People are always eager to hear more about the mysteries of the Valley of the Kings.

News from this hidden canyon where the Pharaohs of Egypt were buried during the New Kingdom (ca. 1550-1100 BCE) is reported enthusiastically by the media and devoured avidly by the public.

The spectacular discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 is, of course, to a large degree responsible for the fascination that the valley holds for the general public. But many people do not know that the foothills of the Theban massif just east of the royal tombs are also filled with unique tombs belonging to the people who served the Pharaohs.

Buried here are viziers, officials, courtiers, and even the workmen who carved and decorated the tombs. To date, approximately 800 tombs have been unearthed, and many more surely remain hidden in the rocky hills.

Some of the Theban tombs are well-known and contain familiar scenes. Others have been lost almost completely to the eyes of the world. Many are accessible but are closed to the public and visited only sporadically by scholars. Others have been hidden under villages built above them over the past centuries.

Of these modern villages, the most famous is Al-Qurna just west of the Ramesseum, where local people began to construct houses soon after foreign adventurers came to the Luxor area and began to rediscover the royal and private tombs. A number of the more notorious inhabitants of Al-Qurna have been well-known antiquities dealers, since one of the reasons that houses were built on top of the tombs was so that they could be robbed in secret.

Some years ago, we went with the police to one of the houses in this village and found that the owner had built it over the beautifully decorated tomb of Amenhotep Huy, viceroy of Nubia under Tutankhamun. Another person had dug a tunnel from his house to a nearby private tomb so that he could use it to store stolen antiquities. Others use the tombs beneath their houses as animal pens.

In 2007, the construction of a modern village called Al-Tarif to the north of the Valley of the Kings was finished. The villagers from Al-Qurna were moved to new homes here and their old houses were torn down, with 25 left as testimony to the unique history of this area. It should come as no surprise to learn that when the old houses were removed a number of tombs were discovered beneath them.