By the autumn of 1922, Howard Carter had spent five fruitless seasons scouring the Valley of the Kings, and his patron's patience was exhausted. George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon — owner of Highclere Castle, the house that later played Downton Abbey — summoned Carter to tell him the funding was over. Carter argued for one final season, by some accounts offering to pay for it himself, and Carnarvon relented. Digging resumed on 1 November 1922 in the one unexplored patch left: beneath the remains of ancient workmen's huts near the tomb of Ramesses VI. On 4 November a step cut into the rock appeared — tradition credits a boy carrying water, though like much in this story the detail has been polished by retelling. By 6 November Carter had cabled Carnarvon in England: "At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact."
Carnarvon arrived with his daughter, and on 26 November Carter made a small breach in the second doorway and put in a candle. From behind him Carnarvon asked, "Can you see anything?" Carter's reply as published in his book — "Yes, wonderful things" — became archaeology's most famous sentence; his diary records the flatter "Yes, it is wonderful." Either way, what the candlelight caught was extraordinary: gilded couches, dismantled chariots, "everywhere the glint of gold". Tomb KV62 was the only near-intact royal burial ever found in the Valley of the Kings, preserved precisely because it had been buried and forgotten under the flood debris and huts of later tomb-builders.
Tutankhamun himself was a minor king — a boy who took the throne around age nine amid the wreckage of his father Akhenaten's religious revolution, restored the old gods, and died around eighteen or nineteen in about 1323 BC. Later pharaohs struck his name from the king lists. Yet his obscurity became his immortality: the modest tomb held around 5,400 objects, from the solid-gold innermost coffin to board games, trumpets and a dagger with an iron blade forged from a meteorite. The gold funerary mask, weighing around ten kilograms, became the face of ancient Egypt. Clearing, conserving and cataloguing the four small chambers took Carter a decade of painstaking work, each object photographed by Harry Burton, whose images made the excavation the best-documented — and most publicised — dig in the history of archaeology.
The curse the papers built
Then the sponsor died. In April 1923 Carnarvon, weakened after nicking a mosquito bite while shaving, succumbed in Cairo to blood poisoning and pneumonia. The newspapers had their sequel. Carnarvon had sold exclusive access to The Times for £5,000, leaving every rival correspondent in Luxor starved of copy — and a mummy's curse costs nothing to print. The novelist Marie Corelli had already written publicly warning of punishment for intruders; Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the ultra-rational Sherlock Holmes but a committed spiritualist, mused that "elementals" guarding the tomb might have struck. Embellishments multiplied: Cairo's lights were said to have failed at the moment of death (Cairo's lights failed often), and Carnarvon's dog Susie was said to have howled and died at Highclere the same hour.
The record is stubbornly unsupernatural. No curse inscription was found in the tomb. Of the people present when it was opened, most lived long lives; a statistical study published in the British Medical Journal in 2002 found no significant difference in survival between those "exposed" to the tomb and those not. The most exposed man of all, Howard Carter, worked in the burial chamber for years and died in London in 1939, aged 64, of lymphoma — his funeral attended by a handful of people.
Afterlives
Tutankhamun's second reign has outrun most pharaohs' first. The touring exhibitions of the 1960s and 1970s — above all the 1972 British Museum show, which drew about 1.7 million visitors — made him a global celebrity and coined "Tutmania". CT scans and DNA studies have since probed how he died (a leg fracture and malaria feature in leading theories; the lurid murder-by-blow theory has faded), and his treasures anchor Egypt's Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza. The pharaoh whose successors tried to erase him is now the only one almost everyone can name — proof that in Egypt, as Carter's candle showed, oblivion can be the best preservative.
Quiz nuggets
- The first step of tomb KV62 was found on 4 November 1922, beneath ancient workmen's huts near the tomb of Ramesses VI.
- Asked "Can you see anything?" on 26 November 1922, Carter replied "Yes, wonderful things" — his diary version was "Yes, it is wonderful."
- Lord Carnarvon, the excavation's sponsor and owner of Highclere Castle, died in April 1923 after an infected mosquito bite was nicked while shaving.
- The tomb held around 5,400 objects and took Carter roughly a decade to clear and catalogue.
- Howard Carter died of lymphoma in 1939 aged 64, and a 2002 BMJ study found no statistical evidence of any curse.