Carter

At twenty past three on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth of November 1922, in the antechamber of an unrobbed Eighteenth-Dynasty royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor in Upper Egypt, Howard Carter, the forty-eight-year-old Kensington-born Egyptologist, in his sixth season of patient excavation under the patronage of George Herbert, fifth Earl of Carnarvon, opened a breach in the sealed door of the inner chamber of the tomb of Tutankhamun, eleventh king of the Eighteenth Dynasty (reigned c.1332–1323 BC, died at about nineteen years of age). The tomb (designated KV62) had been sealed for three thousand two hundred and forty-five years and was the only intact royal tomb yet discovered in the Valley. Carnarvon, his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, and Carter's assistant Arthur Callender stood behind him at the breach. Carnarvon asked, by Carter's own published account three months later, can you see anything? Carter, by his own published account, replied: yes, wonderful things. The discovery was the most consequential single archaeological event of the twentieth century. Tutankhamun is, by every careful judgment of the Egyptological literature, the most-recognised ancient Egyptian in the world.

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