Valley of the Kings

The Valley of the Kings (also called the Valley of the Gates of the Kings) is a long, narrow wadi on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor that served as the principal royal necropolis of Egypt's New Kingdom. Rock-cut tombs were excavated here for nearly 500 years from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasty. The site has been a focus of modern Egyptological exploration for about two centuries; early cataloguing efforts (notably John Gardner Wilkinson's tomb numbering in 1821) led to more systematic mapping and study by later projects such as the Theban Mapping Project directed by Egyptologists including Kent R. Weeks. Archaeologically the valley is world-famous for discoveries such as the virtually untouched tomb of Tutankhamun uncovered in 1922, and it continues to be an active site for preservation, research, and controlled tourism. The site was also visited in antiquity (especially during Roman times) and remains a high-profile tourist destination where only a limited number of tombs are open to visitors and photography inside tombs is restricted. The supplied research materials contain no primary-sourced accounts of paranormal phenomena, named spirits, or specific haunting events tied to the Valley of the Kings. While popular culture outside these sources sometimes references curses or supernatural associations with Egyptian tombs, those claims are not documented in the provided source set and are therefore not asserted here.