Howard Carter
Howard Carter
| Howard Carter was seven years old when his mother thought he should go to school; Samuel, his father did not allow it thinking he was too weak. A teacher was called to the house to give to the little weakling the rudiments of knowledge. Mother Martha filled her son with attention, always afraid that he would get sick. He couldn’t play with other children. Samuel Carter’s success as a painter of animals was attributed to the fact that photography was still too expensive; the high-ranking, mad on horses made him paint the thoroughbreds, and hung them on the walls of their country-houses. As the animals were his only friends, Howard spent his free time in his father’s menagerie, behind their house. According to his parent, his son’s timid attempts to imitate him painting imprisoned birds were an “hereditary talent”. The whole family spent the summer months in the country ( Swaffham, Norfolk), where the painter was born. Then Carter junior began to move from village to village. One day in the summer in 1891, in Didlington, he met Lady Amherst of Hackney. The baroness told him that if he wanted to be a painter she had an occupation for him: the famous exhumer Flinders Petrie and his young assistant Percy Newberry, that came from an expedition in central Egypt, had brought the previous winter, hundreds of penciled sketches, so the poor Newberry was day and night in the British Museum finishing them in a good copy. The lady offered to help him. Carter answered that he was more than willing to do it. Accompanied by his father, he left for London and presented himself at the British Museum. They engaged him for three months. He liked to copy the sketches; his employers were satisfied. When, in October 1891, for the Egypt Exploration Fund, Newberry prepared to return to the Land of the Pharaohs, he informed the committee that it would have been cheaper to bring along also the young copyist, who would have been able to draw from reality, while the exhumers would have had more time to search. Lord Amherst agreed to pay for the expenses as long as Carter could also help to dig besides draw: to collect ancient objects was a passion of his. In the following months he and Newberry worked on the rocky burials in Beni Hassan and in Der al-Bersha; Carter had only drawn as it was impossible to use shovels, so he decided to go to Tell El-Amarna, where he hoped to unearth something for Lord Amherst. When he got to Amarna he went to the director of the excavations, Petrie, that gave him the task to draw. But Carter from the first day said he wanted to participate actively in the excavations. So Petrie assigned him a piece of land near the outside wall of the great temple in Aton. The land assigned to him had been examined for a long time, but Carter worked fervently: he had to find something, he could not let down his patron. After the third day, when Petrie seeing Carter’s enthusiasm, decided to assign to him a piece of land that nobody had ever dug, Carter happily showed him the pieces of a statue of a queen and after a few hours he unburied many torsos passed through the previous examinations. Carter’s enthusiasm and youthful surge had made him gain Flinders Petrie’s friendship. Carter was fascinated by Petrie. Ah, if he would have become as him. But the initial luck seemed to abandon him: Carter worked like a madman, but unfortunately after weeks of work he found only three blocks of stone, evidently pieces of a big tombstone, on one Akhenaton’s head was recognizable . Petrie tried to explain to Carter that the foundations that were coming to light were those of the biggest temple in the world. But Carter was disappointed. So he started to draw the plan in scale. Petrie thought that the youngster would have gained a large sum, if he would have included the sketch of the temple in the comprehensive plan of the ancient city, a task that nobody had ever tried before. The capable designer didn’t hesitate, walking for thirty, forty and often fifty kilometers a day, he measured, he surveyed, he draw and, in a few weeks he prepared his first cartographical document of Tell-el-Amarna, Akhenaton, the ancient capital. The whole plan of the city was so perfect, that Petrie told Carter to send it to Cairo, to the Antiques Office. Carter followed the advice, he took the urban plan to Minia and mailed it. It disappeared ever since: weeks of hard work went into smoke. For some time Carter had understood that perseverance was the first quality for an exhumer; then he also knew the second quality: imagination. The determination with which Howard worked soon gave its results: even he began to unearth useful finds, always more often, until at the end of the season he reached the number of seventeen. One evening, during the usual exam of the objects found, Petrie showed Carter a ring, a ring with a seal, on the cartouche there was a king’s name: “Tut-ankh-Amon”- “Amon is as alive as ever”. It was the forgotten Pharaoh’s name. Tut’s ghost had been in the archaeological scene for many years, every once in a while his name – or a trace of it was found. Petrie was the first to work systematically on the Forgotten’s chronology. At 20 years old, Carter got to Luxor, he introduced himself to Edward Faville and worked for him for almost 6 years. He learned to do his activity independently, working with scientific precision, a wonder at the limit of the desert happened to him: the queen Hatshepsut’s temple, Carter draw, built, photographed, documented, contemporarily assisting to a rebirth: a temple in ruins, forgotten, was resurrecting; history lived. At 25 years old Carter became inspector for Antiques in Upper Egypt and Nubia, with its center in Luxor. Now he had to control Karnak, Tebe, Edfu, Philae, Abu Simbel, the great temples and the biggest places of ancient culture. As the inspector for antiques, Carter had the power, but not the money until he met Theodore Davis. Together they traveled on the Nile and the inspector showed his empire to his guest. Davis said it would have been a pleasure to search in those places; if there were expenses he would not go back. Carter answered that he would have tried to do everything possible. Howard of course, would have been more than happy to work in an excavation, instead of working on the bills and preparing the wages. In October 3rd 1899, eleven of the 134 gigantic columns of the great temple in Karnak crumbled. They were colossal twenty-one meters high; the foundations of one of them had given way; the column had bent on a