The classic historical account of one of the world's richest archaeological sites. For more than five hundred years, until about 1000 BC, the Valley of the Kings held a busy community of tomb workers, the limestone landscape was white with the debris of fresh excavation and all the known pharaohs of the Egyptian New Kingdom lay in their great stone sarcophagi. The Valley itself was then lost from the historical records for hundreds of years. Valley of the Kings, John Romer's first book originally published in 1981, tells two fascinating stories. The first is about the tombs of the ancient Egyptian kings, queens and nobles who were buried with pomp and extravagance between 1570 and 1085 BC. The second, equally compelling, is the story of the archaeologists and their hunt for the past.