Howard Carter and the Discovery of Tutankhamun’s Tomb

On 4 November 1922, after five years of fruitless searching in the Valley of the Kings, the English archaeologist Howard Carter crouched at the bottom of a flight of freshly cut stone steps, held a candle to a hole in a sealed door, and saw gold. It was the most spectacular archaeological discovery of the twentieth century, the nearly intact tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun, designated KV62, and it transformed the way the world thought about ancient Egypt. The definitive modern account is T. G. H. James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun (1992); the original documentary record is Carter’s three-volume Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen (1923-1933).

A small but persistent myth puts the famous “peering in” moment on November 4, 1922. Carter’s own diary, which is harder to read than people realize because the entries are out of chronological order, makes it clear that the first step of the staircase was uncovered on the 4th. The actual breach in the blocked doorway, with Carnarvon watching, came on 26 November. I mention this because the 4 November date is now in every schoolbook, and it is wrong about the most dramatic moment in the discovery.

Howard Carter: A Self-Taught Archaeologist

Carter was born in 1874 in Kensington, London, the youngest of eleven children of a painter of animal portraits. He was sent to Egypt at seventeen to work for the Egyptian Exploration Fund and never left. By the age of twenty-five, as James records (Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun, 1992, pp. 5-22), he was already serving as the chief inspector of monuments in Upper Egypt, the most senior British archaeological position in the country.

In 1891, Carter began working at the Egyptian antiquities service and rose through the ranks. He supervised excavations in the Valley of the Kings and elsewhere, served as inspector general of Upper Egypt, and was the first person in modern times to enter two royal tombs (those of Thutmose IV and Hatshepsut). He learned hieroglyphs, he trained Egyptian workers, and he developed a near-supernatural feel for the desert.

By 1914, however, Carter had fallen out of favor with Egyptian authorities and was in a low, frustrated period of his career. He had been dismissed from his government post after a series of disputes, and his reputation in Egypt had suffered. It was at this low point that Lord Carnarvon, an English aristocrat with a passion for Egyptology, arrived to rescue him.

The Carnarvon-Carter Partnership

George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, had been collecting Egyptian antiquities since 1906 and was looking for an experienced archaeologist to lead excavations. He hired Carter in 1907, and for the next five years the two worked together, with limited success, at various sites. World War I interrupted their work, and they did not return to the field until 1917.

Carnarvon’s concession, granted by the Egyptian government, gave him the right to excavate in the Valley of the Kings. The Valley had already been heavily worked since the 1880s, and most Egyptologists believed there was nothing left to find. Carter disagreed. He was convinced that one tomb, somewhere in the Valley, had not yet been discovered, and that it would belong to Tutankhamun.

The Long Search

Between 1917 and 1922, Carter and Carnarvon’s team methodically combed the Valley. They dug trenches, cleared debris, and examined every square meter of the area. Year after year, the team found almost nothing of importance. By 1922, Carnarvon’s patience was exhausted, and the permit for the dig was due to expire.

Carter asked for one more season. Carnarvon, ill and doubtful, agreed, and arrived from England to see what would be the last season of his life. The team began work in early November 1922, focusing on a small area of debris near the entrance to the tomb of Ramesses VI. They had dug there in previous seasons without success.

The Discovery

On 4 November 1922, workers clearing the last of the rubble exposed a step cut into the bedrock. Carter ordered the rest of the team to be careful. As more and more steps were uncovered, a sealed doorway became visible. The seal showed the cartouche of Tutankhamun, repeated again and again. Carter sent a telegram to Carnarvon: “At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; reopen with ceremonies; congratulations.” (The wording is preserved in James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun, 1992, p. 142.)

Carnarvon arrived in Alexandria on 18 November, and the next day, in the presence of officials, journalists, and (in later versions of the story) a small white dog named Susie, Carter made the first breach in the blocked doorway. He peered in, and his eyes, after some minutes, slowly grew wider.

“What do you see?” Lord Carnarvon asked, in the famous version recorded years later.

“Wonderful things,” Carter replied.

What he saw was a corridor filled with stone and wooden objects, and, at the far end, a second sealed door. Beyond it, on 26 November, the team broke into the burial chamber itself, a small room packed wall to wall with shrines, chariots, couches, and the golden shrine that contained the king’s mummy. The sealed second door was finally opened on 16 February 1923 (James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun, 1992, pp. 156-158).

The next several months revealed that the tomb had not been looted in antiquity, and that the riches inside were beyond anything anyone had imagined. There were Canopic jars, golden coffins, a funeral mask, thrones, beds, statues, jewelry, and a great quantity of food and wine for the king’s afterlife. The full list would eventually run to 5,398 separate items.

The Long, Troubled Aftermath

The clearing and cataloguing of the tomb took more than ten years. Carter was meticulous, refusing to be rushed and refusing to make concessions to public excitement. He died in 1939, only a few years after publishing the third volume of his massive three-volume report, most of the tomb’s contents, by the time of his death, had still not been fully published.

Carnarvon, sadly, did not live to see even the first year of clearing. He died on 5 April 1923, in Cairo, of an infected mosquito bite, an event that, together with the deaths of several other members of the expedition, sparked the Tutankhamun “curse” legend. The mummy of Carnarvon is now in Highclere Castle, the setting of Downton Abbey.

Carter himself died largely unrecognized, and his grave in Putney Vale Cemetery in London was unmarked for many years. A small stone bearing only the words “Howard Carter, Egyptologist,” was placed there in 1977.

The Significance of the Discovery

The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb was the first time in modern history that a royal Egyptian tomb had been found nearly intact. It revolutionized popular interest in Egyptology, transformed the way museums thought about Egyptian art, and gave the world a direct, vivid window into the burial customs of the New Kingdom of Egypt.

For professional archaeologists, the tomb’s greatest contribution was the sheer volume of well-preserved material it contained. As Reeves has shown (The Complete Tutankhamun, 1990, rev. 2008), the objects, especially the wooden and textile items that rarely survive in Egyptian tombs, gave scholars an entirely new understanding of daily life, religious practice, and royal ideology in the late Eighteenth Dynasty. It is, by almost any measure, the most important single archaeological find of the modern era.