Authors: Jo Marchant
The next day, Callender rigged electric lighting in the tomb, and the four explorers entered the chamber for the first time.* It was much easier to see with the electric lamps, but the effect was still utterly confusing. The room was fairly small, roughly twenty-six feet by thirteen feet, but a bewildering mass of objects was heaped everywhere in disarray. It was hard to move around, and impossible to take everything in.
Opposite the entrance, a strange gilded couch was propped against the wall, and beneath it, there was an opening in the rock wall—another sealed doorway, though this too had been broken open. Carter and Carnarvon crawled under the couch and peeped through. They saw another room, smaller than the one they were in and on a lower level (Carter subsequently named it the annex, and the room in which they were standing the antechamber). The state of this room was even worse. Stones from the forced wall lay on top of crushed objects, and there was a mass of beds, chairs, boxes, vases, statuettes—all overturned, with boxes opened and their contents scattered all over the floor. Looking at the chaos, Carter realized for the first time what a daunting task clearing this tomb was going to be.
There was no trace of any mummies in either chamber. And then, on the right as the party came in, they saw a sealed doorway, flanked by two statues of the king—their gorgeous gold-lined eyes keeping patient watch for intruders. That was when Carter realized that his dream had come true. What they had seen so far were just the outer rooms. This was Tutankhamun’s tomb after all, and behind that wall was his burial chamber. But, ominously, the doorway had a small hole at the bottom, which had been plastered over and resealed.
News of the discovery started to spread, as did a variety of tall stories. One version popular among the locals was that three airplanes had landed in the Valley and taken off to an unknown destination with loads of treasure.8 Partly to try to stem these rumors, Carter held an official opening of the antechamber a few days later, on November 29. It was attended by various Egyptian and foreign notables, and a reporter from The Times, who sent a special report to his London paper by telegram from Luxor.
By the next day, the discovery was worldwide news. The Times raved about the tomb’s contents: a child’s stool, quaint bronze musical instruments, a dummy for wigs and robes, and food including trussed duck and haunches of venison.9 One of the boxes appeared to contain rolls of papyri—which caused great excitement as any written records found had the potential to revolutionize understanding of this intriguing period in history.
Meanwhile, Egyptologists and journalists alike were falling over themselves to amass what little information was known about Tutankhamun, and newspaper articles about the Amarna period became required reading at breakfast tables across the educated world. Soon it was common knowledge that the heretic king Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti had six daughters. One of them married a man called Smenkhkare, who ruled briefly (as Akhenaten’s coruler and perhaps alone after Akhenaten died) just before Tutankhamun’s accession. A younger daughter married Tutankhamun, originally called Tutankhaten, when both were children. Before long, Tutankhaten was on the throne, had changed his name, and returned to Thebes.
The main source of information about Tutankhamun was a sandstone slab found at Karnak temple, on which he boasts about restoring Egypt to its former glory: “I found the temples fallen into ruin, with their holy places overgrown with weeds. I reconstructed their sanctuaries, re-endowed the temples and made the gifts of all precious things. I cast statues of the gods in gold and electrum and decorated them with lapis lazuli and all fine stones.”10
Carter went to Cairo for supplies. He ordered a steel gate for the tomb’s doorway, and bought provisions including more than a mile of wadding and as much again of surgical bandages, as well as photographic material, chemicals, packing boxes, and a motorcar. He also amassed a small team of helpers including two draftsmen, a government chemist and conservator called Alfred Lucas, plus photographer Harry Burton and archaeologist Arthur Mace, both on loan from the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
On December 27, they were ready to start removing objects from the antechamber. Unlike previous tomb clearances, where everything was stripped out in hours or days with few or no records taken, Carter’s approach was a model of patient, meticulous archaeology. Before moving anything, he put numbered cards next to each object, which Burton photographed in situ, lighting his pictures with two portable three thousand–candlepower lamps. The draftsmen followed with a scale plan, drawing on every object in its position in the tomb. Only then were the artifacts—starting with a painted casket—carried out on padded wooden stretchers.
