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History of the discovery of an extraordinary treasure: the tomb of Tutankhamun

Tutankhamun's funerary mask, made of 10kg of solid gold, is one of the masterpieces of the treasure found by Howard Carter in 1922. © Kevin Sielaff / AP Photo

Text by: Anoushka Notaras

14 mins

On November 26, 1922, three weeks after the chance exposure of a staircase dug into the arid soil of the Valley of the Kings, Egypt, British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered, by candlelight, an incredible hidden treasure for more than 3,000 years: the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun (1334-1324 BC).

Intact, it seems to have escaped incessant excavations and looting since Antiquity and the thousands of objects that make it up will make it one of the major archaeological events of the 20th century.

A look back at the story of an extraordinary discovery that has not finished revealing its secrets.

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An unexpected discovery

This discovery, we owe it to the tenacity of a man: the Briton Howard Carter.

In 1914, when he resumed excavations in the Valley of the Kings on behalf of Lord Carnarvon, a British aristocrat fond of Egyptology, he was convinced that the tomb of a certain Tutankhamun, an unknown pharaoh of the XVIIIth dynasty of the New Kingdom (1550-1085 BC), is hidden somewhere among the sixty tombs already exhumed.

Arrived in the Nile Valley in 1890 at the age of 17, this talented draftsman and archeology enthusiast knows the terrain perfectly.

Appointed Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt in 1900, he based his intuition on ceramic debris bearing the name of Tutankhamun found during earlier excavations.

However, after a dozen years of prospecting and the updating of numerous burials, the previous owner of the concession, the American Theodore Monroe Davis declared when he sold it to Lord Carnarvon that "there was nothing left to find there.

The discovery by Davis in 1907 of Tutankhamun's embalming cache remained in the aftermath, but provided Carter with an additional argument for his quest.  

In 1922, after seven years of excavations in the Theban necropolis, the poor results are not up to the heavy expenses involved and Lord Carnarvon asks Carter to stop everything.

But the archaeologist is a stubborn person and manages to convince his patron to finance him for another year.

For this final excavation campaign which starts on November 1, the archaeologist is concentrating his research in a hitherto little explored area located between the tombs of Ramses III, Merenptah and Ramses IX, not far from the embalming cache and of the location where he found the debris in the name of Tutankhamun.

After having evacuated a considerable quantity of rubble, his teams ended up clearing the remains of workers' huts from the royal necropolis in order to excavate the ground on which they rested.

Arriving on the morning of November 4, Carter noticed that "an unusual silence" reigned on the site: a young water carrier had tripped and exposed the first step of a staircase sinking into the ground, four meters from the entrance to the tomb of Ramses VI.

The discovery is unexpected.

In an atmosphere of hope and excitement, it takes two days of intense work to clear the first twelve steps of the staircase, revealing the top of a door sealed with seals that Carter identifies as those of the necropolis. royal.

Out of curiosity, he digs a small opening under the wooden lintel through which he glimpses a totally obstructed corridor.

If nothing yet allows him to know to whom it belongs, he understands that he is probably in front of a royal tomb still intact, an exceptional fact when all the other tombs have undergone excavations and looting since Antiquity.

On the evening of November 5, faced with this discovery which could be major, he sent a telegram to Lord Carnarvon in England: “ 

.

»

“ 

Do you see anything?

 » … « 

Yes, I see wonders!

 »

On November 23, Lord Carnarvon and his daughter, Evelyn Herbert, arrived in Luxor and excavations resumed the following day.

The whole of the first door is quickly cleared, revealing seals bearing the cartouche of Tutankhamun, but also traces of what looks like failed looting attempts.

Certain debris collected, identified as belonging to his father Akhenaton and his sister Merytaton, sows confusion as to the identification of the hypogeum and suggests an Amarna royal cache.

The first gate opened on the morning of November 25, opening into a descending corridor of more than seven meters completely filled with rubble.

In the afternoon of November 26, a second door appeared, a replica of the first and also bearing the seal of Tutankhamun.

