The incredible life of Howard Carter and the discovery of the Tutankhamun tomb
Howard Carter was seven years old when his mother thought he should be sent to school; Samuel, his father, did not want to send him to school, believing he was too weak. Therefore a private teacher was called who gave the sick boy the rudiments of knowledge at home. Mother Martha showered her son with attentions, always fearful that he would catch an illness. He couldn't play with the other boys.
Samuel Carter's success as an animal painter was related to the fact that photography was still very expensive; the high-ranking people who were crazy about horses had them portray purebred ones, which they then hung up in country houses. Since animals were his only companions, Howard spent his free time in his father's menagerie behind their home. In the parent's judgment, the son's timid attempts to imitate him in portraying captive birds were "hereditary talent". The whole family spent the summer months in the countryside (Swaffham, Norfolk), where the budding painter was born.
The young Carter began to move from village to village. One day in the summer of 1891, in Didlington, he met Lady Amherst of Hackney. The Baroness told him that if she intended to become a painter perhaps she had an occupation for him: the well-known exhumer Flinders Petrieand his young assistant Percy Newberry, returning from an expedition to central Egypt, had brought back thousands of pencil sketches the previous winter, so that poor Newberry was day and night in the British Museum finishing them in fair copies. The lady offered to help him.
Carter replied that he was willing to do it. Accompanied by his father, he left for London and presented himself at the British Museum. They hired him for three months job. He liked copying drawings; his employers were pleased. When, in October 1891, on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Fund, Newberry prepared to return to the Land of the Pharaohs, he let the committee know that it would be more economical to take the young copier there too, who would thus have had the opportunity to draw from life, while the exhumers would have had more time to search. Lord Amherst said he was willing to bear the expenses provided that in addition to drawing Carter also helped to dig: collecting antiques was a passion for him.
Over the next few months he and Newberry worked on the rock burials of Beni Hassan and Der al-Bersha; Carter had only drawn since it was unthinkable to get a hand with shovels, so he decided to go to Tell El_Amarna, where he really hoped to dig up something for Lord Amherst.
Once in Amarna he presented himself to the director of the excavations, Petrie, who gave him the first task of drawing. But Carter from the first day expressed the desire to be able to actively participate in the excavations. Petrie then gave him a plot near the outer wall of the great temple of the Aten. The land assigned to him had been examined for a long time, but Carter worked feverishly: he had to find something, he couldn't disappoint his patron. After the third day, when Petrie seeing Carter's enthusiasm, he decided to give him a plot in which no one had ever dug, Carter showed him beaming fragments of a statue of a queen and a few hours later unearthed several torsos passed through the mesh of the previous sifting. Carter's enthusiasm and youthful drive had won him the friendship of Flinders Petrie. Carter was fascinated by Petrie. Ah, if he could become like him. But the luck that had been favorable to him at the beginning seemed to abandon him: Carter worked like crazy, but unfortunately after weeks of work he found only three blocks of stone in his hands, evidently fragments of a large tombstone, on one of which one could recognize the head of Akhenaten.
Petrie tried to explain to Carter that the foundations that were coming to light were those of the largest temple in the world. But Carter was disappointed. He then began to draw the plans to scale. Petrie was of the opinion that the young man would have earned a large sum if he had inserted the Templar sketch into the overall plan of the ancient city, a feat never attempted up to then: fifty kilometers to day, he measured, surveyed, drew and, in a few weeks, prepared the first cartographic document of Tell el_Amarna, Akhetaton, the ancient capital.
The plan of the city was so perfect that Petrie proposed that Carter send it to Cairo, to the Antiquities Office.
Carter followed the advice, brought the urban plan to Minia and sent it by mail. He has since disappeared. He never arrived at his destination: weeks of hard work gone up in smoke!!
For some time now Carter had understood that perseverance was the first virtue of the digger; then he became aware of the second virtue: fantasy. The grit with which Howard had set to work soon paid off for him: he too began to unearth useful finds, more and more frequently, until reaching the number of seventeen at the end of the season.
One evening during the usual examination of the found objects Petrie showed Carter a ring, a signet ring, on the cartouche of which was the name of a king: "Tut-ankh-Amon ” – “more than ever alive is Amun”. It was the name of the forgotten pharaoh. Tut's ghost had been hovering over the archaeological scene for many years, occasionally his name or traces of it were found. Petrie was the first to deal systematically of the chronology of the Forgotten kings.
At the age of 20, Carter arrived in Luxor and introduced himself to Edward Faville and worked for him for almost 6 years. He learned to go about his business independently, working with scientific precision; he touched him with a marvel at the edge of the desert: the temple of Queen Hatshepsut.
Carter designed, built, photographed, documented, simultaneously witnessing a rebirth: a temple in ruins, forgotten, resurrected; his story came alive.
At 25 Carter became Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt and Nubia, based in Luxor. Now it was up to him to control Karnak, Thebes, Edfu, Philae, Abu Simbel, the great temples and major centers of ancient culture. As inspector of antiquities Carter had the power, but not the money until he met Theodore Davis. Together they crossed the waters of the Nile and the new inspector showed his empire to the guest. Davis said it would be a pleasure to rummage around; as for him, if there was something to spend, he didn't hold back. He would try to do what he could, Carter replied. Howard, of course, would have been happy to roll up his sleeves on a dig instead of sitting there making ends meet and preparing payroll.