side and had dragged the others. Now it was necessary to put them back up. Carter also commanded the armed men that guarded the pharaohs’ burials already discovered in the Valley of the Kings. But each time, Howard Carter made an inspection on his donkey, he realized that he wasn’t the right man in the right places. You couldn’t reconstruct history in an office, you needed to move, get dusty and muddy in the desert, work with a shovel and a pick. Davis and Carter agreed rapidly: they would dig together, using the formers financial capital and the latter’s experience. Howard arranged that the wealthy American was allowed to dig in the Valley of the Kings. Maspero agreed reluctantly: in one point of view he feared that, if Carter would dedicate himself to digging, his work as an inspector would have suffered and, on the other hand, he thought that nothing more of archaeological importance could be found in the Valley of the Kings. Carter was adamant. In the first days of 1902, Carter began to search in the Valley of the Kings on his own. He began from the rocky wall at the soth-east of the valley. Although it was an inaccessible area, in 3 days he found what he was looking for: stone steps, the burial entrance, passage, the chamber with the sarcophagus, in short, Tuthosi’s IV resting place, carefully stripped (besides a few ornaments and a cart). While he was digging to find Tuthosi’s IV resting place, Howard found a cup in alabaster and a small azure scarabs with the queen Hatshepsut’s name on it. On February 2nd 1903, sixty meters north of Tuthmosi’s IV tomb, Carter found a rock on which there was the ring with Hatshepsut’s name; in that moment he was sure of finding himself in front of the eccentric queen’s burial. The opening of the rocky sepulcher was, concerning the technique, one of the most complicated works ever faced in archaeological research. Even if the tomb was stripped, unadorned and with no inscriptions, its discovery made Carter famous, because he succeeded in what Napoleon and Lepsius had failed. Howard Carter, the discoverer, was suddenly interesting, he was invited for teas, and to receptions. Four social classes were present in the square in Luxor: a high class of a few wealthy or nouveau-riche men; business men and state functionaries; a continuous flow of tourists and wealthy jovial people, and the great native population, half of which worked regularly, while the other half was busy thinking up stratagems to get money from the rich class and the tourists. The archaeologists, except for a few that were poor, were a kind of curiosity that the wealthy class contended. Around the end of 1905, in Saqqara, a group of drunk Frenchmen tried to enter the Serapeum, without the ticket, pushing the guard that resisted and didn’t let them go in. This stupid event with which at first Carter had nothing to do, got bad. When the chief-guard told Carter what was happening, he went rapidly to the sepulcher of the bulls and was involved in the fight and badly insulted. He ordered the guards to defend themselves and one of the Frenchmen got killed. Back in Cairo, the tourists protested against Carter and the General Consul of France demanded apologies. Howard refused, he said he had done his duty. The event ended with his resignation. Maspero tried in every way to persuade his inspector to apologize, to end the whole thing, but Carter preferred to resign. From a day to the other a promising archaeological career ended. At thirty-one years old Carter found himself unemployed. He had always felt less attracted by Saqqara, from Menfi and from Lower Egypt, compared to Luxor, to Tebe, to Upper Egypt and above all to “his” valley. On the way, he met Ahmed Gurgar. The ex-inspector didn’t hide his worries from his old foreman: no home, no work, no money. Ahmed gave him hospitality. Pondering over his bad fate, Howard remembered he had a profession, what he had learned: he began to paint landscapes and to sell them to the tourists. Although he realized that he was putting himself on the natives’ same level, he began to trade his paintings: he had to live someway. Theodore M. Davis was not insensible in seeing Howard forgotten: Davis knew he was the discoverer of Hatshepsut’s and Tutmosi’s IV tombs. One day, meeting him, he asked him how he was. Carter began to talk about himself with no reticence: what he earned was enough just not to die; but he wouldn’t go back to England, because in Egypt it was easier to be poor. Theodore wanted to know if he would like to dig and draw for him, paid of course. He was supposed to, in the following excavation season, to copy the inscriptions and to draw all the finds. The unemployed archaeologist had no other choice; he had to accept, though it was a depressing work. The first weeks of the new work were frustrating. Davis, who pratically could dig anywhere he wanted to in the valley, had used his picks in a side valley. From the 1st of November to the 20th of December 1904 he removed great quantities of sand and rocks, with no result: Carter’s pencil remained completely idle. After a short vacation for the Christmas and New Year holidays, Howard and the inspector Quibell found a small open space at the entrance of the Valley of the Kings, between Ramses’s XI (1099-1070) tomb- that, at the time was still attributed to Ramses XII, that didn’t exist. In those days, Gaston Maspero, General Director for Antiques, announced that he was going to visit Luxor. Remembering that Maspero had torpedoed Carter, Davis told the Englishman that he had to stay away from the valley, in the following days; it was necessary to avoid any confrontation. Maybe Maspero shouldn’t even know that the ex-inspector drew for Theodore. On February the 6th 1905, seeing Davis coming to the valley on his donkey, the foreman ran towards him shouting: “a step, a step!”