Tutankhamen (10 page)

Carter spent a few months living in Cairo, then returned to Luxor to spend three years scraping a precarious living as an artist working for archaeological missions who, in the absence of colour photography, needed a good watercolour record of their finds. Most memorably, he painted some of the contents of the tomb of Yuya and Thuya for Davis, being paid £15 for each of the fourteen plates featured in the publication. At the same time he acted as an up-market tourist guide,
and sold paintings and antiquities to wealthy visitors who might want a unique souvenir of their Egyptian holiday.

In 1909 Maspero introduced Carter to George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, with the suggestion that they might work profitably together. Carnarvon, like Davis, was a wealthy amateur with a passion for Egyptology. He, too, wanted to make a spectacular discovery, and he, too, needed a professional colleague who would allow him to overcome the amateur status that was causing the authorities, in the person of Weigall, to refuse him permission to excavate the more important Theban sites. Weigall, who had been forced to work alongside the slapdash Davis, firmly believed that wealthy amateurs such as Carnarvon (or Davis, or Robert Mond, an equally wealthy amateur who had worked with Weigall in the Theban necropolis) should not be allowed to buy their way on to an archaeological excavation, where they might do irreparable damage.

Carter became Carnarvon's employee, the bond between them one of mutual convenience and a shared goal. Contemporary accounts, and their own correspondence, show that this formal working relationship soon matured into a firm friendship. The normally introverted Carter got on extremely well with his new patron and, indeed, with the whole Herbert family, and he became a frequent visitor to Highclere, the Carnarvon family's Berkshire estate. With Carter and Carnarvon working as a team, Weigall felt able to allocate more promising sites. They were rewarded by a steady stream of unspectacular, but archaeologically satisfying, results which allowed Carter to polish his skills as an excavator. In 1912 the team moved to northern Egypt, and the less immediately appealing sites of the Delta. There was a brief excavation at the snake-infested site of Sakha (ancient Xois), followed by a longer season at the town mound of Tell el-Balamun (ancient Pa-iu-en-Amen), where Carter discovered some silver Graeco-Roman jewellery, hidden in a pot. After that minor excitement there was a return to the familiar comforts, and sunnier climate, of Thebes.

In 1914 Davis gave up the concession to excavate in the Valley of the Kings and Carnarvon seized his chance. Many people thought that he was wasting his time:

A temporary agreement allowing Carter to perform some work in February 1915 was superseded by official permission signed on 18 April 1915, which confirmed that ‘the work of excavation shall be carried out at the expense, risk and peril of the Earl of Carnarvon by Mr Howard Carter; the latter should be constantly present during excavation'.
³⁸
The days when an excavator might reasonably expect to receive half of any finds were, however, long gone, and Article 8 stated that ‘mummies of the Kings, of Princes, and of High Priests, together with their coffins and sarcophagi, shall remain the property of the Antiquities Service'. More ominously, Articles 9 and 10 stipulated:

This new, tough approach – an approach which does not appear unduly tough today – sparked intense resentment among Western excavators, most of whom relied on funding from museums, institutions and private individuals who expected to be rewarded for their generosity with a share of the finds. There was a strong feeling that, without this reward, there would be no financial contribution. It would be the end of excavation in Egypt, and perhaps of Egyptology as a whole. Meanwhile, the Great War prevented any intensive excavation. Carter spent his war years doing unspecified intelligence work in Cairo, and his leave conducting useful but essentially small-scale fieldwork in Luxor. It was not until 1 December 1917 that he finally started work in the Valley of the Kings.

Carter and Carnarvon had determined to find Tutankhamen's tomb, which, for perfectly sound archaeological and historical reasons, they believed was situated in the Valley. But the Valley was an ill-documented mess; there was no official record of who had already excavated or where, and the vast spoil heaps left by earlier excavators made it difficult to reconstruct its excavation history. The only way to be certain that there were no lost tombs was to clear the Valley floor down to its bedrock. Carter realised that this was ‘a rather desperate undertaking', but he felt that there was no other option.
³⁹
It proved to be slow, dull work: not only did the rubble have to be cleared from the Valley, it had to be inspected, then dumped responsibly. And, of course, the earlier spoil heaps also had to be removed, inspected and dumped. In an article written for
The Times
on 11 December 1922, Carnarvon estimated that they had moved something approaching 150,000 – 200,000 tons of rubbish, concentrating on a triangle between the tombs of Ramesses II, Merenptah and Ramesses VI.