On October 3, 1899, eleven of one hundred thirty-four gigantic columns in the great temple of Karnak collapsed. These were giants twenty-one meters high; the foundations of one of them had given way; the column had leaned to one side and dragged the others along with it. Now we had to put them back on their feet. Carter also commanded armed men who guarded pharaonic burials already discovered in the Valley of the Kings. Every time, however, Howard Carter on the back of a donkey did his inspection increasingly revealed that he was not the right man in the right place. The story could not be reconstructed exactly; one had to move, get dusty and muddy in the desert, work with a pick and shovel. Davis and Carter quickly agreed: they would dig together, using the former's financial capital and the latter's wealth of experience. Howard worked hard to get the authorisation from the wealthy American to be allowed to excavate in the Valley of the Kings. Maspero reluctantly agreed: on the one hand, he feared that if Carter dedicated himself to digging up, his activity as an inspector would suffer and, on the other, he was of the opinion that nothing more archaeologically valid could be found in the Valley of the Kings. Carter was adamant.
In the early days of 1902, Carter began searching the Valley of the Kings on his own. He initially aimed at the southeast rocky wall of the valley basin. Despite being an inaccessible area, within 3 days he found what he was looking for: stone steps, sepulchral entrance, corridor, sarcophagus chamber, in short, the last home of the fourth Thutmose, carefully stripped (except for a few furnishings and a cart). While digging to find Thutmose IV's final resting place, Howard unearthed an alabaster cup and a small blue scarab with Queen Hatshepsut's name on it.
On February 2, 1903, sixty meters north of the tomb of Thutmose IV, Carter found a stone bearing the ring with the name of Hatshepsut; at that moment he was certain that he was facing the burial of the eccentric king. The opening of the rock tomb was, from a technical point of view, one of the most complicated undertakings ever faced by archaeological research. Even if the grave was stripped, unadorned and devoid of inscriptions, having discovered it made Carter famous, for having succeeded where Napoleon and Lepsius had failed. Howard Carter, the discoverer, suddenly became interesting, he was invited to tea, to receptions. Four social classes were present on the square of Luxor: an upper stratum of a few wealthy or enriched individuals; businessmen and state officials; a constant flow of tourists and wealthy revelers, and the great mass of the indigenous population, one half of whom was regularly employed, while the other was busy devising stratagems to extort money from the upper class and the tourists. All archaeologists, with rare exceptions penniless, they were a kind of curiosity that wealthy groups disputed with each other.
Towards the end of 1905, in Saqqara, a group of drunk Frenchmen tried to enter the Serapeum, without a ticket, jostling the guardian who, however, put up a firm resistance and did not let them enter. This stupid happening with which first Carter had nothing to do, then took a bad turn. When the chief sentry warned Carter of what was happening he hurried to the grave of the bulls and was involved in the quarrel and badly insulted. He ordered the sentries to defend themselves and a Frenchman was killed. Back in Cairo, the tourists protested against Carter and the French consul general demanded an apology. Howard refused, said he had only done his duty. However, the affair ended with his resignation. Maspero tried in every way to get his inspector to apologize, to put an end to that matter, but Carter preferred to resign.
Overnight a promising archaeological career came to an end.
At thirty-one, Carter found himself jobless. He had always felt less attracted to Saqqara, Memphis and Lower Egypt than Luxor, Thebes, Upper Egypt and above all "his" Valley. On the way, he met Ahmed Gurgar. The former inspector did not hide from his old foreman that he was worried: homeless, jobless, moneyless. Ahmed gave him hospitality. Meditating on his bad luck, Howard remembered that he had a trade in his hand, the one he had learned: he began to paint landscapes and sell them to tourists. While realizing that he was putting himself on the same level as the natives, he began to trade his paintings: he had to live. Theodore M. Davis was not insensitive to seeing Howard so forgotten: Davis knew that he was the discoverer of Hatshepsut's tomb and that of Thutmose IV. Meeting him one day, he asked him how he was. Carter began to talk about himself without hesitation: what he earned was just enough not to die; in England, however, he would not return, since in Egypt it was easier to be poor. Theodore wanted to know if he didn't like to dig and draw for him for a fee, of course. In the following excavation season, it was a question of copying the inscriptions and drawing all the finds. The unemployed archaeologist had no other choice: he had to accept the offer, even if it was a depressing job.
The first few weeks of this new business were frustrating. From November 1 to December 20, 1904, he had enormous quantities of sand and rock removed, but to no avail: Carter's pencil remained completely inoperative. After a short Christmas and New Year's holiday, Howard and Inspector Quibell found a small clearing at the entrance to the Valley of the Kings, between the burials of Ramses III (1184-1153) and that of Ramses XI (1099-1070) – which, at that time, came still attributed to Ramses XII, later revealed to be non-existent. In those days Gaston Maspero, general director of Antiquities, announced that he would come to visit Luxor. Remembering that it was Maspero himself who had torpedoed Carter, Davis let the Englishman know that in the following days he would have to keep away from the Valley; any confrontation was to be avoided. Maybe Maspero didn't even know that the ex-inspector was drawing for Theodore.
On February 6, 1905, seeing in the distance Davis advancing into the Valley on the back of a donkey, the foreman ran towards him shouting: "one step, one step!" At the bottom of the hole the workmen had discovered a stone step. From it, unmistakably, began a grave. It was the final resting place of Tuja and Juja. Carter watched the event from afar, but as soon as Maspero left Carter wanted to see in person what he had only heard about: he made the sketches and drawings which Davis, in 1907, would have published by the London publisher Archibald Constable and Co. Ltd. Howard's work was of great importance: up to that moment, in fact, the tomb of Juja and Tuja was the only one found with original furnishings.
