Tutankhamen (15 page)

As for the mask:

With the pieces separated, the unguent could be removed with the help of cleaning solvents and a blast lamp. It was now apparent that the mask was made of gold sheets beaten together, the surface of the mask being 18.4 carat gold, the headdress 22.5 carats and the underlying mask 23 carats. There were solder-lines around the edges of the face and forehead, and rivets visible at the base of the throat, while the beard was a separate piece, made of gold inlaid with faience. The mask wore the
nemes
headdress: a headcloth covering the head and nape of the neck, with large flaps of cloth decending behind each ear to the shoulder. This was inlaid with stripes of blue glass, and bore the protective vulture and cobra on the brow. Texts inscribed on the back of the mask were taken from the
Book of the Dead
.

On 31 December 1925, the innermost coffin and the funerary mask journeyed north by train, escorted by Carter, Lucas and an armed guard. For maximum security, the train was shunted directly into the Museum gardens. The rest of the season was then dedicated to conserving the coffins and the jewellery.

Work started with the restoration of the mummy to the granite sarcophagus. With Tutankhamen secure, attention turned to the Treasury. This room, too, had been robbed, with many of its chests showing the unmissable evidence of broken seals. However, it appeared to have suffered less disturbance, or maybe to have been better restored, than the other chambers. Here were a host of highly symbolic artefacts including a large shrine topped with the jackal-figure of the funerary god Anubis, a large and curious golden cow's head representing a form of the goddess Hathor, and a fleet of boats that would allow the dead king to sail to Abydos, the cult centre of Osiris. Most astonishing of all was the object that had caught Carter's eye four years earlier: the magnificent canopic shrine provided to house Tutankhamen's preserved entrails:

The Annexe was the last chamber to be cleared. This was the chamber most affected by the robberies, and unlike the ‘orderly confusion' of the Antechamber, its restoration appeared to have been effected by the ancient equivalent of sweeping everything under the bed. There was not a single inch of floor space for Carter and his team to stand, and the tower of grave goods reached a height, in some places, of 1.8m:

The fact that the floor of the Annexe was almost a metre below the floor of the Antechamber simply compounded Carter's problems: the first objects had to be moved by team members dangling headfirst from the doorway, supported by a rope sling which passed under the armpits, and was held by three or four men standing in the Antechamber. Once it became possible to actually stand in the room, Carter realised that the Annexe had originally been used to store food, wine, oils and perfumes, plus some miscellaneous furniture which more properly belonged in the over-filled Antechamber. Work proceeded slowly and methodically, following tried and tested patterns, until the final piece was removed from the Annexe on 15 December. Attention then switched to the conservation lab and to the large shrines, which were still stacked in pieces in the Antechamber.

The 1928 – 9 season was a peaceful one, although the team was plagued with illnesses. The 1929 – 30 season proved more tricky. With the work almost ended, Lady Carnarvon had given up her concession and, from 1930 onwards, all costs were met by the Egyptian government. This caused problems for Carter, who, as a foreigner with no official position, suddenly found himself locked out of the tomb and the lab. His knee-jerk response – to argue that the steel gates, locks and keys actually belonged to Lady Carnarvon rather than to the Antiquities Service – did little to help resolve the issue. Finally it was agreed that the keys would be held by a local Antiquities Service Inspector, who would arrive every day to unlock the tombs.

The last piece of shrine was removed from Tutankhamen's tomb in November 1930. Conservation work continued for another year, and it was not until February 1932 that the last consignment of grave goods was sent to Cairo. Carter's long labour was finally over and he was free to turn his attention to the academic publication of his work.

Carter never did finish the publication of Tutankhamen's tomb. This may explain why he never received any official recognition for his life's work. What few academic honours he did receive came from abroad. In 1924 he received an honorary science doctorate from Yale, and that same year he became a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of History in Madrid. He received a decoration from the King of Egypt in 1926, and a decoration from the King of Belgium in 1932. Given that he lived in an age when prominent British archaeologists and Egyptologists were routinely rewarded with knighthoods – Sirs Flinders Petrie, Leonard Woolley, Max Mallowan, Mortimer Wheeler and Alan Gardiner were either contemporaries, or near-contemporaries – he might reasonably have expected something similar. His lack of a patron, lack of a supporting institution and, perhaps, lack of breeding did not help his cause, but it may simply be that his
own complex personality was to blame. Opinion among his contemporaries seems to have been more or less equally divided over whether Carter was simply shy and insecure about his lack of formal education, or an overbearingly arrogant boor.

 

Carter died in London on 2 March 1939. After an unimpressive, ill-attended funeral he was buried in a nondescript grave in Putney Vale Cemetery. A simple headstone commemorated ‘Howard Carter, Archaeologist and Egyptologist, 1874 – 1939'.
²⁵
His grave was then more or less forgotten so that when, in 1991, archaeologist Paul Bahn arrived to pay his respects to perhaps the most famous archaeologist in history, the stone surround was broken and it was barely possible to read the epitaph. Bahn wrote an article for
Archaeology
magazine in the United States, suggesting that something should be done to restore the grave for the seventieth anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb, and readers started to send in cheques.
²⁶
Inevitably,
The Times
picked up the story. When the British Museum stepped in to commission a new gravestone, the cheques were returned to the
generous American readers. Today his grave bears a more splendid stone, dedicated to ‘Howard Carter, Egyptologist, Discoverer of the tomb of Tutankhamen 1922. Born 9 May 1874, Died, 2 March 1939.' There are two quotations from hieroglyphic texts. ‘Oh night, spread thy wings over me as the imperishable stars', a version of the hymn to the sky goddess Nut, which is inscribed inside many New Kingdom coffins, is on the foot of the surround. The headstone bears an abbreviated form of the prayer engraved on Tutankhamen's ‘wishing cup':

4

The box of papyri – Tutankhamen's library – caused great excitement. As the linguist charged with decoding the tomb's texts, Gardiner outlined its importance for readers of
The Times
:

Unfortunately, the library proved to be a less than exciting box of discoloured linen rolls. The
Daily Mail,
no great friend to Carter, dismissed them as ‘simply folded table napkins'; they have since been tentatively identified as Tutankhamen's loincloths. Much to everyone's great surprise, the tomb yielded no original or personal writings and, although there were extracts from the standard funerary texts engraved on some of the grave goods, there was just one badly decayed and essentially uninformative scrap of papyrus recovered from the mummy itself. Gardiner was far less optimistic when he next shared his thoughts with
The Times
:

It was natural that Gardiner felt some disappointment. Technology and material culture, no matter how beautiful, would never excite a linguist, while a library of scrolls, or even a simple family tree, would have given a welcome boost to the understanding of the complex history of the late 18th Dynasty royal family. However, Gardiner was wrong in his supposition that Tutankhamen's mute grave goods would be valued primarily for their artistic quality. As Egyptology has developed into a science rather than a language-based discipline, items that in his day were essentially ornate dead ends are starting to yield an unexpected harvest. It is now recognised that every artefact, no matter how superficially mundane, has a story to tell. This phenomenon is particularly well illustrated by a consideration of the textiles recovered from the tomb.