can you help me get more info on Tut's burial chamber?

Question

what was the 4 layers in the burial chamber for?

Answer 1

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/tut/mysteries/index.html

Answer 2

Perhaps this will help:

"The theme of fours is conspicuous in Egyptian religious practice. Tutankhamon's tomb contains four chambers. The burial chamber, with a ritual if not an actual orientation towards the West, is the chamber of departure towards the funeral destinies. The internment of the body certainly is the beginning of the sojourn of the dead, and the Egyptians saw the dead as departing into the West. The room called the Treasury is then interpreted to have a ritual orientation towards the North as the chamber of reconstitution of the body. Since the most conspicuous object in the Treasury was a great gilt sledge holding the shrine containing the canopic chest, which holds the king's viscera, this could well suggest the problem of reassembling the king's living body. That task, indeed, has a very important place in Egyptian mythology. After the goddess Isis had retrieved her husband Osiris's murdered body from Byblos, their common brother, Seth, the original murderer, stole the body, cut it into pieces, and tossed them in the Nile. Isis then had to retrieve the parts of the body before Osiris could be restored to life. Her search through the Delta, which is in the North of Egypt, seems to parallel the sacred pilgrimage to cities of the Delta that Desroches-Noblecourt relates as one of ritual acts of the funeral, as many of the other objects in the Treasury seem to be accessories for that pilgrimage. For the sovereign to be reborn it was necessary that a symbolic pilgrimage be made to the holy cities of the delta. The principal halts of the journey corresponded almost exactly to the four cardinal points of the delta where these cities were situated. Sais, to the west, represented the necropolis where the body was buried; Buto to the north, with its famous canal, was an essential stage of the transformations within the aquatic world of the primordial abyss, evoking the water surrounding the unborn child; and Mendes to the east whose name could be written with the two pillars of Osiris, the djed pillars, evoking the concept of air. There, said the old texts, the gods Shu and Tefenet were reunited, or again, according to the 17th chapter of The Book of the Dead, that was where the souls of Osiris and Re had joined. Finally, the southern-most city which completed the cycle of Heliopolis, the city of the sun, symbolizing the fourth [sic] element, fire, where the heavenly body arose in youth glory between the two hills on the horizon. [Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, 1963, p. 238-9] As these four cities parallel the four rooms of the tomb itself, we seem to have a nice series of parallel symbols. If Sais, in the West, was significant for its necropolis, then Sais, like the burial chamber, can represent the departure into the West. Buto itself, the northernmost city, then represents the site of the actual reconstitution of the body. What followed Isis's reassembly of Osiris's body was its revivification. Mendes, in the East, where the sun rises, would then seem to be the locus for that, with the associations, especially with Osiris. In the tomb, the small Annex is then associated with this ritual stage, the chamber of rebirth. The ritual pilgrimage then ends at Heliopolis in the South, where the king, having been reborn, reassumes his throne, as Desroches-Noblecourt views the Antechamber of the tomb as the chamber of eternal royalty. Overall, the tomb may be divided into three parts: The Inner Tomb, which means the burial chamber and its side rooms, however elaborate; the Middle Tomb; and the Outer Tomb. In the Outer Tomb, six parts may be distinguished: four passages, the Well, and the optional well room. The four passages originally consisted of two deep stairs and two sloping corridors. The outer stair might not now be considered part of the tomb proper, since it merely led up to the sealed entrance of the tomb; but the Egyptians saw it as already part of the tomb and named it the god's first passage, or the god's first passage of the sun's path. All the corridors, indeed, were thought to represent the passage of the sun god Rê through the twelve caverns of the underworld in the hours of the night, prior to his rebirth at dawn--the precedent for the rebirth of the king. Consequently, when decorated, they at first held excerpts from the Amduat, the book of That Which is in the Underworld, or the later Book of Gates. As the emphasis slowly shifted with time from the association with the underworld to an association with Rê himself, another work, the Litany of Rê made its appearance. The stair of the god's third passage was thus originally a room with the stair in its floor. As the stairs later became ramps, and as the descent of the passages leveled out by the XX Dynasty, the god's third passage was revealed as having a ritual as well as a practical meaning; for the flat spaces of the original room were preserved, even when they had been reduced to no more than long niches in part of the walls of the third passage. These were called the sanctuaries in which the gods of East and West repose. East and West refer to the ritual orientation of the passage, East on the Left when facing out of the tomb (as the Egyptians saw it), West on the Right. The fourth passage eventually acquired two niches at the end, called the doorkeepers' niches. The Well itself is a feature that has excited considerable interest. The Egyptians called the Well the hall of waiting or hindering. The function of such a room, as symbolic of the whole tomb, provides a ritual locus for rebirth. The Ba soul in earlier representations flies up the shaft of the tomb and out into the world. All that is added in the royal tomb is the king's trip through the underworld, the four entering or, as the Egyptians also saw them, exiting passages. The Hall of Waiting, with or without the well itself or the lower well room, typically shows scenes of the king meeting the gods--one of the motifs of the burial chamber in Tutankhamon's tomb--and this is often shown when decoration has not been completed elsewhere in the tomb, as in that of Thutmose IV.