Tutankhamun. Finding someone today who has not heard this name or who does not know who it is is a difficult task.
However, this was not always like that. Barely a century ago the pharaoh was a great unknown, but all this began to change on November 4, 1922, thanks to the stubbornness and tenacity of one of the few who knew of his existence: the British archaeologist Howard Carter .
That day a stroke of luck rewarded the obstinacy of Carter, who had spent the previous five years digging in the Valley of the Kings, without finding anything really relevant. One of the children who distributed water to the workers of his expedition tripped over an unusual stone.
The boy informed his employer and he began to clear the land and realized that the stone in question was actually the rung of a ladder cut into the bedrock. Clearing away the dirt accumulated over the centuries, he came across a mud door stamped with oval seals and hieroglyphics.
“Do you see anything?” Carter was asked by the Earl of Carnarvon, George Hebert, who financed his adventure. “I see wonderful things,” replied the explorer once he broke down the door and poked his head into the tomb.
But who was Howard Carter, what was the importance of his discovery and was it made or not with objects from the tomb of the Egyptian monarch. With the help of experts, BBC Mundo will try to answer these questions.
A brilliant autodidact
The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, full of treasures, made Carter the most famous archaeologist in the world. This, despite the fact that he did not study this discipline.
“Carter was not educated, that is, he did not go to university. We do not even know if he went to high school. What we do know is that he was educated at home by his parents, who were artists,” American Egyptologist Bob Brier tells BBC World.
Carter was born on May 9, 1874 in the London neighborhood of Kensington and was the youngest of 11 children. Because he was a sickly child, he spent long periods both in the family home in the British capital and the one that his maternal relatives had in the English town of Swaffham, in the center of England. Hence, his instruction was assumed by his parents, in particular his father, Samuel John Carter, who was a renowned painter.
“Carter himself was an artist and that’s how he got into archeology,” says the professor at Long Island University in New York, who has just published a book about Carter’s discovery (“Tutankhamun and the tomb that changed the world” ).
“As a teenager he was hired to work on a dig, for his artistic gifts. He copied the paintings and hieroglyphics of the temples and eventually became an archaeologist himself, even becoming chief inspector of antiquities of Upper Egypt during the British colonial administration,” he added.
For her part, the Egyptologist Daniela Rosenow believes that we should all be grateful that the British were the ones who found the tomb. The reason? “He learned the trade from the best Egyptologists of his day,” she replied.
The find of the century
After being forced to resign from his position due to an incident with some French tourists and having to survive by selling watercolors of the pharaonic ruins to precisely people like those who cost him his job, Carter obtained in 1914 permission from the Egyptian authorities to excavate in the King’s Valley.
Despite the fact that for decades other researchers had removed tons of earth and rocks in the area without finding anything, the British believed that there was at least one tomb that remained hidden.
In addition to his instinct, Carter had some clues. He knew that in other excavations objects with the name of Tutankhamun were found, which did not appear in almost any record.
“Before Carter nobody knew about Tutankhamun. Tutankhamun was a minor pharaoh, about whom little was known. Nobody knew who he was. But once Carter found his tomb he became the most famous pharaoh in the world. Carter not only discovered the tomb, but Tutankhamun,” Brier said.
Tutankhamun was only on the throne for about 10 years and died around 1372 BC at the age of 19, but in addition to the short duration of his reign, he was the son of the controversial Akhenaten. This monarch changed the religion in Egypt and from worshiping several gods, only one happened: Aten, the Sun god.
“Tutankhamun’s father was the first monotheist in the world. But this did not please the Egyptians and when he died they erased his name from the records, destroyed his tomb and the same thing happened to his son. Tutakhamun’s successors consciously dedicated themselves to erase him from history and his grave was forgotten,” Brier explained.
The discovery of the tomb, the first and only one so far to have been found intact, made Carter and the boy pharaoh global celebrities.
The person in charge of Tutmania
The news about the treasures found in the tomb, especially the sarcophagus and the solid gold death mask, spread like wildfire and sparked an unusual interest in Egyptology.
“Carter made Tutankhamun the most famous Egyptian in the world. Everyone wanted to read about what they found in the tomb,” said Brier, who attributed this to advances in communications.
“The fact that newspapers could print photographs helped the fever that was unleashed in those years by Tutankhamun,” he concluded.
Carter and his financier, the Earl of Carnarvon, sold the story exclusivity to the London newspaper “The Times” for 4,000 pounds sterling at the time (about $2.4 million today).
However, other media did not hesitate to send correspondents to Egypt to report on the findings. The excavations and classification work of the more than 5,000 objects found in the tomb lasted for ten years.
However, Carter later regretted this decision. At least that is how he hinted at it in his diaries, where he complained about the flow of onlookers that the information about his discovery attracted and which forced him to constantly paralyze his work.
Hero or villain?
Despite the fact that many consider him the father of modern archaeology, suspicions of not very lawful conduct have always weighed on Carter. Some misgivings that Brier confirms in his latest book.
“There is a lot of evidence that Carter removed items from the tomb without permission,” he says.
However, the investigator clarified that he did not do it for economic purposes. “Carter didn’t get rich, he lived modestly the rest of his life,” he claimed.
“He took things out of the tomb showing off his colonial mentality. He believed that the tomb belonged to him, because he discovered it,” he said, adding: “The objects he took out were given to acquaintances and friends as souvenirs.”
In his book “Tutankhamun and the tomb that changed the world”, Brier cites a letter that a Carter collaborator sent him, in which he complained that Carter gave him an amulet that belonged to the pharaoh’s treasure and that he never warned him. .
For his part, Rosenow, who works at the Griffith Institute at Oxford University, where Carter’s diaries and files ended up, refuses to beatify or demonize the archaeologist.
“People need to understand that this discovery was a 10-year job involving a large team, including dozens of Egyptians who have remained anonymous. This was not the story of one heroic man,” he said.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-62752976, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-11-04 15:00:06
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