Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive
Edited by Richard Bruce Parkinson (Bodleian/the Griffith Institute, £30)
IT is a century since Howard Carter put his eye to a hole in the Valley of the Kings and told his patron, Lord Carnarvon: ‘I see wonderful things.’ Except that he may not have said that at all, if the authors of this book are correct —Carnarvon had sold the story to The Times and it made a great line.
It was the discovery to best all discoveries. Nigh unexpected, incredibly well-preserved, the tomb of the boy king revealed the riches of ancient Egypt to a wondering world. It would offer a memorial of heartstopping beauty to a generation bereaved by the First World War, for Tutankhamun was only young, and his golden mask bore, in Carter’s words, ‘a sad but tranquil expression’, which he later described as ‘suggestive of youth overtaken prematurely by death.’
After years of frustration, the tomb was the greatest single find in Egyptian archaeology and the first to be kept intact within the country, in the Cairo museum where it would give impetus to the Egyptians’ sense of nationhood. The dig became a media drama spiced by mummy’s curses and the lure of gold. Almost all was recorded in situ; Harry Burton’s glass negatives deliver more detail than modern digital photographs.
Clearing the tomb took 10 years and Carter’s archive was ultimately donated to the Griffith Institute of Egyptology at Oxford, whose staff have created this absorbing book, describing 50 related artefacts. Some are Burton’s staged images showing the team at work, examining the mummy, preparing to enter the second chamber, uncovering the boy king layer by layer. They have a wonderful freshness, as do Burton’s photographs of artefacts, from the jumble of pots and arrows found in an annexe, carefully numbered, to the scrabbling marks of a tombrobber’s fingers left in a jar of ointment. Tomb-raiders did at first break in, but officials tidied up and resealed the tomb, which had lain undisturbed for 3,500 years.
‘The first impression… suggested the property room of an opera-house of a vanished civilisation,’ Carter wrote. There was not only gold and jewels, but cloth... perfumed oils, bread, fruit and flowers, including a touching floral collar of cornflowers, willow, pomegranate leaves and nightshade berries. ‘Among all that regal splendour,’ he added, ‘there was nothing so beautiful as those few withered flowers, still retaining their tinge of colour.’ I like the image of Carnarvon resting on a planter’s chair at Luxor, extending his incredibly long legs. Six months later, he died from an infected mosquito bite, not, say the authors firmly, a curse.