Results were so meagre that Carnarvon started to have serious doubts over the wisdom of pouring time, energy and money into a potentially fruitless mission. Maybe they should abandon the Valley, and look for a more fertile site? By most people's standards, Carnarvon
was an extremely rich man. In addition to his inherited wealth and properties, his marriage to Almina Wombwell, the natural daughter of the extraordinarily wealthy Alfred de Rothschild, had brought a £500,000 dowry plus an annual income of £12,000 and the repayment of his outstanding gaming and personal debts.
⁴⁰
It was effectively Rothschild money that financed his Egyptian adventure, and that would continue to fund it, via Almina, after his death. He was not, however, a man of infinite resources and nor was he a dedicated Egyptologist. He enjoyed a wide range of expensive interests, including photography, horse racing, yachting and the newfangled automobiles, and it is possible that he was simply growing slightly bored with his slow-moving new hobby. As a gambler, he understood the importance of not throwing good money after bad.

Carter, who was definitely not a wealthy man, disagreed. He felt that they should carry on until the entire Valley had been inspected. It is even rumoured, though he makes no mention of this in his publication, that he offered to pay the costs of a final season himself. Could this have been a genuine offer – could he really have afforded to pay for a short season? Perhaps. While it has been estimated that Carnarvon's Egyptian adventure had already cost him something in the region of £35,000,
⁴¹
local labour was cheap, and a few weeks' work would probably have cost no more than a few hundred pounds. Weigall gives us some idea of the relevant costs when he tells us that in 1905 ‘the total cost to Mr Davis of the season's work which produced one of the greatest finds ever made in Egypt [the tomb of Yuya and Thuya] was about £80'.
⁴²
Carnarvon's associated social activities – transport, hotels, dressing, dining and entertaining – would have cost far more than the work itself.

Carnarvon agreed to one last gamble. Carter would be given time to clear the part of the Valley, a heap of rubble and ancient workmen's huts beneath the entrance to the tomb of Ramesses VI (KV 9), that had so far been left untouched because excavations in this area would
disrupt the flow of tourists intent on visiting the tomb above. In fact Carter had already started to remove these huts in 1917 and, like Davis, had come very close to finding Tutankhamen, stopping within a metre or so of the lost tomb. In order to cause minimum disruption, and to allow Carter to remove the footpath if necessary, the 1922 – 3 season would start unusually early. Carter arrived in Luxor on 28 October, full of determination:

On 1 November 1922 Carter's workmen, led by the highly experienced foreman Reis Ahmed Gerigar, cleared away the rubbish below Ramesses' tomb. They then cut through a 3ft layer of what Carter somewhat loosely describes as ‘soil' or, in his diary ‘heavy rubbish'.
⁴⁴
Three days later – while Carter was temporarily absent from the site – they discovered the first of a flight of sixteen stone steps. These led down to a small blocked and plastered doorway stamped with a range of oval seal impressions including the distinctive seal of the necropolis: a jackal crouching above nine bound captives. None of the seal impressions included a name.

A small portion of plaster had fallen away from the upper section of the doorway, revealing a heavy wooden lintel. This point of weakness allowed Carter to make a small hole. Inserting an electric torch
he peered into a passage packed with stones and rubbish. Clearly he had made a significant discovery, although whether it was a tomb or a cache, intact or robbed and resealed, was not yet clear; ‘anything, literally anything, might lie beyond that passage, and it needed all my self-control to keep from breaking down the doorway and investigating there and then'.
⁴⁵
On 6 November Carter crossed the river to the Luxor telegram office, where he composed a coded message (here decoded) for his patron:

3

In December 1922 Pierre Lacau, Head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, wrote formally to Lord Carnarvon. An edited version of his letter, translated from the French, was reproduced in
The Times
on 14 December 1922:

In order to protect the anonymous tomb and its unknown contents, Carter re-buried the stairwell and rolled large flint boulders on top. He then resigned himself to a tense wait. On 18 November 1922 he left Luxor for Cairo, where he met Carnarvon and his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert. He returned to Luxor on the 21st, and Carnarvon followed two days later. With the assistance of Carter's friend, retired engineer and architect Arthur Callender, the clearing of the lower stairwell was completed by the afternoon of 24 November. The fill from the lower part of the stairwell yielded a mixture of objects, including large quantities of broken pottery, a scarab of Tuthmosis III and fragments of boxes inscribed with the names of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten, Neferneferuaten and Meritaten, and Tutankhamen. This was curious. Why were so many 18th Dynasty royal names associated with this one tomb? Carter persuaded himself that he had discovered a late 18th Dynasty cache, a tomb similar in design and use, perhaps, to the nearby KV 55.

With the doorway fully exposed, a different seal-type was revealed. Now it was possible to read a name: Tutankhamen. Tutankhamen, then, or his officials, had sealed this tomb. His seals were intact and ancient, and it was clear there had been no recent breach of security. But it was equally clear that the upper left corner of the door showed signs of tampering: the tomb had been opened and re-sealed at least twice in antiquity and, although it might be reasonably supposed that no one would bother to re-seal an empty tomb, it was by no means certain that Carter had discovered an unplundered cache or burial.