KV62, Valley of the Kings

Six seasons of finding nothing

Howard Carter had been searching for the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings for six full digging seasons — from November 1917 to April 1922 — without finding a single fragment of evidence that the tomb existed.

His patron Lord Carnarvon, who had funded every previous season, told Carter in the summer of 1922 that he would not pay for another season. Carter persuaded him to fund one final attempt, beginning in November 1922, on a small area of debris next to the entrance to the tomb of Ramesses VI that Carter had previously skipped.

Eight days into the season — on 4 November 1922 — workmen uncovered a stone step. Within hours they had cleared a flight of 16 steps descending into the rock.

Carter had found his tomb.

"Yes, wonderful things"

On 26 November 1922, with Carnarvon, his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, and Carter's assistant Arthur Callender present, Carter made a small hole in the upper-left corner of the sealed doorway at the bottom of the staircase, inserted a candle, and looked through.

Carnarvon, behind him, asked:

Can you see anything?

Carter's reply — "Yes, wonderful things" — is the most famous line in the history of archaeology.

The four men entered the antechamber the same afternoon. Behind the antechamber lay three more rooms, each one packed floor-to- ceiling with grave goods. There were 5 398 individual objects in the tomb, the largest single intact royal burial assemblage ever found. The clearance and cataloguing of the tomb would take Carter ten years to complete.

The boy king the Egyptians erased

Tutankhamun was a minor pharaoh by any measure. He took the throne around age 9, died around age 19, and ruled for ten unremarkable years.

He was the son of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten — the revolutionary who had attempted to replace Egypt's traditional polytheism with worship of a single sun-disc deity (the Aten) — and his entire dynasty had been formally erased from Egyptian king-lists shortly after his death.

The damnatio memoriae was so effective that, by 1300 BC, Tutankhamun's name had been chiselled off most public monuments, his tomb had been quickly buried under the debris from cutting Ramesses VI's much larger tomb in the 1100s BC, and Egyptian historical memory had erased him entirely.

This is why the tomb survived intact. The robbers who emptied every other royal tomb in the valley did not know his existed.

The curse that wasn't

Lord Carnarvon died on 5 April 1923, five months after entering the tomb, from septicaemia following an infected mosquito bite he had nicked while shaving. He was 56 and in poor general health.

The British press, hungry for sensation, immediately attributed his death to the Curse of the Pharaoh — an inscription supposedly found in the tomb threatening anyone who disturbed the king.

No such inscription was ever in the tomb. The supposed text — "Death shall come on swift wings to whoever toucheth the tomb of the pharaoh" — was invented by the press around the time of Carnarvon's death.

Howard Carter, who did the actual work of clearing the tomb, lived another sixteen years and died in 1939 of lymphoma, age 64. Of the 58 people present at the opening of the burial chamber in 1923, only eight died within the next twelve years — slightly better than the actuarial average for British men of their class in the 1920s and 30s.