Once a year the Government Commission for Antiquities chaired by Maspero met and granted permission to excavate, provided that half of the finds were handed over. But he wanted to give Carter a hand. The dismissal had occurred following political pressure; but he had not forgotten the young man's abilities. Even then he had done everything not to send him away, begging him insistently to present an apology. So he introduced him to Lord Carnavon. When they first met, their eyes remained rather hostile; yet for sixteen years these two men would be together so outwardly similar, but also profoundly different. Carnavon was then forty-one years old, very rich, full of life; for him archeology was a fascinating way to spend the time, an opportunity to put together objects to show: Carter, thirty-three years old, was poor, resigned, withdrawn; a failed existence, from which all value had been subtracted. At first there was a kind of love-hate; they needed each other. Carter's daily wages (one British pound) were annually rounded up to four hundred: settle down, work and shut up.
In the spring of 1907 Maspero gave the two Englishmen permission to excavate in an area which lay northwest of the point where Carnavon had previously searched, at Der el-Bahari. Immediately on the first day the Lord made it clear that he was the master, he was in charge; Carter was only to act as a consultant. Carnavon not only dictated when, but also where to dig. He proudly showed his diary, which among other things reads: "We had been digging for ten days in Der el-Bahari, when we found an inviolate burial. It had a strikingly modern feel. There were several coffins. One of them particularly attracted our attention: it was white, painted with care, it had a funeral blanket and, at its feet, a bunch of flowers. For twenty-five centuries no one had touched them. Forget. We soon discovered why the strippers had spared that tomb: it was completely devoid of valuables; evidently the coffins belonged to poor people who, together with their own, had also invested in them all the money of their relatives. After the funeral, there was nothing left. The complete failure with which the first excavation campaign ended made it clear to Carnavon that, at the very least, it was necessary to use Carter's experience and allow him to choose where to use the pickaxes. However, the Lord did not want to let go of the reins. For the following year he identified three excavation sites that seemed promising to him: 1st a few meters north of the mosque; 2° a township still further north, between the mounds of the village of Dra Abu el-Nagga and arable land; 3° a territory in the northern part of Der el_Bahari. The anticipation of Carnavon was great. He began digging a few meters north of the mosque. The first week passed without anything coming to light; the second week also proved a failure, the Lord called Carter to report. Howard begged him to be patient. He was pretty sure he was on the right track. The natives, and especially the inhabitants of el-Lurna, had spoken of a tomb, of which they had heard news; this meant that the burial existed; perhaps it had already been looted by them for a long time and everything had already been sold on the black market. He kept looking. At the beginning of the third week, among huge masses of rubble, the tomb appeared. Although almost empty, it dated from the eighteenth dynasty; the perfectly preserved inscriptions and reliefs made it extremely important. From them it could be deduced that it was the final resting place of Teta-Ky (the son of a king). In addition to numerous scenes, it contained a full-length relief of Queen Ahmes-Nofretari, mother of Pharaoh Amenhotep I, one of the few sovereigns who in life was worshiped as a goddess. A large number of wooden funeral figurines and small wooden mummy coffins (evidently the grave robbers had deemed them worthless), made the Carnavon collector jump: he had finally found something! For three days Carter and his workers explored the subsoil about one hundred and fifty meters from the mouth of the valley at Der el-Bahari (in a north-easterly direction), then they discovered something else: a tomb from the 17th dynasty. Not finding the owner's name and being the ninth burial in the area, Carter marked it with the number nine. It was necessary to remove a huge pile of rubble and shards to make access possible. He first found some stripped mummy: the violators had disturbed their eternal rest. On the threshold of the antechamber lay two wooden tablets, which Carter examined carefully: on the layer of plaster that covered them was painted hieratic writing. Howard asked Francis Llewellyn Griffith, an Egyptologist at Oxford, one of the most brilliant linguists of the time, for help. He told Carter that what he had found was of extraordinary historical importance and showing him the tablets he said: “It is the story of General Kamose, who freed Egypt from the domination of the hykos. A very important document”. Carnavon didn't look at the find with particular enthusiasm: they weren't collectibles; these were finds that were of interest only from a historical point of view. In April 1908, after the excavation season, tomb number 9 was again filled with debris. Carter, who had imitated exploring the ancient chamber, believed that the bulk of the treasure could be in the niche of the sarcophagus and feared that it would be stolen. Howard writes: "But in 1909, to open the main chamber, we had to dig a lot, especially because the pile of rubble was very high and was constantly collapsing. We found only a few pots, similar to those found in the antechamber; a child's coffin, too ruined to be of any use. The tomb consisted of an open space, in the center of which was the entrance to a corridor six meters long and dug into the rock which led to a rectangular chamber (probably the dead man must have used it as a warehouse). On the west side of the chamber there was a well about three meters deep, through which two other superimposed rooms could be reached. It is not easy for me to imagine that the mass of shards found outside the tomb all belonged to him: it was too small. I assume that much of it comes from nearby, perhaps larger, graves. Carter's assumption was to prove true. A few days later, a few centimeters deep, the workers hit a wall, which was found to be in an excellent state of conservation. It was of stones, and Carter brought to light first ten meters, then twenty and finally forty meters. The wall, two meters and sixty wide, became longer and longer, made an elbow and the outline of a building appeared. In the north they unearth the access. On the inside, the worked stone blocks testified that they had originally been part of an older complex and that they had been used to carry out the new project.
