Year: Day to Day Men: February 16

A Daydream Moment

The sixteenth of February in 1923 marks the opening of the sealed door to the burial chamber of the Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh, Tutankhamun. During his reign of ten years, Tutankhamun restored the traditional polytheistic form of the ancient Egyptian religion from the religious-political changes enacted by the former pharaoh Akhenaten.

Born in May of 1874, British archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter was from an early age interested in Egyptian artifacts; he would often visit and draw illustrations of specimens in the collection owned by the Amherst family. Impressed by his skills, Lady Amherst made arrangements for seventeen year-old Carter to assist British Egyptologist Percy Newberry in an excavation at Middle Kingdom tombs on the Lower Nile River.

After training under Egyptologists Flinders Petrie and Édouard Naville, Carter was appointed in 1899 as Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt by the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Based at Luxor, he oversaw excavations at nearby Thebes and supervised American archaeologist Theodore Davis’s systematic exploration of the Valley of the Kings. During his service, Carter improved the protection and accessibility to existing excavations and developed a grid-block system for tomb searching.

In 1907, Carter began his employment with George Edward Herbert, 5th Lord of Carnarvon, a financial backer for Egyptian antiquities research. Lord Carnarvon received in 1914 the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings. Carter led a systematic search for any tombs that were missed in previous expeditions, including that of Tutankhamun. The search was halted during the years of the First World War and resumed in 1917. After five years with no major finds, Carnarvon became dissatisfied with the project; howver, after a discussion with Carter, he agreed to fund one more season of work in the Valley of the Kings. 

On the fourth of November in 1922, a water boy discovered a buried flight of stairs cut into the bedrock. After partially digging out the steps, a mud-plastered doorway was found stamped with indistinct cartouches. Howard Carter had the staircase refilled and notified Lord Carnarvon of the find by telegram. On November twenty-third, Carnarvon arrived accompanied by his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert. The full extent of the stairway was cleared on the next day; it revealed Tutankhamun’s cartouche on the outer doorway. The doorway was removed and the corridor behind it was cleared of rubble.

With Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Carter’s assistant Arthur Callender present, Howard Carter opened a tiny breach in the door of the tomb and was able to see the many gold and ebony treasures within. Carter had in fact discovered the burial tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The site was secured until the morning of the twenty-seventh of November, at which time the tomb was officially opened in the presence of a member of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.

Tutankhamun’s tomb was virtually intact with all its furnishings and shrines, in spite of previous ancient break-ins. Two life-sized statues of Tutankhamun guarded the sealed doorway to the inner burial chamber. Assisted by staff members of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art which included archeologist Arthur Mace and photographer Harry Burton, Howard Carter over the next several months catalogued and preserved the contents of the chambers. 

On the sixteenth of February in 1923, Howard Carter opened the sealed inner doorway and confirmed it led to a burial chamber that contained the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. His tomb was considered the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings. Carter’s meticulous assessing and cataloguing the thousands of objects in the tomb took nearly ten years; the final work was completed in February of 1932.

Despite the significance of the find, Howard Carter received no honors from the British government. In 1926, he received the Order of the Nile, third class, from Egypt’s King Fuad I. Carter was also award an honorary Doctor of Science from Yale University and a honorary membership in Madrid’s Real Academia de la Historia.