His roots were rural and lower class. His grandfather had been gamekeeper on a Norfolk country estate, where his family had lived for generations. Carter’s father, Samuel, had been the one to break away, developing his natural gifts to become a painter specializing in animal portraits.
Carter would write of him in later years (in an autobiographical sketch or journal he never published): “He was one of the most powerful draughtsmen I ever knew. His knowledge of comparative anatomy and memory for form was [sic] matchless. He could depict from memory, accurately, any animal in any action, foreshortened or otherwise, with the greatest ease.”
To this he added a word of professional criticism: “However, if a son may criticize his father, this faculty was in many ways his misfortune. For by it he was not so obliged to seek nature as much as an artist should, hence his art became somewhat styled as well as period marked.”
Whatever his merits or faults as a painter, the elder Carter had enough admirers to make a career for himself. He worked in the great country houses, painting the beloved horses of the aristocrats; and he worked as an artist for the Illustrated Times as well, supplying sketches and drawings for the London newspaper. This eventually necessitated his moving to London with his large family and his animal models (penned up behind the house).
Howard Carter, however, was raised by a maiden aunt in Norfolk. He was a sickly child, and it was thought that the country air would strengthen him. What’s more, such an arrangement eased the financial strain, Carter being the youngest of eleven brothers and sisters.
His formal education was cut short after a few years in a simple rural school in Norfolk where he learned the basics. He wrote later that this was due to ill health, but the real reason was probably financial. It was necessary for Carter to begin to make a living as soon as possible. “I have next to nothing to say about my education … nature thrusts some of us into the world miserably incomplete,” he remarked with some bitterness in his journal. Throughout his life, he felt his lack of education. It was one of the sources of his resentment—and of his determination to succeed.
Fortunately, Carter showed early signs of having inherited a gift for sketching and painting. When his father worked in the great country houses, the young Carter began to go with him, serving a kind of informal apprenticeship. Soon, he was able to obtain small commissions of his own: “For a living, I began by drawing in water colours and coloured chalks portraits of pet parrots, cats and snappy, smelly lap dogs.”
But as he sat drawing his lapdogs and parrots, fate hovered over the boy. William Tyssen-Amherst, one of his father’s patrons, was an aficionado, an Egyptomaniac, an addict—call it what you will—a passionate collector. He was mad for Egypt, as was his whole family, his wife and five daughters (Mary Tyssen-Amherst, later Lady Cecil, would excavate in Aswan, uncovering a significant cache of late Ptolemaic papyri, among other finds).
Didlington Hall, the Tyssen-Amherst estate, housed some of the most important Egyptian antiquities in private hands. As you approached the manor on its south side, you passed through a formal garden. Here, seven massive black statues loomed amid the flower beds and gravel paths. Fashioned in the fourteenth century BC for Amenhotep III—Tutankhamun’s grandfather—they were signifiers of a different reality: images of Sekhmet, a goddess who tore men to pieces at the request of the sun, her lithe, bare-breasted body joined to a lion’s head.
They were a hint of what was in the great hall: the vividly painted coffins and shawabti (magical figures, “answerers” who would come to life at the utterance of a spell); the wonderful statues from almost every period in Egypt’s history. Some, like the block statue of Senwosret-Senebefny, Overseer of the Reckoning of the Cattle, were covered with biographical inscriptions. The Overseer is a powerful figure, whose strong limbs, or a suggestion of them, can be seen just under his robe, a marvel of the sculptor’s art (Twelfth Dynasty, ca. 1800 BC).
For two years, from age fifteen to seventeen, Carter was a frequent visitor at the estate, becoming a favorite of the family. From a sketch his father made of him at the time, we can see the boy: An enormous white collar falls over his buttoned-up wool jacket, his longish wavy hair is parted on one side, his eyes are large and dreamy. When not occupied with his work, Carter drew the gods and goddesses, the mummies and coffins; his sketchbooks from this period are filled with them. He was developing a feeling for Egyptian art—he was “hooked”: “It was the Amherst Egyptian Collection at Didlington Hall,” he later wrote, “that aroused my longing for that country. It gave me an earnest desire to see Egypt.”
