High in the bone-dry limestone cliffs above the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, concealed behind a narrow fissure that had been sealed with rubble for nearly three millennia, lay the most extraordinary secret in the history of archaeology. Known today as DB320 — Deir el-Bahari Cache 320, also catalogued as Theban Tomb 320 — this modest shaft tomb became the final resting place not of one pharaoh but of more than fifty: an emergency vault into which ancient Egyptian priests had gathered the most sacred mummies in the world to protect them from the tomb robbers who were systematically plundering the Valley of the Kings during Egypt's turbulent Third Intermediate Period.
When the cache was finally cleared in 1881 by Émile Brugsch under the direction of Gaston Maspero, the discoveries arrived in waves of astonishment. Here was Ramesses II — Ramesses the Great, conqueror of Kadesh, builder of Abu Simbel — lying quietly in a plain coffin. Here was Seti I, whose tomb in the Valley of the Kings is still considered the most beautiful ever cut. Here were Ahmose I, founder of the New Kingdom; Thutmose III, Egypt's greatest military commander; Amenhotep I; and dozens more. In a single morning, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo received more pharaohs than most countries have ever known. The story of how they got there — and how they were found — is one of the most dramatic episodes in the entire history of Egyptology.
The mummy of Ramesses II — recovered from DB320 in 1881 and now among the most studied human remains in the world. His face, remarkably preserved, still carries the fierce dignity of a king who ruled Egypt for 66 years.
In This Guide
Overview & Significance
DB320 is, by any measure, the single most important archaeological find in the history of Egyptology — and arguably one of the greatest discoveries in the history of human civilisation. Its contents represent the physical remains of the men and women who built Egypt's New Kingdom empire: pharaohs who commanded armies across the ancient Near East, erected the temples and obelisks that still astonish the world, and shaped the religious and artistic traditions that influenced every subsequent culture of the Mediterranean and beyond.
The cache is not a tomb in the conventional sense. It was not purpose-built for any of its eventual occupants. Rather, it was an originally modest private tomb — probably cut for a 21st-Dynasty high priest named Pinedjem II and his family — that was repurposed, during a period of acute crisis for the royal necropolis, into a communal refuge for the displaced dead. The shaft itself is steep, narrow, and entirely undecorated: its power lies not in its architecture but in the contents that were pressed into it in an act of desperate priestly piety, concealed, and then forgotten by the wider world for three thousand years.
History of the Concealment
To understand why the priests of Amun undertook the extraordinary measure of gathering so many royal mummies into a single hidden shaft, it is necessary to understand the political and social crisis engulfing Egypt in the later New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period. Here is the full timeline:
Widespread tomb robbery strikes the Valley of the Kings as Egypt's central authority collapses under weak late-Ramesside pharaohs. Official investigations — recorded in the Turin Judicial Papyrus and related documents — reveal that gangs of workers, sometimes including members of the very workforce responsible for building royal tombs, are systematically breaking in and looting. Several royal tombs are found violated.
Egypt splits: pharaohs reign from Tanis in the Delta while the High Priests of Amun exercise near-royal authority from Thebes. The Theban clergy, responsible for the safety of the royal necropolis, launch a systematic programme of inspecting royal tombs, restoring damaged mummies, rewrapping them in fresh linen, and secretly relocating them from compromised or robbed tombs to safer caches. Dockets and linen inscriptions record each rewrapping and move in meticulous detail.
The high priest Pinedjem II and the Theban administration make the final, decisive transfer: over fifty royal mummies are gathered from their original tombs and from intermediate caches and concentrated into the shaft tomb at Deir el-Bahari that will become DB320. The entrance is sealed, covered with rubble, and the location is kept secret — a secret that holds for nearly three thousand years.
The Abd el-Rassul family of Gurna — hereditary diggers who lived directly above the Theban necropolis — discover the cache. For approximately a decade they exploit it covertly, selling funerary objects on the antiquities market. The sudden appearance of New Kingdom royal ushabtis, papyri, and other objects in European collections triggers alarm among Egyptologists and ultimately a formal investigation by Egyptian authorities.
Under interrogation, Mohamed Abd el-Rassul reveals the location of the cache to Mustafa Agha Ayat and subsequently to the Antiquities Service. Émile Brugsch, assistant to Director General Gaston Maspero, is dispatched to Luxor. On 6 July 1881, Brugsch descends the shaft and encounters the mummies. The clearance is completed in a breathless 48 hours, with the mummies loaded onto a Nile steamer for Cairo.
