Discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun

The Valley of the Kings in 1922. The tomb of Tutankhamun lies near the central path through the valley, at centre right.

The ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun ruled during the Eighteenth Dynasty, part of a broader period known as the New Kingdom. He died c. 1323 BC and was buried in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the burial place for most New Kingdom rulers, near the city of Thebes (modern Luxor).[1] Instead of a full-size royal tomb cut into the slopes of the valley, he was interred in a small tomb that was dug into the valley floor, probably a private tomb that was modified to fit the voluminous goods that accompanied a royal burial.[2]

Within a few years of the burial, robbers broke into the tomb twice. Officials hastily restored and resealed the tomb, filling its entrance passage with chips of limestone to deter further intrusion. During the reigns of Ramesses V and Ramesses VI, nearly 200 years after Tutankhamun's death, his tomb was covered by debris from the construction of their tomb, KV9.[Note 1] Tutankhamun's tomb was thus hidden from later waves of robbery, so that alone among the tombs in the valley it retained most of the goods it had been stocked with.[5]

In the early twentieth century Egypt was a de facto British colony, ostensibly ruled by monarchs from the Muhammad Ali dynasty but in fact managed by a British consul-general, who oversaw a government staffed by Egyptians but dominated by the British. Egyptology, the study of ancient Egypt, was overseen by the Antiquities Service, a department of the Egyptian government.[6][7] New excavations of ancient sites were heavily dependent on the system known as "partage" or "division of finds": museums or private collectors of ancient artefacts would fund an Egyptological dig in exchange for a share of the artefacts, customarily half, while the remainder went to the Antiquities Service and its museum, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.[8][9]

Many of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings had lain open since ancient times.[10] Dozens of others, whose entrances had been deliberately buried by their builders or had become hidden by flash flood debris, were discovered in the course of the nineteenth century.[11][12] Royal mummies[13] and individual burial goods had been discovered in some of these tombs, but nothing close to a complete set of royal burial equipment had been found.[14]

A period of rapid discoveries in the valley began after Howard Carter became the Antiquities Service's inspector for Upper Egypt, including the Valley of the Kings, in 1900.[15] Carter had come to Egypt as an artist, assisting in recording Egyptian tomb art, and was then trained as an archaeologist.[16] As inspector, Carter both restored and protected the open tombs in the valley and sought to dig for undiscovered tombs. In searching for a patron to fund these efforts he found Theodore M. Davis, a wealthy American who regularly visited Egypt. With Davis's support Carter made several small finds and uncovered three previously unknown tombs.[17] After the Antiquities Service transferred Carter to Lower Egypt in 1904, Davis held the concession to excavate in the valley for another ten years, his efforts managed by a series of five archaeologists.[15] Davis pressured these excavators to work rapidly, resulting in prolific discoveries that were often carelessly treated and inadequately documented. His excavation of KV55, the tomb of a member of the royal family from Tutankhamun's time, was so poorly handled that the identity of its occupant has been uncertain ever since.[18]

Little was known about Tutankhamun in Davis's time, though he was known to have shifted the monarchy back toward traditional practices after a brief episode of radical innovation known as the Amarna Period. It was thus likely that he was buried in the Valley of the Kings, the traditional site for royal burials before and after the Amarna Period.[19] Davis never found Tutankhamun's tomb, assuming no tomb would have been cut into the valley floor, but he did find signs that the king had been buried in the valley.[20] One such sign was a pit, discovered in 1907 and designated KV54, that contained a handful of objects bearing Tutankhamun's name. These objects are now thought to have been either burial goods that were originally stored in the entrance corridor of Tutankhamun's tomb, which were removed and reburied in KV54 when the restorers filled the corridor, or objects related to Tutankhamun's funeral. Another was an uninscribed tomb, found in 1909 and known as KV58, that contained pieces of a chariot harness bearing Tutankhamun's name and that of his successor, Ay. Davis concluded that KV58 was all that remained of Tutankhamun's burial, which would mean that virtually all the kings' tombs one would expect to find in the valley were accounted for.[21] The last several years of Davis's work in the valley produced almost no finds, and in 1912 he wrote: "I fear the Valley of the Tombs is now exhausted."[22]

