Tutankhamen (12 page)

Back in London, Carnarvon entertained King George and Queen Mary with an account of his adventures. More importantly, he opened formal negotiations with
The Times
. Tutankhamen was likely to prove a drain on Carnarvon's resources for a long time to come. Of course, he fully expected to receive a share of the artefacts from the tomb, and these could be sold to defray expenses. The sums involved were likely to be huge: on 2 December the
Daily Express
valued the grave goods at £3,000,000; on 4 December the
New York Times
suggested $15,000,000. Nevertheless, it seemed sensible to capitalise on Tutankhamen's obvious commercial value, and negotiate an exclusive deal. Tutankhamen had already entered Western popular culture, and others were making money from the discovery. In America, inevitably, questions were even being asked over the ownership of his name. Could Tutankhamen, or Tut, or Tut-Tut possibly be copyrighted? Although he suspected that the
Daily Mail
might pay more,
Carnarvon preferred to deal with the more upmarket
Times
. On 9 January 1923 he signed a contract:

Carnarvon was to receive £5,000 on signature of the agreement, plus 75 per cent of net profits above this initial payment. From this point onwards, the most important and accurate account of events in the Valley would be provided, not by learned journals, but by a British national newspaper. Ambitious plans to release a film of work in the Valley never came to fruition, although the Goldwyn Picture Company did express a great deal of interest in an outline film script prepared by the Earl himself. This would have included documentary footage of the actual discovery plus reconstructions by actors.

Financially,
The Times
deal was a sensible move. Practically, too, it made sense, as it would restrict the number of journalists disrupting work within the tomb. But it was a move that alienated the world's press, many of whom had representatives ready and waiting for news in the Valley. To a man, the excluded journalists were furious. With Reuters (represented by V. Williams), the
Daily Express
(H.V. Morton), the
Daily Mail
(Weigall) and the
Morning Post
and
New York Times
(both A. H. Bradstreet) taking the lead, they formed an anti-
Times
alliance. Refusing to leave Luxor, yet denied any form of official story, they used what the excavators considered to be underhand means to obtain information, and printed whatever they could. The Egyptian journalists, who faced the prospect of being excluded from a discovery
in their own country, were particularly incensed and, in an age of growing nationalism, it was not long before the question of tomb-ownership was being raised. What right did foreigners have to disturb, and profit from, Egypt's dead kings?

In dire need of assistance, Carter appealed, by telegram, to Albert M. Lythgoe, Head of the Department of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. The response was immediate and enthusiastic:

Carter's team would vary from season to season, but at its core were Callender and the government chemist Lucas, plus, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum, the archaeologist and conservator Arthur Mace and the photographer Harry Burton. Burton was particularly welcome, as it had proved impossible to take decent photographs inside the dark tomb and, given the potential fire risk, no one wanted to risk experimenting with flashlight. His images and occasional short films are still proving their worth today as, even though some were undoubtedly deliberately posed for the press, they offer a helpful eye-witness supplement to Carter's written records. Architect Walter Hauser and artist Lindsley Foote Hall, also borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum, were to plan the tomb while Gardiner was to work on any texts and inscriptions. Additional, occasional, team
members included Percy Newberry, who worked on the botanical specimens while his wife, Essie, assisted with the textiles, and James Henry Breastead, founder of the Oriental Institute at Chicago.

Acting Sergeant Richard Adamson was almost certainly not a member of the team, despite his claim to have guarded the tomb night and day for seven years, sleeping on a camp bed in the Burial Chamber and playing loud music on his portable gramophone to frighten away thieves. Adamson did not tell his remarkable story until the death of his wife, and the deaths of all the core team members, in 1966. He quickly became a popular public speaker, presenting a slide show of images published in books and magazines. He collaborated with author Barry Wynne in the writing of
Behind the Mask of Tutankhamen
(1972) and, as ‘the last surviving member of the Tutankhamen expedition', was interviewed by the
Daily Mail
in August 1980. However, Adamson is excluded from all official and unofficial accounts of the discovery: he is never mentioned by any tomb visitor or journalist, and is not included in any of the many hundreds of photographs. There is compelling evidence – his marriage certificate and the birth certificates of his three children – to suggest that Adamson was not in Egypt at the times that he claimed.
⁸