As the steamer carrying the royal mummies travels north along the Nile, local Egyptians line the banks — women wailing in mourning, men firing rifles in salute — in a spontaneous outpouring of grief and reverence that moved every European witness to silence. The mummies arrive at the Boulaq Museum (later the Egyptian Museum) and begin a new chapter of scientific study that continues to this day.
The story of DB320 did not end in 1881. Ongoing scientific investigation — from early X-ray studies in the 1960s to modern CT scanning, DNA analysis, and isotopic testing — has continued to unlock new information about the identities, health, and lives of the royal mummies, turning them from silent relics into richly documented individuals whose biology, diet, and diseases can now be read from their own bones and tissues.
The Tomb: Structure & Layout
DB320 is architecturally unassuming — its importance lies entirely in what was placed inside it rather than in any intrinsic grandeur of design. The tomb was originally cut for Pinedjem II, a High Priest of Amun who ruled Thebes in the mid-10th century BCE, and follows the standard T-shaped plan common to elite Theban burials of the Third Intermediate Period.
Access begins via a steeply descending shaft cut vertically into the limestone cliff face, approximately 11–12 metres deep. At the base of the shaft, a low doorway opens into a roughly horizontal corridor about 45 metres long that leads to a larger chamber. The walls throughout are undecorated bare rock — no paintings, no inscriptions, no architectural ornament of any kind. The tomb's concealment was its decoration: the narrow shaft entrance was sealed with stone chips and rubble and positioned behind a natural rock outcrop that rendered it virtually invisible even to those who knew the general area.
When Brugsch entered in 1881, coffins were stacked in the corridor and chamber in multiple layers, some placed directly on the floor, others propped against the walls. The density of the deposit — over fifty coffins, funerary boxes, canopic equipment, and wrapped bundles in a space roughly the size of a large modern room — spoke vividly of the urgency with which the priests had worked. There was no room for ceremony: the mummies had been brought here to be saved, not to be displayed.
The Royal Mummies Inside
The inventory of DB320 reads like a roll-call of Egyptian history's greatest names. Among the mummies recovered were some of the most famous rulers the ancient world has ever produced.
New Kingdom Pharaohs
The bulk of the cache was made up of 18th, 19th, and 20th Dynasty rulers — the pharaohs of Egypt's imperial golden age. Ahmose I, the warrior king who expelled the Hyksos and founded the New Kingdom, was present. So were Thutmose I, Thutmose II, and Thutmose III — three of the most powerful monarchs of the 18th Dynasty. Amenhotep I was found so beautifully preserved and still wearing his original garlands that Egyptologists initially refused to unwrap him; he has since been studied using non-invasive CT scanning to preserve his wrappings intact.
The Ramessides
The 19th and 20th Dynasty pharaohs formed another extraordinary group. Seti I — whose original tomb in the Valley of the Kings remains the most elaborately decorated royal burial chamber ever discovered — lay in DB320 with his face so perfectly preserved that he has been described as looking merely asleep. And most famously of all: Ramesses II, who ruled for 66 years, fought the Battle of Kadesh, constructed Abu Simbel, and fathered over 100 children. His mummy was so well-preserved that when it was flown to Paris in 1976 for conservation treatment, it was issued an Egyptian passport listing his occupation as "King (deceased)."
👑 Ramesses II
Egypt's most celebrated pharaoh, ruler for 66 years, builder of Abu Simbel. His mummy is among the best-preserved of any ancient Egyptian king.
⚔️ Ahmose I
Founder of the 18th Dynasty and the New Kingdom, who expelled the Hyksos invaders and reunified Egypt under a single crown around 1550 BCE.
🌍 Thutmose III
Often called the "Napoleon of ancient Egypt," Thutmose III conducted 17 military campaigns and expanded Egypt's empire to its greatest extent.
🎨 Seti I
Owner of the most beautifully decorated tomb in the Valley of the Kings; his face in DB320 is so well preserved it prompted gasps from the excavators in 1881.
📜 Pinedjem II
The High Priest of Amun for whom DB320 was originally cut; found here with his family, the last official owners of the tomb that became a refuge for the ages.
🌺 Amenhotep I
So perfectly preserved with original garlands still intact that Egyptologists chose not to unwrap him — he has since been studied entirely by CT scan.