Carter had left the Antiquities Service in 1905. When a group of French tourists forced their way into a closed archaeological site at Saqqara, Carter ordered the site's Egyptian guards to eject them. The use of force by Egyptians against Europeans caused a scandal, and in its wake Carter resigned.[23] In 1907, he found employment with George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, a collector of Egyptian antiquities, as both an advisor for Carnarvon's purchases of artefacts and as an excavator. After digging at several sites in Egypt, Carnarvon purchased the concession for the Valley of the Kings after Davis relinquished it in 1914. The outbreak of the First World War made it difficult to conduct fieldwork for several years, but beginning in 1917 Carter launched a concerted effort to clear the valley down to the bedrock.[24] Doing so required sifting through the spoil heaps produced by decades of previous excavations, as well as the valley's natural alluvium.[25] At the time neither Carter nor Carnarvon stated they were looking for Tutankhamun's tomb, but there was reason for them to believe it had not been found. The objects in KV54 and KV58 indicated that Tutankhamun had been buried somewhere in the valley, but such meager remains were unlikely to be a royal burial.[26]

While these excavations continued, the political status of Egypt shifted dramatically. Its people rose up against British rule in the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, which convinced British authorities that Egypt's current status was unsustainable. They unilaterally declared the country independent in February 1922, though the declaration left the United Kingdom with substantial influence over the government, particularly in military and foreign affairs.[27] Antiquities policy was one of the areas ceded to the Egyptians. The Antiquities Service retained its incumbent director, Pierre Lacau, but he would now answer to an Egyptian minister of public works.[28]

The season for excavation and tourism in Egypt extends from November to April, avoiding the worst of the country's heat.[29] In mid-1922, when Carter and Carnarvon were in a pause between digging seasons, only one section of the Valley of the Kings remained covered by debris. This area would be difficult to clear because it included the remains of ancient workers' huts and lay close to the entrance to KV9, which attracted heavy tourist traffic. Carnarvon discussed the possibility of abandoning excavation in the valley, given how fruitless the effort so far had been, but Carter offered to cover the expense of clearing this final section himself. Carnarvon, impressed by Carter's dedication, agreed to fund the work for one more season.[30]

Carter and his Egyptian workforce began on 1 November 1922, earlier in the season than usual, to minimise the disruption to tourists.[31] On 4 November one of the workers uncovered a step in the rock. According to Carter's published accounts, the workmen discovered the step while digging beneath the remains of the huts, although other accounts attribute the discovery to a boy digging outside the assigned work area.[32][Note 2] The step proved to be the beginning of a tomb entrance staircase. At the bottom stood a sealed doorway, into which Carter cut a peephole to see the passage beyond was filled with rubble. Carter sent a telegram to Carnarvon, who was then in England, and had the workmen re-fill the pit they had dug, so as to secure the tomb until Carnarvon's arrival.[36] While waiting, Carter called upon his friend and colleague Arthur Callender to assist with the upcoming excavation.[37]

On 23 November Carnarvon arrived in Luxor, with his daughter Evelyn Herbert, and the digging resumed. Upon closer examination the doorway seal proved to be inscribed with the name of Tutankhamun, which would suggest this was his tomb, but the debris that filled the passage contained objects bearing the names of other kings, suggesting it might instead be a cache of miscellaneous objects buried during his reign. The doorway had been partially demolished before being resealed, indicating that the tomb had been robbed in ancient times. On 26 November the excavators reached another sealed doorway.[38] Carter's book about the discovery, co-written with Arthur Cruttenden Mace, described the breaching of the seal in one of the most famous passages in the history of archaeology:[39][40]

With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner. Darkness and blank space, as far as an iron testing-rod could reach, showed that whatever lay beyond was empty, and not filled like the passage we had just cleared. Candle tests were applied as a precaution against possible foul gases, and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in, Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Callender standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict. At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold.[41]

Carnarvon asked Carter whether he could see anything. Accounts differ as to the wording of his answer; in the best-known version, in his book, Carter replied "Yes, wonderful things."[40][Note 3]

View of the southwest corner of the antechamber, with disassembled chariots on the left and furniture on the right

Stacked objects on the west side of the antechamber, with each object labeled with a reference number before being removed from the tomb

