ABSTRACT
TH E Giza Pyramids and their hundreds of attendantmastabas have been known for nearly five thousandyears. Unlike later sepulchres there was no attempt at concealment; the brick and stone superstructure revealed plainly where the burials were. For the better part of fifty centuries they have been open to the attacks of robbers and it would seem impossible that any tomb, above all a royal tomb, could remain undetected until the twentieth century. Yet this did happen once, and the story of how the tomb was discovered, excavated and its splendid furniture reconstructed from a mass of decayed wood and fragmented metal is one of the great romances of Egyptology. We propose to describe this discovery in the manner of a detective story, so that the reader can, if he wishes, piece together for himself the evidence provided by the successive clues which the excavation found. Afterwards he can compare his reading with the dramatic story which the archaeologists themselves were able to reconstruct from these same clues.
