The grandiose pharaonic monuments that we enjoy today only began to enjoy official protection in 1858, when the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette convinced the viceroy of Egypt of the need for this safeguard. The Egyptian Antiquities Service was then created, dependent, at the time, on the Ministry of Public Works. His work was immense; its resources, limited.
To alleviate this budget shortage, rich dilettantes, lovers of ancient Egypt, were encouraged to subsidize their own excavations, which were added to those carried out by official institutions. In exchange for their financial efforts, these patrons received half of the objects discovered in the excavation.
One of these patrons was Theodore M. Davis (1838-1915), an American lawyer who made his fortune in the business world. He began excavating in Egypt in 1902, when he obtained the Valley of the Kings concession.
Until 1914. Then, considering that the Valley was exhausted, he renounced his concession. He had no shortage of reasons to believe it, since, during his twelve years of research, he discovered or excavated only thirty tombs (among them, those of Horemheb or Ramses II). Davis died a few months later, so he did not get to see how the first of the inspectors who was in charge of his excavations, Howard Carter, demonstrated how wrong that opinion was.
Carter is known for his discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in collaboration with Lord Carnarvon (another patron), but his work in the Nile Valley began much earlier. Trained as a draftsman, in this capacity he was hired, in 1897, by the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF). At just seventeen years old, his task would be to help an Egyptologist copy tombs.
There he discovered his calling for a job that was well suited to his skills and temperament. In total he spent eight years excavating for the EEF, most notably at the temple of Hatshepsut in Deir el-Bahari. His work was so good and his qualities for archeology so evident that in 1899 he was chosen instead of Percy Newberry (an Oxford-trained Egyptologist) to be chief inspector in Upper Egypt of the Antiquities Service.
Gaston Maspero was not wrong to prefer Carter, who dedicated himself to his work with passion. Sherlock Holmes himself would have been delighted with his methodology when solving the robbery of a royal tomb. The event took place in November 1901, when, taking advantage of the fact that Carter was traveling, a group of thieves plundered the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV 35).
Cabled to return to Luxor immediately, Carter discovered that things had not happened as told by the watchers of the Valley of the Kings. According to their version, a large group of thieves surprised them one afternoon, and while half held them at gunpoint, the rest entered the tomb to steal. Soon, they hurried away through the hills, preventing the guards from following them after firing several warning shots at them.
Carter noted that the account did not match the evidence. It was, above all, the broken padlock on the tomb, which had been camouflaged with lead paper so that it would not look like one, that gave him the answer, because an identical system had been used a few weeks before in the looting of the tomb of Yi-ma-dua. In reality, the tomb had been robbed days before without the guards realizing it. When they realized this, they decided to invent the story of the assault to hide their negligence.
During his investigations, Carter found that there were footprints of a single pair of bare feet, which he photographed and measured, verifying that they corresponded to those left by the thief of the tomb of Yi-ma-dua. A looter who could very well have been Ahmed Abd el Rasul, in front of whose house the trail of footprints that left KV 35 seemed to end, to where a professional tracker had followed them.
With the judge’s permission, Carter measured and studied the suspect’s feet, which matched the footprints on the two graves. Ahmed Abd el Rasul was arrested and tried. Unfortunately, Carter’s identification system was not admitted into evidence and the thief walked free.
The second anecdote that tells us about Carter’s devotion to archeology and the good opinion that the Egyptians with whom he worked had of him took place a decade and a half later. It was during World War I, a war that Carter was stationed in Egypt, doing information work for the Army. Having a few days’ leave, he decided to approach Luxor. He couldn’t imagine the adventure that awaited him.
It was 1916, and with authorities more focused on war than archaeology, the activities of tomb raiders had picked up. One afternoon he received news of a conflict between rival gangs. Apparently, one of them had made an unexpected discovery, an apparently intact tomb in a remote wadi (rambla) in the mountains on the western shore.
Their enemies lacked time to, in a surprise attack, snatch the discovery from them. Fearing that the revenge of the defeated would take on a bloody character, the living forces of the town went to Carter with the idea that, if he managed to take possession of the tomb in the name of the Antiquities Service, the dispute would end.
Carter gathered the few of his men who had not been drafted into the Army at dusk and organized, as he himself tells it, “an expedition that involved climbing more than eighteen hundred feet [550 meters] of the Gurna Mountains in the light of Moon”. It was midnight when they reached the point of the cliff from which a rope hung that reached to an opening in the wall. Carter cut the thieves’ rope, arranged his own and climbed down it, standing at the entrance. The faces of the thieves must have been worth seeing.
The matter could have ended badly for the archaeologist, had they not accepted his “invitation” (Carter spoke fluent Arabic) to leave the tomb peacefully and without reprisals. Otherwise, they would stay there for a few days until the authorities came for them.
After sleeping on the cliff to avoid the return of the thieves, the next day, Carter went down to the tomb again, discovering that it had belonged to Hatshepsut when she was still only the main wife of Thutmose II. Although intact, it barely contained anything more than the sandstone sarcophagus of which she would later become queen of Egypt.
When this occurred, Carter had not been employed by the Egyptian archaeological authorities for a decade and had been working as an independent archaeologist for Lord Carnarvon for just over five years. He got the job after leaving the Antiquities Service, which generated a small conflict between France and the United Kingdom. It happened in 1905, when he had just been appointed chief inspector of Lower Egypt, whose main site was Sakkara.
One day, a guard came to look for him in a hurry: something was happening in the necropolis. A group of French tourists had drunkenly tried to visit a tomb with fewer tickets than they were entitled to, which was prevented by the guards. The rioters beat the guards and tried to break the door, then took refuge on the terrace of Auguste Mariette’s house.
At that moment Carter arrived and ordered his men to evict the French from state property. In the ensuing scramble, two tourists and two Egyptians ended up KO on the ground and many more with bumps and gaps.
Egypt was then a protectorate of Great Britain, while the Egyptian Antiquities Service was always directed by a Frenchman. So the event could have diplomatic ramifications, especially because, by letting his men defend themselves, Carter allowed some natives to dare hit some Europeans, something intolerable for the time.
Outraged by the affront, the French demanded an apology, which Carter refused. He did not even give in when, after several weeks, the French themselves announced that they would apologize for his behavior. Once things had calmed down, Carter was only required to apologize for the result of his orders, not for having given them.
A few minutes of polite mingling in an office, with Maspero at his side, would be enough for everything to be forgotten, but not even that. Carter persisted in his position and presented his resignation. He saved face, but not the job. He couldn’t know it, but this interruption in his career put him on the path to fame.
The following years were the worst of Carter’s life, and he survived in Egypt by selling his watercolors and acting as an expert guide to wealthy visitors. Finally, his problems ended when Gaston Maspero, who bore him no resentment and much appreciation, recommended him to Lord Carnarvon.
This English nobleman was a restless spirit who visited Egypt in winter, to avoid possible harm to his battered lungs, after a car accident in Germany. Trying not to die of boredom on the banks of the Nile, he requested an excavation permit, which was granted, but, to be allowed to work in the places potentially richest in finds, he needed to hire a professional archaeologist. This is how Howard Carter entered his life in 1909, with whom he made history years later by discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb.
This text is part of an article published in number 639 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