It took the entire 1909 season to free up the mighty building complex. There were many secrets to reveal. Egyptologists flocked from all over the world stood by and looked at the perimeter walls, without being able to explain what meaning they had and what they were for. Carnavon was enthusiastic: "They, reigned". His terraced temple must have been connected in one way or another with the building discovered by Carter. To confirm it, the road that reached it perfectly straight was enough. Carter remembered the Gise and Abusir buildings, and both the meaning and purpose of the building were suddenly clear to him. It was one of the so-called valley temples and served as the entrance building to the main temple. From here the visitor, walking along the avenue of sphinxes (the statues all had the heads of Hatshepsut), reached the entrance to the actual temple, a pillar which has now disappeared. There was one thing Howard didn't know yet: the line that connected the valley temple with the terraced one was none other than the extension of the Karnakian temple axis of Amon. The why has so far remained an enigma. Beneath the foundations of the valley temple Carter came across several simple tombs hewn out of massive rock. None had escaped the thiefs. Some had even been visited twice, as the exhumers found traces dating back to the Middle Empire and relics from Hatshepsut's reign. Fragments of the same commemorative stone came to light in two different tombs (number twenty-seven and number thirty-one). In the sepulcher marked with the number twenty-five there was a still closed coffin, which, however, was unadorned; on the mummy there were no indications about the name of the deceased and the era in which he lived. Carnavon's interest was attracted by a bronze mirror with an ivory handle and a necklace of gold and hard stones; that's all. Howard Carter, however, dealt with a couple of hundred pieces of wood, ivory tiles, splinters of cedar and ebony. Experience told him that they were components of jewelry boxes, which usually had inscriptions, information about the owner. While the Lord searched the burials Howard withdrew for a couple of days and devoted himself to recomposing the ancient puzzle. He succeeded. His hypothesis proved to be well founded. The jewelry box, in addition to being finely crafted, bore the name of Amenemhet IV, an almost completely unknown pharaoh of the XII dynasty, and the name of Kemen, the one who "administers the pantries". On the lid of the jewel box was an invocation to Sobek, the "lord of Hent", a place in the Fayyum where the kings of the XII dynasty were particularly active.
In 1912, after five years of work in Thebes, Carnavon was convinced that it was useless to continue searching in the Valley of the Kings and he asked to be able to dig elsewhere, somewhere in Lower Egypt, preferably in the delta. The Cairo authorities pointed him to Xois, at the mouth of the Nile. Carter reluctantly followed his employer; but the adventure lasted only two weeks. It was as if the gods had decided it: hundreds of venomous cobras took up the defenses of ancient Xois; each stroke of the pickaxe risked costing a life; besides, the heat was tremendous. Carnavon gave up. For the Lord, the question therefore arose as to whether it was worth asking for a new concession. The most attractive locations were firmly in French, German or American hands, and were Samara, Amarna, Thebes. According to Carter, the possibility of discovering something in the Valley was far from exhausted. But Carnavon objected. Howard didn't change his mind, he managed to convince the boss to make a new one last attempt. The Lord had applied for permission to go back searching in the Valley of the kings, that the First World War broke out. Carter was far from spared from the First World War, but of all archaeologists he had the best of luck. As a king's messenger, a diplomatic courier operating in the Near East, Carter was based at his headquarters in Cairo. He tapped the walls inch by inch and remained listening, as if he were waiting for an answer from inside. Then, in the company of some fellahs, he moved two kilometers away, in a rock gully located in the Libyan desert. The paths recessed between the peaks, the remains of ancient stone huts and hieratic rock writings had given rise to Howard's suspicion that officials and workers of the Theban necropolis had worked in that place. “My initial searches,” Carter writes in his account, “were limited to a general reconnaissance of the area, starting from the southeast to the northwest, proceeding slowly, one valley after another. With the help of a modest staff, I sounded out wherever I thought possible the existence of a tomb, never mind if it had already been despoiled by the looters I knew to be very active among the natives. Next to the rock writings I had my initials and the date carved: HC 1915. Anyone who searches after me must know when the last attempt was made to annotate or copy them. In the side valleys Howard discovered several rock tombs and numerous inscriptions, all of minor importance. We must also add that he had not pinned excessive hopes on the enterprise, the Wadi being too out of the way, too "sterile". The rulers had been buried in the Valley of the Kings; the nobles and the wealthy slept eternal sleep at Der el-Medina or al-Kurna. The rulers had been buried in the Valley of the Kings; the nobles and the wealthy slept eternal at Der el-Medina or al-Kurna, so very little to unearth. Yet in Wadi and Taka and Zeide, Carter never stopped searching for a moment. But nothing, absolutely nothing, found him to bear any trace of human work. Carter himself felt pushed by an unknown force that made him climb walls hundreds of meters high. Arrived at the top, he stopped to observe the gully and listened to the bouncing pebbles. The crash usually lasted a few seconds. Once, however, the flight of a stone was truncated in half compared to that of the others. Carter looked down, leaning forward so he could see down the perpendicular wall. From up there he could see where the stone had stopped: it was a small rocky ledge. But he saw something else: a stone step, which was undoubtedly the first one dug into the rock: Seventy meters from the valley floor, forty meters from the top, a stairway penetrated the mountain. Who had hidden it and placed it in such an awkward position?
