ENTRANCE TO THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS —BIBAN-EL - 
MOLOOK. 
Here the Pharaohs of Thebes were entombed, in a narrow valley in the Libyan range 
of mountains which bound on the eastern side the valley of the Nile. Its traditional 
name, the “Gate of the Kings,” has been applied to the tombs themselves, but with 
far greater propriety it seems to have been derived from the narrow gorge at the 
inner entrance to the valley. 
This valley was always known to have been their place of sepulture, and 
many of the tombs were opened and rifled by the Persians and later conquerors of 
Egypt; but so ingeniously were some of them concealed, that it was only after a 
lapse of thirty-two centuries that the indefatigable Belzoni discovered some of them. 
His zeal and energy in Egyptian research were nowhere more remarkably displayed 
than in this retired valley. Here his intuitive perception of what the rocks around 
him concealed led to his opening several of these sacred depositories, which had never 
before been visited or examined since the day when the priests closed them upon their 
inmates. These tombs were most costly in their construction, penetrating into the 
rocks to great depths, and enriched with the most elaborate appliances of art. It is 
difficult to conceive why such lavish expenditure was incurred in places ingeniously 
contrived for concealment. 
The most remarkable of these tombs, that which in the drawing is seen the second 
on the left, was discovered by Belzoni in 1817, and bears his name; this tomb, 
excavated in the living rock, is in its total horizontal length, to where the sarcophagus 
of Osirei, the father of Remeses, was found within it, three hundred and twenty feet; 
beyond this another long, sloping passage descended, but the rock had fallen in and 
barred further progress; its perpendicular depth, below the level of the entrance, is 
ninety feet. The details of this discovery are fully given in Belzoni’s work. 
Warburton, who describes his visit to the Tombs of the Kings, says:—“We started 
at daybreak. For a couple of hours we continued along the plain, which was partially 
covered with wavy corn, but flecked widely here and there with desert tracts. Then 
we entered the gloomy mountain gorge through which the Theban monarchs passed 
to their tombs. Our path lay through a narrow defile, between precipitous cliffs of 
rubble and calcareous strata: and some large boulders of coarse conglomerate lay 
strewn along tins desolate valley, in which no living thing of earth or air ever met 
our view. The plains below once teemed with life, and, perhaps, swarmed with palaces; 
but the gloomy defiles we were now traversing must have ever been as they now are, 
lonely, lifeless, desolate,—a fit avenue to the tombs for which we were bound. 
“After five or six miles of travel, our guide stopped at the base of one of the 
precipices, and, laying his long sphere against the rock, proceeded to light his torches. 
There was no apparent entrance at the distance of a few yards, nor was this great 
tomb betrayed to the outer world by any visible aperture until discovered by Belzoni. 
“We descended by a steep path into this tomb, through a doorway covered with 
hieroglyphics, and entered a corridor that ran some hundred yards into the mountain. 
