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For treasure, the tomb probably won't come close to Tut's, since robbers apparently plundered the chambers long ago. No gold or fine jewelry has been uncovered so far, and Weeks does not expect to find any riches to speak of. Archaeologically, though, the tomb is as good as a gold mine. The carvings and inscriptions Weeks and his colleagues have seen, along with thousands of artifacts littering the floors -- including beads, fragments of jars that were used to store the organs of the deceased, and mummified body parts -- promise to tell historians an enormous amount about ancient Egypt during the reign of its most important king. "Egyptians do not call him Ramesses II," Sabry Abd El Aziz, director of antiquities for the Qurna region, told TIME correspondent Lara Marlowe last week, as she and photographer Barry Iverson became the first Western journalists to enter the tomb since the new discoveries were announced. "We call him Ramesses al-Akbar-Ramesses the Greatest."
No wonder. During his 67 years on the throne, stretching from 1279 B.C. to 1212 B.C., Ramesses could have filled an ancient edition of the Guinness Book of Records all by himself: he built more temples, obelisks and monuments; took more wives (eight, not counting concubines) and claimed to have sired more children (as many as 162, by some accounts) than any other pharaoh in history. And he presided over an empire that stretched from present-day Libya to Iraq in the east, as far north as Turkey and southward into the Sudan.
Ramesses is also much celebrated outside of Egypt, though many Westerners probably don't connect the name with the fame. In Exodus he is simply known as "Pharaoh," and Shelley's poem Ozymandias, inspired by the fallen statues at the Ramesseum, his mortuary temple at Thebes, takes its title from the Greek version of one of the ruler's alternate names, User-maat-re. "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" said the inscription on the pharaoh's statue in Shelley's sonnet. Though the poet was making the point that such boasts are hollow because great monuments eventually decay, Ramesses' achievements were truly magnificent.
Because of his marathon reign, historians already know a great deal about Ramesses and the customs of his day. But the newly explored tomb suddenly presents scholars with all sorts of puzzles to ponder. For one thing, many of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings are syringe-like, plunging straight as a needle into the steep hillsides. For reasons nobody yet knows, says Weeks, this one "is more like an octopus, with a body surrounded by tentacles."
The body in this case is an enormous square room, at least 50 ft. on a side and divided by 16 massive columns. In Ramesses' day the room would have seemed positively cavernous; now it's filled nearly to the top with rubble washed in over the centuries by infrequent flash floods. Anyone who wants to traverse the chamber has to crawl through a tight passage, lighted by a string of dim electric light bulbs, where the dirt has been painstakingly cleared away. "It's like crawling under a bed," says Time's Marlowe, "except that it goes on and on, and the ceiling above your head is studded with jagged outcroppings of rock that are in danger of caving in."