Authors: Jo Marchant
Artistic ability was what took Carter to Egypt in the first place. He was born in Norfolk, youngest of eight surviving children, and his father painted animal portraits—mainly dogs and horses—for rich local clients. Carter accompanied his father to one such engagement where he was introduced to an Egyptologist called Percy Newberry, who arranged for him to go to Egypt, aged seventeen, to copy tomb paintings.
He continued to paint in later life, even when working as an archaeologist. In the watercolors Fleming shows me, Carter has copied ancient Egyptian depictions of various animals and birds, then painted alongside their modern-day equivalents—inhabitants of the desert around him from the scimitar-horned oryx and Nubian ibex to the Egyptian vulture, falcon, and red-backed shrike. The pictures are elegant and effortless, with the attention to detail of someone who is both knowledgeable and passionate about his subject.
Indeed, Carter seems to have spent a lot of time contemplating the wildlife he encountered in the Valley of the Kings. You get the impression that sometimes he was keener on the vultures and jackals around him than the people. Perhaps it was a rare source of pleasure during his early years of excavations in the Valley, which from his notebooks sound like a pretty horrendous endeavor.
In the first season, the winter of 1917–1918 (archaeologists generally prefer to work in Thebes in the winter, to avoid the searing temperatures of summer), Carter started to investigate his chosen triangle. It wasn’t a large area but this was still a monumental task. In those days, the Valley looked like a huge quarry, covered with piles of stones and chippings up to thirty feet high that had been left by previous excavators. Carter had no choice but to clear these waste dumps—tens of thousands of tons of them—before he could embark on his own hunt, digging through the unexcavated layer of flood debris all the way down to bedrock.
To remove the rubbish, he borrowed a railway track from the antiquities service, with tipping trucks that were pushed along the rails by manpower. His team of local workmen and boys filled their baskets with picks and hoes, then emptied them into the trucks, thousands of times a day.
Toward the end of this first season, right in front of the tomb of the Nineteenth-Dynasty ruler Rameses VI, Carter uncovered a group of workmen’s huts, also from the Nineteenth Dynasty. They were undisturbed, suggesting that no one had penetrated the layer of flood debris beneath them since at least that time. What’s more, they were only forty feet from where the unplundered Amarna cache had been found.
If there was an intact Eighteenth-Dynasty tomb in the area, beneath those ancient huts seemed a pretty good place to look. Yet Carter didn’t. Instead, he set his workers digging elsewhere. Carter always said it was because to excavate there would have cut off visitor access to Rameses VI’s tomb, one of the most popular in the Valley, so he wanted to wait for a quieter time before exploring the area.1 But he found the huts at the end of World War I, a slack period with few visitors—presumably the perfect time to carry out such work.
An alternative explanation is that Carter knew how exciting the site was, so wanted to save it for a time when Carnarvon’s enthusiasm for funding the work was flagging. Finding Tutankhamun’s tomb was important to Carter, but so was the less glamorous task of methodically checking every undug part of the Valley before his patron found something else to do.2
He started looking elsewhere—for five depressing seasons. In month after month of back-breaking work, Carter’s men literally moved mountains, clearing hundreds of square feet of the valley right down to bedrock. The waste layers were so closely fused with the natural soil, he had to keep a close watch for charcoal and fish bones to tell whether they were digging through untouched layers of earth or artificial layers dumped by previous excavators.
During that time, he found hardly anything for Carnarvon—just a few ritual deposits marking the foundations of previously discovered tombs, and a cache of thirteen alabaster vases, which Carnarvon’s daughter Evelyn Herbert (who always accompanied her father on his trips to Egypt) insisted on digging out of the ground with her bare hands.
It was a lonely time for Carter. But he loved the remote, solitary valley, with its rugged, savage rocks, which he once said, in certain conditions of mind, “were not unproductive of delight.”3 He found it especially impressive when riding home alone late at night, the noise of his donkey’s footsteps interrupted only by the gloomy booming of a desert eagle owl or the occasional howl of a jackal.
