In the Valley of the Kings (3 page)

They were a hint of what was in the great hall: the vividly painted coffins and shawabti (magical figures, “answerers” who would come to life at the utterance of a spell); the wonderful statues from almost every period in Egypt’s history. Some, like the block statue of Senwosret-Senebefny, Overseer of the Reckoning of the Cattle, were covered with biographical inscriptions. The Overseer is a powerful figure, whose strong limbs, or a suggestion of them, can be seen just under his robe, a marvel of the sculptor’s art (Twelfth Dynasty, ca.
1800 BC
).

For two years, from age fifteen to seventeen, Carter was a frequent visitor at the estate, becoming a favorite of the family. From a sketch his father made of him at the time, we can see the boy: An enormous white collar falls over his buttoned-up wool jacket, his longish wavy hair is parted on one side, his eyes are large and dreamy. When not occupied with his work, Carter drew the gods and goddesses, the mummies and coffins; his sketchbooks from this period are filled with them. He was developing a feeling for
Egyptian art—he was “hooked”: “It was the Amherst Egyptian Collection at Didlington Hall,” he later wrote, “that aroused my longing for that country. It gave me an earnest desire to see Egypt.”

Just as important to him as the works of art were Tyssen-Amherst’s papyri. How could they fail to capture the boy’s imagination? Translated by the foremost scholars of the day, they included poems and songs and sacred texts beautifully illustrated—the Book of the Dead, and the Book of Gates, and the Book of What Is in the Underworld—and the harsh drama of an ancient grave-robbing trial known simply as the Amherst papyrus. Written in hieratic—a flowing script, a kind of shorthand hieroglyphs—the transcript records a trial that took place during the reign of Ramesses IX (Twentieth Dynasty,
1120-1108 BC
).

Charged with plundering the tomb of Pharaoh Sobekemsaf, an ancient tomb even then (Thirteenth Dynasty), the stonemason Amunpanefer at first denied everything. But when he was beaten again and again with a double rod (“Give him the stick! The stick!”), he finally confessed. We can almost hear him cry out: “We found the noble mummy of this king with a sword. There were many amulets and jewels of gold upon his neck … and his mask of gold was upon him. The noble mummy of this god was completely covered with gold and his coffins were adorned with gold and silver, inside and out, and with every costly stone. We stripped off the gold that we found on the august mummy of this god, and its amulets and ornaments that were at its throat, and we set fire to the coverings….”

This trial was one of many, since the lure of the treasure was irresistible, as other ancient transcripts reveal: “We went up in a single body. The foreigner Nesamun showed us the tomb of Ramesses VI, the Great God. We said to him, Where is the tomb maker who was with you? And he said to us: He was killed….

“I spent four days breaking into the tomb, there being five of us.
We opened the tomb and we entered it. We found a basket lying on sixty chests…. We opened them and found …

“My father ferried the thieves over to the island of Amunemopet and they said to him, This inner coffin is ours. It belonged to some great person. We were hungry and we went and brought it away, but you be silent and we will give you a loincloth. So they said to him. And they gave him a loincloth. But my mother said to him, You are a silly old man. What you have done is stealing.”

Later, such documents would be important clues when Carter began to piece together his deductions about the royal necropolis (city of the dead). But for now, he was just becoming familiar with the long-dead figures: the Ramesses and Setis and Amenhoteps who would, for the next forty-five years, be his all-consuming passion. There would be no great love in his life, not even a passing romance. No wife, no mistress, no children. The tombs he uncovered were to be the main events of his life, a long list of them leading toward the great prize: a royal tomb, almost untouched—as his sixth sense told him it would be—and filled with breathtakingly beautiful objects.

To the young Carter, though, Egypt seemed as far away as the moon. The Tyssen-Amherst collection had fired his imagination, but there matters ended. The scholars and professors who visited at Didlington Hall were in a different category from his. They were equals who had come to talk learnedly about the antiquities. In class-conscious England, Carter was a step above the servants; his job was to sketch Tyssen-Amherst’s favorite animals.

Ironically enough, his lack of education—his being “miserably incomplete,” as he put it—would give him his first break. His services could be obtained cheaply, which was just what the recently founded Egyptian Exploration Fund needed. They could not afford to hire another expensive gentleman-scholar.

Engaged in an epic project, the fund had been recording the
countless ancient inscriptions and friezes endangered by vandals, flooding, fading, and the like. Photography could capture just so much, given the limited techniques of the time. To copy the paintings in the long, winding passages of the dark tombs, to record the rows of hieroglyphics on temple walls, to faithfully reproduce colors and details, artists were needed. The fund had a team working in the rock tombs of Beni Hasan (Middle Egypt). But the work had lagged, and an extra hand was needed.

One of the fund’s directors wrote to John Newberry (whose brother, Percy Newberry, was a Cambridge-trained Egyptologist working for the fund at Beni Hasan): “If you come across a colourist (eye for colour must be chief qualification added to drawing) who would like a trip to Egypt for expenses paid and nothing else, I should be much obliged if you would ask him to call…. It seems to me that as cost is a great consideration it matters not whether the artist is a gentleman or not. Your brother [Percy Newberry] can fraternize with George Willoughby Fraser [another member of the Beni Hasan team and a ‘gentleman’]…. A gentleman unless of an economical turn of mind would run into extra expenses very likely, while if a non-gentleman were sent out Percy Newberry could take him under his wing and manage all his feeding etc. as his employer. In this way 2 or 3 shillings might be saved daily.”

As it happened, Percy Newberry was on leave in England at the time, and his brother forwarded the letter to him. Since Newberry frequently visited at Didlington Hall, he immediately thought of Carter. He had seen his work and thought it was “good enough;” moreover, he liked the boy.