. At the bottom of the hole the workers had found a stone step, from which, with no doubt, a tomb began. It was Tuja’s and Juja’s last home. Carter watched the event from afar, but as soon as Maspero left, Carter wanted to see for himself what he had heard about: he made sketches and designs that later Davis, in 1907, would have published by the London publisher Archibald Constable and Co.Ltd. Howard’s work had a great importance: up to then, in fact, Juja’s and Tuja’s tomb was the only one found with the original grave goods. Once a year the government committee for Antiques presided over by Maspero met and gave permission to excavate, as long as half the finds were consigned. Maspero wanted to help Carter. The dismissal had followed political pressures, but he hadn’t forgotten the young man’s ability. Event then he had done everything to avoid to send him away, begging him to apologize. So he introduced him to Lord Carnavon. When they met for the first time, their eyes were rather hostile; but for sixteen years they would be together, these two men so similar in appearance, but also so deeply different. Carnavon was then forty-one years old, he was very rich, full of life; for him archaeology was a fascinating way to pass his time, a way for him to show off objects: Carter, thirty-three years old, was poor, resigned, closed: a failed existence, from which any value had been taken away. At the beginning there was a kind of love-hate; they needed each other. Carter’s daily pay (an English pound) was yearly brought to four hundred: to be satisfied, to work and keep quiet. In the spring in 1907 Maspero gave the two Englishmen the permission to excavate in an area that was north-west of where Carnavon had searched until then, in Der el-Bahari. Right on the first day the Lord made it clear that he was the master, that he commanded; Carter was to be only a consultant. Carnavon, decided not only when but also where to excavate. He showed off proudly his diary, on which you can read: “We had been digging for ten days in Der el-Bahari, when we found an inviolate tomb. It had an extraordinary modern aspect. There were various coffins. One of them got our attention particularly: it was white, painted with care, it had a funeral blanket and, at its feet, a bunch of flowers. For twenty-five centuries nobody had touched them. Forgotten. We didn’t lose time in realizing why the ravagers had left that sepulcher: it had no valuable objects in it; evidently the coffins were of poor people that, had invested in it all the relatives’ money besides their own. After the funerals there was nothing left. The complete failure of the first excavations made Carnavon realize that, at least, it was necessary to use Carter’s experience and allow him to choose where to use the picks. The Lord however did not let go of the reins. The following year he picked out three places to excavate that seemed promising: 1° a few meters north of the mosque; 2° an area more to the north, among the tumulus of the Dra Abu el-Nagga village and the land fit for cultivation; 3° a territory in the north part of Der el-Bahari. Carnavon’s expectation was great. They started to dig a few meters north of the mosque. Nothing came to light on the first week, the second was also a failure, the Lord called Carter to report. Howard begged him to be patient. He was quite sure of being on the right path. The natives, especially those in el-Lurna, had talked about a tomb, that they had heard of; that meant that the burial existed; maybe it had already been stripped by them and everything sold on the black market. He went on searching. At the beginning of the third week, among great mounds of rubble, the tomb appeared. Although it was almost empty, it went back to the eighteenth dynasty; the inscriptions and relief, that were perfectly kept, gave it a great importance. From them it was possible to deduce that it was Teta-Ky’s (a king’s son) resting place. Besides many scenes, it had a whole-figure relief of the queen Ahmes-Nofretari, the pharaoh Amenofi’s I mother, one of the few queens that had been worshipped as a goddess. A great quantity of little wood funeral figures and small wood coffins for mummies (evidently the ravagers had thought them worthless), made the collector Carnavon start: he had found something at last! For three days Carter and his workers explored the subsoil at one hundred and fifty meters from the entrance to Der el-Bahari (in the north-east direction), he then discovered something else: a tomb from the XVII dynasty. Not finding the owner’s name and as that was the ninth burial of the area, Carter marked it with the number nine. It was necessary to remove a great mound of rubble and crock to be able to enter. First he found some stripped mummies: the violators had disturbed their eternal rest. In the antechamber there were two wood tablets, that Carter examined with attention: on the plaster that covered it a scripture in ieratico letters was painted. Howard asked for Francis Llewellyn Griffith’s help, Egyptologist in Oxford, one of the most capable linguists of the epoch. He told Carter that what he had found had an extraordinary historical importance and showing him the tablets he told him: “It’s the General Kamose’s story, that had rescued Egypt from the hykos domination. It’s a very important document”. Carnavon didn’t regard the find with particular enthusiasm: they weren’t collection objects; they were finds that were interesting only for history. In April 1908, at the end of the excavation season, the tomb number 9 was filled again with debris. Carter, that had explored only the ancient chamber, thought that in the niche in the sepulcher there could be the best part of the treasure and he feared if could be robbed. Howard writes:” But in 1909, to open the main chamber, we had to dig a lot, because the mound of rubble was very high and collapsed continually. We found only some pots, similar to the ones found in the antechamber; a child’s coffin, too ruined to be useful. The tomb was in an open space, in the middle of which there was the entrance to a corridor six meters long and excavated in a rock that led to the west of the rectangular chamber (probably the dead person had to use it as a warehouse). On the western side of the chamber there was a pit three meters deep, through which other two superimposed rooms could be reached. For me it’s not easy to imagine that the whole mound of crock found outside the sepulcher belonged to it: it was too small: I suppose that the best part of it came from nearby tombs, maybe bigger. Carter’s supposition was right. A few days later, a few centimeters , the workers bumped into a wall, that was perfectly kept. It was made of rocks and Carter brought to light initially ten meters, then twenty and finally forty meters of it. The wall, two meters and sixty wide, got always longer, it bent and the outline of a building appeared. They unearth the entrance at the north. On the inner side, the carved stone blocks proved that, originally, they had been part of a more ancient complex and they had been used to carry out the new project. It took the whole 1909 season to release the great building complex. The secrets to reveal were many. The Egyptologists