Beyond the pharaohs, the cache contained mummies of royal women and children, 21st-Dynasty high priests and their families, and numerous items of funerary equipment including coffins, canopic equipment, shabtis, papyri of the Book of the Dead, and linen wrapping bands inscribed with the names of the priests who carried out each rewrapping. These secondary objects have proven invaluable in reconstructing the sequence and chronology of the concealment operation.
The Dockets: A Record of Rescue
Equally precious to scholars are the hieratic dockets — short inscriptions written in ink on the outer wrappings and coffins — that the 21st-Dynasty priests used to identify and date each rewrapping. These dockets constitute the most detailed administrative record of priestly activity in the Theban necropolis and have allowed researchers to reconstruct, with remarkable precision, exactly when each mummy was moved, inspected, re-linen'd, and transferred to its final resting place in DB320. They transform what might otherwise be an anonymous collection of bodies into a documented rescue operation.
Key Discoveries & Stories
Within a discovery of uniformly extraordinary significance, several individual stories stand out for the dramatic light they shed on ancient Egyptian history and on the circumstances of the cache's concealment and rediscovery.
The Mummy of Ramesses II Goes to Paris
In 1974, museum conservators at the Egyptian Museum noticed that the mummy of Ramesses II was deteriorating from a fungal infection. The decision was made to send the mummy to France for specialist conservation treatment — the first time a pharaoh's remains had left Egypt since their original transfer to Cairo in 1881. To comply with French customs regulations, the mummy required a passport. Egyptian authorities duly issued one, with the occupation listed as "King (deceased)" and the photo a formal museum photograph. Upon arrival at Le Bourget airport, Ramesses II was received with full military honours — the official protocol for a visiting head of state. The story has since become one of the most beloved anecdotes in all of Egyptology.
Amenhotep I: Egypt's Untouched King
When the mummy of Amenhotep I arrived in Cairo from DB320, it was in such exceptional condition — still wearing its original dry flower garlands, the face covered with a painted mask — that the Director General of Antiquities ordered it not to be unwrapped. For over a century he was the only major royal mummy never to be fully examined. In 2021, a team led by Dr. Zahi Hawass published the results of a full CT scan of Amenhotep I: he was found to be approximately 35 years old at death, 169 cm tall, circumcised, and buried with 30 amulets and a golden ceremonial belt. The scan also revealed evidence that his mummy had been disturbed and repaired by ancient priests — consistent with the rewrapping dockets found on his coffin.
The Abd el-Rassul Affair
The human story of how DB320 was found is as gripping as any archaeological drama. The Abd el-Rassul family — who had lived on the West Bank for generations — discovered the cache around 1871. For a decade they fed a trickle of extraordinary objects onto the antiquities market: a royal ushabti here, a papyrus of the Book of the Dead there, all bearing the names of New Kingdom pharaohs. European dealers and museum curators began to notice that an impossible quantity of royal-quality material was appearing from a single, unknown source. Gaston Maspero directed his colleague Eugène Lefébure to investigate. Under police pressure, Mohamed Abd el-Rassul eventually revealed the location — reportedly stating, with considerable understatement, that there were "a few" mummies inside.
The Journey Down the Nile
The transport of the mummies from Luxor to Cairo by Nile steamer in July 1881 produced one of the most haunting scenes in modern Egyptian history. As the boat passed each village along the river, men and women gathered on the banks — the women with hair unbound, keening in the traditional gesture of mourning; men firing rifles into the air in a salute of honour. It was as though the whole of Egypt instinctively understood what was passing, and reached across three thousand years to offer farewell to the kings who had made it great.
Scholarship & Legacy
The Royal Cache has generated more continuous scientific study than any other assemblage of ancient human remains in the world. Initial work by Gaston Maspero and Grafton Elliot Smith in the late 19th and early 20th centuries established the basic identifications and produced the first detailed physical descriptions of each mummy. The landmark study by Smith, published as "The Royal Mummies" (1912), remains a foundational text in both physical anthropology and Egyptology.
Modern science has transformed what is possible. CT scanning — applied to virtually every mummy from DB320 in collaborative projects between the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, Cairo University, and international partners — has revealed internal anatomy, healed fractures, dental health, diet, and in several cases cause of death without the need for destructive physical examination. DNA studies, including a landmark 2010 project published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, succeeded in establishing genetic relationships between several New Kingdom pharaohs, confirming and in some cases overturning earlier assumptions about family connections and succession.