Tyssen-Amherst seconded the idea, so the matter was settled. Carter was to spend the summer training at the British Museum, where he would carefully study the precise and beautiful drawings done in the beginning of the century by Robert Hay, one of the first Europeans to have explored the ruins of Egypt.

Whatever training he received was picked up hastily, during these few summer months. Francis Llewellyn Griffith, superintendent of the Archaeological Survey, tried to prepare him as best he could, along with C. H. Read. “These venerable people,” Carter recalled later, “and this august building with its associations and its resonant rooms, deeply impressed me and produced an awe that caused me to be in a mortal funk lest my boots squeaked.” His boots well oiled—presumably—here he learned more about the lines of Egyptian art and the hieroglyphic writing he would be copying.

Then, at the end of those three months in 1892—Carter was seventeen years old—his new life began.

^1*
The tombs in the Valley of the Kings are numbered from one to sixty-two. The general rule is that tombs with lower numbers have either lain open since antiquity or were discovered earlier than those higher in the sequence. The tombs in the adjoining valleys (the Valley of the Queens, the Nobles, the West Valley, and Deir el-Bahri) are referred to by their own numbering sequences. DB #320, for example, refers to tomb number 320 from the Deir el-Bahri sequence. It is to John Gardner Wilkinson that we owe the numbering system still in use. In the 1820s and 1830s, Wilkinson lived in Gurneh, at the edge of the Valley of the Kings, where he studied those tombs that were accessible and devised his numbering system.

^2*
Over the next decades, the study of mummies would make great progress. The first X-raying of mummies was performed by William Flinders Petrie in 1898. By 1911, Sir Armand Ruffer, a French baron and professor of medicine in Cairo, had developed a technique for preventing brittle ancient mummy tissue from crumbling under the microscope. And the autopsies Dr. Grafton Elliot Smith of the Cairo School of Medicine performed on the royal mummies were all meticulously recorded and published.

ALMOST A DECADE LATER, THE CARTER OF 1901 STOOD BEFORE
the tomb he had discovered. Though still not considered a gentleman by the standards of his countrymen, he could give a good imitation of one. At least he was considered passable company: His colleagues fraternized with him, albeit with a patronizing attitude.

He was formally attired, though he was in the middle of the desert, as were the others who had gathered for the opening of “his” tomb—that is, the intact royal tomb he had discovered.

With nothing more than a hunch to go on, he’d struggled for two years to organize an expedition. Every step of the way had been fraught with difficulties, from finding a backer to pay for the dig, to getting the Department of Antiquities’ permission to work the site,
^1*
to the excavation itself, which proved unbelievably complicated.

Hundreds of feet underground, at the end of a long, descending
passage, he had finally uncovered a vast, almost empty chamber after months of digging. Leading down from this chamber was a sunken shaft that was so deep, it took two seasons to clear it. But clear it he finally did, coming upon a door stamped with the seal of the royal necropolis: a recumbent jackal, Anubis, god of mummification, over nine bound prisoners.

This sealed doorway, and the unbreached underground stone wall on either side of it (twelve feet thick), caused him to summon the consul, the Egyptian prime minister, the head of the Antiquities Service, and the experts: Carter had made an unprecedented find.

If he was nervous, he did not show it: On public occasions he was known for his self-possession. From the shy boy in the British Museum, trembling lest his boots squeak, he had developed what Emma Andrews (traveling companion of the millionaire Theodore Davis) called “a dominant personality.” For almost a decade now, the Egyptian desert had been his home; he knew its terrain well, had explored its most remote valleys and lived in its tombs (sometimes sleeping in the ancient sepulchers when no other shelter was available, then a common practice).

From Carter’s notebooks it can be seen that nothing escaped his notice: the quality of the rock; the patterns of flash floods in the desert (over the centuries, sudden violent torrents moved great boulders and masses of debris, covering tomb entrances and burying temples and ruins); the ancient graffiti scrawled on the cliffs—secret “markers” left by priests, doodlings and caricatures scratched by necropolis workers and guards, comments by Greek pilgrims and Roman passersby; and the wildlife to be found in the desert, which especially appealed to him: “some scaly, a few furred like the fox and the desert hare, but mostly feathered. Several kinds of vultures, one or two falcons, a long-legged buzzard, ravens, blue rock pigeons, sand partridge and other smaller desert birds which delight in eking out a precarious existence in desolate solitude. On
high eagles soared in the still air. And along the riverbank in the scant patches of palm were turtle doves.”

It was the one pleasure he allowed himself when he could: riding out on horseback to explore and to sketch. On one of these outings two years earlier (1898), his horse stumbled and fell. Unhurt, he got up to investigate. As he described it in the report he filed for the service
(Anuales du Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte
II [1901]): “The ground gave way under the horse’s legs bringing both of us down. Afterwards, on looking into the small hole there formed, I saw traces of stone work, from which I concluded that there must be something and most probably a tomb. I commenced excavating on the 20th January, 1900, in order to find out what really was there, and in a short time, I was able to trace the three sides of the stone work, the fourth side, to the east, being open. From this state of the east end, I concluded that, if it was a tomb, the entrance would be below the western end, so I at once set the men to work there….”

In his report, he quickly moved from the fateful fall in the desert to the excavation. But two years intervened before he was able to raise the funds for the excavation. His immediate superior at the time, the scholar Édouard Naville, was skeptical. As Carter remembered in his journal: “All that I received for my pains was a somewhat splenetic remark, that had a taint of ridicule.”

Carter shrugged off Professor Naville’s ridicule, however, and tried to raise money to dig. He won over Maspero, who found some money for him and then convinced an unidentified sponsor to step forward with the rest.