By 1922, Carnarvon had serious doubts about continuing the work. He was tired of digging with so little reward, not to mention being the butt of other Egyptologists’ jokes. As a racing man, he was happy to gamble, but only if the odds were in his favor. That summer, he invited Carter to Highclere, intending to bring the partnership to an end. But Carter didn’t give up that easily. He told Carnarvon about the prime site he had been saving beneath the workmen’s huts, and even offered to pay for the work himself, as long as Carnarvon allowed Carter to keep excavating under his name.
Carter may also have mentioned a new clue that Tutankhamun really was buried in the Valley. It had just come from Herbert Winlock, an Egyptologist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who was studying the debris-filled jars, inscribed with Tutankhamun’s name, that Davis found in 1907 then gave away. After similar finds were made for other kings, Winlock finally realized what they were—the materials used in Tutankhamun’s embalming. The ancient Egyptians didn’t throw away anything that touched the king’s body as it was being prepared for burial; instead they carefully gathered all the rubbish up and buried it close to the relevant tomb.
Some of the jars contained the powdered salts used to dry out the body, and rags the embalmers cleaned up with afterward. Some limestone slabs that Winlock left at Davis’s house must have been the stones that the body was laid on while it was being mummified. Other pots contained broken pottery, animal bones, and the flower necklaces that Davis was so fond of ripping up—these were the remains of the banquet held at Tutankhamun’s funeral, including floral garlands worn by the guests. It was the surest sign yet that this king’s tomb had to be nearby.
Carnarvon relented, and in October 1922, Carter returned to the Valley for one last season.
AT THE GRIFFITH INSTITUTE, Fleming brings out the notebooks describing Carter’s subsequent discovery. There’s a small Letts diary, cream with a red spine, as well as a larger ring binder—Carter’s excavation journal. Together with his popular books about Tutankhamun, they give—in most cases—a pretty good sense of what he was up to in those historic days and weeks.
Carter started excavations on November 1, 1922, exactly where he had left off back in 1918, by those workmen’s huts in front of Rameses VI’s tomb. He spent the next couple of days uncovering more huts, noting their details, then removing them, to clear away the three feet or so of stony soil that lay between them and bedrock.
On Saturday November 4, Carter arrived at the dig site at about ten in the morning, to find his usually rowdy team of workmen strangely quiet. At first he feared there had been an accident, but his foreman, Reis Ahmed Gerigar, told him the good news—a step had been discovered, cut into bedrock, under almost the first hut the men had cleared.
As the men dug further over the rest of that day and the next, a steep, sunken staircase started to emerge, cut into the rock about twelve feet below the entrance of Rameses VI’s tomb. Carter tried to suppress his excitement. This was exactly how he would expect to find a hidden tomb. But he had been humiliated once before by jumping to conclusions. In 1898, Carter had stumbled on what he thought might be an intact royal tomb, just in front of Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri. Two years later, after months of burrowing, he proudly invited Lord Cromer to witness the final discovery. But the last chamber contained only some wooden boats and a few pots. “There was nothing,” Carter wrote. “I was filled with dismay.”4 Perhaps a similar fate awaited him with this latest find.
Toward sunset on Sunday, the men exposed the upper part of a plastered doorway, and Carter breathed a small sigh of relief. The seals on the door were intact, and showed the jackal god Anubis (associated with mummification and the afterlife) over nine bound captives—the official seal of the Royal Necropolis. There was no visible sign of exactly who was buried inside, but the style was Eighteenth Dynasty. The entrance seemed small for a pharaoh’s tomb, but the royal seal indicated that the occupant must be someone important.
Carter made a small hole in the upper right corner of the door and shone in an electric torch. The passage beyond was completely filled with stones and rubble, more evidence that the last people to enter had been priests, not thieves. “It was a thrilling moment for an excavator,” he wrote in his journal on November 5, 1922, “quite alone save his native staff of workmen, to suddenly find himself, after so many years of toilsome work, on the verge of what looked like a magnificent discovery—an untouched tomb.”