Using a rope, Carter let himself be lowered down twenty meters, up to a ledge five wide, then – through a crevasse – he descended even further below. He found himself in front of the stone staircase. But the hope of finding oneself in a moment in the chamber of a sepulcher crammed with gold was dashed: the corridor which at the foot of the steps seemed to advance in a straight line into the heart of the mountain was cluttered with rubble from floor to ceiling, which was two more meters and twenty. Under it the human moles had drilled a tunnel, through which one could advance by crawling on one's belly. Howard didn't think twice about where the tunnel might end, or what meaning or purpose it had: he armed himself with a carbide lamp and, pushing it forward, penetrated like a snake towards the unknown. The tunnel became interminable: curves, ascents, descents: it could only have been dug by the violators, a tunnel-probe. After an advance of twenty-nine meters, Howard found the tunnel interrupted. The thief had stopped there. Certain that he was on the trail of an important discovery, Carter decided to clear the corridor. The men he had would be enough. The debris could very well spill them into the valley, a stone's throw away. Howard solved the problem in a technically complicated way: with the aid of the beasts of burden, he had some beams dragged to the top of the rock, from where he lowered them onto the rock ledge in front of the entrance, to build a structure supporting an arm with a hoist capable of lifting one man at a time from the valley floor and placing him back down. Working two or three people per shift, Carter organized a continuous cycle (day and night for three weeks). Five stone steps led to a portal, from which a seventeen-metre corridor started which, slightly downhill, penetrated the mountain up to an anteroom of nine square metres; a short passage on the right led to a chamber of the sarcophagus (5.40 x 5.30, 3 metres tall). In the center of this chamber, after clearing a great deal of rubble, Howard found a yellow sandstone sarcophagus. It was empty. The lid rested on the shorter side. Numerous hieroglyphics gave notice of the owner of that unreachable labyrinth. “The crown princess, full of grace and benevolence, sovereign of all countries, daughter and sister of the king, consort of god, great royal consort, sovereign of the Two Countries, Hatshepsut”. Carter was dazed. But wasn't she the sovereign, whose tomb he - thirteen years earlier - had laboriously unearthed in the Valley? By further examining the chamber that housed the coffin, Carter was able to clarify the riddle. He writes: “No there was the slightest sign that anyone had been buried there, nothing except the necks of two jars, such as were used by tomb-builders. Everything testified that the works, at a certain point, had not continued…”.
Here is the reason: Hatshepsut had that solitary tomb built when she was still the wife of her half-brother Thutmosi II: her husband died (April 30, 1940 BC) and assumed the powers of pharaoh, the eccentric queen demanded a tomb in the Valley of the Kings (at Biban el Moluk) and ordered that the eagle's nest in the rock be abandoned. In January 1917 Carter completed the works in Wadi, Taka and Zeide. He was called back to Cairo; there was a need for his work as a diplomatic courier. One problem remained unsolved: the sarcophagus weighed tons; how had they managed to bring it up there? In parentheses: it was never known. As soon as he had done his duty as a soldier, Howard returned to the Valley of the Kings. The failure of all previous efforts made him even more convinced that he must work with intensity and tenacity. To probe the ground with new excavations he lacked the financial means and manpower. Without an authorisation from the Lord he could not begin. In order not to waste time, he built a house on the road that led to the Valley; it was to serve him and Carnavon as a home-office-laboratory. It was Howard who designed it; the execution of the work was entrusted to some old men of el-Kurna unfit for war.
Due to the war, archaeological and scientific activities were blocked for a long time. Carter also had to limit his polls. Although the conflict raged and it was suicidal to face the sea, Carnavon tried several times to reach the country of the Nile. He finally arrived in Cairo, after an adventurous journey, exactly on the day in which the Turks attacked the Suez Canal. Without delay he wanted to speak to Carter. His concern was where to dig. Howard, taking a map of the valley out of his jacket pocket, pointed to a spot marked with a cross. Carnavon was disappointed! But how? Still in that Valley?
A few days after the end of the '15-'18 war they embarked to reach Upper Egypt. Carter resumed digging where he had left off four years earlier, a short distance away, but el-Kurna's men rummaged for only a couple of days; the rock stopped them. The Earl of Carnavon believed that, from an archaeological point of view, the Valley of the Kings no longer had a future. There was, said the Fayyum, the gigantic oasis on the edge of the Libyan desert: better in terms of climate, less inaccessible, more hospitable than the arid Valley full of burials. Having noticed his companion's opposition, Carnavon personally coordinated the preparations for the expedition. Everything was ready for the departure already set, when a revolt broke out in the Fayyum which pushed the country towards anarchy. For Europe there was only one place, where a certain tranquility existed: Cairo. Carnavon had to postpone the date of departure for the Fayyum; Carter didn't regret it. In Cairo the Lord waited patiently for a few weeks, then he fully realized that it was unthinkable to start work by that winter: he returned to London. Carter's big break had come.