In the presence of Lord Carnarvon, his daughter and Arthur Callender, an English archaeologist who came to assist Carter, the latter opens a breach at the top of the door and discovers, by candlelight, an impressive bric a brac of objects, statues and everywhere, the glitter of gold.

Faced with a stunned Carter's silence, Carnarvon grows impatient and asks, " 

 » what the archaeologist answers « 

 »

After having enlarged the opening in the door, the four Britons enter a first room which will be designated as the antechamber.

Once acclimated to the darkness, they discover a partially messy room, as if stolen objects had been redeposited there.

But also gilded funeral beds with animal heads, two life-size statues wearing the crowned Cobra facing each other, like sentries, chariots in pieces, chairs, a golden throne, vases for ointments in alabaster, chests containing linen clothes and a multitude of preciously decorated objects.

Once the electricity is installed, Carter and Callender search every corner and find a second smaller room, the annex, also filled with a profusion of precious objects and furniture piled on top of each other.

On November 28, with the help of Egyptian workers, the British opened a breach in the wall located between the two sentries and this time discovered a room with painted walls, almost all of whose space was occupied by a huge wooden chest. finely carved gold wood: the funeral chamber.

It will take almost three years to dismantle the four chapels and three sarcophagi which, nested like Russian dolls, house the mummy of the young Tutankhamun who rests in a solid gold coffin of 110kg, wearing a sumptuous funerary mask in inlaid gold lapis lazuli and semi-precious stones.

While the official date of the opening of the burial chamber is noted as February 17, 1923, various clues tend to show that Carter would have used fragments or copies of seals to close it and camouflage his crime, as explained by Marc Gabolde , archaeologist and Egyptologist at the University of Montpellier.

November 29 thus marks the date of the official opening of the tomb in the presence of Egyptian notables.

The news of this incredible discovery goes around the world, arousing the curiosity of tourists and the interest of many institutions.

Carter and Lord Carnarvon recruit a team of specialists to help exploit the discovery.

It will take more than 10 years to extract and inventory all of the approximately 5,000 pieces from the tomb - including more than 2,000 objects of jewelery and goldsmithery - which will make it possible to better understand the history of royal life and the daily life of the 'era.

The premature disappearance of Lord Carnarvon, in April 1923, will feed the myth of the curse of the pharaoh, which will be elucidated by the presence in the tomb of fungi causing respiratory diseases.

A pharaoh erased from history

How could this exceptional treasure, the only one to have been found intact, escape the countless lootings that have plagued the Nile Valley since Antiquity?

How to explain its extent when Tutankhamun was a rather unknown pharaoh?

Born in el-Amarna around 1340 BC.

AD, during the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom, Tutankhaton - the birth name of Tutankhamun - is the son of Akhenaten and presumably Nefertiti.

Orphaned at the age of four, he would have ascended the throne between the ages of seven and nine.

He reigns for about ten years from Luxor, the capital of Egypt, which was called Thebes in antiquity.

Like all pharaohs, he marks his reign by building buildings in his name.

But after his death, all references to his existence, images and monuments, are erased and his name disappears from the official list of the pharaohs of Antiquity.

If he was thus deleted from history, it is to his father Akhenaten that he owes it.

While he was a young sovereign, Amenophis IV – Akhenaton's birth name – carried out a major reform to transform the historically pantheistic and polytheistic Egyptian religion into the worship of a single god, Aten, the solar disk.

In doing so, he reduced the Egyptian clergy to nothing.

Dimitri Laboury, Egyptologist at the University of Liège, tells how this heretical sovereign had his own capital built, 300km north of Luxor, which he baptized Akhétaton (Amarna), which means "the horizon of Aten" in Egyptian. , because it is there the point of appearance of the sun on Earth.

He will thus upset the Maât, that is to say the mission entrusted by the gods to the pharaohs to enforce the principle of order, life and truth which ensures the stability of the world as it was established during of Creation.

The Maat,

it is also the worship that the pharaoh renders to the gods who, in exchange, ensure his prosperity and that of the population.