came from all over the world and observed the perimeter walls, without being able to explain their meaning and their use. Carnavon was enthusiastic:” They, if joined to an only block named Senenmut queen Hatshepsut’s famous architect ), showed that the wall work found went back to the period when the queen had governed”. Her temple with the terraces had to be connected one way or the other to the construction Carter had discovered. To confirm it, the path that went perfectly straight to it, was enough. Carter remembered the buildings in Gise and in Abusir, and all at once both the meaning and the purpose of the building were clear. It was one of the so-called valley temples and was the entrance-building of the main temple. From here the visitor, going along the sphinxes path (all the statues had Hatshepsut’s head), could reach the entrance of the main temple, a pillar that today doesn’t exist. There was one thing that Howard didn’t know yet: the line that joined the valley temple to the main one was the continuation of the axis of Amon’s temple in Karnak.. The reason is still today a mystery. Under the foundation of the valley temple Carte found many simple tombs, excavated in the great rocks. Not one of them had escaped the thieves. Some of them had been visited twice, because the exhumers found traces that went back to the Middle Reign and finds from when Hatchepsut governed. Pieces of the same commemorative tombstone were found in two different tombs (number twenty-seven and number thirty-one). In the sepulcher marked with number twenty-five there was nothing to indicate the name or the epoch when he lived. Carnavon’s attention went to a bronze mirror with an ivory handle and to a gold and gem necklace; that was all. Howard Carter, instead, was busy with a couple of hundred little pieces of wood, ivory tiles, splinters of cedar and ebony. His experience told him that they were pieces of a jewel-box, that usually had inscriptions on, information on the owner. While the Lord explored the burials Howard stayed on his own for a couple of days and dedicated himself to recompose the ancient puzzle. He succeeded. His hypothesis was right. The jewel-box, besides being carefully carved, had Amenemhet’s IV name on it, he was a pharaoh of the XII dynasty almost completely unknown, and the name Kemen, who “administers the dispensations”. On the lid of the jewel-box there was an invocation to Sobek the “Lord of Hent”, a locality in Fayyum, where the sovereigns of the XII dynasty were particularly active. In 1912, after five years of work in Tebe, Carnavon was sure that it was useless to go on searching in the Valley of the Kings and asked to excavate somewhere else, some place in Lower Egypt, better if on the Delta. The authorities in Cairo indicated Xois, at the mouth of the Nile. Carter followed his employer, reluctantly,, but the adventure was only two weeks long. It seemed the gods’ will: hundreds of poisonous cobras defended ancient Xois; at every knock with the pick a life was at risk; moreover the heat was terrible. Carnavon gave up. The Lord wondered if it was worth asking new permission. The best places were held by the French, the Germans or the Americans, and they were Samara, Amarna, Tebe. According to Carter the possibility to find something in the valley of the Kings was anything but exhausted. But Carnavon was of the opposite opinion. Howard didn’t change his mind, he convinced his employer to make a new, last try. The Lord had just asked permission to go back to search in the Valley of the Kings, when the First World War began. Carter didn’t escape from this conflict, but among all the archaeologists he had the best fate. As the king’s messenger, as a diplomatic carrier in the near east, Carter had his base in the headquarter in Cairo. He covered every centimeter of the walls and listened, as if he expected an answer from inside. So with a fellah’s company, he moved two kilometers away, in a rocky canyon in the Libyan desert. The paths between the peaks, the rests of ancient stone huts and the rocky ieratic scriptures made Howard suspect that in that place officers and workers of the tebana necropolis had worked. “My first researches”, Carter wrote in his report, “were limited to a general reconnaissance of the area, from south-east to north-west, going on slowly, one valley after the other. Helped by a modest staff I made surveys wherever I thought a tomb could possibly be, it didn’t matter if it had been stripped by the marauders that were many among the natives. Next to the rocky inscriptions I sculptured my initials and the date: H.C. 1915. Anybody that searches after me must know when the last attempt was made to sign them or copy them. On the side valleys Howard discovered various tombs in the rock and many inscriptions, but all of minimal importance. It’s necessary to add that he didn’t have great expectations on the task, as the Wadi was too distant, too “barren”. The sovereigns were buried in the Valley of the Kings; the nobles and the rich slept the eternal sleep in Der el-Medina or in Al el_kurna. So there, there was almost nothing to unearth. Anyway in Wadi and Taka and Zeide, Carter didn’t stop searching for a moment. But he found nothing at all, with traces of human work. Carter himself felt pushed by an unknown force to climb on walls hundreds of meters high. When he got to the top, he observed the canyon and listened to the pebbles bounce. The noise lasted a few seconds. Once he noticed that the fall of a rock was half compared to the others. Carter looked down, leaning to see the bottom of the perpendicular wall. From up there he was able to see where the rock had stopped: it was a small rocky bulge. But he also saw something else: a stone step, that was with no doubt the first excavated in the rock: at seventy meters from the valley bottom, at forty meters from the peak, stairs went into the mountain. Who had hidden and put it in such an uncomfortable position? Using a rope, Carter went twenty meters down, to a bulge five meters wide, then – through a crack- he went down even more. He was in front of the stairs. But the hope to find in a moment the sepulcher chamber full of gold vanished: the corridor at the feet of the stairs that seemed to go right into the mountain was full of rubble from the pavement to the ceiling, that was two meters and twenty high. Under them the human moles had drilled a tunnel, through which it was possible to crawl. Howard had no doubt about where the tunnel led, or its meaning and purpose: he got a