Carter · 1922
Wonderful things
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.
It is a quarter past three on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth of November 1922, in the antechamber at the foot of sixteen steps cut into the Valley of the Kings floor near Luxor in Upper Egypt, in the lamplight of two oil lanterns and a electric torch run from a portable battery. He is forty-eight years old. He is Howard Carter, born at Kensington, London, on the ninth of May 1874, son of Samuel Carter the animal painter (a Punch-magazine illustrator) and Martha Sands of Norfolk, schooled at home (he never attended formal school), entered Egyptology as a Norfolk apprentice tracer in 1891 under the patronage of Lord Amherst of Hackney, in his thirty-second season of work in the Valley of the Kings.
Behind him at the breach are George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon (sixty-six, his financial patron since 1907, who has come up from Luxor on the telegram Carter sent on the sixth of November, at last have made wonderful discovery in Valley, a magnificent tomb with seals intact, recovered same for your arrival, congratulations), Carnarvon's daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert (twenty), and Carter's assistant Arthur Callender (engineer of the Egyptian railways, fifty-six).
He has, on the sealed door of the inner chamber of the tomb (the antechamber having been opened at the foot of the stairs on the twenty-fourth of November), made a breach with a chisel at the top-left corner of the door. The breach is about a hand's-width across. The oil lantern is in his right hand. He has raised the lantern to the breach and is looking through it.
He thinks: the antechamber is full of stacked grave-goods. The antechamber was the storeroom of the tomb. The inner chamber is the burial chamber proper.
He thinks: if the inner chamber is intact (and the seals at the door are unbroken), I am looking at the first unrobbed royal burial of the New Kingdom found in archaeological history.
He thinks: Lord Carnarvon is at my elbow waiting for me to speak. The speakable answer in this moment will be the public report of this moment forever.
Carnarvon, who has been holding his breath, says: can you see anything? Carter, by his own published account in the third volume of his Tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen (1933), replies, after a pause: yes, wonderful things. The lantern light, by his own description, is reflected back at him by the yellow gold of three life-size couches, the gilded chariots, the alabaster vases, the inlaid throne with the painted relief of the young king and his queen Ankhesenamun, the two life-size guardian-figures of the king flanking the door of the burial chamber proper.
The burial chamber itself was opened on the seventeenth of February 1923 in the presence of about twenty invited guests and the Egyptian Department of Antiquities officials. The intact triple-shrine was opened over the next three years; the innermost coffin of solid gold (the 110-kilogram gold coffin) was opened on the twenty-eighth of October 1925. The gold death-mask of Tutankhamun (now in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo, the single most-recognised ancient Egyptian object in the world) was first seen at that opening.
Lord Carnarvon died on the fifth of April 1923 at the Hotel Continental in Cairo, of blood poisoning following an infected mosquito-bite on his cheek; the tabloid legend of the Curse of the Pharaoh dates from the report of his death. The register of the tomb's contents (5,398 objects) was completed by Carter and his team of Egyptian and British assistants in 1932. The tomb is, in the Valley of the Kings, the most-visited ancient Egyptian tomb. Howard Carter himself was never offered, by the British honours system, a knighthood (the reason has been argued by Carter's biographers for ninety years; the conventional view is that the 1924 dispute with the Egyptian government over the disposition of the find, which Carter had wished to share between Britain and Egypt and which the Egyptian state correctly kept entirely, made him politically inconvenient in London). He died at his house at 19 Collingham Gardens, Kensington, on the second of March 1939, sixty-four years old, of Hodgkin's lymphoma. He is buried at Putney Vale Cemetery in south-west London. The inscription on the headstone is from the Wishing Cup of Tutankhamun (one of the alabaster pieces from the antechamber, now in the Egyptian Museum): May your spirit live, may you spend millions of years, you who love Thebes, sitting with your face to the north wind, your eyes beholding happiness.