While Akhenaten's reign, which lasted about 15 years, is considered in part a religious and cultural revolution of antiquity, it ended tragically with a bankrupt state, a kingdom hit by an epidemic of plague and subjected to military defeats.

Upon Akhenaton's death, his daughter Merytaton, Tutankhaton's older half-sister, succeeded him for about three years.

She initiates, until the appointment of her younger brother, the break with the reform carried out by their father and restores the traditional cult of the god Amon and the order of Ma'at.

Back in Thebes, the one now called Tutankhamun begins the transformation of the country with the help of the ambitious general Horemheb.

While the latter has no royal origin, he knows a formidable rise within the court.

After the premature death of Tutankhamun around 1323 BC.

AD, he manages, with the help of the Egyptian clergy, to quickly oust his successor Aÿ.

Once in power, Horemheb, who will be the last pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, undertakes to erase all traces of the reign of the heretic Akhenaten, but also of his descendants.

This sanction results in the destruction of each image and monument in their name, but also in their removal from the official lists of archives of the monarchy.

Because in the tradition of ancient Egypt, erasing the name condemns to oblivion and annihilates all hope of life after death.

Even the entrance to Tutankhamun's tomb is covered with rubble from the digging of later tombs, making it invisible to looters.

This oversight inflicted on Tutankhamun will thus have made it possible to preserve his funerary treasure.

A tomb and part of the treasure were not intended for him

Since the discovery of this extraordinary treasure by Howard Carter in 1922, many researchers have tried to unlock its secret.

One of them, Marc Gabolde, archaeologist and Egyptologist specializing in the 18th dynasty demonstrates, in his book

that part of the treasure was not intended for the young pharaoh, but for a predecessor who would have governed for a short time. period before him: Tutankhamun's sister, Merytaton.

During her three-year reign, she is said to have built up a lavish funeral trousseau which, after her disappearance in unexplained circumstances, was stored and then reassigned to her brother, and discovered by Carter in 1922.

Gabolde explains how he discovered, under the cartouche with the name of Tutankhamun engraved on small sarcophagi with viscera, canes and certain golden chapels, the name of the queen-pharaoh Merytaton.

Even more, it was by chance while repairing the solid gold funerary mask whose beard had come off, that he again noticed the presence of the name of this queen-pharaoh under that of Tutankhamun.

The British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves makes the demonstration from the pierced ears of the golden mask.

In ancient Egypt, children-pharaohs had their ears pierced, but in adulthood only women wore earrings.

The pharaohs no longer wear them, confirming that this funerary mask was therefore originally intended for Merytaton.

Since 2015, Nicholas Reeves has focused his work on the theory that the tomb of Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten and mother-in-law of Tutankhamun, is behind the latter's burial chamber.

The Briton assumes that, for lack of a tomb available at the death of the young pharaoh, the tomb of Nefertiti would have been reopened to bury her.

If the radar images that probed the burial chamber in 2016 did not confirm anything, Reeves declares, in an interview granted to the British media

in September 2022, that he would have found clues in the hieroglyphs of the north wall: the cartouches which illustrate Aÿ burying Tutankhamun would have actually covered the initial cartouches showing Tutankhamun burying his predecessor, that is to say Nefertiti.

Although Nicholas Reeves is a renowned Egyptologist who worked at the British Museum, other archaeologists refute his theory.

In the meantime, research continues and one hundred years after its discovery, this exceptional treasure has not yet finished revealing all its secrets to us.

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Our selection on the subject:

→ Does Tutankhamun still have secrets for us?

→ Tutankhamun, a pharaonic treasure

→ Tutankhamun exhibition: "The curators played with this reputation of the treasure"

→ Tutankhamun's DNA and other revelations about the dead of antiquity

References :

• Tutankhamun

  , Marc Gabolde, Pierre Taller, Pygmalion Editions

• Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation.

  The Diaries of Howard Carter, The Griffith Institute at Oxford University

• Tutankhamun, Universalis Encyclopedia

• The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, Gallica / BnF

• Archaeological traces of tomb looting

• Ma'at, social order and inequalities in ancient Egypt 

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