Howard Carter (9 May 1874 - 2 March 1939) was a British archaeologist and Egyptologist who became world-famous after discovering the intact tomb (designated KV62) of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh, Tutankhamun (colloquially known as "King Tut" and "the boy king"), in November 1922.
Video Howard Carter
Early life
Howard Carter was born in Kensington on 9 May 1874, the son of Samuel John Carter, an artist, and Martha Joyce Carter (née Sands). His father trained and developed Howard's artistic talents.
Carter spent much of his childhood with relatives in the Norfolk market town of Swaffham, the birthplace of both his parents. Nearby was the mansion of the Amherst family, Didlington Hall, containing a sizable collection of Egyptian antiques, which sparked Carter's interest in that subject. In 1891 the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF), on the prompting of Mary Cecil, sent Carter to assist an Amherst family friend, Percy Newberry, in the excavation and recording of Middle Kingdom tombs at Beni Hasan.
Although only 17, Carter was innovative in improving the methods of copying tomb decoration. In 1892, he worked under the tutelage of Flinders Petrie for one season at Amarna, the capital founded by the pharaoh Akhenaten. From 1894 to 1899, he worked with Édouard Naville at Deir el-Bahari, where he recorded the wall reliefs in the temple of Hatshepsut.
In 1899, Carter was appointed to the position of Chief Inspector of the Egyptian Antiquities Service (EAS). He supervised a number of excavations at Thebes (now known as Luxor). In 1904, he was transferred to the Inspectorate of Lower Egypt. Carter was praised for his improvements in the protection of, and accessibility to, existing excavation sites, and his development of a grid-block system for searching for tombs. The Antiquities Service also provided funding for Carter to head his own excavation projects.
Carter resigned from the Antiquities Service in 1905 after a formal inquiry into what became known as the Saqqara Affair, a noisy confrontation between Egyptian site guards and a group of French tourists. Carter sided with the Egyptian personnel.
Maps Howard Carter
Tutankhamun's tomb
In 1907, after three hard years for Carter, Lord Carnarvon employed him to supervise excavations of nobles' tombs in Deir el-Bahri, near Thebes. Gaston Maspero had recommended Carter to Carnarvon as he knew he would apply modern archaeological methods and systems of recording.
In 1914 Lord Carnarvon received the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings, Carter again employed to lead the work. However excavations and study were soon interrupted by the First World War, Carter spending these war years working for the British Government as a diplomatic courier and translator. He enthusiastically resumed his excavation work towards the end of 1917.
By 1922 Lord Carnarvon had become dissatisfied with the lack of results after several years of finding little. He informed Carter that he had one more season of funding to make a significant find in the Valley of the Kings.
On 4 November 1922, Carter's excavation group found steps that Carter hoped led to Tutankhamun's tomb (subsequently designated KV62), and he wired Lord Carnarvon to come to Egypt. On 26 November 1922, Carter made a "tiny breach in the top left hand corner" of the doorway, with Carnarvon, his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, and others in attendance, using a chisel that his grandmother had given him for his 17th birthday. He was able to peer in by the light of a candle and see that many of the gold and ebony treasures were still in place. He did not yet know whether it was "a tomb or merely a cache", but he did see a promising sealed doorway between two sentinel statues. Carnarvon asked, "Can you see anything?" Carter replied with the famous words: "Yes, wonderful things!"
The next several months were spent cataloguing the contents of the antechamber under the "often stressful" supervision of Pierre Lacau, director general of the Department of Antiquities of Egypt. On 16 February 1923, Carter opened the sealed doorway and found that it did indeed lead to a burial chamber, and he got his first glimpse of the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun. The tomb was considered the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings, and the discovery was eagerly covered by the world's press, but most of their representatives were kept in their hotels, much to their annoyance. Only H. V. Morton of The Times was allowed on the scene, and his vivid descriptions helped to cement Carter's reputation with the British public.
Carter's own notes and photographic evidence indicate that he, Lord Carnarvon, and Lady Evelyn Herbert entered the burial chamber in November 1922, shortly after the tomb's discovery and before the official opening.
