History
Which pharaoh's tomb was found nearly intact in 1922?
- Tutankhamun
- Ramses II
- Khufu
The answer is Tutankhamun. Found by Howard Carter.
Tutankhamun, and he was a minor pharaoh - a boy who took the throne at about nine and died at nineteen, whose reign mattered mainly for undoing his predecessor's religious revolution. He is famous entirely because his tomb was small, hastily prepared, and then buried under the debris from a later tomb's construction, which hid it from the robbers who emptied everything else in the valley.
Howard Carter had been searching for six years and his backer, Lord Carnarvon, had given him one final season. The famous exchange came when Carter made a hole and held a candle through it - asked whether he could see anything, he said yes, wonderful things. It took him ten years to clear and catalogue the contents.
The curse was invented by newspapers. Carnarvon died months later of an infected mosquito bite, which was enough to launch it, and the press had a commercial motive: Carnarvon had sold exclusive coverage to The Times, so every other paper needed a different story and the curse was one they could all run. Carter himself lived another sixteen years. Recent work has been rather more interesting than the mythology - CT scanning and DNA suggest a young man with a club foot, malaria, and parents who were siblings.