Carter reluctantly closed the hole he had made. It was dark by now, so he rode his donkey home by moonlight. The next morning, he cabled Carnarvon at Highclere: “At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact, recovered same for your arrival, congratulations.”
The next day, the men worked feverishly, covering up the door and steps, then rolling boulders over the entrance. The tomb had vanished, and more than once Carter found himself wondering if the entire thing was even real. He spent the next couple of weeks making preparations for opening the tomb, and hiring staff including his old friend Arthur Callender, a retired railway engineer who was to be his right-hand man in the work ahead. Carnarvon and his daughter arrived in Luxor on November 22, and Callender was put in charge of reopening the tomb.
He got to the doorway on November 24, at the bottom of sixteen steps in all. Now the lower part of the door was uncovered for the first time, revealing just what Carter had been hoping for—seal impressions with the cartouche of Tutankhamun. But there was bad news too. On closer inspection, the door seemed to have been opened, and resealed, twice, suggesting that the tomb had after all been entered in ancient times.
The workmen pulled down the rough stones of the door, and emptied the corridor beyond of its rubble. It was mostly filled with white stone chips, but in the upper left corner, where the door had been resealed, there was a stripe of dark flint. Robbers must have tunneled through the chippings, and their hole later refilled with a different kind of stone.
By the afternoon of Sunday November 26, after clearing a steep passage about thirty feet long, the workmen came across a second sealed door. Again, Carter made a tiny hole in the top corner to see what was beyond. The layout so far was just the same as the Amarna cache, so Carter feared this wasn’t a proper tomb after all, but another cache. He poked an iron testing rod into the darkness and found empty space, then lit a candle to check for foul gases. Reassured that the air wasn’t poisonous, Carter widened the hole and looked in, while Carnarvon, Evelyn, Callender, and the foremen waited anxiously behind him.
Carter’s candlelight crept uninvited into the darkness beyond. Inside the tomb, time creaked into motion. Blurred shapes were forced into focus. Objects lumbered into being. After thousands of years of enduring silence, the tomb had visitors.
FROM READING CARTER’S DIARIES, “He was obviously a man of few words,” comments Malek, keeper of the Griffith Institute’s archive. “He was very prosaic, very down to earth.” A typical diary entry reads simply, “Two donkeys,” a reference to that day’s transport to and from the tomb. “But when you read Carter’s description of when they first opened the tomb, he suddenly becomes a poet.”
With white-gloved hands, Malek’s assistant Fleming pulls Carter’s yellowed journal from a cardboard case and lays it gently on a cushion on the table in front of us. She finds the famous page—squared paper filled with neat, black ink—and starts to read Carter’s stiff but evocative words: “It was sometime before one could see, the hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker, but as soon as one’s eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one, with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another.”
At first, Carter thought he was looking at wall paintings; then he realized he was seeing actual three-dimensional things. He was quiet, taking in the confusing, flickering sight until Carnarvon couldn’t bear it any longer: “Can you see anything?”
“Yes, it is wonderful,” was all Carter was able to reply.* He made the hole in the door big enough so that the others could see in, and they shone an electric torch into the dark space. What they saw probably still stands as the most amazing archaeological discovery of all time.
Looming out of the darkness were two ebony-black statues of a king, with gold staffs, kilts, and sandals; gilded couches with the heads of strange beasts; exquisitely painted ornamental caskets; flowers; alabaster vases; strange black shrines adorned with a gilded monster snake; ordinary-looking white chests; finely carved chairs; a golden throne; a heap of curious white egg-shaped boxes; stools of all shapes and designs; and a scramble of overturned chariot parts glinting with gold, peering from among which was a manikin. In short, it was utter confusion, with a mindboggling assortment of objects piled all on top of one another. The first impression, said Carter, was not so much that of an orderly royal tomb, but “the property-room of an opera of a vanished civilisation.”
The little group closed the hole, locked the wooden grill that had been placed over the doorway, and rode their donkeys home in silence. Carter barely slept that night, with two questions that he turned over and over: Was the jumble of objects he had discovered merely a cache, or was it really Tutankhamun’s tomb? And if so, what were the chances of finding the king’s mummy intact?