The gilded furniture and statuary that Carter had seen when first peering into the tomb stood in what came to be known as the antechamber.[43] This room alone contained burial goods in greater quantity than the excavators had ever expected. Some were types of object that were very familiar from previous finds; some were exceptionally elaborate examples of their kind; and some were entirely unexpected.[44][45] From the antechamber led two doorways that had been blocked with plaster and then breached by ancient robbers. One was left open, revealing that the chamber beyond, dubbed the annexe, was filled with a chaotic jumble of objects. The other had been resealed in ancient times. Many of the objects bore Tutankhamun's name, leaving the excavators in no doubt that this was his original burial.[46]

At some point in the days after first peering into the antechamber, the excavators breached the plaster of the blocked doorway.[47] Carter, Carnarvon and Evelyn Herbert squeezed through the hole to find the tomb's burial chamber, which was mostly filled by the set of gilded shrines that enclosed Tutankhamun's sarcophagus.[48] The robbers had gone no further than the outermost shrine.[49] Carter, in particular, may have wanted to be certain of that fact; in 1900 he had opened what he thought was an undisturbed royal tomb, the Bab el-Hosan, in front of many highly placed guests, only to find it nearly empty.[50][51] Breaching the doorway, before the tomb had been inspected by the Antiquities Service, was not explicitly against the terms of Carnarvon's concession,[52] but it was irregular, and it necessitated moving some of the artefacts that stood in front of the partition, meaning their original positions could not be recorded.[53] The excavators resealed the hole with new plaster,[47] though their breach of the doorway became something of an open secret in the Egyptological community.[48]

Clearing the tomb of its artefacts would require an unprecedented effort.[54] Moisture from flash floods in the valley above had periodically seeped into the tomb over the centuries. As a result, alternating periods of humidity and dryness had warped wood, dissolved glue and caused leather and textiles to decay. Every exposed surface was covered with an unidentified pink film. Carter later estimated that without intensive restoration efforts, only a tenth of the burial goods would have survived being transported to Cairo.[55] He needed assistance, and he called upon Albert Lythgoe, head of the Egyptian Expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was working nearby, to loan some of its personnel. Lythgoe sent Mace, a specialist in conservation; Harry Burton, regarded as the best archaeological photographer in Egypt; and the architect Walter Hauser and the artist Lindsley Hall, who drew plans of the tomb.[56]

Tangled objects with addition of supports and cards bearing reference numbers. (Source: The Tomb of Tut.Ankh.Amen, Volume 1: Search, Discovery and Clearance of the Antechamber by Howard Carter and A. C. Mace. Duckworth, 2003 [1923]. pp. 109, 128, 130)

Other experts also volunteered their services: Alfred Lucas, a chemist for the Antiquities Service, whose expertise would be a great help in the conservation effort; James Henry Breasted and Alan Gardiner, two of the foremost scholars of the Egyptian language of the time, who would translate any texts discovered in the tomb; and Percy Newberry, a specialist of botanical specimens, and his wife Essie, who helped conserve textiles from the burial.[57][58][Note 4] They used the entrance of KV15, the tomb of Seti II, as a storeroom and conservation laboratory; KV55 as a photographic darkroom; and KV4, the tomb of Ramesses XI, as a place to take meals.[60] Four Egyptian foremen—Ahmed Gerigar, Gad Hassan, Hussein Abu Awad and Hussein Ahmed Said—also worked in the tomb, and a handful of Egyptian porters, whose names are not recorded, carried objects from Tutankhamun's tomb to KV15.[61]

Once the tomb was re-opened on 16 December the excavators began clearing the antechamber, starting with the objects north of the entrance and moving anti-clockwise around the room.[62] Objects were labeled with reference numbers and photographed in situ before being moved.[63] Carter said of the stacks of furniture and other objects in the antechamber, "So crowded were they that it was a matter of extreme difficulty to move one without running serious risk of damaging others, and in some cases they were so inextricably tangled that an elaborate series of supports had to be devised to hold one object or group of objects in place while another was being removed."[64] The disorganised contents of various boxes had to be sorted through, and in some cases pieces of a single object, such as an elaborate inlaid corselet, were scattered through the chamber and had to be searched for before being reassembled.[65] Upon removal from the tomb, the objects were cleaned and, if necessary, treated with preservatives such as celluloid solution or paraffin wax.[66] The items in most urgent need of conservation were treated on the spot, while most were removed to KV15 for treatment.[64]

Tourist crowds outside the tomb entrance in February 1923

Advertisement in Vogue magazine, June 1923, for Ramsès perfume, touting "scent-bases known and used since the days of Tut-ankh-Amen"

