The 3,300-year-old find is highly surprising considering the vast number of visitors and researchers that have descended into the boy-pharaoh's tomb since British explorer Howard Carter discovered and broke into the treasure-packed burial place in the early 1920s.
Dr. Zahi Hawass, a world-famous Egyptologist who heads Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said his team of archaeologists had discovered baskets containing "large quantities of well-preserved doum [palm] fruits," and twenty pear-shaped vases bearing Tutankhamun's official seal.
The discovery is the second major find in three months for Hawass, who announced in June he had identified the mummy of Hatshepsut, Egypt's best-known female pharaoh and an ancestor of Tutankhamun.
Hawass's team reportedly found the provisions, intended to accompany Tutankhamun into the afterlife, in a treasure chamber next to the room where the king's elaborate, multi-layered coffin was discovered. It remains unclear whether Howard Carter saw the items, but they are not listed in his reports on the tomb.
Despite his short, relatively unimportant reign and early death, Tutankhamun shot to international fame after Carter's discovery, due to the hundreds of perfectly preserved luxury items discovered in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings, in a desert near modern-day Luxor.
As Tutankhamun's reign marked the end of the 'heretic' Armana period of Pharaonic Egypt when the traditional gods were rejected and the people were ordered to worship the god Aten via his intermediary the pharaoh, many items belonging to his 18th-Dynasty predecessors were bundled into his tomb, to seal the end of the era.
Concealed deep under the sand and forgotten, the burial place was left untouched for over three millennia, while many of the more illustrious Egyptian kings had their tombs looted from antiquity onwards. Tutankhamun's solid-gold funerary mask remains one of the most widely recognized symbols of ancient Egypt.
The boy-king's tomb, visited by thousands every year, is now largely empty, the contents having been moved to the Cairo Museum. However, his body - cut into pieces by Carter's team to recover the precious stones and amulets stuck to the mummy - remains in the tomb, in its inner sarcophagus.
