A king's coffin in tomb KV55 had its gold face hacked off and its names cut out, and the gold from its base turned up in a Munich museum

In January 1907 Edward Ayrton, digging for the American Theodore Davis, opened a small undecorated tomb in the Valley of the Kings, later numbered KV55. It held reused Amarna-period burial goods, seal impressions with Tutankhamun's name, a gilded shrine that Akhenaten made for his mother Tiye, and a coffin with a body. Davis published it as the tomb of Queen Tiye. The anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith found the body was a man's. The coffin had been made for Kiya, a secondary wife of Akhenaten, and altered for a royal man. In antiquity someone hacked away its gold face and cut the king's cartouche out of the gold band. Akhenaten's names on the shrine were erased. The gold from the coffin's lower half disappeared between a 1914 restoration and a 1931 inventory. A Geneva dealer, Nicolas Koutoulakis, acquired it about 1950. It went to the State Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich in 1980 and was restored there in secret, and the dealer's daughter donated it in 1994. In 1999 the journal KMT published photographs showing it was in Munich. In 2010 DNA identified the man in the coffin as a son of Amenhotep III and the father of Tutankhamun. In 2016 a box of 500 gold sheets found in a storeroom of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo was studied as possibly from the same coffin. The coffin is in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.