Arthur Phillips search for meaning in life. The novel was well received commercially and critically, winning Phillips the 2003 Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for Best First Fiction, as well as other honors. "The Egyptologist" is structured as journals, letters, telegrams, and drawings, from several different points of view. The main story is set in 1922 and follows a hopeful explorer who, working near Howard Carter (the man who discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun), risks more and more of his life and savings on an apparently quixotic effort to find the tomb of an apocryphal Egyptian king. The book was an
Theodore M. Davis KV57 (tomb of Horemheb) and KV54 (Tutankhamun embalming cache). With Carter's discovery of KV62, Tutankhamun's tomb, in 1922 Davis's opinion that the "valley had been exhausted", was proved wrong. Burton later recalled that when Davis terminated his last excavation in the valley, out of fear of undercutting nearby tombs and pathways, he was only two metres away from discovering the entrance to KV62. Davis was portrayed by William Hope in the 2005 BBC docudrama "Egypt". Davis and the tomb of Queen Tiyi also feature prominently in "The Ape Who Guards the Balance" by Elizabeth Peters, where he is portrayed as