Just as important to him as the works of art were Tyssen-Amherst’s papyri. How could they fail to capture the boy’s imagination? Translated by the foremost scholars of the day, they included poems and songs and sacred texts beautifully illustrated—the Book of the Dead, and the Book of Gates, and the Book of What Is in the Underworld—and the harsh drama of an ancient grave-robbing trial known simply as the Amherst papyrus. Written in hieratic—a flowing script, a kind of shorthand hieroglyphs—the transcript records a trial that took place during the reign of Ramesses IX (Twentieth Dynasty, 1120-1108 BC).
Charged with plundering the tomb of Pharaoh Sobekemsaf, an ancient tomb even then (Thirteenth Dynasty), the stonemason Amunpanefer at first denied everything. But when he was beaten again and again with a double rod (“Give him the stick! The stick!”), he finally confessed. We can almost hear him cry out: “We found the noble mummy of this king with a sword. There were many amulets and jewels of gold upon his neck … and his mask of gold was upon him. The noble mummy of this god was completely covered with gold and his coffins were adorned with gold and silver, inside and out, and with every costly stone. We stripped off the gold that we found on the august mummy of this god, and its amulets and ornaments that were at its throat, and we set fire to the coverings….”
This trial was one of many, since the lure of the treasure was irresistible, as other ancient transcripts reveal: “We went up in a single body. The foreigner Nesamun showed us the tomb of Ramesses VI, the Great God. We said to him, Where is the tomb maker who was with you? And he said to us: He was killed….
“I spent four days breaking into the tomb, there being five of us. We opened the tomb and we entered it. We found a basket lying on sixty chests…. We opened them and found …
“My father ferried the thieves over to the island of Amunemopet and they said to him, This inner coffin is ours. It belonged to some great person. We were hungry and we went and brought it away, but you be silent and we will give you a loincloth. So they said to him. And they gave him a loincloth. But my mother said to him, You are a silly old man. What you have done is stealing.”
Later, such documents would be important clues when Carter began to piece together his deductions about the royal necropolis (city of the dead). But for now, he was just becoming familiar with the long-dead figures: the Ramesses and Setis and Amenhoteps who would, for the next forty-five years, be his all-consuming passion. There would be no great love in his life, not even a passing romance. No wife, no mistress, no children. The tombs he uncovered were to be the main events of his life, a long list of them leading toward the great prize: a royal tomb, almost untouched—as his sixth sense told him it would be—and filled with breathtakingly beautiful objects.
To the young Carter, though, Egypt seemed as far away as the moon. The Tyssen-Amherst collection had fired his imagination, but there matters ended. The scholars and professors who visited at Didlington Hall were in a different category from his. They were equals who had come to talk learnedly about the antiquities. In class-conscious England, Carter was a step above the servants; his job was to sketch Tyssen-Amherst’s favorite animals.
Ironically enough, his lack of education—his being “miserably incomplete,” as he put it—would give him his first break. His services could be obtained cheaply, which was just what the recently founded Egyptian Exploration Fund needed. They could not afford to hire another expensive ge
ntleman-scholar.
Engaged in an epic project, the fund had been recording the countless ancient inscriptions and friezes endangered by vandals, flooding, fading, and the like. Photography could capture just so much, given the limited techniques of the time. To copy the paintings in the long, winding passages of the dark tombs, to record the rows of hieroglyphics on temple walls, to faithfully reproduce colors and details, artists were needed. The fund had a team working in the rock tombs of Beni Hasan (Middle Egypt). But the work had lagged, and an extra hand was needed.
One of the fund’s directors wrote to John Newberry (whose brother, Percy Newberry, was a Cambridge-trained Egyptologist working for the fund at Beni Hasan): “If you come across a colourist (eye for colour must be chief qualification added to drawing) who would like a trip to Egypt for expenses paid and nothing else, I should be much obliged if you would ask him to call…. It seems to me that as cost is a great consideration it matters not whether the artist is a gentleman or not. Your brother [Percy Newberry] can fraternize with George Willoughby Fraser [another member of the Beni Hasan team and a ‘gentleman’]…. A gentleman unless of an economical turn of mind would run into extra expenses very likely, while if a non-gentleman were sent out Percy Newberry could take him under his wing and manage all his feeding etc. as his employer. In this way 2 or 3 shillings might be saved daily.”