Carter returned to Luxor with enormous quantities of material including three and a half miles of cotton wool and several thousand light bulbs. The tomb was re-opened on 16 December 1922 and a steel security gate was fitted on the 17th. The Valley now became Carter's workshop, as KV 55 was converted into a photographic darkroom, KV 15 (Seti II) became a combined laboratory and store, and KV 4 (Ramesses XI) became the essential ‘luncheon tomb'. Finally, the task of clearing the Antechamber could begin. This was difficult: the chamber had been packed with a multitude of objects which, in a conventional, far larger, royal tomb, would probably have been distributed between several storerooms. It had then been robbed and restored, in a somewhat haphazard fashion, twice. With everything jumbled together,
and objects precariously balanced on other objects, there was no space to manoeuvre; even to enter the room was difficult, as the team were forced to step over the ‘wishing cup', a semi-translucent calcite goblet with lotus flower handles supporting kneeling figures signifying eternity, which lay in the doorway. Carter likened the clearance to playing a ‘gigantic game of spillikins'; a popular parlour game which required players to use physical and mental dexterity in extracting sticks from a heap, without disturbing the other sticks. In fact, as he later came to realise:

The team worked their way around the room in an anti-clockwise direction, starting to the right of the doorway (working towards the north-east corner) and ending with the dismantled chariots which lay to the left of the door. The work was painfully slow and nerve-racking, as the team fought to prevent the artefacts from crumbling beneath their touch. Each chest or bundle, safely extracted from the heap in the tomb, then had to undergo its own mini-excavation in the conservation lab. Just one of the boxes yielded contents that agreed with its original label; all the others contained a mixture of artefacts stuffed in any old how by the restorers.

The first artefact to be taken for treatment – a beautiful chest, known today as the ‘Painted Box' – provides a perfect example of the problems encountered by the conservators. The wooden chest had been plastered and painted over its entire outer surface with traditional scenes of hunting in the desert (lid) and fierce battles featuring
Tutankhamen triumphant in his chariot, vanquishing his Syrian enemies (body). There were a few chips in the plaster and a few gaps in the joints, but at first sight the chest appeared to be in good condition. It was therefore cleaned, patches of discoloration were treated with benzine, and the whole was sprayed with celluloid solution. However, after three weeks in the dry atmosphere of the conservation tomb, the wood began to shrink and the painted plaster to buckle. The chest was therefore treated with melted paraffin wax, which penetrated the plaster, effectively gluing it back in place. Inside the box was a curious and ill-assorted mess of decaying objects which Mace, in his diary entry for 10 January 1923, described as ‘a hay pie, jumbled up anyhow'. The pie included a pair of woven sandals, three pairs of leather sandals, at least seven beaded and finely decorated robes including an imitation leopardskin cloak, two bags or caps, two faience collars, loincloths, rolls of cloth and bandages, a glove and a golden headrest. Many of the robes were beyond redemption: ‘a mass of decayed cloth, much of it the consistency of soot, spangled throughout with rosettes and sequins of gold and silver'.
¹⁰
Some were obviously children's garments, causing Mace to speculate, for the first time, that Tutankhamen may have succeeded to his throne as a boy. It took Mace three weeks to empty this one chest, picking out fragments of material piece by piece and photographing each stage of the operation.

 

On the afternoon of Friday 16 February the doorway to the Burial Chamber was dismantled in the presence of an invited audience of archaeologists and government officials.
¹¹
Spotlighted by two lamps, focused on the wall, Carnarvon started proceedings with a brief but impressive speech, thanking all those who had assisted in the work so far. Mervyn Herbert tells us that his brother was unusually nervous, ‘like a naughty schoolboy', in case anyone should realise that the wall had already been breached.
¹²
Standing on a specially designed wooden platform, Carter too made a speech, which was, according to Herbert, less impressive than Carnarvon's. Then, having stripped to his trousers and vest, he located the wooden lintel at the top of the doorway and applied his crowbar, working, for reasons of safety, from the top downwards. Mace took the blocks from the wall and handed them to Callender, who passed them along a chain of workmen to be stacked outside the tomb. The pack of reporters, who spent the afternoon glumly sitting on the tomb parapet listening to events within, was deliberately fed misinformation by the workmen: first eight mummies had been found, then four, then an enormous cat statue. Inevitably, some of this misinformation made its way into print.

After about fifteen minutes Carter had made a hole large enough to insert an electric torch; this revealed what appeared to be a wall of solid gold. Soon after, he was able to push a mattress through the hole, to protect the golden wall from falling masonry. After two hours the party was at last able, three at a time, to squeeze through the hole and drop down into the Burial Chamber. Carter recorded his impressions of this first official visit to the Chamber:

The enormous and very fragile gilt shrine was fitted, on its eastern face, with double folding doors which were closed and bolted, but not sealed. Eagerly, Carter drew back the ebony bolts and swung open the doors to reveal a second golden shrine, covered with a delicate linen pall appliquéd with gilded bronze flowers. This shrine was bolted top and bottom and sealed with two seals: the necropolis seal of the jackal and nine bound captives, and Tutankhamen's own necropolis seal. Finally, here was proof that the ancient robbers had failed to penetrate to the heart of Tutankhamen's burial.