In November 1922, almost at the tailend of his expedition sponsored by Lord Carnarvon, Howard Carter finally discovered the tomb which would make him the most famous archeologist outside fiction. Tutankhamum, an insignificant pharaoh who reigned for less than a decade and died young, was buried in a hastily-prepared minor tomb which was largely unrecorded and thus escaped grave-robbers.
After wiring Lord Carnarvon, Carter also engaged the services of Harry Burton. Burton, working for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian department, was widely regarded as the greatest archaeological photographer, and he proved it with this tomb. His photographs of the tomb of Tutankhamum, starting with the intact seal locking his funerary chamber, are both meticulous archaeological surveys and glorious still-lifes.
For the next eight years, Burton devoted his career to carefully cataloguing the riches of Tutankhamum. He was the only photographer authorized to work inside the tomb and took over 1,970 photos, of which 142 were published in February 1923 in The Times, to which Lord Carnarvon had sold the exclusive publishing rights. All of them could be seen on an online gallery at The Griffith Institute, Oxford.
For all its later infamy as a cursed necropolis, the tomb of Tutankhamum did not contain a jinx. Scholars and Egyptologists scoff at the idea, eventhough they themselves were of guilty of spreading these rumors, in order to dissuade the local porters and diggers from pilfering the finds. Lord Carnarvon was the only major member of the expedition to die prematurely. Carter lived for seventeen more years. Carnarvon’s daughter Lady Evelyn who, along with her father and Carter, was among the first to enter the tomb, died only in 1980 at the age of 79.
This post rekindles my childhood memories from primary school (4-12 yrs) and a teacher who had a deep passion to teach Egyptian, Greek and Roman history. Wonderful post. For this, I salute you!