In the Valley of the Kings: Howard Carter and the Mystery of King Tutankhamun's Tomb by Daniel Meyerson

Author:Daniel Meyerson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Ancient, Social Science, Howard, Great Britain, Tutankhamen - Tomb, Excavations (Archaeology) - Egypt - Valley of the Kings, Ancient - Egypt, Egyptology, SCIENCE, Valley of the Kings, Ancient Egypt, Historical, Egyptian archaeology, Excavations (Archaeology), Archaeology, History, Egyptologists, Egyptologists - Great Britain, Carter, Egypt, 20th century, General, Ancient Egypt - History, History: World, Biography & Autobiography, Biography
ISBN: 9780345476937
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-05-19T07:00:00+00:00

AS 1900 APPROACHED, THE TURN OF THE CENTURY BROUGHT Carter a great surprise. The excellence of his work for the last five years had been noted by Gaston Maspero, director of the Service des Antiquités. He was requested to join the department as chief inspector for the south, a vast area including the Sudan (then an Egyptian province). Though his duties included all kinds of official obligations and administrative work (which Carter took very seriously), and though there was much work to be done in the many temples included in his new domain (especially in the Ramesseum and at Abu Simbel and Edfu, where the ancient structures needed shoring up), at last he was able to concentrate on “his” tombs.

For the next four years, from 1900 on, he spent more time underground than in the light of day, working on a long list of tombs, both royal (Seti II; Amenhotep II; Ramesses I, III, VI, and IX) and nonroyal (Maihipri, warrior companion of Amenhotep II; Hatshepsut’s wet nurse; Sennefer, mayor of Thebes—among others).

Though these tombs were already “opened,” some recently, some since antiquity, the work of thoroughly exploring them demanded everything Carter had—stamina, patience, skill. He would file many reports about the southern temples, but it was in the tombs that he really came alive.

Each one had its unique challenge, some requiring a more delicate hand—the murals, reliefs, and fine architectural details were, after all, more than three and a half millennia old. Others called for the sheer strength of will to keep slugging away—tomb KV #20, unidentified when Carter first tackled it, showed him at his best: a fighter “with heart.”

“The tomb proved to be 700 feet long …,” he remembered. “With the exception of the first portion cleared by former explorers [Denon, 1799; Belzoni, 1823; Lepsius, 1845] almost the entire length was filled to the roof with rubble, most of which had been carried in by water from spates of past centuries.

“The filling was cemented into a hard mass by the action of water. To excavate, it needed heavy pickaxes, and the whole of this rubble had to be carried to the mouth of the tomb by a continuous chain of men…. Half way down its corridor the white limestone stratum came to an end, and a stratum of brown shaly [shalelike] rock of uneven fragile nature commenced. It was here when our difficulties began, for the latter stratum of rocks was so bad there was a serious danger of its falling in upon us.

“To add to our troubles the air was also very bad [from centuries’ accumulation of bat dung and the like]; candles would not give sufficient light to enable the men to see to work….”

Undeterred, Carter set up an air pump and ran an electric line down to replace the candles that kept flickering out. Sometimes they passed over rubble that had reached up to two feet of the ceiling—crawling on their stomachs as bats fluttered by or the sudden screeching of an eagle-owl they had disturbed shocked them into a moment’s pause.

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