Howard Carter - The Tomb of Tutankhamun: Volume 3: The Annexe and Treasury

The Tomb of Tutankhamun: Volume 3

TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES

Aesthetic Theory , Theodor W. Adorno

The Oresteia , Aeschylus

Being and Event , Alain Badiou

Infinite Thought, Alain Badiou

On Religion, Karl Barth

The Language of Fashion , Roland Barthes

The Intelligence of Evil , Jean Baudrillard

Key Writings , Henri Bergson

I and Thou , Martin Buber

The Tomb of Tutankhamun: Volume 1 , Howard Carter and A. C. Mace

The Tomb of Tutankhamun: Volume 2 , Howard Carter

In Defence of Politics , Bernard Crick

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy , Manuel DeLanda

Cinema I , Gilles Deleuze

Cinema II , Gilles Deleuze

Difference and Repetition , Gilles Deleuze

A Thousand Plateaus , Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Anti-Oedipus , Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Origins of Analytical Philosophy , Michael Dummett

Taking Rights Seriously , Ronald Dworkin

Discourse on Free Will , Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther

The Theatre of the Absurd , Martin Esslin

Education for Critical Consciousness , Paulo Freire

Pedagogy of Hope , Paulo Freire

Marxs Concept of Man , Erich Fromm and Karl Marx

To Have or To Be? , Erich Fromm

Truth and Method , Hans Georg Gadamer

All Men Are Brothers , Mohandas K. Gandhi

Violence and the Sacred , Ren Girard

Among the Dead Cities , A. C. Grayling

Towards the Light , A. C. Grayling

The Three Ecologies , Flix Guattari

The Essence of Truth , Martin Heidegger

The Odyssey , Homer

Eclipse of Reason , Max Horkheimer

Language of the Third Reich , Victor Klemperer

Rhythmanalysis , Henri Lefebvre

After Virtue , Alasdair MacIntyre

Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri

Apologia Pro Vita Sua, John Henry Newman

The Politics of Aesthetics , Jacques Rancire

Course in General Linguistics , Ferdinand de Saussure

An Actor Prepares , Constantin Stanislavski

Building A Character , Constantin Stanislavski

Creating A Role , Constantin Stanislavski

Interrogating the Real , Slavoj iek

The Universal Exception, Slavoj iek

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A CARVED IVORY PANEL

The scene represents TutankhAmen and his Queen AnkhesenAmen in a pavilion. From a lid of a box.

(See p. 118)

The Tomb of Tutankhamun: Volume 3

The Annexe and Treasury

Discovered by the late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter

By Howard Carter

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in 1923, by Cassell & Company Ltd. Reprinted in 2003 by permission of The Griffith Institute, Oxford.

1923, 2014 Howard Carter.

Foreword 2003, 2014 Nicholas Reeves

Illustrations from Photographs by Harry Burton.

Publishers Note

The publishers wish to record their thanks to the French Ministry of Culture for a grant towards the cost of translation.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

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ePub ISBN: 978-1-47257-778-8

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At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, Can you see anything? it was all I could do to get out the words, Yes, wonderful things

(Howard Carter and Arthur C. Mace, The Tomb of TutankhAmen. Search, Discovery and the Clearance of the Antechamber, pp. 823)

On 4 November, 1922, Howard Carter and his sponsor, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, made a discovery in Egypts Valley of the Kings which would change the face of archaeology for good. For the first time in recorded history, diggers had stumbled upon the virtually intact burial of an Egyptian pharaoh the boy-king Tutankhamun, son and successor of the heretic Akhenaten; and it was a tomb piled high with funerary treasures and gold. The popular perception of Egyptology changed overnight: no longer the worthy pursuit of dusty academics, it was now seen as high-stakes adventure. Without the excitement engendered by Tutankhamun, it is doubtful that Indiana Jones would ever have been born.

The story of the find reads like a fairytale fiction: how Carter dug for years with little success in pursuit of the impossible dream; how, in his final season, the tomb he sought was found; how this tomb impacted upon the world, turning its discoverers into celebrities overnight; and how, with the unexpected death of Lord Carnarvon (supposed victim of the pharaohs curse), the triumph turned sour.

The careful documentation and clearance of Tutankhamuns tomb, and the transportation to Cairo of the objects interred there, took Howard Carter the best part of a decade, with the excavators personal narrative of the work appearing in three wonderfully written, self-contained volumes published between 1923 and 1933. This, the third in the trilogy, describes the excavation of two of the store chambers the Treasury and the Annexe within which had been gathered many of the boy-kings most precious funerary treasures. Published in a relatively small edition in 1933, the book soon went out of print and has for many years been virtually unobtainable.

For all his riches, Tutankhamun was in life a relatively insignificant king, too young to impose his personality on the state he ruled and intentionally forgotten by those who came after. With the discovery of his tomb, his name was at long last made to live: today, more than three thousand years after his death, Egypts boy-king stands as a veritable icon not only of Egyptology itself, but of archaeological endeavour as a whole.

Contents

The very stillness of its atmosphere, intensified by the many inanimate things that fill it, standing for centuries and centuries as pious hands had placed them, creates the sense of sacred obligation which is indescribable and which causes one to ponder before daring to enter, much less touch anything. E`motions thus aroused, of which the sense of awe is the root, are difficult to convey in words; the spirit of curiosity is checked; the very tread of ones foot, the slightest noise, tends to increase a fear and magnify an unconscious reverencethe intruder becomes mute.