Tutan Hamen And The Discovery Of His Tomb

“First steps of tomb found,” British archaeologist Howard Carter excitedly wrote across a page of his pocket diary on November 4, 1922. The next day’s excavation in the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile River would reveal a tantalizing entrance. He quickly sent a telegram to Lord Carnarvon, who had been sponsoring his (mostly unsuccessful) investigations of Egyptian antiquities for several years and had reluctantly backed this final season: “At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact.”

The subsequent opening of Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s long untouched tomb and its burial chamber—and the dissemination of its treasures through photography, film, and traveling exhibitions—would captivate the world and transform a young Egyptian king whose reign was brief and little remembered into an icon of ancient mysteries.

Because Tutankhamun’s tomb was largely undisturbed—there are indications it was robbed a couple of times in antiquity but then restored—it offered a rare view into ancient Egypt and its faith, culture, and funerary rites. Stories about its discovery and the gradual uncovering of its artifacts made front-page news across the globe, with reporters marveling at each opulently adorned statue and alabaster vase. On December 22, 1922, The New York Times published a first-hand account in which the author wrote: “No finer human interest story, no more thrilling drama, no greater archaeological revelations could be summoned from history or the most vivid imagination than is told by the mute objects in this tomb of King Tutankhamen.”

Howard Carter was a British archaeologist and Egyptologist who discovered the intact tomb of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Tutankhamun in November 1922, the best-preserved pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings. This is his story!