The Valley of the Kings became like a little village, with Carter and his team using a variety of nearby tombs for different purposes. Burton set up a darkroom in KV55, the tomb that had held the Amarna cache. He hung a pair of heavy black curtains over the entrance, and posted a boy outside with his watch, to call out the minutes so he’d know when to take out each plate* and put it in the fixing bath.
KV4, originally built for Rameses XI, was already established as a “luncheon tomb”—the sloping floor leveled with earth so that the wine wouldn’t slide off the table. And most importantly, the tomb of Seti II, tucked beneath overhanging cliffs in a remote corner of the valley, became Lucas’s storeroom and laboratory. The secluded spot could be protected from visitors, and was sheltered and cool (relatively—the temperature inside was still a steady 80° F). The space was a long, narrow passage—three hundred feet long by just twelve feet wide. The farther recesses—past where the electric lights could reach—were used for storage, while the upper part was used for restoration work. Here, Lucas set up wooden trestle tables as well as benches and shelves filled with bottles of his favorite conservation materials, including acetone, paraffin, celluloid solution, and beeswax. You could smell the chemicals while you were still walking up the path to the lab.
Trying to stabilize and conserve the objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb was horrendously difficult as they were fragile and liable to fall apart when moved. Sandals of patterned beadwork crumbled to the touch, leaving just a handful of loose beads. Funerary bouquets needed three or four sprayings of celluloid solution before they could be moved. It took Mace three weeks to empty a single casket of the king’s clothing—one robe alone sported over three thousand gold sequins and twelve thousand blue beads, all in danger of falling off.
Work inside the tomb was just as tricky. Because the objects were in such a tangled mess, it was hard to remove one thing without disturbing everything else. Carter described it as like “a gigantic game of spillikins,” for which he had to devise an elaborate system of props and supports.11
As he cleared the antechamber, it became clear that much of its messy state was the result of ancient robbers, who it seemed had indeed broken into the tomb. Helping him to interpret the clues they left behind was Lucas, who happened to be an expert in forensics and crime scene investigations. In one trial, Lucas had identified the poison on the tip of an arrow used in a murder. Another time, he calculated the trajectory of a bullet that a British soldier had accidentally fired from a train, killing a passenger in an adjacent compartment. The bullet deflected off ironwork in a station back through the window of the train—Lucas calculated where the bullet must have struck and identified the mark.12
The multiple seals on the tomb doors showed that this crime scene had been broken into twice, both within just a few years of Tutankhamun’s burial. The thieves were clearly in a rush, and only able to take small, portable objects. They upturned boxes and tipped their contents over the floor, looking for small gold items. The antechamber had later been hastily tidied, with objects randomly pushed back into boxes and the lids jammed shut. But the annex was just as the robbers had left it, with stuff all over the floor. There was jewelry missing, arrows with their metal points broken off, and a wooden pedestal from which a gold statuette had been ripped away. A shawl, tied into a knot with a handful of solid gold rings inside, had been dropped and left behind, suggesting the looters were disturbed during their plundering—perhaps even caught red-handed in the tomb.
Tutankh-Amen though dead yet liveth and reigneth in Thebes and Luxor today … One cannot escape the name of Tutankh-Amen anywhere. It is shouted in the streets, whispered in the hotels, while the local shops advertise Tutankh-Amen art, Tutankh-Amen hats, Tutankh-Amen curios, Tutankh-Amen photographs, and tomorrow probably genuine Tutankh-Amen antiquities … Slight acquaintances buttonhole one and tell of dreams they had yesterday of Tutankh-Amen. There is a dance tonight at which the first piece is to be a Tutankh-Amen rag.
—NEW YORK TIMES, FEBRUARY 18, 1923
TO LEARN ABOUT what happened in the early days after finding Tutankhamun’s tomb, Carter himself is the main source of information, along with accounts of a few other privileged observers. But once news of the discovery got out, that changed dramatically, and suddenly we can watch the events unfold through hundreds of different pairs of eyes. The newspapers took each day’s developments to fascinated audiences around the world, and Tutankhamun’s story was no longer just about what archaeologists were getting up to inside his tomb. He had become an international phenomenon.
