Howard Carter (1874–1939) had been working in Egypt since 1891, when he was hired as an artist at age 17 by the Egypt Exploration Fund to copy tomb wall paintings at Beni Hasan. He had been a staff archaeologist at the Egyptian Antiquities Service from 1899 to 1905 — when he resigned over the “Saqqara incident,” in which French tourists had broken into a tomb under his supervision and Carter had personally restrained them rather than apologising, as the senior French antiquities administration had required. The resignation left him unemployed and substantially financially insecure for the next two years.
In 1907 he was hired by George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon — a wealthy British aristocrat who had developed Egyptological interests during winter visits to Luxor for his post-1901 motor-accident convalescence. Carnarvon paid Carter to supervise his concession excavations in the Theban Necropolis. The arrangement lasted twenty-two years.
The Tutankhamun concession
By 1914 Carter had concluded — on the basis of small finds at various Valley of the Kings sites and on the basis of the 18th-Dynasty royal cartouches that had been turning up in incidental finds — that the as-yet undiscovered tomb of the minor 14th-century BCE pharaoh Tutankhamun was probably somewhere in the Valley of the Kings, in a substantially small area near the previously excavated tombs of Ramesses VI and Amenmesse.
The concession for systematic excavation of that area was held by the American collector Theodore Davis. Davis had concluded by 1914 that the Valley of the Kings was exhausted and gave up the concession. Carnarvon applied for it through Carter’s intermediation, and was granted it the same year.
The First World War interrupted serious excavation until 1917. Carter resumed in 1918. The next six seasons — 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, plus partial seasons — produced essentially no significant finds. The available unexcavated area near the Ramesses VI tomb had been narrowed down through careful exclusion of all other possible locations. By summer 1922 Carter was excavating the last small triangular area he had not yet cleared.
Carnarvon visited London in summer 1922 and met Carter at Highclere Castle to inform him that the funding would not continue. Six years of expensive excavation without significant finds had exhausted the budget. Carter offered to fund a final 1922-1923 season himself if Carnarvon would maintain only the legal concession. Carnarvon agreed to one more season of full funding.
4 November 1922
Carter arrived at Luxor on 27 October 1922 and reopened the excavation on 1 November 1922. The 1922 plan was to clear the last unexcavated patch — approximately 60 square metres — directly below the foundations of a row of ancient stone workmen’s huts that had served the excavation of the Ramesses VI tomb in the 12th century BCE.
On the morning of 4 November 1922 Carter’s foreman Ahmed Gerigar uncovered the upper edge of a cut stone step approximately 4 metres below the modern desert surface. By the afternoon of 5 November Carter’s workmen had cleared sixteen descending steps down to a sealed plaster wall bearing the cartouches of the necropolis (a jackal above nine captives — the standard 18th-Dynasty Valley of the Kings seal) and the name Tut-ankh-Amun.
Carter sent his famous cable to Carnarvon at Highclere Castle on the morning of 6 November:
At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley. A magnificent tomb with seals intact. Recovered same for your arrival. Congratulations.
Carnarvon arrived at Luxor with his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert on 23 November 1922. The sealed wall was broken on 26 November 1922. Carter cut a small hole at the upper left corner, inserted a candle, and looked through.
What he saw — “wonderful things” (the famously laconic Carter answer to Carnarvon’s question of whether he could see anything) — was the antechamber of the tomb, approximately 8 by 3.5 metres, filled with substantially intact 18th-Dynasty royal funerary goods. Two large ceremonial guardian statues stood against the south wall. Three large gilt couches, several decorated chests, and what would prove to be the dismantled parts of approximately five chariots filled most of the floor space.
The burial chamber
The antechamber was photographed, catalogued, and cleared over the next eleven weeks. The sealed door at the eastern end of the antechamber — which Carter had identified by 27 November 1922 as concealing the burial chamber itself — was broken on 16 February 1923.
The burial chamber contained the intact gilded outermost wooden coffin shrine, approximately 5 by 3.5 metres, almost filling the chamber. Inside the outermost shrine were three further nested shrines, then a quartzite sarcophagus, then three nested anthropoid coffins, the innermost of which was made of 110 kilograms of solid gold and contained the intact mummy of Tutankhamun under the now-iconic solid-gold death mask.
The intact preservation of the tomb was unique in 20th-century Egyptological work. Almost every other royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings had been looted in the late New Kingdom (approximately 1000-700 BCE). Tutankhamun’s tomb had been entered twice in antiquity by tomb robbers — small items had been removed — but the substantial 18th-Dynasty royal funerary assemblage had been intact.
The total number of objects catalogued by Carter and his team across the ten-year clearance (1922-1932) was approximately 5,398 individual items.
The curse
Lord Carnarvon died at Cairo on 5 April 1923 of an infected mosquito bite that had become septicemic. He was 56. The death — five months after the tomb’s discovery — produced the British and American press narrative of the “Curse of the Pharaohs” that has remained attached to the Tutankhamun discovery for the subsequent century.
The specific narrative was that the substantial 18th-Dynasty Egyptian priestly funerary inscriptions had condemned anyone who disturbed the tomb to a substantial early death. The supernatural-revenge narrative was promoted by the novelist Marie Corelli, who wrote in the New York Times of 24 March 1923 (before Carnarvon’s death) that she had read a 18th-Dynasty papyrus warning of the consequences. The specific papyrus has not been identified.
Modern statistical analysis of the death rates of the Tutankhamun expedition personnel (undertaken by Mark Nelson in 2002) found that the members of the 1922-1923 expedition who had contact with the tomb had a average post-discovery lifespan indistinguishable from a matched-age control group. The “curse” has no statistical basis.
The more plausible explanation of the press attention to Carnarvon’s death is that the story was commercially valuable for the newspapers covering the Tutankhamun discovery and subsequent newspaper deaths of other Egyptologists were retrospectively interpreted as “curse” deaths even when the actuarial pattern was routine.
Carter himself lived another sixteen years after the discovery.