Royal Mummy Cache of Deir el-Bahari (TT320) and Its Discovery

The royal mummy cache of Deir el-Bahari is a tomb on the west bank of Thebes where Egyptian priests secretly reburied the bodies of many of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs. The tomb, known as TT320 or DB320, was finally sealed around 935 BC. Rediscovered by local villagers in about 1871 and cleared by the Antiquities Service in 1881, it gave the world the actual bodies of kings such as Seti I and Ramesses II.

Why the kings were moved

By the end of the New Kingdom, around 1070 BC, the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings were being robbed. Papyri from the reign of Ramesses IX record trials of tomb robbers, and the state was too weak to guard the necropolis.

During the 21st dynasty, the high priests of Amun at Thebes took action. They inspected the royal tombs, removed the mummies, rewrapped many of them and moved them to safer places. The officials also stripped much of the remaining gold, which helped fund their own government.

The rewrapped mummies were often given new coffins, with notes, called dockets, written on the wrappings and coffins. These record the dates and names of the officials who moved them, and they are key evidence for the whole operation.

Tomb TT320

TT320 lies in a cliff south of the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari. It consists of a deep shaft leading to a long corridor and a burial chamber. It was used for the burial of the high priest Pinedjem II and members of his family.

Royal mummies were brought into the tomb in stages. Dockets show that the final burials took place in the early 22nd dynasty, probably in about year 11 of Shoshenq I, which is around 935 BC. After that the tomb was sealed and forgotten for nearly 3,000 years.

The discovery by the Abd el-Rassul family

Around 1871 members of the Abd el-Rassul family, from the village of Qurna near the Theban tombs, came upon the shaft. Over the next decade they removed small objects and sold them on the antiquities market.

By the late 1870s papyri, funerary figurines and other items bearing royal names began to appear in Luxor and abroad. Gaston Maspero, the head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, realised that an unknown royal tomb had been found. In 1881 two of the brothers were arrested and questioned harshly by the provincial governor, but did not confess.

In June 1881 Mohammed Abd el-Rassul finally revealed the location. On 6 July 1881 Émile Brugsch, Maspero’s assistant, was led down the shaft and found the corridor crowded with coffins and burial goods.

The 1881 clearance

Fearing theft, Brugsch had the tomb emptied very quickly, within a few days, with the help of hundreds of workers. The work was hasty and poorly recorded by modern standards, and the original position of many coffins was not documented.

The coffins were carried to the Nile and loaded onto a steamer for the Bulaq Museum in Cairo. Brugsch and Maspero later reported that villagers lined the riverbank, with women wailing and men firing guns, as the boat passed. Mohammed Abd el-Rassul received a reward and was given a post as foreman of excavations.

Who was found

The cache contained more than 50 mummies of kings, queens, princes and officials. Among the kings were Seqenenre Tao, Ahmose I, Amenhotep I, Thutmose II, Thutmose III, Seti I, Ramesses II and Ramesses III. Several 21st-dynasty high priests and their families were also there.

One mysterious burial, known as Unknown Man E, has been linked to the plot described in Harem Conspiracy: The Plot to Murder Ramesses III.

Legacy

The cache made it possible to study the bodies of famous rulers directly, from their age and health to embalming methods. A second cache, found in 1898 in the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV35), added more royal mummies.

The story inspired the Egyptian film The Night of Counting the Years (1969), directed by Shadi Abdel Salam. On 3 April 2021, 22 royal mummies, many from TT320, were moved through Cairo in the Pharaohs’ Golden Parade to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization.

Timeline

• c. 1100-1070 BC: Widespread robbing of royal tombs at Thebes.
• c. 1070-945 BC: 21st-dynasty priests move and rewrap the royal mummies.
• c. 969 BC: The high priest Pinedjem II is buried in TT320.
• c. 935 BC: The final burials are made and the tomb is sealed.
• c. 1871: The Abd el-Rassul family finds the tomb.
• 1881, 6 July: Émile Brugsch enters the tomb; it is cleared within days.
• 1898: A second royal cache is found in KV35.
• 2021, 3 April: The royal mummies are moved to a new museum in Cairo.

Why it matters

The Deir el-Bahari cache is one of the most important finds in Egyptology. It preserves the bodies of many rulers whose tombs were otherwise empty, and its dockets reveal how a later Egyptian state tried to protect its ancestors. Its story also shows how local knowledge, the antiquities trade and official archaeology were entangled in 19th-century Egypt.