carbide lamp and pushing it ahead, he penetrated as a snake towards the unknown. The tunnel was endless: curves, rises, slopes: it could have been excavated only by violators, a probe-tunnel. After he went ahead twenty-nine meters, Howard found the tunnel interrupted. The thieves had stopped there. Sure of being on the tracks of an important discovery Carter decided to clear the corridor. The men he had would have been enough. They could move the debris to the near valley. The problem for him and his men was to reach safely their work place. Howard resolved the problem in a way technically complicated: with pack animals he dragged some girders on the peak, from where he lowered them on the rocky bulge in front of the entrance, to build a structure to support an arm with a hoist to pick up one man at a time from the bottom and bring him back up. Letting two or three men work on each shift, Carter organized a continuous work cycle (day and night for three weeks). Five stone steps led to a portal, from which a corridor seventeen meters long began that, slightly sloping, penetrated the mountain to an antechamber nine square meters big; through a short passage on the right there was the sarcophagus chamber (5,40 x 5,30, 3 meters high). In the center of this chamber, after he had removed a great quantity of rubble, Howard found a sarcophagus yellowed with sandstone. It was empty. The cover was put on the shorter side. Many hieroglyphics gave information on the owner of that unreachable labyrinth. “The heiress princess, full of grace and benevolence, queen of the Two Countries, Hatshepsut, “Carter was dazed. Wasn’t she the queen, whose tomb he- thirteen years before- had exhaustingly unearthe in the valley? Examining better the coffin chamber, Carter resolved the puzzle. He writes :”There wasn’t the least trace that anybody had been buried there, nothing except two necks of jars, used by those who built the tombs. Everything seemed to prove that the works, at a certain point, didn’t go on…” Here’s the reason: Hatshepsut had ordered to build that lonely sepulcher when she was still Thutmosi’s II stepbrother’s wife: Once her husband died (30 April 1940 BC) and she had the pharaoh’s powers, the eccentric queen demanded a tomb in the Valley of the Kings (in Biban el Moluk) and ordered that the one as an eagle nest should be abandoned. In January 1917 Carter finished his works in Wadi and Taka and Zeide. He was called back in Cairo; his work as a diplomatic courier was needed. A problem remained unsolved: the sarcophagus weighed tons; how had they been able to bring it up there? It was never known. As soon as he completed his duty as a soldier, Howard returned to the Valley of the Kings. The failure of all his previous tries, convinced him even more that he had to work with intensity and tenacity. He didn’t have the financing and the labour to survey all the land with new excavations. Without an agreement with the Lord he couldn’t begin. To not waste time, he built a house on the road to the valley; it was to be used by Carnavon and himself as a home-office-laboratory. Howard himself planned it; the building was committed to some old people in el-Kurna unfit for the war. The archaeological and scientific activities, were blocked for a long time, because of the war. Even Carter had to limit his surveys. Though the conflict went on, and it was suicidal to brave the sea, Carnavon tried to reach the country of the nile. Finally he arrived in Cairo, after an adventurous journey, exactly on the same day when the Turkish attacked the Suez canal. With no delay he wanted to talk to Carter. His worry was in which place to excavate. Howard taking from his jacket pocket the map of the Valley indicated a place 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 took up his excavations from where he had stopped four years earlier, at a little distance, but the men from el-Kurna searched only for a couple of days; the rock stopped them. The earl Carnavon thought that, for archaeology the Valley of the Kings had no future. There was, he said the Fayyum, a gigantic oasis at the limit of the Libyan desert: the climate was better, the place more accessible, more friendly compared to the dry Valley full of burials. Noticing his companion’s annoyance, Carnavon himself coordinated the preparations for the expedition. Everything was ready for the fixed departure, when in Fayyum there was a revolt that brought the country to anarchy. For Europe there was only one place rather calm: Cairo. Carnavon had to postpone his departure date for Fayyum; Carter wasn’t unhappy about it. In Cairo the Lord waited patiently a few weeks, then he realized that it was unthinkable to start the works that winter: he went back to London. Carter had his big chance. November 5th 1922. London. Alan Gardiner, professor in oriental languages, Hebrew and Arabic, is very requested. Secretary of the Egypt Exploration Society, he’s working on Egyptian grammar. The phone rings. It’s Lord Carnavon. « Listen », Carnavon says, “I got a telegram from Carter:”You have finally found something beautiful in the Valley of the Kings. An extraordinary tomb with intact seal. Buried again until your return”. “Do you think it could be Tut-ankh-Amon’s burial?” the Lord asked impatiently . Gardiner answered that he didn’t have precise information on the XVIII dynasty, but it was possible. Carnavon asked him to leave for Egypt with him, but Gardiner answered that he couldn’t leave before the new year. But what had happened in the Valley of the Kings? Carter had spent the summer in 1922 in London, in low spirits. Judging by Carnavon’s attitude, the Lord wasn’t willing to finance the excavations in the valley. He recognized his efforts in the last year “but”, he added “considering the financial difficulties in this post-war period, it’s impossible for me to continue to give my support to an activity that has proved to be really barren”. The end. Carter’s career as an archaeologist was over. With no mercy, the Lord had told him what he feared. “My Lord” Carter said moved, “the persistant failure has not touched my convinction that the valley hides at least one tomb, with no doubt Tut-ankh-Amon’s one”. “I believe it”, Carnavon answered, “but…”You know there are proofs”, Carter interrupted him and gave him a map. Carnavon knew it. On it the exhumer had marked all the excavations and researches of all the seasons, for each square meter of the land. Seen in a superficial way, the map gave the impression that all the possibilities to excavate were