How Tutankhamun Got His Gold | Lost Treasures of Egypt

Thomas and Jennifer are investigating one of Tutankhamun's secrets, excavating under a ruined fortress for evidence he got his gold from the inhospitable eastern desert. Did his miners shelter here? The team has just found something: stone blocks that offer a tantalizing glimpse of a settlement from Tutankhamun's time.

So, these are architectural blocks. They carry some hieroglyphic inscriptions, very faintly visible here, which would indicate that they were carved and set up in some sort of building that dates to the reign of Tutankhamun. It's exciting because that gives us a sort of a ballpark for the time when this site was busy and active and important during the 18th dynasty.

Jennifer's team must now move the precious blocks off-site for further analysis. As they dig deeper into the layers below the fortress, they uncover more clues that this site was in use in Tutankhamun's time.

"It is beautiful! This is a really distinctive, very different from any of the Ptolemaic material. The Greek style pottery that we find in most of the rooms of the fort—that is really common. This kind of pottery, which belongs to the New Kingdom, is not wheel-made; it's handmade. You can tell that by looking at the interior of the pot, which has a surface that is very irregular and that it's been smoothed with a smooth stone."

Most likely, it's not just one or two pieces of Tutankhamun era pottery. Jennifer's team is revealing that the layers of earth beneath the fortress are packed full of it.

"We have New Kingdom material under the floors of rooms 20, 19, 26, 18, and 17. But to have the fort now documented on top of deposits that indicate some kind of occupation in the New Kingdom—that's really exciting."

The discovery is proof the site may have been used in Tutankhamun's time by his gold workers. But the team has found another remarkable clue concealed in the fortress: cutting into the bedrock, 60 feet below the surface, is a well.

"It's a vital source of water that explains why the safe haven and Tutankhamun's gold workers were here. The world was built at the time of Tutankhamun by the evidence we have now. It was, I guess, more precious than even gold for people that they can have water to go inside the desert."

The evidence here and at other sites reveals how Tutankhamun got his gold from the remote eastern desert. Miners had to trek vast distances from the Nile Valley across the hot, dry desert to reach the gold mines. Ancient engineers dug wells along the route for precious drinking water. Each well was a day's walk from the last, creating a network of vital rest stops.

This allowed them to survive the brutal journey across the desert to mine gold in the east and bring it back to their pharaoh. Thomas and Jennifer have revealed one of Tutankhamun's secrets. Sites like this were a critical part of the infrastructure that allowed him to amass the gold for one of the most elaborate burials in history: the golden Tut's mask.

"All that gold in his tomb—that's coming from the eastern desert. Episodes like this, that looked really modest, are actually the mechanism that allowed New Kingdom gold to be mined."