well as much disputed, that the body found in this tomb was that of the famous king, Akhenaten, who moved the capital to Akhetaten (modern-day Amarna).

The results of genetic and other scientific tests published in February 2010 have confirmed that the person buried there was both the son of Amenhotep III and the father of Tutankhamun.

At that time, any additional, hypothetical occupants of the tomb would have been removed and (possibly) relocated to KV35, while the remaining mummy and some of the other artefacts were desecrated and abandoned.

The tomb was first entered on 9 January by Ayrton, Davis, Joseph Lindon Smith and (as the representative of the antiquities service) Arthur Weigall.

[7] According to a letter from Davis to Gaston Maspero, some of the objects found in KV55 were still in place in January 1908, and their study and attempts at conservation were still ongoing at that later date.

In 1996, she undertook conservation work on the stairs and the plastering inside the burial chamber through a grant from the American Research Centre in Egypt.

[10] Three days before the discovery of KV55, Ayrton uncovered a recess in the rock (now designated as KVC) located immediately above the entrance to KV55 and containing jars of twentieth dynasty type.

Oriented almost due east, its entrance way consists of a set of stairs cut into the valley bedrock that leads to a gently sloping corridor and then to the single chamber of the tomb.

An ostracon found by Pinch Brock in 1993 has been interpreted as a plan of the tomb, and possibly indicates a widening of the entrance after its initial cutting.

[10] On top of the rubble fill were found a panel and door of a large gilded shrine, although the exact position of these items is unclear.

[26][27] Recent careful re-examinations of the original publication, of eyewitness reports, and of the photographs taken before the tomb was cleared have brought some clarity to the situation.

[28] Although the tomb was clearly disturbed in antiquity and its contents have been described as disordered and chaotic,[29] Martha Bell argued that this disarray was more apparent than real.

Her reconstruction of the layout of the tomb indicates an orderly and deliberate arrangement of artefacts, and she suggests that the impression of chaos might be due to the collapse of wooden objects caused by falling plaster and stone.

[25] The decoration, which appears to have been very similar on all sides of the shrine, features Akhenaten and Tiye making offerings to the Aten, with a focus on the king rather than his mother.

Georges Daressy further deduced that the gilded coffin found in the tomb was originally made for a woman and only later adapted to accommodate a king, through alterations to its inscriptions and the addition of a false beard, a uraeus and the royal scepters (crook and flail).

[36] The identity of the coffin's original owner has been a matter of much discussion over the years, with Tiye, Nefertiti, Meketaten and Meritaten all proposed as candidates.

Like the coffin, the canopic jars were altered for the burial of a king through the erasure of Kiya's titulary and the addition of a royal uraeus to each portrait head.

[7] As possible reasons for this initial identification the (typical female) position of the mummy's arms,[44] post-mortem damage to the pelvic bones[45] and the absence of male genitalia have been suggested.

[19] But when anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith examined the skull and bones in Cairo a few months later he concluded that they were those of a young male, with wide hips, a pendent chin, and distorted cranium brought on by chronic hydrocephalus.

[7] The age of death he estimated as being around 25 years although he later suggested the possibility that the body had suffered from Frölich's syndrome which delayed normal skeletal maturation.

These results were seen to support the initial claims by Weigall, Maspero and Smith, based on other evidence found in the tomb (see above) that the body was that of Akhenaten.

[46] Later re-examinations of the remains confirmed Smith's original identification of the mummy as belonging to a young male (although with feminine traits)[47] but pushed the estimated age of death back to around 20 years.

Based on these results it was concluded that the KV55 body was too young to be Akhenaten and they were seen to support the claim that the mummy was that of Smenkhkare, an idea first proposed by Rex Engelbach in 1931.

[1][35][59] However, a number of experts dispute these findings, claiming that Hawass et al. have not provided sufficient evidence to assume the older age at death.

[43] Objects inscribed with Amenhotep III's nomen and prenomen might be contemporary with that king's reign and could be interpreted as possessions of Queen Tiye.

[29] Although it is unclear whether or not the original blocking of the tomb was stamped with Tutankhamun's seal, the several small seal-impressions carrying his prenomen are most likely related to the reburial(s) in KV55, since he was probably not involved in the original burial preparations of either Tiye (who died several years before Tutankhamun came to the throne) or Akhenaten (who, presumably, was buried by his co-regent and probable immediate successor, Smenkhkare).

Moreover, the gold face mask was ripped from Akhenaten's sarcophagus and his identifying cartouche was removed from its hieroglyphic inscription, thus consigning its occupant to oblivion.

[68] The discovery and opening of KV55 is one of the events recounted in the novel The Ape Who Guards the Balance by the Egyptologist Barbara Mertz (writing as Elizabeth Peters).