The tomb inspired a public craze that came to be known as "Tutmania", a specific instance of the long-standing phenomenon of Western Egyptomania.[67] As Breasted's son Charles put it, the news of the discovery "broke upon a world sated with post-First World War conferences, with nothing proved and nothing achieved, after a summer journalistically so dull that an English farmer's report of a gooseberry the size of a crabapple achieved the main news pages of the London metropolitan dailies."[68] The resulting media frenzy was unprecedented in the history of Egyptology.[69] Carter and Carnarvon became internationally famous,[70] and Tutankhamun, formerly unknown to the public, became so familiar as to be given a nickname, "King Tut".[71]

Tourists in Luxor abandoned the normal sightseeing itinerary and flocked to the tomb, crowding around the retaining wall that rimmed the pit in which the tomb entrance lay. At times the excavators feared the wall might collapse from the weight of the people leaning on it. When possible, the excavators left objects uncovered when carrying them out of the entrance, so as to please the sightseers. People who demanded to enter the tomb, many of whom were too highly positioned or well-connected to refuse, presented a greater difficulty. Every visit to the tomb by a non-archaeologist increased the risk of damage to the burial goods and disrupted the excavators' work schedule; Carter and Mace estimated that a quarter of the work time during the first season was given over to accommodating such visitors.[72]

The phenomenon extended far beyond the tomb itself. Guests at the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor danced to the "Tutankhamun Rag",[73] while in the United States the discovery inspired a flurry of ephemeral Egypt-themed films and a more enduring hit song, "Old King Tut".[74] General interest in Egyptology, and sales of books about ancient Egypt, also surged;[75] several established Egyptologists published books about Tutankhamun to capitalise on the trend.[76]

The opulence of Tutankhamun's burial goods, in particular, caught the public's attention.[77] Replicas of them appeared as early as 1924, when the British Empire Exhibition featured a reproduction of the tomb, even though many of the tomb's contents had not yet been seen, even by the excavators, and could not be included.[78] The public in Europe and the United States compared the everyday items in the tomb to modern household goods, and producers of clothing, jewellery, furniture and household decor hastened to create Egyptian-inspired designs. Some were based on actual artefacts found in the tomb, while others simply adopted ancient Egyptian names and motifs. Although Egyptian Revival decorative arts had existed since the early 19th century, they had largely been aimed at the world of wealthy art connoisseurs. The products of Tutmania were mass-produced and marketed to the general public.[79]

In the nineteenth century Egyptians had little interest in ancient Egyptian civilisation.[80] In the early twentieth century that attitude changed, largely because of Ahmed Kamal, one of the first Egyptian Egyptologists, who raised public awareness of ancient Egyptian history.[81][82] In the years leading up to the First World War, Egyptian nationalists began treating ancient Egypt as a source of national identity, one that bound together Egypt's Muslims and Coptic Christians and emphasized that Egypt had once been powerful and independent.[83][84] This ideology, known as pharaonism, was well established by the time of the 1919 revolution. The Western mania for ancient Egypt had inspired modern Egyptians to adopt it as a source of national pride, and Tutankhamun in particular became a national symbol once Tutmania emerged.[85] After the discovery, ancient imagery became ubiquitous in Egyptian print media, and ancient Egypt became a common subject for Egyptian plays and novels. Major Egyptian literary figures, such as the poet Ahmed Shawqi, focused on Pharaonist themes in the wake of the discovery.[86] The first Egyptian film, made in 1923, was titled In the Country of Tut-Ankh-Amun.[87]

Carnarvon embraced the publicity, hoping to defray the costs of the excavation by licensing various rights to the media.[88] On 9 January 1923 he signed a contract with The Times of London, granting its reporter, Arthur Merton, exclusive press access to the tomb.[89] Other Egyptological digs had made similar arrangements with newspapers in the past, but the unique nature of the Tutankhamun find made this one a major source of conflict.[90] A coalition of other press outlets joined to denounce the Times monopoly on official information from the excavation,[91] and their coverage of Carnarvon grew increasingly negative.[92] Egyptian papers joined the international press in denouncing the monopoly, which they saw as a sign of continued foreign domination, at the same time that pharaonist authors expressed fear that the tomb would be subject to a division of finds, sending many of the burial goods out of the country. An editorial in Al-Ahram, written by Fikri Abaza, declared "Lord Carnarvon is exploiting the mortal remains of our ancient fathers before our eyes, and he fails to give the grandchildren any information about their forefathers".[93]