November 5, 1922. London. Alan Gardiner professor of oriental languages, Hebrew and Arabic, is in great demand. Secretary of the Egypt Exploration Society, he is working on an Egyptian grammar. He rings the phone. It is Lord Carnavon. “Look,” Carnavon says, “I received a telegram from Carter: “I have finally found something wonderful in the Valley of the Kings. Extraordinary tomb with intact seals. I wait until your arrival”. “Do you think it could be the burial of Tut-ankh-Amon?” the Lord asked impatiently. Gardiner replied that he did not have precise knowledge about the XVIII dynasty, but this could not be excluded. Carnavon already asked to leave for Egypt with him, but Gardiner replied that before the new year he could not leave. But what had happened in the Valley of the Kings? Carter had spent the summer of 1922 in London in shattered spirits. Judging from Carnavon's attitude, the Lord was no longer willing to finance excavations in the Valley. "It is impossible for me to continue to give support to an activity which has proved to be practically sterile”. Closed. Archaeologist Carter's career was over. Mercilessly the Lord had told him exactly what Howard feared. "My lord", Carter said excitedly, "the persistent failure has not affected my belief that the Valley hides at least one tomb, certainly that of Tut-ankh-Amon". “I believe it,” Carnavon said, “but ... "You know there's proof," Carter interrupted and spread a card in front of him. Carnavon knew it. On it the exhumer had marked the excavations and searches of all seasons, for each square meter of land. Superficially viewed, this map could give the impression that all excavation possibilities were truly exhausted. But Howard pointed to a small triangle and said: “Under the entrance to the tomb of Ramses IV are the remains of masonry foundations which belonged to ancient stone huts, presumably built by builders to survey the underlying ground. Only when I have cleared this triangle will I be convinced that my work in the Valley is done." Another season of excavations to be financed, therefore. It didn't make sense to Carnavon. He refused. Howard begged him to at least let him search at his own expense, but using the grant in the Lord's name, the workers and the equipment. If, at the end of the season, I haven't found anything, I will leave the Valley of the Kings with a clear conscience. But if I were to make a discovery, it will belong to you, as it is written in the concession”: Carnavon felt moved. Let Carter dig and pass the costs on him? No, he couldn't. He shook his hand: "All right, Howard, see you in the Valley, but at my expense": Carter was happy. He never expected to be able to achieve so much. Carter realized this was his last season of digging: either he found the forgotten pharaoh or failure would end his career as an archaeologist.
Arriving in Luxor on October 28, 1922, Howard put the old team of excavators back together.
Work began on November 1st. Under the sepulchral entrance of Ramses IV, freed from the rubble, the foundations of the huts erected three thousand years earlier by the necropolis builders came to light. Carter had them removed.
On November 3, the foundations were gone. The following morning, when he arrived at the construction site, he didn't hear the usual noise of picks and shovels: something must have happened. The foreman led the way and showed him a step in the rock, right where the foundations had been removed. Years of failure had made the exhumer skeptical: "I could not believe that we had finally discovered a tomb": They worked like crazy until the afternoon of the following day to unearth twelve steps and the upper part of a walled up doorway. Howard could not understand: in thirty years he had found many tombs, but never with a sealed portal. The thousand-year-old mortar bore the seals; Carter recognized those from the city of the dead: the jackal with nine captives; the others he could not decipher, he assumed they belonged to Ramses IX: Great became the tension. They worked like crazy until the afternoon of the following day to unearth twelve steps and the upper part of a walled-up doorway. Successful, where for tens of centuries everyone had failed? How could he discover an inviolate pharaonic last abode? It seemed to Carter that they were working too slowly. He, who in the past had been calm itself, was seized by a sort of fever: he had to speed up: he yawned and carried the baskets full of debris himself. Then he pushed the collaborators aside, grabbed hammer and chisel, drilled a hole in the wall under the upper crossbeam, so that an electric bulb could be inserted. Then, shielding his eyes with her hand, he took a look inside. He felt disappointed, but also encouraged. You could see a corridor filled with rubble. Clear evidence that the burial had never been attacked by violators? During the New Empire it was customary to saturate the passages with debris, after having buried the mummy precisely to protect it from the thiefs. Though Howard still didn't know whose final resting place it was, he decided to not immediately break through the part that blocked the portal. But, invisible behind him was the Earl of Carnavon; the money belonged to him, the money he had been living on for fifteen years. Meanwhile dusk had fallen. Carter ordered workers to cover the steps with debris. More than real was the danger of a nocturnal attack. He only walked away from the burial when he had assigned guard duty. The next morning he had the telegram we already know sent from Luxor.
Carnavon immediately replied that he would come as soon as possible. Meanwhile Howard completed the preparations. Though he'd told the workers not to say a word, he knew the secret would reach Luxor within twenty-four hours.
On 18 November he took the train to Cairo: he personally brought the news of the find to the Antiquities Office, but he also needed tools and packing material. The hope of meeting the Lord in the capital did not materialize. The ship was late. Howard returned to Luxor. Carnavon and Evelyn arrived two days later.
It was November 24, 1922. The steps were immediately freed. Sixteen stone steps, modest perhaps, but which led him up the slope of happiness. Now that the portal was no longer walled up he saw more seals below. They had escaped him, because he had dug up the last four steps later. Two feet below, rings with the name, the sun sign, and the beetle appeared. Tut-ankh-Amun, there was no doubt! The Lord and the archaeologist embraced. A few minutes after they embraced, Howard pointed fearfully at the wall that blocked the entrance. He didn't say a word, just kept his finger pointed at a smear on the portal, top right. The Lord also noticed it, illuminated by the oblique rays of the sun: a hole, half a meter in diameter, plastered over at a later time, perhaps even twice. No one would have been able to express what the unfortunate exhumer was feeling at that moment. Triumph and defeat, inextricably intertwined. Howard's desperation was even greater than that of the Lord, who had in fact missed a detail: in freeing the last steps, fragments and a scarab had come to light with the names of Thutmosi III, Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. Was it a hiding place of furnishings hidden by some grave robber?
November 25, 1922 the wall that closed the portal was demolished. The suspicion that the tomb had already been violated was confirmed. Impossible not to notice that the corridor was filled with rubble of different colors. The vault was a couple of meters high; in the upper left corner the predators had dug a tunnel, from which, however - observed Carter - they had been able to pass only small objects.
