I have been to the Valley of Kings and Queens 3 times. Especially the Valley of the Kings is a really special and often gloomy place, just like when you walk through the cemetery. But the question is to what extent this feeling is evoked by the projection of us people (tourists) who go to the Valley of the Kings and to what extent it has something to do with reality.

Chris Dunn concluded me at the end of his book Forgotten pyramid builders technologies has led to some very valuable ideas:

We do not know when these underground complexes were actually built. They are stone buildings and for their dating we use only reference information from inscriptions and / or organic materials. In both cases, however, we are not able to determine whether the things were put here during construction or much later, when someone used the already finished place for their purpose. It's similar to a sprayer scribbling his graffiti on a concrete wall.

The ancient Egyptians prepared all their lives for death. This is the official doctrine of contemporary Egyptology. But Dunn offers a different interpretation. Imagine a highly developed civilization more than 100 years old that is fully aware that its demise is imminent due to some cataclysmic catastrophe that not everyone can survive. One such major catastrophe was the Flood of the World around 11000 BC. This civilization has done everything to give survivors a chance to learn and pass on their knowledge. So they created underground cities and palaces in the mountains (the valley of kings is really in the mountains), where they left their messages on the walls for future generations. Some texts are repeated, ie. were important. The places in the final actually served as burial grounds, but that certainly does not mean that this was their only purpose and that the pharaohs who were buried here were also the authors of the locations. Even the Egyptologists themselves admit that in this respect there was competition between the pharaohs, when they robbed each other of tombs.

Even today, there are tribes of people who live with the dead, literally. They mummify the bodies of their ancestors and store them in the house where they normally live. It is therefore appropriate to accept the possibility that these Egyptian complexes were multipurpose or rather changed their purpose over time. Let us remember that the existence of underground cities is not something unique to Egypt. In Turkey, for example, there is an extensive network of corridors and rooms in Derinkuyu, which definitely functioned as an underground city. Similarly, the complex under Jerusalem.