really exhausted. But Howard indicated a small triangle and said: “Under the entrance of Ramses’s IV tomb there are the rests of stone foundations of ancient stone huts, possibly built by the constructors to examine the underlying land. Only when I will have cleared this triangle I will be sure that my work in the valley is over”. Another excavation season to finance. Carnavon thought it was senseless. He refused. Howard begged him to let him at least excavate at his own expense, using the Lord’s concession, the workers and the equipment. “if, at the end of the season, I will have not found anything, I will leave the Valley of the Kings with a clear conscience. But if I shall make a discovery, it will belong to you, as written on the concession”: Carnavon was touched. Let Carter excavate at his own expense? No, he couldn’t. He shook his hand: “Ok Howard, we’ll see each other in the Valley, but at my expense”. Carter was happy about it. He had never hoped for so much. Carter realized that this was his last excavation season: or he found the forgotten pharaoh or the failure would have ended his career as an archaeologist. He arrived in Luxor in October 28th 1922, Howard put back together his old group of workers. The works began on the first of November. Under the entrance to Ramses’s IV sepulcher, cleared of the rubble, the foundations of huts built three thousand years before by the necropolis constructors, came to light. Carter removed them. The 3rd of November the foundations were no longer there. The following morning, when he got to the site, he didn’t hear the usual noise of the picks and the shovels: something must have happened. The foreman led him and showed him a step in the rock, exactly where the foundations had been removed. Years of failures had made the exhumer skeptical : “I could hardly believe we had finally discovered a tomb”: They worked as madmen until the afternoon of the following day to unearth twelve steps and the top part of a walled portal. Howard couldn’t understand: in thirty years he had found many sepulchers, but never with a sealed portal. The millennial mortar had the seals engraved; Carter recognized the ones of the city of the dead: the jackal with nine prisoners; he couldn’t decipher the other ones, and he supposed they belonged to Ramses IX: the tension was great. Was it possible that he succeeded, there where others had failed for centuries? How could he discover the last pharaohnic inviolate resting place? Carter thought the work was too slow. He, who in the past was calm in person, was taken from a kind of fever: it was necessary to go faster: he shoveled and removed baskets of rubble himself. Then he pushed aside his collaborators, he grabbed hammer and chisel, he made a hole in the wall under the transversal top girder, to be able to introduce an electric lamp. Then, shielding his eyes with his hand, he looked inside. He was disappointed, but also encouraged. There was a corridor full to the brim with rubble. Was it a sure proof that the burial had never been visited by violators? During the New Reign it was usual to fill the passages with debris, after the mummy was buried to protect it from the thieves. Although Howard didn’t know yet whose final resting place it was, it was hard for him to not break down immediately the part that blocked the portal. But, invisible, behind him was the earl Carnavon; the money was his, the money with which he’d lived for fifteen years was his. In the meantime it was twilight. Carter ordered the workers to cover the steps with debris. The danger of a nocturne aggression was real. He left the burial only after he had organized the guard shifts. The following morning he sent to Luxor the telegram we know about. Carnavon answered immediately that he would get there as soon as possible. In the meantime Howard completed the preparations. Although he had ordered the workers not to say a word, he knew the secret would have reached Luxor in twenty-four hours. November 18th he got a train to Cairo: he brought the news of the discovery himself to the Antiques Office, but he needed tools and packing material. The hope to meet the Lord in the capital was not fulfilled. The ship was delayed. Howard returned to Luxor. Carnavon and Evelyn arrived two days later. It was November 24th 1922.The steps were cleared right away. Sixteen stone steps, modest, maybe, but that let his happiness go up. Now that the portal was no longer walled he saw, at the bottom, other seals. He hadn’t noticed them, because the last four steps had been unearthed later. Fifty centimeters lower, rings with the name, the sign for the sun and the scarabs on them, appeared. Tut-ankh-Amon for sure! The Lord and the archaeologist embraced. A few minutes after they had hugged each other, Howard indicated with fear the wall that blocked the entrance. He didn’t say a word, he only pointed his finger at a stain on the portal, on top on the right. Even the Lord noticed it, as it was illuminated by the oblique sun beams: it was a hole, with a diameter half a meter long, plastered in a following epoch, maybe twice. Nobody would have been able to explain what the unlucky exhumer was feeling in that moment. Triumph and failure were indissolubly intertwined. Howard’s desperation was even greater than the Lord’s. that hadn’t noticed a detail: clearing the last steps, some pieces and a scarabs with the names Thutmos III, Amenofi III and Akhenaton, had come to light. Could it be a hiding place for grave goods of some thieves? The 25th November 1922 the wall that closed the portal was demolished. The suspicion that the sepulcher had been violated was confirmed. It was impossible not to notice that the corridor full of rubble was of a different color. The ceiling was a couple of meters high; in the corner at the top on the left, the predators had dug a small tunnel, through which- Carter noticed- they could let only small objects pass. Around 3pm of the following day, when they removed the debris, at eight and a half meters from the entrance portal a second sealed door appeared. It also had a hole plastered in a different color, but it was so small that it would have been very difficult for a man to go through it. When Howard saw on the seal the ring with Tut-ankh-Amon’s name, he began to hope again .Maybe, the Forgotten’s last resting place was still intact. Carnavon saw that Carter’s hands trembled, as carefully, he began to chisel the top-left part of the sealed door. At first he saw nothing. Then at once, with an iron bar, he began to beat