Around fifteen the next day, having removed the mass of debris, eight and a half meters from the entrance portal a second sealed door appeared. It too had a hole plugged with different plaster, but it was so small that it would have been very tiring for a man to penetrate. When Howard saw the ring with Tut-ankh-Amun's name on the seals, he began to hope again. Who knows, maybe the Forgotten One's final resting place was still intact. Carnavon saw Carter's hands tremble as he delicately set about chipping away at the top left of the sealed door. He at first saw nothing. Then pointedly, with an iron bar, he began to strike the hole. He rang the void. The chamber from which the wall separated him was not filled with debris. Howard lit a candle, held it in front of the small opening. The gust of hot air from inside made the flame waver. Contrary to what he had feared, there was no poisonous gas. In order to introduce the candle, Howard had to widen the breach. It took time, a long time. When he finished, Carnavon and Evelyn looked and gasped. Pushing the candle forward with the left, Carter put his head in as carefully as he could. As if from under a veil, fabulous things slowly emerged: strange animals staring at him, life-size men armed with sticks emerged from the shadows, precious coffers, luminous alabaster vases, parked carts waiting for the horses, graceful sofas with heads and animal paws invited to lie down. After allowing Carnavon to take a look, Carter demolished the Moor almost entirely. In the meantime the electrical system had been set up, and they were watching, enraptured like children, the story of a life that had taken place three thousand two hundred and sixty years ago. Carter wrote: "Our first impression is that the chamber we have already opened is only an antechamber of the Pharaonic mausoleum; in fact, having found the seals on the door, we think we will find Tut. The Turin papyri say - describing the tomb of Ramses IV - that it was customary to close the king's corpse in three coffins, as well as in the sarcophagus, and that the latter was in turn locked in a whole series of coffins. Since the door was not open - except for a small hole in the wall made by grave robbers and plugged by Ramses IX's necroguardians - , we have well-founded reason to hope that the pharaoh himself has not been violated, just as the golden objects have been found intact ..” . Without hesitation, Howard continued: “The find is particularly important precisely because, for the first time, it is a royal burial with the doors untampered with, sealed by Ramses IX's inspectors: Naturally great is our desire to break more seals; first, however, we must arrange all the exhibits in the antechamber. Until we're done, we beg archaeologists around the world to be patient. In a couple of months we hope to be able to start examining the other chambers”. It is surprising how Carter described the details of the future discovery. But he made a mistake when he spoke of the seals; mon were Ramesside those of the entrance portal; hole, its filling and plastering had taken place before. The seals subsequently affixed also bore the name of Tut-ankh-Amun. The indescribable disorder of the antechamber proved that the despoilers had turned it upside down: torn friezes, broken chests, stripped wood of the gold coverings. Human greed had left its mark. Evidently the gangsters must have been disturbed during the crime. Hence the unrest. But who were the tomb burglars? Why were they violating graves? Only the priests and necropolis builders of Der el-Medina knew the secrets of the burials. While the priests were required to officially transmit them to their successors, the builders of tombs, if they disclosed the news concerning the last royal residences, acted against the law; corruption must have been of decisive importance. When the ancient cemetery officials in charge of guarding the Valley realized that Tut's burial had been violated, they walled up the holes with bricks and plaster and set their seal in fresco: In a report sent to the "Times", Carnavon had stated that the the seals of the doors were from Ramses IX and therefore the break-in must have taken place in that period (1127-1109). James Henry Breasted, later commissioned by Carter to examine the seals, established that those attributed to Ramses IX were actually - albeit in a poor state of preservation - of Tut-ankh-Amon. It should be borne in mind that the tomb of the child-king was already forgotten when Ramses VI reigned (1142 - 1135). This is the only way to explain the fact that those who built the tomb of the sixth Ramesside pharaoh in the rock erected the huts over the sepulchral entrance of Tut, whose final home had certainly been violated immediately after construction.
Carter was not slow to notice, was beyond his strength and his capabilities. But it was far from easy to convince Carnavon that a whole team of archaeologists was needed if the burial had to be examined with scientific accuracy. The request of Howard was collected by an expedition of the New Yorker Metropolitan Museum, which, led by Arthur Mace, was completing the excavations begun in 1906 at Lisht. Lythgoe (head of the Egyptian section of that museum) gave his telegraphic assent. The Tut company, from private, became a limited liability company. The understanding between Mace and Carter was excellent. For two years he was his best support when it came to overcoming the many difficulties they gradually had to face. Then there was another archaeologist who proved to be a true friend: the American James Henry Breasted. Breasted received news of the discovery on December 7, 1922. Leaving by ship from Abu Simbel and landed in Aswan, he found a letter from Carnavon stuck in the post: informed him of the tomb found by Carter, he immediately left for Luxor. Arrived here, he heard of treasures, of an inviolate pharaonic tomb. More precisely, no one knew anything. The Egyptian newspapers had not yet reported it. Howard was missing, rumor had it that he had left for Cairo.