Workmen moving goods from the tomb along a Decauville railroad track to the Nile

The antechamber was almost entirely cleared by 16 February,[94] and on the following day Carter and Carnarvon formally opened the burial chamber with various government officials in attendance.[95] At the east end of the burial chamber was an open doorway to a fourth room, dubbed the treasury. It contained, among other things, the canopic chest that housed Tutankhamun's embalmed organs. Carter had the entrance to this chamber boarded up so it would not be a distraction during the upcoming clearance of the burial chamber; it would only be reopened in 1927.[96]

After a viewing period for the press and the general public, the tomb was closed for the season on 26 February.[97] As in each subsequent season, the entrance was reburied to prevent intrusion,[98] and the objects that had been conserved were packed and hand-propelled along a length of Decauville railway track.[99] The limited length of available track had to be constantly taken up and re-laid in order to cover the distance down to the Nile, where the artefacts were shipped to Cairo.[99]

Shortly after the tomb was closed, Carnarvon accidentally cut open a mosquito bite on his cheek while shaving. The wound became infected, and after weeks of illness, culminating in blood poisoning and pneumonia, he died on 5 April.[100] Although Carnarvon had been in frail health for twenty years, his death soon attracted speculation that something more than infectious disease was at work.[101]

Works of fiction in which Egyptian spirits or reanimated mummies exact revenge upon those who disturb their tombs first appeared in the late nineteenth century.[102][103] The real-life stories of Walter Ingram, who died in 1888 after purchasing an Egyptian mummy, and of a coffin lid called the "Unlucky Mummy", which was purported to cause a variety of misfortunes, cemented the idea of the curse in the public imagination.[104] Now the pre-existing concept was applied to Carnarvon's death.[105]

Various people, such as the author Marie Corelli and a psychic known as Cheiro, claimed to have warned Carnarvon of mortal peril before his death.[106] Arthur Weigall, a former Egyptologist who was now the Daily Mail correspondent on the tomb, said he had observed Carnarvon joking as he entered the tomb and remarked "If he goes down in that spirit, I give him six weeks to live!"[107] Later accounts, such as the recollections of the anthropologist Henry Field, claimed that an ancient text wishing death upon violators of the tomb was inscribed over its doorway or on an object within.[108] No written curse has ever been documented in Tutankhamun's tomb, and although some Egyptian tombs did contain such curses, most are from non-royal tombs that predate Tutankhamun by centuries.[109]

Any deaths or other unusual events connected with the tomb were treated as possible results of the curse. Carnarvon's son and heir, Henry Herbert, 6th Earl of Carnarvon, said that Cairo suffered a power outage at the moment of his father's death, while in England his father's dog let out a howl and died.[110] Another such story, recounted by Carter and others involved in the excavation,[111][112] involved a canary that Carter had bought at the beginning of the digging season.[113] Initially the Egyptian workmen regarded the bird as sign of good luck, and when the tomb was discovered they dubbed it "the tomb of the bird." When a cobra entered Carter's house and ate the canary, the Egyptians called it an ill omen, relating the intruding animal to the uraeus, the protective cobra emblem, on the brow of Tutankhamun's statues.[114][115] When George Jay Gould, who had visited the tomb, died the following May, his death was attributed to the curse, as was that of Aubrey Herbert, Carnarvon's half-brother, in September. In July the killing of Ali Fahmy, who visited the tomb as a tourist, was also attributed to the curse.[116][117] Later additions to the list of purportedly cursed deaths included those of Carnarvon's secretary Richard Bethell in 1929 and of Weigall in 1934.[118] Most Egyptologists dismissed such claims.[119] In subsequent decades, some sources, such as the author Philipp Vandenberg, have suggested natural explanations for the fatalities, such as poisons present in the tomb,[120] but a study in the British Medical Journal in 2002 found no significant difference in mortality between those who had entered the tomb and those who had not.[121]

Egyptian writers picked up the trope of the curse and adapted it for their own purposes. Al-Ahram published humorous stories in which Tutankhamun awoke from death to comment on the politics of the day, while more serious works of fiction depicted mummies confronting the Westerners who disturb their tombs, although in a more benign manner than in the Western stories on the same theme. These stories portrayed mummies not as objects of horror but as national ancestors seeking to redress the treatment of Egypt and its heritage by foreign powers.[122]

