Factum has been working in the Valley of the Kings since 2001, as part of a long-term collaboration with the University of Basel under the aegis of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. Since 2009, this work has primarily been carried out through the Theban Necropolis Preservation Initiative (TNPI).

Some of the major achievements of Factum Foundation and the TNPI, together with our collaborators in Basel, Egypt and elsewhere, are as follows:

• The creation of a facsimile of the tomb of Tutankhamen, which was given to the Egyptian people in 2012
• The installation of the Tutankhamen tomb facsimile in an underground building designed by the Tarek Waly Center for Architecture & Heritage next to Carter’s House at the entrance to the Valley of the Kings (2014)
• The ongoing scanning of the whole of the tomb of Seti, and facsimiles of Pillared Hall J, the Hall of Beauties, and Seti’s sarcophagus (2001, 2016-present)
• A major exhibition held at the Antikenmuseum Basel: ‘Scanning Seti: the Regeneration of a Pharaonic Tomb’ (2017)
• The restoration of Hassan Fathy's Stoppelaëre House and its repurposing as a 3D Scanning, Archiving, and Training Centre run by a fully Egyptian staff and with an Egyptian manager (2016-present)
• The establishment at the Centre of a training program which by 2022 will see ten students complete training in a range of recording technologies, providing them with skills which can be transferred to other projects within the Valley of the Kings and beyond (2016-present)
• The recording of many fragments removed from the tomb by early excavators and tourists, now in museums around the world.

The TNPI is committed to promoting sustainable tourism, to ensuring the ongoing study and monitoring of tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and to establishing an autonomous Egyptian team with the technologies, skills and infrastructure to provide 3D recording services to the Ministry of Antiquities and the many foreign archaeological missions working in Luxor. In 2019, the Initiative received the official patronage of the Egyptian National Commission for UNESCO.

You can find out more about different elements of the TNPI and Factum Foundation’s work in Egypt by clicking on the links below. Alternatively, you can click here to take a virtual tour of the tomb of Seti, here to see images from the making of the Scanning Seti exhibition, or here to explore a high-resolution image viewer of the tomb of Tutankhamen.