He was a minor pharaoh, and the excavation of his tomb was a disreputable affair. But, a century later, there is more to learn.
Not long ago, in my sister’s elementary-school classroom, I met a second grader who seemed well on his way to a doctoral degree in Egyptology. After describing the mummification process in recondite detail—not only why the brain was removed through the nose but how exactly natron dried out the rest of the body—the child drew an elaborate cartouche with the hieroglyphs used to spell my name.
The original source had no doubts about the significance of his accomplishment. Howard Carter was a working-class artist born in London in 1874 and brought up in Swaffham, an inauspicious market town known only for an auspicious bit of folklore, according to which a local tinker found a buried treasure there. Carter’s own treasure lay further afield. At seventeen, he went to Egypt to take a job reproducing the wall art and the hieroglyphs of pharaonic tombs.
By 1922, Carnarvon was low on both money and patience, increasingly worried that the sixty-one tombs already uncovered were all there was to find in the valley necropolis. Pressed by Carter, who was nearing fifty and was more than five years into the search for Tutankhamun, Carnarvon agreed to finance one more season of field work. Within a few months, he was rewarded with a shocking telegram: “At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact.
The scale of Tutankhamun’s riches is unrivalled because his was one of the only ancient tombs to be found nearly intact—or entirely intact, according to those who allege that Carter faked an ancient break-in as a way of circumventing a law that gave Egypt ownership over everything inside an unviolated tomb.
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