Between digging seasons, Carter and Mace wrote the first volume of The Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen, their account of the discovery and the work that had been done thus far; it was published in October as Carter headed back to Egypt to resume work.[123] With Carnarvon's death, the tomb clearance would be financed by Carnarvon's widow, Almina Herbert, Countess of Carnarvon, but with Carter now the spokesman to the government and the press.[124]

The season began with the removal of the two life-size statues of Tutankhamun that stood in the antechamber on either side of the burial chamber doorway. Then the excavators set about removing the sarcophagus shrines. The task was a struggle, because the shrines took up most of the space in the chamber and left the excavators with little room to move.[125] The partition wall between the antechamber and burial chamber—which bore part of the painted decoration of the burial chamber wall[126]—had to be partly demolished to give the excavators room to manoeuvre, and scaffolding had to be erected so the shrines could be dismantled from the top down.[127]

Meanwhile, there was increasing friction between the excavators and the Antiquities Service. Carter wanted the service to more tightly limit visitors to the tomb. Lacau required an Antiquities Service inspector on site while work was ongoing, and he demanded that Carter submit a list of all his personnel for government approval. This latter regulation has since become standard on Egyptological digs but was novel at the time, and in this case it was clearly aimed at Merton, whom Carter had made a member of the excavation team.[128]

In a letter to Carter on 10 January 1924, Lacau also touched on the issue of division of finds,[129] a topic that the excavators had previously avoided.[130] In 1922 Lacau had declared the end of the traditional half-share given to excavators; the government might grant artefacts to the sponsors of an excavation as gifts, but all antiquities in Egypt belonged in principle to the government. This change did not, however, apply to Carnarvon's existing concession.[129] That concession stated that the contents of an intact tomb should be surrendered to the Antiquities Service with no division. Carnarvon had planned to argue that Tutankhamun's tomb did not qualify as intact because it had been robbed, even though it had been restored and resealed in ancient times. He had fully expected to receive a share of the artefacts and had promised that the Metropolitan Museum would be "well taken care of", receiving a portion of his share, in exchange for its assistance.[131] Now, however, Lacau implied that all the tomb's contents were property of the Egyptian government, meaning no division of finds would take place.[132]

Other Egyptologists worried that the regulations Lacau was imposing in response to the Tutankhamun situation would hamper other Egyptological work. Lythgoe, Gardiner, Breasted and Newberry sent a letter of protest to Lacau and his superior, the minister of public works, asserting that the Tutankhamun discovery "belongs not to Egypt alone but to the entire world". By doing so they further inflamed the political tensions.[133] The Egyptian elections of January 1924 had brought to the Wafd Party to power, forming a nationalist government headed by Prime Minister Saad Zaghloul.[134] The new minister of public works, to whom the letters was sent, was Morcos Bey Hanna,[133] who was not inclined to be accommodating toward Britons, as the British government had put him on trial for treason.[135][136]

Once the shrines were disassembled, the excavators had to rig a system of pulleys to lift the lid of the stone sarcophagus, an especially delicate task because the lid was cracked. On 12 February the lid was raised, revealing, beneath a shroud, a gilded and inlaid wooden coffin in human shape, bearing Tutankhamun's face—the outermost of a nested set. It was the first complete set of royal coffins ever found, and its artistic quality and state of preservation impressed even the experienced Egyptologists who were present.[137]

A viewing of the coffin by the Egyptian press was scheduled for 13 February, followed by a tour for the excavators' wives and families.[138] Hanna, however, saw this tour as a slight—he pointed out that wives of Egyptian cabinet ministers had not been allowed into the tomb[139]—and forbade the families' visit, sending a police force to ensure his order was carried out.[140] Carter and his collaborators were incensed, and they announced they were halting work in protest of what they called "impossible restrictions and discourtesies" imposed by the Egyptian government. Carter locked the tomb, where the sarcophagus lid was still suspended above the coffin.[141] Hanna terminated the Carnarvon concession, and Lacau brought workmen to the tomb to saw off Carter's locks and secure the sarcophagus lid.[142]

