By the early s he was working for American archaeology enthusiast Theodore M. Davis in the Valley of the Kings. It was regarded incorrectly it seems as ideal for royal interments because its remoteness was thought to deter grave robbers. A group of drunken tourists at the necropolis of Saqqara caused a disturbance, and Carter ordered them to leave.
They complained to their ambassador, who demanded an apology from Carter. He refused and was forced to resign. At age 31, with no job and no money, Carter had to leave archaeology behind; he eked out a living by painting watercolors for tourists. A collector of racing cars and horses, Lord Carnarvon had been seriously injured in a car accident in Germany. Quickly growing bored with Cairo life, he took an interest in archaeology.
He made inquiries, and Carter was recommended to him. In their partnership began. When Carter and Carnarvon joined forces, the concession to dig in the valley was held by Theodore Davis. In a stash of embalming material in the valley, Davis found linen and other items bearing the name of Tutankhamun.
Davis was certain that there was nothing more to be found, so he gave up the concession. Carter and Carnarvon quickly snapped it up. It was not until December that he was able to resume work and finally search for the resting place of the boy king. Carter employed a systematic method he had developed during his many years in the field: a meticulous division of the site into a grid. For years Carter and his team scoured the rocky landscape, scarred with the trenches of previous digs.
Discoveries were thin on the ground. In a frustrated Carnarvon informed Carter he would not continue to finance the work. Carter pleaded with him to reconsider; moved by his passion, Carnarvon agreed to fund one last season. On November 1, , Carter resumed digging in the Valley of the Kings. On November 4, they found the stairway that led to the unopened tomb of Tutankhamun. By early the next year its contents had been logged and removed, leaving just two statues guarding the door to another area, which Carter had a hunch must be the burial chamber.
That door was opened in February , and the room was found to be entirely taken up with three nested shrines. Deep inside these lay a series of gold sarcophagi, at the heart of which lay the mummy of King Tut wearing his golden funerary mask. Abutting the burial chamber was another, smaller room, which became known as the Treasury.
Carnarvon died a few months after the discovery, from an infected mosquito bite. But Carter would survive to complete his work. He continued with the task of inventorying the myriad contents of the tomb, completing his work in He spent his final years preparing the results for publication, and died in London in , age All rights reserved.
This is a transcript from the video series History of Ancient Egypt. Watch it now, on Wondrium. Upon entering, the first room was full of furniture like ritual beds on which Tutankhamun was laid. It took them almost an year to clear out the room.
An enormous gilded shrine had taken up the entire burial chamber. The wooden shrine was difficult to dismantle because the wood was 1, years old, and they had to be very careful.
When Carter finally dismantled it, he found another shrine inside it. And then, there were two more shrines inside it. Inside the fourth shrine, Carter found a spectacular thing—a beautiful sarcophagus. Inside it there were coffins nested inside each other. Finally, he got to a stone sarcophagus, which was very difficult to open. But he finally managed to open it. They were finally able to discover the mummy of Tutankhamen, the first pharaoh whose mummy was still in the tomb, which was also found intact.
After discovering the tomb, Carter said several times that Tutankhamun eluded him. What did he by this? Up until then, Tutankhamen, a king, was just a mystery, just a name. There were no papyri in the entire tomb. There was nothing that gave more information about his parents. A pharaoh is buried in his tomb with literally thousands of objects, no expense spared, and there is nothing historical to tell us about who he was.
There were other things about the tomb that were rather puzzling. Funeral scenes were painted on these yellow walls. On the ground around the shrine were a number of items, including portions of two broken necklaces, which looked as if they had been dropped by robbers, and magic oars "to ferry the king's barque [boat] across the waters of the Nether World.
To take apart and examine the shrine, Carter had to first demolish the partition wall between the Antechamber and the Burial Chamber. Still, there was not much room between the three remaining walls and the shrine. As Carter and his team worked to disassemble the shrine they found that this was merely the outer shrine, with four shrines in total.