Tourists and journalists flocked to Luxor. They came from Europe and the United States in the thousands, crossing the Atlantic on steamers with names like the Homeric, Empress of Scotland, and Mauretania. The telegraph office at Luxor was so deluged by newspaper dispatches that three direct lines had to be laid between Luxor and Cairo, while an emergency hospital was converted into a telegraph office for presswork. Tourist shops sold out of cameras, films, and books on Egypt’s history. Luxor’s two biggest hotels set up tents in their gardens, with their guests sleeping on army cots.
Each day, these visitors crossed the river on wooden sailing boats called feluccas. They headed into the Valley of the Kings by donkey, sand cart, or horse-drawn cab, and made themselves at home for the day, sitting on a wall around the top of Tutankhamun’s tomb as they waited for something to happen. About once a day, Carter’s team brought out the most recently retrieved objects and carried them in convoy to the lab—they looked like casualties of war on their wooden stretchers, wrapped in surgical bandages and fixed with safety pins. Reporters whipped out their notebooks, tourists aimed their cameras, and a lane had to be cleared for the procession to pass through.
Carter himself was bombarded with letters and telegrams—congratulations, offers of assistance from tomb planning to personal valeting, requests for souvenirs, offers of money for everything from moving picture rights to the copyright on Egyptian fashions of dress. He was given advice on how to preserve antiquities and how to appease evil spirits. Shoemakers wanted the design of the royal slippers, and provisions dealers wanted parcels of mummified foods—apparently they expected them to be canned.
Tutankhamun “is as well known now as the Kaiser used to be,” announced the New York Times on January 27, “and while Mr. Ford may still be in the lead, the space between them is small.”13
Beyond the race to cash in on newfound “Tutmania,” there was also increasing excitement about the prospect of entering the king’s burial chamber and finding his mummy—finally, a chance to find out how an Egyptian pharaoh was actually laid to rest. Experts speculated about what state the mummy might be found in: Winlock predicted that “it will be one of the most perfect examples of its kind which has come down to us,”14 while others feared the body was already desecrated, or that ancient priests had hidden it elsewhere.
By February, Carter realized that what he had thought were rolls of papyri were actually folded loincloths. It was a blow for historians, as no other texts were found in the tomb. And it made a scientific examination of the king’s body even more important. With no letters, journals, or archives that could throw light on Tutankhamun’s reign or the times in which he lived, any historical information would now have to come from the mummy itself. For example, it wasn’t known how long Tutankhamun ruled for, or how he died. Children’s clothing and furniture in the tomb suggested he died young,* but some experts maintained that the burial chamber would contain the mummy of an elderly man.
There was also a heartfelt debate over what should be done with the mummy, if it was found. Although most other royal mummies had been taken to the Cairo Museum, the locals, hoping that Tutankhamun would become a powerful tourist attraction, wanted him to stay in his tomb.
Celebrities from scientists to writers had other ideas. Henry Rider Haggard, a popular author of adventure novels, argued that the mummies of all the pharaohs, including Tutankhamun, should be sealed with concrete inside the Great Pyramid at Giza. “Presently [Tutankhamun] too, may be stripped like the great Rameses and many other monarchs very mighty in his day and laid half naked to rot in a glass case in the museum at Cairo,” he wrote in outrage.15 “Is this decent? Is it doing as we would be done by?” After examining the mummies, he said, archaeologists should “hide them away again forever, as we ourselves would be hidden away.”
Eminent archaeologist Flinders Petrie’s response to the suggestion was withering. “Why spoil the great pyramid by blocking up one of the chambers?” he asked, arguing that there was no point getting sentimental about the fate of the pharaohs and their tombs when almost all of them had been plundered by the ancient Egyptians themselves.16 To take the remains to Cairo’s damper climate would be devastating, argued Petrie, but he didn’t think Tutankhamun’s mummy would be safe if left in the tomb. He suggested building a museum for all the royal mummies in the dry mountains of Thebes—with the small matter of a garrison of fifty-plus men to protect it from thieves.
Other distinguished archaeologists argued that the mummy should stay put, while in London the debate reached the highest political circles. Questions in the British House of Commons included whether the government would push for Tutankhamun’s body to remain in his tomb, and whether they had any proof that the body was really there. Ronald McNeill, undersecretary for foreign affairs, answered no on both counts.17