Towards end of February 1923 a rift between Lord Carnarvon and Carter, probably caused by a disagreement on how to manage the supervising Egyptian authorities, temporarily closed excavation. Work recommenced in early March after Lord Carnarvon apologised to Carter. Later that month Lord Carnarvon contracted blood poisoning while staying in Luxor near the tomb site. He died in Cairo on 5 April 1923. Lady Carnarvon retained her late husband's concession in the Valley of the Kings, allowing Carter to continue his work.
Carter's painstaking cataloguing of the thousands of objects in the tomb continued until 1932, most being moved to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. There were a number of breaks in the work, including one lasting nearly a year in 1924-25, caused by to a dispute over what Carter saw as excessive control of the excavation by the Egyptian Antiquities Service. The Egyptian authorities eventually agreed that Carter should complete the tomb's clearance.
In 1926 Carter received the Order of the Nile, third class, from King Fuad I of Egypt. He received no British honour.
Later work and death
After the clearance of the tomb had been completed, Carter retired from archaeology and became a part-time agent for collectors and museums, including the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. In 1924 he had toured Britain, as well as France, Spain and the United States, delivering a series of illustrated lectures. Those in New York City and other US cities were attended by large and enthusiastic audiences, sparking American Egyptomania.
Carter died of lymphoma in Kensington, London, on 2 March 1939, aged 64. Carter is now buried in Putney Vale Cemetery in London. His epitaph reads: "May your spirit live, may you spend millions of years, you who love Thebes, sitting with your face to the north wind, your eyes beholding happiness", a quotation taken from the Wishing Cup of Tutankhamun, and "O night, spread thy wings over me as the imperishable stars".
In popular culture
Internet
- On 9 May 2012 Google commemorated Carter's 138th birthday with a Google doodle.
Art
- A paraphrased extract from Carter's diary of 26 November 1922 is used as the plaintext for Part 3 of the encrypted Kryptos sculpture at the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Comic books
- He is referenced in Hergé's volume 13 of The Adventures of Tintin: The Seven Crystal Balls (1944).
Film and television
Carter has been portrayed in many film and television productions:
- In the Columbia Pictures Television film The Curse of King Tut's Tomb (1980), he is portrayed by Robin Ellis;
- In the Lucasfilm TV films Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal (1992) and Young Indiana Jones and the Treasure of the Peacock's Eye (1995), he is portrayed by Pip Torrens;
- In the IMAX documentary Mysteries of Egypt (1998), he is portrayed by Timothy Davies;
- In the made-for-TV film The Tutankhamun Conspiracy (2001), he is portrayed by Giles Watling;
- In an episode of 2005 BBC docudrama Egypt, he is portrayed by Stuart Graham;
- As the main character in 2016 BBC miniseries Tutankhamun, portrayed by Max Irons.
Literature
- He is referenced in Sally Beauman's The Visitors, a novel re-creation of the hunt for Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.
- In Laura Lee Guhrke's historical romance novel Wedding of the Season (2011), Carter's telegram to the fictional British Egyptologist, the Duke of Sunderland, reports discovering "steps to a new tomb" and creates a climactic conflict.
- He is a key character in Christian Jacq's book The Tutankhamun Affair.
- James Patterson and Martin Dugard's book The Murder of King Tut focuses on Carter's search for King Tut's tomb.
- He appears as a main character in Muhammad Al-Mansi Qindeel's novel A Cloudy Day on the West Side.
- He is parodied in the book Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay, with a character in the book named Howard Carson.
References
Further reading
External links
- Works by Howard Carter at Project Gutenberg
- (in Spanish) Video del descubrimiento de Tutankamon
- Howard Carter at Find a Grave
- Five Years' Explorations at Thebes
- Schulz, Matthias (15 January 2010). "Did King Tut's Discoverer Steal from the Tomb?". Der Spiegel Online. Retrieved 19 January 2010.
- Works by or about Howard Carter in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Source of article : Wikipedia
0 Comments