Each section of the shrines weighed up to half a ton. In the small confines of the Burial Chamber, work was difficult and uncomfortable. When the fourth shrine was disassembled, the king's sarcophagus was revealed. The sarcophagus was yellow and made out of a single block of quartzite. The lid did not match the rest of the sarcophagus and had been cracked in the middle during antiquity an attempt had been made to cover the crack by filling it with gypsum.
When the heavy lid was lifted, a gilded wooden coffin was revealed. The coffin was in a distinctly human shape and was 7 feet, 4 inches long. A year and a half later, they were ready to lift the lid of the coffin.
Conservation work of other objects already removed from the tomb had taken precedence. Thus, the anticipation of what lay beneath was extreme.
Inside, they found another, smaller coffin. The lifting of the lid of the second coffin revealed a third one, made entirely of gold. On top of this third, and final, coffin was a dark material that had once been liquid and poured over the coffin from the hands to the ankles.
The liquid had hardened over the years and firmly stuck the third coffin to the bottom of the second. The thick residue had to be removed with heat and hammering.
Then the lid of the third coffin was raised. At last, the royal mummy of Tutankhamun was revealed. It had been over 3, years since a human being had seen the king's remains. This was the first royal Egyptian mummy that had been found untouched since his burial.
Carter and the others hoped King Tutankhamun's mummy would reveal a large amount of knowledge about ancient Egyptian burial customs. Though it was still an unprecedented find, Carter and his team were dismayed to learn that the liquid poured on the mummy had done a great deal of damage.
The linen wrappings of the mummy could not be unwrapped as hoped, but instead had to be removed in large chunks. Many of the items found within the wrappings had also been damaged, and some were almost completely disintegrated. Carter and his team found over items on the mummy—almost all of them gold—including amulets, bracelets, collars, rings, and daggers.
Certain evidence also attributed Tutankhamun's death to murder. On the right wall of the Burial Chamber was an entrance into a storeroom, now known as the Treasury. The Treasury, like the Antechamber, was filled with items including many boxes and model boats. Most notable in this room was the large gilded canopic shrine. Inside the gilded shrine was the canopic chest made out of a single block of calcite. Inside the canopic chest were the four canopic jars, each in the shape of an Egyptian coffin and elaborately decorated, holding the pharaoh's embalmed organs: liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines.
Also discovered in the Treasury were two small coffins found in a simple, undecorated wooden box. Inside these two coffins were the mummies of two premature fetuses. It is hypothesized that these were Tutankhamun's children. Tutankhamun is not known to have had any surviving children. The discovery of King Tut's tomb in November created an obsession around the world.
Daily updates of the find were demanded. Masses of mail and telegrams deluged Carter and his associates. Hundreds of tourists waited outside the tomb for a peek.
Hundreds more people tried to use their influential friends and acquaintances to get a tour of the tomb, which caused a great hindrance to work in the tomb and endangered the artifacts. Ancient Egyptian-style clothes quickly hit the markets and appeared in fashion magazines. Even architecture was affected when Egyptian designs were copied into modern buildings. The rumors and excitement over the discovery became especially acute when Lord Carnarvon became suddenly ill from an infected mosquito bite on his cheek he had accidentally aggravated it while shaving.
On April 5, , just a week after the bite, Lord Carnarvon died. Carnarvon's death gave fuel to the idea that there was a curse associated with King Tut's tomb. In all, it took Carter and his colleagues 10 years to document and clear out Tutankhamun's tomb. After Carter completed his work at the tomb in , he began to write a six-volume definitive work, "A Report Upon the Tomb of Tut 'ankh Amun. The mysteries of the young pharaoh's tomb live on: As recently as March , radar scans indicated that there may yet be hidden chambers not yet opened within King Tut's tomb.
Ironically, Tutankhamun, whose obscurity during his own time allowed his tomb to be forgotten, has now become one of the most well-known pharaohs of ancient Egypt. Having traveled around the world as part of an exhibit, King Tut's body once again rests in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Actively scan device characteristics for identification.
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