the hole. The emptiness resounded. The chamber from which he was separated by the wall was not full of debris. Howard lit a candle, and kept it in front of the small opening. The breath of warm air from the inside made the flame waver. On the contrary of what he had feared, there was no poisonous gas. To put the candle inside, Howard had to widen the hole. It took him a lot of time. When he finished, Carnavon and Evelyn looked and were astonished. Putting ahead the candle with his left, Carter put his head in carefully as much as he could. As if from under a veil very slowly, fabulous things emerged: strange animals staring at him, men in natural size armed with sticks came out of the shadows, precious chests, shining alabaster vases, carts awaiting horses, lovely settees with animals’ heads and paws invited to lay down. After he let Carnavon take a look, Carter demolished the wall almost completely. In the meantime the electric equipment was ready, and they stayed watching enraptured like children the fairy tale of a life of three-thousand-two hundred and sixty years before. Carter wrote:” Our first impression is that the chamber we have already opened is only the antechamber of the pharahonic mausoleum; finding the seals on the doors, we think we’ll find Tut. The papyrus say – describing Ramses’s IV tomb- that it was a custom to keep the king’s body in three coffins, besides the sarcophagus, and that this was closed in various coffins. As the door wasn’t opened – except for a small hole in the wall made by the thieves and closed by Ramses’s IX guardian- we have justified reason to hope that the pharaoh himself has not been violated, as the intact objects…” With no hesitation Howard continued:” The discovery is particularly important because, for the first time, they are royal burials with doors that have not been forced, sealed by Ramses’s IX inspectors: Of course our desire to break the other seals is great; but first, we have to take care of all the finds in the antechamber. Until we finish, we pray all the archaeologists in the world to be patient. We hope to begin examining the other chambers in a couple of months It’s surprising how Carter described the details of the future discovery. But he was mistaken when he talked about the seals; the ones on the entrance portal were not from Ramses; the hole, the covering and the plaster were done before. Event the following seals had Tut-ankh-Amon’s name. The incredible disorder in the antechamber proved that the thieves had put it upside down: torn decorations, broken chests, wood stripped of its golden covering. Human greed had left its mark. Evidently the gangsters had been disturbed during their crime. From this, the disorder. But who were the sepulchers burglars? Why did they violate tombs? Only the priests and the necropolis builders in Der-el Medina knew the secrets of the burials. While the priests had to notice them officially to the successors, the builders of the tombs, if they spread information about the last royal resting homes acted against the law; corruption must have had a determining importance. When the ancient functionaries of the cemetery that had to guard the Valley noticed that Tut’s burial had been violated, they covered the holes with bricks and plaster and put back new seals: in a report sent to the “Times”, Carnavon had affirmed that the seals on the doors were of Ramses IX and so the burglary had been in that period (1127-1109). James Henry Breasted, later charged by Carter to examine the seals, stated that the ones attributed to Ramses IX were actually- though badly kept- Tut-ankh-Amon’s. It’s necessary to remember that the child-king’s sepulcher had already been forgotten when Ramses VI reigned (1142-1135). Only this way it could be explained why those who built on the rock the sixth ramses pharaoh tomb, built huts on Tut’s sepulcher entrance, whose tomb had been certainly violated right after its construction. The Tut work, Carter realized was above his strength and ability. But it was anything but easy to convince Carnavon that a whole equip of archaeologists was needed, if they wanted to examine with scientific precision the burial. Howard’s SOS was taken up by an expedition of the New Yorker Metropolitan Museum that, guided by Arthur Mace, was completing the excavations begun in 1906 in Lischt. Lythgoe (at the head of the Egyptian section in that museum) gave his telegraphic approval. The Tut work, from a private, became a limited responsibility company. The relation between Mace and Carter was great. For two years he was his best support, when he had overcome the difficulties that came up. There was another archaeologist that proved to be a true friend: the American James Henry Breasted. Breasted knew about the discovery in December 7th 1922. He left with a ship for Abu Simbel and when he got to Assuan he found Carnavon’s letter in the mail: the letter informed him about the tomb Carter had discovered, he left right away for Luxor. When he got there, he heard talk about treasures, about an inviolate pharaohnic tomb. Nobody knew anything more. The Egyptian newspapers had not yet given any information about it. Howard had disappeared, it was said that he had left for Cairo. James Henry and his son Charles rented two donkeys and went to the Valley. Passing in front of Carter’s dark house, that he had built during his years of failures, Breasted thought about when he first had met Howard, almost twenty years earlier, in a period when Carter went up and down the archaeological ladder. But the conviction that Tut was buried in the Valley had never left him. Nobody more than Howard deserved to succeed. The Americans were still far away when they saw the burial, right under the entrance of Ramses’s VI one. It was surrounded by military armed with rifles. In the middle of the ditch there was a mound of rubble and upon it, a calcareous plank with Carnavon’s blazon stylized in black on it, by Carter. The designer’s new assistant, A.R.Callender sat with a gun on his knees, guarding the mound that evidently hid the entrance to the sepulcher. They saw nothing else. The following morning, Carter and Breasted met on the pier on the Nile, where the American ship was. Carter began to tell: “Think that already twice I dug at a little distance from the first step. The first time, years ago, when I dug with Davis. He then suggested a different place, with better chances. The second time, a few seasons ago: Lord Carnavon and I decided to stop the researches in this area, to not hamper