Carter left London without Carnarvon. Nothing notable occurred until the morning of 4 November.12 Then, as the sun began to bleach the surrounding slopes, one of his diggers scraped against a stone step cut into the rock. Excavated carefully, twelve steps were revealed, leading to a doorway that was sealed and plastered over.13 ‘This seemed too good to be true,’ but, deciphering the seal, Carter was astonished to discover he had unearthed a royal necropolis. He was itching to break down the door, but as he rode his donkey back to camp that evening, having left guards at the site, he realised he must wait. Carnarvon was paying for the dig and should be there when any grand tomb was opened. Next day, Carter sent a telegram giving him the news and inviting him to come.14
Lord Carnarvon was a romantic figure – a great shot, a famous yachtsman who, at the age of twenty-three, had sailed around the world. He was also a passionate collector and the owner of the third automobile licensed in Britain. It was his love of speed that led, indirectly, to the Valley of the Kings. A car accident had permanently damaged his lungs, making England uncomfortable in wintertime. Exploring Egypt in search of a mild climate, he discovered archaeology.
Carnarvon arrived in Luxor on the twenty-third. Beyond the first door was a small chamber filled with rubble. When this was cleared away, they found a second door. A small hole was made, and everyone retreated, just in case there were any poisonous gases escaping. Then the hole was enlarged, and Carter shone the beam of his torch through the hole to explore the second chamber.
‘Can you see anything?’ Carnarvon was peremptory.
Carter didn’t reply for a moment. When he did, his voice broke. ‘Yes.’ Another pause. ‘Wonderful things.’15
He did not exaggerate. ‘No archaeologist in history has ever seen by torchlight what Carter saw.’16 When they finally entered the second chamber, the tomb was found to be packed with luxurious objects – a gilded throne, two golden couches, alabaster vases, exotic animal heads on the walls, and a golden snake.17 Two royal statues faced each other, ‘like sentinels,’ wearing gold kilts and gold sandals on their feet. There were protective cobras on their heads, and they each held a mace in one hand, a staff in the other. As Carnarvon and Carter took in this amazing splendour, it dawned on them that there was something missing – there was no sarcophagus. Had it been stolen? It was only now that Carter realised there was a third door. Given what they had found already, the inner chamber promised to be even more spectacular. But Carter was a professional. Before the inner chamber could be opened up, he determined to make a proper archaeological study of the outer room, lest precious knowledge be lost. And so the antechamber, as it came to be called, was resealed (and of course heavily guarded) while Carter called in a number of experts from around the world to collaborate on an academic investigation. The inscriptions needed study, as did the seals, and even the remains of plants that had been found.18
The tomb was not reopened until 16 December. Inside were objects of the most astounding quality.19 There was a wooden casket decorated with hunting scenes of a kind never yet seen in Egyptian art. There were three animal-sided couches that, Carter realised, had been seen illustrated in other excavations – in other words, this site was famous even in ancient Egypt.20 And there were four chariots, completely covered in gold and so big that the axles had to be broken in two before they could be installed. No fewer than thirty-four heavy packing cases were filled with objects from the antechamber and put on a steam barge on the Nile, where they began the seven-day journey downriver to Cairo. Only when that had been done was the way clear to open the inner room. When Carter had cut a large enough hole, he shone his torch through it as before. ‘He could see nothing but a shining wall. Shifting the flashlight this way and that, he was still unable to find its outer limits. Apparently it blocked off the whole entrance to the chamber beyond the door. Once more, Carter was seeing something never seen before, or since. He was looking at a wall of solid gold.’ The door was dismantled, and it became clear that the gold wall was part of a shrine that occupied – all but filled – the third chamber. Measurements taken later would show that the shrine measured seventeen feet by eleven feet by nine feet high and was completely covered in gold except for inlaid panels of brilliant blue faience, depicting magic symbols to protect the dead.21 Carnarvon, Carter, and the workmen were speechless. To complete their astonishment, in the main shrine there was a room within a room. Inside the inner shrine was a third, and inside that a fourth.
Removing these layers took eighty-four days.22 A special tackle had to be devised to lift the lid of the sarcophagus. And here the final drama was enacted. On the lid of the coffin was a golden effigy of the boy-ruler Tutankhamen: ‘The gold glittered as brightly as if it had just come from the foundry.’23 ‘Never was there such a treasure as the king’s head, his face made of gold, his brows and [eye]lids of lapis lazuli blue glass and the eyes contrasting in obsidian and aragonite.’ Most moving of all were the remains of a small wreath of flowers, ‘the last farewell offering of the widowed girl-queen to her husband.’24 After all that, and perhaps inevitably, the body itself proved a disappointment. The boy-king had been so smothered in ‘unguents and other oils’ that, over the centuries, the chemicals had mixed to form a pitchy deposit and had invaded the swaddling clothes. Layers of jewels had been poured between the wrappings, which had reacted with the pitch, causing a spontaneous combustion that carbonised the remains and surrounding linen. Nonetheless, the age of the king could be fixed at nearer seventeen than eighteen.25
In life Tutankhamen was not an especially important pharaoh. But his treasures and sumptuous tomb stimulated public interest in archaeology as never before, more even than had the discoveries at Machu Picchu. The high drama of the excavation, however, concealed a mystery. If the ancient Egyptians buried a seventeen-year-old monarch with such style, what might they have done for older, more accomplished kings? If such tombs haven’t been found – and they haven’t – does this mean they have been lost to plunderers? And at what cost to knowledge? If they are still there, how might they change our understanding of the way civilisations evolve?
Much of the fascination in Middle Eastern archaeology, however, lay not in finding gold but in teasing out fact from myth. By the 1920s the biblical account of man’s origins had been called into question time and again. While it was clear that some of the Bible was based on fact, it was no less obvious that the Scriptures were wildly inaccurate in many places. A natural area of investigation was the birth of writing, as the earliest record of the past. But here too there was a mystery.
The mystery arose from the complicated nature of cuneiform writing, a system of wedges cut in clay that existed in Mesopotamia, an area between the rivers of Tigris and Euphrates. Cuneiform was believed to have developed out of pictograph script, spreading in time throughout Mesopotamia. The problem arose from the fact that cuneiform was a mixture of pictographic, syllabic, and alphabetic scripts which could not have arisen, all by themselves, at one time and in one place. It followed that cuneiform must have evolved from an earlier entity – but what? And belonging to which people? Analysis of the language, the type of words that were common, the business transactions typically recorded, led philologists to the idea that cuneiform had not been invented by the Semitic Babylonians or Assyrians but by another people from the highlands to the east. This was pushing the ‘evidence’ further than it would go, but this theoretical group of ancestors had even been given a name. Because the earliest known rulers in the southern part of Mesopotamia had been called ‘Kings of Sumer and Akkad,’ they were called the Sumerians.26