As it happened, Percy Newberry was on leave in England at the time, and his brother forwarded the letter to him. Since Newberry frequently visited at Didlington Hall, he immediately thought of Carter. He had seen his work and thought it was “good enough;” moreover, he liked the boy.
Tyssen-Amherst seconded the idea, so the matter was settled. Carter was to spend the summer training at the British Museum, where he would carefully study the precise and beautiful drawings done in the beginning of the century by Robert Hay, one of the first Europeans to have explored the ruins of Egypt.
Whatever training he received was picked up hastily, during these few summer months. Francis Llewellyn Griffith, superintendent of the Archaeological Survey, tried to prepare him as best he could, along with C. H. Read. “These venerable people,” Carter recalled later, “and this august building with its associations and its resonant rooms, deeply impressed me and produced an awe that caused me to be in a mortal funk lest my boots squeaked.” His boots well oiled—presumably—here he learned more about the lines of Egyptian art and the hieroglyphic writing he would be copying.
Then, at the end of those three months in 1892—Carter was seventeen years old—his new life began.
1* The tombs in the Valley of the Kings are numbered from one to sixty-two. The general rule is that tombs with lower numbers have either lain open since antiquity or were discovered earlier than those higher in the sequence. The tombs in the adjoining valleys (the Valley of the Queens, the Nobles, the West Valley, and Deir el-Bahri) are referred to by their own numbering sequences. DB #320, for example, refers to tomb number 320 from the Deir el-Bahri sequence. It is to John Gardner Wilkinson that we owe the numbering system still in use. In the 1820s and 1830s, Wilkinson lived in Gurneh, at the edge of the Valley of the Kings, where he studied those tombs that were accessible and devised his numbering system.
2* Over the next decades, the study of mummies would make great progress. The first X-raying of mummies was performed by William Flinders Petrie in 1898. By 1911, Sir Armand Ruffer, a French baron and professor of medicine in Cairo, had developed a technique for preventing brittle ancient mummy tissue from crumbling under the microscope. And the autopsies Dr. Grafton Elliot Smith of the Cairo School of Medicine performed on the royal mummies were all meticulously recorded and published.
ALMOST A DECADE LATER, THE CARTER OF 1901 STOOD BEFORE the tomb he had discovered. Though still not considered a gentleman by the standards of his countrymen, he could give a good imitation of one. At least he was considered passable company: His colleagues fraternized with him, albeit with a patronizing attitude.
He was formally attired, though he was in the middle of the desert, as were the others who had gathered for the opening of “his” tomb—that is, the intact royal tomb he had discovered.
With nothing more than a hunch to go on, he’d struggled for two years to organize an expedition. Every step of the way had been fraught with difficulties, from finding a backer to pay for the dig, to getting the Department of Antiquities’ permission to work the site,1* to the excavation itself, which proved unbelievably complicated.
Hundreds of feet underground, at the end of a long, descending passage, he had finally uncovered a vast, almost empty chamber after months of digging. Leading down from this chamber was a sunken shaft that was so deep, it took two seasons to clear it. But clear it he finally did, coming upon a door stamped with the seal of the royal necropolis: a recumbent jackal, Anubis, god of mummification, over nine bound prisoners.
This sealed doorway, and the unbreached underground stone wall on either side of it (twelve feet thick), caused him to summon the consul, the Egyptian prime minister, the head of the Antiquities Service, and the experts: Carter had made an unprecedented find.
If he was nervous, he did not show it: On public occasions he was known for his self-possession. From the shy boy in the British Museum, trembling lest his boots squeak, he had developed what Emma Andrews (traveling companion of the millionaire Theodore Davis) called “a dominant personality.” For almost a decade now, the Egyptian desert had been his home; he knew its terrain well, had explored its most remote valleys and lived in its tombs (sometimes sleeping in the ancient sepulchers when no other shelter was available, then a common practice).