continually the flow of visitors that go to Ramses’s VI tomb”. While he talked, he rummaged in his jacket pocket, and took out an old letter on which he started to draw a map of the antechamber. Then with his pencil he lightly touched various points inside the rectangle, telling the names of the treasures that were there. Breasted expressed his desire to take a look at the tomb. “We’ll go back to clear the entrance”, Carter answered, “in two or three days, we will put on a steel door and settle other things. Come back in three days.” Three days later, Breasted, to avoid suspicions and to avoid attracting curious people, pretended to be a lazy and idle tourist. He climbed the well-known path, he went down the rocky slope. Carter was waiting for him. The ditch had changed. In place of the mound of debris there was a pit; they had built a small shed. Near Howard there were Callender, Burton, Mace and Herbert Winlock. They went down the sixteen steps to the gate covered with a white cloth. Inside the tomb the lights were on, and they cast the iron bars of the gate on the cloth. The shadow was seen. The gate was closed with four chained padlocks. Everybody stood watching Carter open it. They started when he asked: “Aren’t you coming in?” Superfluous words, of course, but the excitement and the tension were so great, that for everybody it was difficult to act normally; the movements were clumsy and hard. It seemed nobody wanted to accept the invitation; Howard turned around and looked at them: there were tears in their eyes. Even Carter was crying. They shook hands, smiled to each other and dried their cheeks. For Howard it wasn’t easy to convince Carnavon that they couldn’t clear the antechamber from a day to the other. The were unique, so they had to be photographed, drawn and listed, before they started to remove them. The Lord thought the waiting excessive. He went back to England and told Carter to give him the date when the works would begin again. The massive gate was opened, similar to the one in a prison, that separated the entrance from the steps, to bring down the chairs. Demolished the top part of the wall, a kind of gold wall appeared, but removing the rest of the wall, they saw it was a gigantic external chest or a tabernacle. He had read about this kind of chests on the ancient papyruses, but this one was real, shining in gold and azure, with a size almost as the one in the second chamber, of which it almost touched the ceiling. Around, between the walls and the sides of the casket, there was papyrus sixty centimeters wide. The first to go in were Carter and Carnavon and right after them Alan Gardiner with his son: “we went ahead up to the first corner on the left and we found ourselves on the front side of the chest, in front of two massive doors. Carter had opened the bolt and the two doors. We saw that inside the big external casket there was another one, also with a double door and intact seal. We counted four protecting chests in all, one inside the other, all covered in gold; the last one had in it the stone sarcophagus: we could see it only a year later”. The real work began at that moment: recover the treasures. The work lasted ten years, ten years of discoveries, spent gathering, preserving and value the finds. Ten years of hard physical work, in a suffocating heat, of intense intellectual effort; ten years of hampers, of political quarrels, molested by visitors. During this period the government had changed five times; also as many times the minister of Egyptian Antiques had changed. In 1932, after forty years of activity in Egypt, Howard returned to London. He was sick. The hard desert climate, the exhausting underground work, but above all the disagreements and emotions that followed the discovery of the century, had hurt his health: he suffered circulatory problems. He was fifty eight years old, but moved as an old man. He retired in his house in Albert Court, with no friends, living as a hermit. He felt, that after he had finished his task, he had nothing more to expect from his life. As usual, he was alone again, his epoch that lived only on sensational things, had already forgotten him. The only one that had contacts with him in the last years was his niece Phyllis Walzer, that begged him to exploit his documents on which he had carefully written every detail of the Tut work. But Carter was tired; the work itself was above his strength. To exploit his documents he had to do everything again, begin from the start again, and he was weak, even financially. He calculated that for a scientific publication he needed thirty thousand English pounds. There is no information on what happened. The three books he wrote about the recovering, were translated in German and Dutch. His only income in his last years came from his interest shares. The scientists laughed on his books: they were not scientific, they had been written for the people, that were also disappointed, because the author had only simply described what was in the tomb, without talking about himself and all the complications that had filled the news . It was another sorrow for Howard. On March 2nd 1939 Carter died, but a few knew about it. The London “Times”, that had sold news about him all over the world, announced his death publishing his name on the list of the deceased people on page sixteen: “Mr. Howard Carter, the great Egyptologist, famous for taking part to the exciting events that led to the discovery of Tut-ankh_Amon’s tomb, that has given archaeology such glory, he who has then examined and studied the burial, died yesterday in his home in London…To discover the sepulcher was a triumph itself, and it was even more, when they realized it was inviolate: for Egyptologists already accustomed to be content with ravaged burials, this was a great event. The discovery moved the civil world more than any other archaeological discovery…” His funeral was rather poor. A few people accompanied to the cemetery, he who had been a hero for the nation. Among the few, the only woman that had been so important for him but also so unreachable: Evelyn Carnavon: the only real love of his life, the Lord’s daughter. He called her Eve. He, on the banks of the Nile, she in England, exchanged tender letters, often one every two days. “O why aren’t you here with me” the girl sobbed. But Eve and Howard both knew that the English etiquette did not allow a vagabond exhumer to marry a Lord’s daughter. The love remained platonic. Carter died unmarried.
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