James Henry and his son Charles rented two donkeys and went to the Valley. As they passed the dark house Carter had built during his years of failure, Breasted couldn't help but think of his first meeting with Howard, almost twenty years first, a time Carter had spent moving up and down the archeology ladder. But the belief that Tut was buried in the Valley had never left him. No one more than Howard, therefore, deserved to succeed. The Americans were still far away when they saw the burial, immediately below the entrance to that of Ramses VI. It was surrounded by soldiers armed with rifles. In the center of the pit was a pile of rubble upon which they saw planted a limestone table with Carter's stylized Carnavon coat of arms in black. The draftsman's new assistant, AR Callender, was seated with a rifle on his knees, guarding the pile which evidently hid the entrance to the tomb. Nothing else could be seen. The following morning, Carter and Breasted met at the landing stage on the Nile, where the American ship was at anchor. Carter immediately began to tell: “Do you think that I had already dug twice a very short distance from the first step. The first time, years ago, when I was digging with Davis. Then he proposed to choose a different place, which offered him better chances. The second time, just a few seasons ago: Lord Carnavon and I decided to suspend searches in this area so as not to continually hinder the flow of visitors who come to the tomb of Ramses VI”: As he spoke, he fumbled in his jacket pocket, took out a old letter on which he began to draw the plan of the antechamber. Then with his pencil he lightly touched several internal points of the rectangle, naming some treasures that were there. Breasted expressed a desire to take a look at the grave. “We'll come back and clear the entrance,” Carter replied, “in two or three days we'll put a steel door on and fix other little things. Come back in three days. Three days later, Breasted, in order not to arouse the slightest suspicion and not to attract a crowd of curious onlookers, pretended to be a listless and idler tourist. He climbed the path well known to him and, having reached the top, descended the rocky slope. Carter was waiting for him. The pit had changed its appearance. In place of the pile of rubble was a well; they had built a small shack. Next to Howard stood Callender, Burton, Mace and Herbert Winlock. They went down the sixteen steps to the gate covered with a white canvas. Inside the tomb were the lights turned on, projecting the iron bars of the gate onto the canvas. There was a shadow of it. The gate was closed with four padlocks and chains. Everyone watched as Carter laboriously opened it. They jumped when he said: "Why don't you come in?": Superfluous words, of course, but the emotion and tension were such that it was difficult for everyone to act naturally; the movements were awkward, costing effort.
It seemed that no one wanted to accept the invitation; Howard turned and looked them in the face: they had tears in their eyes. Carter was crying too. Then they began to shake hands, smile at each other, wiping their cheeks. It was not easy for Howard to convince Carnavon that the antechamber could not be cleared overnight. The uniqueness of the finds demanded that he photograph himself there, draw and catalogue, before starting to remove them. The Lord judged the wait excessive. He returned to England and asked Carter to give him the date of the resumption of work. The massive gate, similar to that of a prison, which separated the entrance from the steps, was opened to bring down the chairs. Once the upper part of the wall was demolished, a sort of all-gold wall appeared, but by removing the rest of the masonry, it was seen that it was a matter of a gigantic external chest or tabernacle. Similar chests had already been read on the ancient papyri, but this one was real, luminous with gold and blue, with a volume almost equal to that of the second chamber, of which it grazed the ceiling. Inside, between the walls and sides of the casket, ran a passage about sixty centimeters wide.
The first to enter were Carter and Carnavon and immediately after Alan Gardiner with his son: “we went as far as the first corner on the left and found ourselves on the front side of the chest, in front of the two massive doors. Carter had slid the bolt and opened both doors. We could see that inside the large outer casket was another, also double-doored with intact seals. In all, we counted four chests of protection, one inside the other, covered with gold; the last one contained the stone sarcophagus: however, we were only able to see him a year later”. The real work began right then: to recover the treasures.
The job lasted ten years, ten years of discoveries, spent collecting, conserving and enhancing the finds. A decade of hard physical labour, stifling heat, intense intellectual toil; ten years of obstacles, of political disputes, punctuated, harassed by visitors. During that period the government had changed five times; the minister who was in charge of Egyptian Antiquities had changed just as much.
In 1932, after forty years of activity in Egypt, Howard returned to London. He was sick. The impossible desert climate, the exhausting underground work, but above all the clashes and emotions deriving from the discovery of the century had undermined his health: he suffered from circulatory disorders. He was fifty-eight, but he moved like an old man. Retired to his home in Albert Court, friendless, he took to living as a hermit. He felt that, having completed his task, he no longer had anything to expect from his own existence. As usual he was alone again; his era, which fed solely on the sensational, had already forgotten him. The only one who had contact with him in recent years was his niece Phyllis Walzer, who begged and begged him to value the papers on which he had annotated with such takes care of every detail of the Tut company. But Carter was tired; his own work had become superior to the forces that remained in him. Valuing the cards meant redoing everything, starting over, and he was weak, even financially. He calculated that thirty thousand British pounds would be needed to produce a scientific publication. There is no information that this happened. The three books he wrote, which concern recovery, were translated into German and Dutch. The only source of income during the last part of its existence were the shares of interest. Scientists laughed at his books: they weren't scientific, they had been written for the great masses, who in turn showed disappointment, because the author had limited himself to describing purely and simply what the tomb contained, without the slightest talk about himself and all the complications that had filled the chronicles. Another reason for bitterness for Howard.
On March 2, 1939, Carter died, but few knew about it. The London "Times", which had sold news of him all over the world, announced his disappearance the next day by publishing the name of the list of deceased on page sixteen: “Mr. Howard Carter, the great Egyptologist who became famous for having taken part in the exciting events which led to the discovery of the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amon what so much prestige has given to archeology, the one who then examined and studied the burial that came to light, died yesterday at his home in London ... Discovering the tomb was in itself a triumph, and it was, to an even greater extent, when it was realized that it was inviolate; for Egyptologists, now accustomed to being satisfied with looted burials, it was a great event. The discovery moved the civilized world more than any other archaeological unearth has ever done...”.
His funeral was quite poor. Few people accompanied the former hero of the nation to the cemetery. Among the few the only woman who had counted for him and who had been so unattainable: Evelyn Carnavon: the true and only love of his life, the daughter of the Lord. He called her Eve. He on the banks of the Nile, she in England, they exchanged tender letters, often one every two days. “Or why aren't you here next to me” the girl sobbed. But Eve and Howard knew that English etiquette did not allow a wandering exhumer to marry a lord's daughter. Love remained platonic. Carter died a bachelor.