From Carter’s notebooks it can be seen that nothing escaped his notice: the quality of the rock; the patterns of flash floods in the desert (over the centuries, sudden violent torrents moved great boulders and masses of debris, covering tomb entrances and burying temples and ruins); the ancient graffiti scrawled on the cliffs—secret “markers” left by priests, doodlings and caricatures scratched by necropolis workers and guards, comments by Greek pilgrims and Roman passersby; and the wildlife to be found in the desert, which especially appealed to him: “some scaly, a few furred like the fox and the desert hare, but mostly feathered. Several kinds of vultures, one or two falcons, a long-legged buzzard, ravens, blue rock pigeons, sand partridge and other smaller desert birds which delight in eking out a precarious existence in desolate solitude. On high eagles soared in the still air. And along the riverbank in the scant patches of palm were turtle doves.”
It was the one pleasure he allowed himself when he could: riding out on horseback to explore and to sketch. On one of these outings two years earlier (1898), his horse stumbled and fell. Unhurt, he got up to investigate. As he described it in the report he filed for the service (Anuales du Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte II [1901]): “The ground gave way under the horse’s legs bringing both of us down. Afterwards, on looking into the small hole there formed, I saw traces of stone work, from which I concluded that there must be something and most probably a tomb. I commenced excavating on the 20th January, 1900, in order to find out what really was there, and in a short time, I was able to trace the three sides of the stone work, the fourth side, to the east, being open. From this state of the east end, I concluded that, if it was a tomb, the entrance would be below the western end, so I at once set the men to work there….”
In his report, he quickly moved from the fateful fall in the desert to the excavation. But two years intervened before he was able to raise the funds for the excavation. His immediate superior at the time, the scholar Édouard Naville, was skeptical. As Carter remembered in his journal: “All that I received for my pains was a somewhat splenetic remark, that had a taint of ridicule.”
Carter shrugged off Professor Naville’s ridicule, however, and tried to raise money to dig. He won over Maspero, who found some money for him and then convinced an unidentified sponsor to step forward with the rest.
The excavation turned out to
be more difficult than anyone had imagined. More and more workers had to be engaged, hundreds of men. The subterranean corridors were hundreds of feet long and cut deep beneath the ground. There were stone-blocking walls twelve feet in thickness and sharp salt stalagmites that had formed out of the rock, obstructing the passage. Finally, Carter reached not the burial chamber but a huge, vaulted room some 56 feet belowground. From this room a vertical shaft led down more than 320 feet to yet another corridor below. The area to be excavated was vast, and the amount of earth and stone to be removed was enormous.
“After working down some 17 metres [56 feet],” as Carter told it, “I found the door which had its original mud brick sealings intact. I made a small hole at the top of the door and entered, finding myself in a long arched passage having a downward incline of about 1 in 5. Inside the door, a head of a calf and portions of a calf’s leg were lying on the floor [the remains of four-thousand-year-old sacrificial offerings]. I descended the passage, which was quite clear and 150 metres [492 feet] long, ending in a large lofty chamber, the roof again arched….
“In the left hand corner, lying on its side was a seated statue … completely wrapped in linen of a very fine quality: beside it lay a long wooden coffin which was inscribed but bore no name…. The style of the work shewed that the tomb was of the early Theban empire [2010 BC]. Along the end wall and in the centre of the chamber, pots with mud sealings, a dish and many small saucers, all of rough red pottery, together with the skeletons of two ducks? and two forelegs of a calf which still had on them the dried up flesh, were lying on the floor. Having tested the ground with a piercing rod, I found that there was a shaft leading down from the chamber.
“On the 16th of March, 1900, I started the men to open the shaft; but on the 20th of April, the shaft proved to be so deep, the rock so bad and becoming so dangerous that I was obliged to stop the work until the next season….”
In the Valley of the Kings: Howard Carter and the Mystery of King Tutankhamun's Tomb Page 2
