Like other pharaohs, Tutankhamun was buried with a wide variety of funerary objects and personal possessions, such as coffins, furniture, clothing and jewelry, though in the unusually limited space these goods had to be densely packed.

Ay was elderly when he came to the throne, and it is possible that he buried his predecessor in KV62 in order to usurp WV23 for himself and ensure that he would have a tomb of suitably royal proportions ready when he himself died.

The geologist Stephen Cross has argued that a major flood deposited this layer after KV62 was last sealed and before the huts were built, which would mean Tutankhamun's tomb had been rendered inaccessible by the time Ay's reign ended.

[14] Several tombs in the Valley of the Kings lay open continuously from ancient times onward, but the entrances to many others remained hidden until after the emergence of Egyptology in the early nineteenth century.

[20] The condition of the burial goods varied greatly; many had been profoundly affected by moisture, which probably derived from both the damp state of the plaster when the tomb was first sealed and from water seepage over the millennia until it was excavated.

[21] Recording the tomb's contents and conserving them so they could survive to be transported to Cairo proved to be an unprecedented task, lasting for ten digging seasons.

[24] The spectacular nature of the tomb goods inspired a media frenzy, dubbed "Tutmania", that made Tutankhamun into one of the most famous pharaohs, often known by the nickname "King Tut".

In protest of the government's increasing restrictions, Carter and his associates stopped work in February 1924, beginning a legal dispute that lasted until January 1925.

The clearance of the tomb itself was completed in November 1930, though Carter and Lucas continued to work on conserving the remaining burial goods until February 1932, when the last shipment was sent to Cairo.

[37] In contrast, since the discovery water has periodically trickled in through the entrance, and on New Year's Day in 1991 a rainstorm flooded the tomb through a fault in the burial chamber ceiling.

[42] In 2015, the Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves argued, based on Factum Arte's scans, that the west and north walls of the burial chamber included previously unnoticed plaster partitions.

[47] Most Eighteenth Dynasty royal tombs used a layout with a bent axis, so that a person moving from the entrance to the burial chamber would take a sharp turn to the left along the way.

The west wall bears an image of twelve baboons, which is an extract from the first section of the Amduat, a funerary text that describes the journey of the sun god Ra through the netherworld.

[65] Nearly all leather in the tomb had dissolved into a pitch-like mass, and while the state of preservation of textiles was highly inconsistent, the worst-preserved had turned into a black powder.

[65] Every exposed surface was covered with an unidentified pink film;[67] Lucas suggested it was some kind of dissolved iron compound that came from the rock or the plaster.

[73] Among the significant objects in the antechamber were several funerary beds with animal heads, which dominated the cluster of furniture against the west wall; an alabaster lotus chalice; and a painted box depicting Tutankhamun in battle, which Carter regarded as one of the finest works of art in the tomb.

Carter thought even more highly of a gilded and inlaid throne depicting Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamun in the art style of the Amarna Period; he called it "the most beautiful thing that has yet been found in Egypt".

[75] Scattered in various places in the antechamber were pieces of gold and semiprecious stones from a corselet, a ceremonial version of the armor that Egyptian kings wore into battle.

Its original contents were jumbled together with objects that had been haphazardly replaced during the restoration after the robberies, including beds, stools, and stone and pottery vessels containing wine and oils.

It is carved with the images of four protective goddesses (Isis, Nephthys, Neith and Serqet), and contained a golden lion-headed bier on which rested three nested coffins in human shape.

[91] In the doorway of the treasury stood a shrine on carrying poles topped by a statue of the jackal god Anubis, in front of which lay a fifth magic brick.

[95] A nested set of small coffins in the treasury contained a lock of hair belonging to Tiye, the wife of Amenhotep III and mother of Akhenaten, who is thought to have been Tutankhamun's grandmother.

"[103] Tutankhamun's clothes—loose tunics, robes and sashes, often elaborately decorated with dye, embroidery or beadwork—exhibit more variety than the clothes depicted in art from his time, which consist largely of plain white kilts and tight sheaths.

These are key pieces of evidence in attempts to reconstruct the relationships between members of the royal family and the sequence in which they reigned, although scholars' interpretations have varied greatly.

The robbers also took bedding and cosmetics; the theft of the latter shows that the robberies took place soon after burial, as the Egyptians' fat-based unguents would have turned rancid within a few years.

[121] These two tombs were among several in the Valley of the Kings that were robbed at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, suggesting that political uncertainty following Tutankhamun's death caused a weakening of security there.

[131] The unguents that were poured over the wrappings before burial had undergone a chemical reaction that Lucas called "some kind of slow spontaneous combustion", possibly caused by fungi in the tomb.

[133][134] The solidified unguents glued together Tutankhamun's remains, his mummy wrappings and the objects on his body, forming a single mass stuck to the bottom of the inner coffin.

Two anatomists, Douglas Derry and Saleh Bey Hamdi, examined the pieces as they came free before coating the fragile flesh in paraffin wax to prevent further deterioration.

For instance, in 1996, the Egyptologist Bob Brier suggested that fragments of bone in the skull cavity, seen in the X-rays that Harrison had taken in 1968, were a sign that Tutankhamun had died of a blow to the head and might have been murdered.