Valley of the Kings public. At the same time, powerful and influential nobles began to be buried with the royal family; the most famous of these tombs is the joint tomb of Yuya and Tjuyu, KV46. They were possibly the parents of Queen Tiy. Until the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, this was the best-preserved of the tombs that had been discovered in the Valley. The return of royal burials to Thebes after the end of the Amarna period marks a change to the layout of royal burials, with the intermediate 'jogged axis' gradually giving way to the 'straight axis' of later dynasties.
Minor tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been intended to contain a human burial or not: KV50 contained fragmentary remains of a wooden coffin and KV52 an empty canopic chest. KV51 contained material which was dated to the Eighteenth dynasty, a dating which is ascribed to all three of these closely related tombs. It has also been suggested (although there is no real evidence to support this theory) that the animals interred here were a king's pets and that, given the proximity of his tomb (KV35), this king might have been Amenhotep II. KV53 is located north of KV29. It was discovered by Ayrton in 1905