Carter sued the Antiquities Service in the Mixed Courts of Egypt, a colonial institution for resolving disputes involving non-Egyptians. He used Carnarvon's lawyer, F. M. Maxwell, a politically insensitive choice, as Maxwell had been the prosecutor in Hanna's treason trial and sought the death penalty for him. In March Maxwell remarked in court that the government had seized control of the tomb "like a bandit".[143] In Arabic the word for "bandit" is so profound an insult that news of the remark provoked riots in Cairo.[144] The Mixed Courts ultimately ruled in Carter's favor, but Hanna took the case to a higher court, which on 31 March issued a decision that fully supported Hanna's actions.[143][145]

Carter had left Egypt on 21 March, setting out on a lecture tour in the United States and Canada. His absence eased the tensions surrounding the tomb, as did the impending retirement of Maxwell, who began transferring his responsibilities to a more conciliatory lawyer, Georges Merzbach.[146][147] Meanwhile, Hanna attempted to find another Egyptologist to complete the tomb clearance, but none were willing to take on the task.[148]

In April the Egyptian government sent a committee to inspect the excavators' unfinished work in the valley. Among the materials stored in various tombs, they discovered a wooden bust of Tutankhamun emerging from a lotus flower, packed in a crate, that was not included in Carter's excavation notes. The Egyptian members of the committee suspected Carter had intended to surreptitiously remove the bust from the site. When asked about it by telegram, Carter responded that the bust had been among the objects found in the entrance corridor, and that he and Callender had packed it because of its fragile state.[149]

The political situation in Egypt changed dramatically on 19 November 1924, when Sir Lee Stack, the sirdar of the Egyptian Army, was assassinated by nationalists. The furious British reaction drove Zaghloul to resign. His successor, Ahmed Ziwar Pasha, formed a more pro-British government, with which the various parties were able to reach an agreement. Carter would continue to oversee the clearance; Lady Carnarvon would continue to fund it but renounced her claim to a share of the burial goods;[Note 5] and the Times monopoly was ended. Carter resumed work on 25 January 1925.[151][152]

Carter and one of the foremen working on the innermost coffin

Douglas Derry makes the first incision in the examination of Tutankhamun's mummy, observed by several others, including Pierre Lacau (far left), Carter (with magnifying glass) and Saleh Bey Hamdi (far right).[153]

In the shortened third season of the tomb clearance, the excavators removed nothing from Tutankhamun's tomb but worked to conserve the objects already stored in the laboratory tomb.[152] In this uneventful phase, the interest of the press quickly dwindled,[152] and although coverage would flare up again when Tutankhamun's mummy was unwrapped, the remainder of the clearance took place out of the media spotlight.[154]

Over the following summer, Callender, who objected to his loss of income from the shortening of the season, had a falling-out with Carter and resigned.[155] Burton, Lucas and the foremen were thus Carter's only consistent collaborators during the rest of the process.[156]

The fourth season, beginning in late 1925, focused on Tutankhamun's burial itself.[157] His mummy lay within a nested series of three coffins, of which the innermost was mainly composed of 110.4 kilograms (243 lb) of solid gold. On his body, and within his mummy wrappings, the king bore a plethora of jewellery and other objects, including a gold burial mask.[158] The inner coffin and Tutankhamun's mummy had both been covered in unguents at burial. These unguents had solidified into hard resin, gluing the mummy and its trappings into a single mass stuck to the bottom of the inner coffin, which was in turn stuck to the bottom of the middle coffin.[159] Moreover, the unguents had undergone some kind of chemical reaction that had carbonised the linen mummy wrappings, and even some of the tissues of the mummy itself, rendering Tutankhamun's flesh extremely fragile.[160][161] The excavators first tried to melt the resin by taking the coffins out of the tomb to be heated by the sun, but the effort failed.[162] Therefore, Tutankhamun's remains were still in place within the coffins when the anatomists Douglas Derry and Saleh Bey Hamdi began examining them on 11 November 1925. Over the course of eight days they dismembered the mummy and individually chiseled the pieces out of the mass of resin, removing the burial goods as they did so, and examined the pieces individually.[163]

Once the examination was complete, the excavators began separating the coffins. They built trestles to suspend the conjoined coffins upside-down, then placed paraffin lamps underneath to raise the temperature to 500 °C (932 °F), shielding the coffins from the heat using wet blankets and plates of zinc. Once the coffins were pulled apart, the remaining resin was cleared away with solvents.[164][165]

