KV57

The tomb consists of a descending entrance stair, a sloping passageway leading to another descending stair, and another passageway that ends in a well shaft. Beyond the well chamber is the first pillared hall. A staircase cut into the floor on the left side of the hall, originally sealed, leads to another descending passage and, via another flight of steps, the antechamber. Beyond it is the pillared burial chamber, surrounded by storerooms, with the floor at the far end lowered to create a crypt.

The layout is transitional between the dog-leg style of earlier Eighteenth Dynasty tombs and the straight axis tombs of the Nineteenth Dynasty, and is known as a jogged axis. Some novel features are not seen again, such as the ramp at the top of the stairs leading to the crypt around the sarcophagus, the second set of stairs in this area, and the burial below the floor in one of the storerooms.

As with earlier tombs, the decoration is confined to three walls of the well chamber, the antechamber and the burial chamber, but for the first time in a royal tomb the walls are decorated with painted bas-reliefs. Much of the decoration in the burial chamber is unfinished, preserving the process from gridded preliminary sketches through carving to painting. The burial chamber uses scenes from the Book of Gates instead of the Amduat for the first time.

After the discovery of the Gold Tomb (KV56) in January 1908, clearance of the valley floor continued westward. On 25 February 1908 signs of a tomb were encountered, and a day later the stairway was exposed, choked almost entirely with sand and debris washed down by flash-flooding. Ayrton crawled inside and found a hieratic inscription naming Horemheb. A more formal entry occurred on 29 February. Little is known of the actual excavation and clearance, as Ayrton's report, which Davis described as exhaustive, was not included in Davis' publication and has since been lost.

Between 2006 and 2007 the tomb was re-excavated in a project led by Geoffrey Thorndike Martin, which cleared debris left by the original excavation, which had piled it into side rooms instead of removing it from the tomb.