The cache's legacy extends far beyond pure science. The Royal Mummies Procession of April 2021 — in which 22 royal mummies were transported in specially designed climate-controlled vehicles through the streets of Cairo from the Egyptian Museum to their new home at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC) — was watched by an estimated global audience of over 100 million people. It transformed what had been a scholarly story into a cultural event of worldwide significance and placed modern Egypt's ancient heritage at the centre of global consciousness.
Plan Your Visit
The shaft tomb of DB320 itself is located in the Deir el-Bahari area on Luxor's West Bank and is not currently open to the general public — its fragile condition and narrow access make visitor entry impractical. However, the mummies from DB320 are among the most accessible and well-displayed ancient objects anywhere in the world. Here is everything you need to know:
| Location of Tomb | Deir el-Bahari cliff face, West Bank, Luxor, Egypt (not open to public) |
|---|---|
| Where to See the Mummies | National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC), Fustat, Cairo — Royal Mummies Hall (22 mummies); Egyptian Museum, Tahrir Square, Cairo — additional mummies on display |
| NMEC Opening Hours | Daily 09:00 – 17:00 (closed Tuesdays); confirm current hours before visiting |
| NMEC Entry Ticket | Separate ticket required for the Royal Mummies Hall — check current pricing at the museum ticket desk |
| Nearest Visitor Site | Temple of Hatshepsut (Deir el-Bahari) — directly below the cliff where DB320 is located; a short drive from the West Bank ferry landing |
| Getting to Deir el-Bahari | Take the public ferry from Luxor East Bank to the West Bank landing, then taxi or minibus approximately 3 km to the temple. Alternatively, book a guided West Bank day tour. |
| Best Time to Visit | October–April for comfortable temperatures; early morning (07:00–09:00) for smaller crowds at the Temple of Hatshepsut |
| Photography | Photography without flash is permitted at the NMEC Royal Mummies Hall; check current rules at the Egyptian Museum separately |
| Dress Code | Modest dress recommended at all Egyptian museum and heritage sites |
| Guided Tours | Licensed Egyptologist guides available at the NMEC and at Luxor's West Bank sites; strongly recommended to contextualise the significance of the finds |
Visitor Advice
For visitors in Luxor, the most meaningful way to experience the story of DB320 is to stand at the Temple of Hatshepsut and look up at the pale cliffs rising directly behind it. Somewhere in that cliff face — invisible, inaccessible, and silent — the shaft still exists, now empty of its extraordinary contents. Combine this with a visit to the Valley of the Kings to see the original tombs from which the pharaohs were moved, and you gain a visceral sense of the geography of crisis and rescue that produced the cache. For those in Cairo, the Royal Mummies Hall at the NMEC is an unmissable experience — a room of quiet, profound intensity unlike anything else in Egyptian cultural life.
Best For
The Royal Cache story appeals equally to Egyptology enthusiasts, historians of the ancient world, students of forensic science and archaeology, and any traveller who wants to encounter ancient Egyptian history not as an abstraction of dates and dynasties but in the most immediate and human terms possible — the actual faces of the men who built it.
Nearby Attractions to Pair With
In Luxor, pair a visit to the Deir el-Bahari area with the Valley of the Kings (where many of the original tombs are located), the Valley of the Queens, and the Ramesseum — Ramesses II's own mortuary temple on the West Bank. In Cairo, the NMEC pairs naturally with the Egyptian Museum at Tahrir Square, which holds a vast additional collection of objects associated with the royal mummies, including coffins, canopic equipment, and papyri from DB320 itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Royal Cache DB320?
Which pharaohs were found in the Royal Cache?
Can I visit the Royal Cache tomb in Luxor?
Where are the mummies from DB320 now?
Why did the priests hide the mummies in DB320?
What happened during the Royal Mummies Procession of 2021?
Further Reading & Sources
The following are among the most authoritative and accessible scholarly resources on the Royal Cache and its mummies:
- Theban Mapping Project – DB320 Royal Cache (thebanmappingproject.com)
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre – Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis
- National Museum of Egyptian Civilization – Royal Mummies Hall (nmec.gov.eg)
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art – The Mummy in Ancient Egypt
- Getty Conservation Institute – Theban Necropolis Conservation Programme