In this season Carter established a pattern of work that would stay in place for the rest of the clearance process: in the first months of the season the excavators would remove objects from Tutankhamun's tomb, then after the new year open it to the public while concentrating on conserving the objects in the laboratory tomb.[166] Though the excavators had hoped to clear the treasury during the fourth season, the unexpected challenges of the burial chamber forced them to wait another year.[167]

When resuming work in the fifth season, Carter rearranged the pieces of the mummy to look whole once again, then placed them in the outermost coffin and covered the sarcophagus with a plate of glass instead of the original lid. With this done, the excavators dismantled the barrier to the treasury and began sorting through its contents: a shrine of the god Anubis, more boxes of belongings such as jewellery, wooden tomb models of boats and the canopic chest that contained the internal organs that had been removed from Tutankhamun's body during embalming. The room's most unexpected contents were the mummies of two fetuses, which are presumed to be Tutankhamun's stillborn children.[168]

In early 1927 Carter published the second volume of The Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen, written with substantial anonymous help from a friend, the novelist Percy White. In the following season the excavators faced the annexe, which contained more than half of the individual objects in the entire tomb.[169] The floor of this room was entirely covered with haphazardly piled burial goods and lay nearly a metre below the floor of the antechamber. To start work in the annexe, the excavators had to clear enough space to stand in the room by having one man lean through the doorway at a precarious angle, supported by slings held by three or four others standing in the antechamber. The last object was removed from the annexe on 15 December, and the rest of the season was spent on conservation.[170]

Little was achieved in the sixth season, as Lucas and Burton developed illnesses that prevented them from working for several weeks. The seventh saw more contention between Carter and the authorities, as the Carnarvon concession expired in 1929 and ownership of the tomb reverted to the Egyptian government. Egyptian law forbade anyone not employed by the government to possess the keys to government property, and Carter objected to having to rely on a government inspector to open the tomb for him each day. In early 1930 the government came to its final settlement with Lady Carnarvon, compensating her with a payout for the expenses incurred during the excavation.[171]

The final challenge involved conserving the dismantled pieces of the shrines, which were still stacked in the antechamber; the last of these pieces were not removed from the tomb until November 1930. Conservation of objects continued until February 1932, when the last burial goods were sent to Cairo.[172]

The artefacts from the tomb were numbered at 5,398 distinct objects.[173] By Carter's estimation, one quarter of a per cent of these objects were damaged beyond repair.[174] Most of the remainder were sent to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo,[175] coming to form about a sixth of the museum's permanent exhibits.[67] The sarcophagus, outermost coffin, and mummy remained in the burial chamber, as did a skullcap and apron, both made of delicate beadwork, that Carter apparently thought too fragile to remove from the mummy.[176][Note 6]

Retrospective discussion of the clearance tends to emphasize how scrupulous and methodical the process was.[178] Jason Thompson, author of a history of Egyptology, regards Carter as one of the three most skilled archaeologists working in Egypt in his time and says that if Davis had discovered the tomb in 1914, the clearance "would have been substandard at best, and the contents of the tomb probably would have been dispersed".[179] Yet a handful of artefacts from the tomb ended up in Carter's own possession rather than that of the Egyptian government, such as a silver tenon from one of the coffins and a glass headrest. Carter's niece and heir, Phyllis Walker, discovered these objects after his death and had them returned to Egypt.[180] In 1978, Thomas Hoving, a former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, pointed out several items in the museum's collection that were not clearly traceable to the tomb but that he thought likely to have originated there.[181] The museum gave several of these objects to the Egyptian government in 2010.[182]

The final volume of The Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen, covering the treasury and annexe, was published in 1933. Yet the three volumes, aimed at the general public, did not constitute a full archaeological description of the tomb and its contents.[183] The clearance process had produced a large volume of documentation.[184] Nearly every object had been catalogued, and most had been photographed by Burton, although many minor objects, somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent of the total, were not photographed.[185] Several experts had produced specialised contributions, such as Derry and Hamdi's anatomical examination and Newberry's botanical studies. Carter hoped to assemble this mass of material into a formal Egyptological report. Beyond outlining a general six-volume plan, however, he had not begun on the project by the time he died in 1939.[186] The Egyptian Council of Ministers moved to fund a full publication of the tomb in 1951, but the effort died in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952.[187]

Shortly after Carter's death, Walker donated his journals and notes on the excavation to the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford. In the 1990s the institute launched an effort to scan this material, which they made available online in the early 2010s.[188][189]