Known as the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics Rainforest, a new immersive exhibition in Cairns, Tomb of the Pharaohs, offers to fulfil Australian’s love of ancient history with a completely unique experience for modern audiences.
Created in collaboration with Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (MOTA), eleven of ancient Egypt’s most lavishly decorated tombs found in the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens have been meticulously recreated within Tomb of the Pharaohs exhibition, making its debut in Cairns as part of an international tour.
The experience offers visitors the opportunity to walk through the burial chambers of New Kingdom Period Kings and Queens, a time when ancient Egypt was under the reign of some of the most powerful and revered pharaohs.
Rulers such as Ramses I, Ramses IV, Ramses V & IV, Seti I and King Tutankhamun were interred in some of the finest tombs comprising long descending passageways ending in burial chambers adorned in colourful hieroglyphs on every surface, each comes to life in this extraordinary attraction.
The burial chambers and gold funerary treasures of some lessor known, but equally significant Pharaohs, who ruled in the Third Intermediate Period, include King Psusennes I and Shoshenq II are also revealed. Branded by archaeologists as the ‘Silver Pharaohs’, Psusennes and Shoshenq were buried in solid silver coffins, deemed more valuable than gold due to its scarcity in Egypt at the time.
“The Ramses lineage was a phenomenon. It started with Ramses I, a commoner that rose up to become General and was appointed Pharaoh in the absence of a natural heir by King Horemheb, the previous ruler,” says Daniel Leipnik, the Tomb of the Pharaoh’s Creative Director and CEO.
“Responsible for countless temples, pyramids, statues, and enormous tombs, this was an influential family of eleven Ramses, spanning hundreds of years and leaving their mark on Egypt with monuments of their works surviving for over 4000 years.”
Of the exhibition’s 453 display items, the star attraction is King Tut’s three gold coffins. Unearthed in 1922 by English archaeologist Howard Carter and his team, the coffins were nestled one inside each other as part of the Egyptian belief that these provided divine protection for the king’s mummified remains. The exhibition also showcases three of the five King Tut tomb rooms: The Burial Chamber, The Antechamber and Treasury.
One of the initial burial chambers presented within the exhibition belongs to High Priest Wahtye, revealed to the world for the first time in the Netflix documentary, Secrets of Saqqara. The recreation of Wahtye’s tomb, complete with rows of life-sized carved human figures within wall cavities has never been shown outside of Egypt.
With Wahtye’s actual tomb in Egypt closed off to the public, this hand-crafted version within the Tomb of the Pharaohs exhibition, provides visitors with an experience only Egyptian Government officials and select archaeologists would normally see.
Other objects demonstrating the artistic innovation of each pharaoh’s reign include golden death masks, carved granite sarcophagi, ornate burial jewellery and even a mummified lion cub are on display.
Tomb of the Pharaohs offers a unique presentation of ancient Egypt, to see the Pharaoh’s burial chambers the way they were originally left and the same way archaeologists discovered them in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Tomb of the Pharaohs
Adjacent to Cairns Aquarium, 122B Lake Street, Cairns
Exhibition continues to 31 December 2026
Information and Bookings: www.tombofthepharaohs.com.au
Images: The vaulted ceiling burial chamber and carved sarcophagus and coffin lid of King Seti I (installation view) | The gold and gem encrusted coffins and gold and lapis death mask of the ‘Boy King’ Tutankhamun (installation view)