Howard Carter

Howard Carter was born on May 9, 1874, in Brompton, London, the youngest son in the large family of Samuel John Carter, a successful animal painter and illustrator whose work appeared in the Illustrated London News ^[1]. Because the boy was considered delicate, he spent much of his childhood with aunts in Swaffham, a market town in Norfolk, rather than in the capital. His formal schooling was brief and unremarkable, a fact that would later mark him out among the university-educated scholars of Egyptology ^[2].

What Carter lacked in academic credentials he made up for in draughtsmanship. His father trained him rigorously in drawing and watercolour painting, skills the family expected him to turn into a livelihood. Near Swaffham stood Didlington Hall, the seat of the Amherst family, whose private collection of Egyptian antiquities was among the finest in England. The young Carter saw these objects at first hand, and the Amhersts noticed his talent with a pencil ^[1].

That connection changed his life. In 1891, when the Egypt Exploration Fund needed a junior artist to help record tomb decoration in Egypt, Lady Amherst recommended the seventeen-year-old Carter. He sailed for Alexandria that autumn with no formal training in archaeology, beginning a working relationship with Egypt that would last nearly half a century ^[2].

Carter's first assignment was at Beni Hasan, copying the painted scenes in Middle Kingdom rock tombs, and he soon moved on to assist at el-Amarna under Flinders Petrie, the most methodical excavator of the age ^[1]. Petrie initially doubted that the young artist would ever make an excavator, but the season at Amarna in 1892 gave Carter his first practical schooling in digging, recording, and handling antiquities. Any account of who Howard Carter was has to begin with this apprenticeship, because he absorbed field methods from working archaeologists rather than from books or lecture halls ^[3].

From 1894 to 1899 Carter worked under Édouard Naville at Deir el-Bahari, producing meticulous copies of the reliefs in the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut. The six folio volumes of that survey rest heavily on his drawings, which combined accuracy with genuine artistic feeling and earned him a professional reputation well beyond his years ^[2].

In 1899 Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, appointed Carter Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt, based at Luxor. He was twenty-five. In this post he supervised excavations in the Valley of the Kings, installed electric lighting in several royal tombs, and oversaw work financed by the American lawyer Theodore Davis, including the discovery of the tomb of Thutmose IV in 1903 ^[3]. Transferred to Lower Egypt in 1904, his career soon stalled: after a confrontation at Saqqara in 1905 between Egyptian site guards and a party of French tourists, Carter backed his guards and refused to apologise. He resigned from the Service rather than give way, a decision that left him without a salary but intact in his stubborn sense of principle ^[1].

For several lean years Carter scraped a living in Luxor selling watercolours to tourists and dealing discreetly in antiquities. Rescue came in 1907, when Maspero introduced him to George Herbert, fifth Earl of Carnarvon, a wealthy English aristocrat who had taken up Egyptian excavation while wintering in Egypt for his health ^[2]. Carnarvon needed a professional to run his digs; Carter needed a patron. Their partnership, which began with modest work in the Theban necropolis, produced a well-regarded joint publication, Five Years' Explorations at Thebes, in 1912 ^[3].

Carter had long been convinced that the Valley of the Kings still concealed the tomb of an obscure Eighteenth Dynasty king named Tutankhamun, whose name appeared on scattered small finds made during the Davis excavations. When Davis relinquished his concession, Carnarvon secured it in 1914, though the First World War delayed systematic work until 1917 ^[1]. Season after season, Carter's workmen shifted enormous quantities of rubble down to bedrock without result. By the summer of 1922 Carnarvon, having spent heavily for little return, was ready to stop. Carter persuaded him to fund one final season, reportedly offering to cover the costs himself if nothing was found ^[3].

Work resumed on November 1, 1922, in a small triangle of ground near the tomb of Ramesses VI that Carter had left unexplored because clearing it meant disturbing tourist access. On November 4 a workman uncovered a rock-cut step beneath the remains of ancient huts. Within days a staircase and a sealed doorway bearing royal necropolis seals had emerged, and Carter cabled Carnarvon in England to come at once ^[2].

On November 26, 1922, with Carnarvon and his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert at his side, Carter made a small opening in a second sealed doorway and held a candle to the gap. Asked whether he could see anything, he answered, by his own later account, that he saw wonderful things ^[1]. The antechamber beyond was crowded with gilded couches, dismantled chariots, chests, and statues, the funerary equipment of Tutankhamun lying much as priests had left it more than three thousand years earlier. Among Howard Carter achievements, nothing else approaches this moment: it remains the only royal tomb of the Valley of the Kings recovered with the great bulk of its contents in place ^[4].

The scale of the find dictated the character of the work that followed. Rather than empty the tomb quickly, Carter assembled a team of specialists, including the photographer Harry Burton, lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the chemist Alfred Lucas, who handled conservation. Every object, and there were more than five thousand, was photographed in position, numbered, recorded on cards, and treated before removal, with a nearby tomb converted into a field laboratory ^[4]. The burial chamber was formally opened in February 1923, and in 1925 Carter's team raised the lid of the third coffin, made of solid gold, to reveal the mummy of the king wearing its now famous gold portrait mask ^[2].

The clearance took ten seasons and was not finished until 1932. It was interrupted by Carnarvon's death from an infected mosquito bite in April 1923, an event that fed newspaper talk of a pharaoh's curse, and by a bitter dispute with the Egyptian government in 1924 that shut Carter out of the tomb for the better part of a year ^[3]. The whole assemblage went, as Egyptian law by then required, to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, not to foreign collections. Carter published a three-volume popular account, The Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen (1923 to 1933), written with Arthur Mace, though the full scientific publication he planned never appeared in his lifetime ^[1].

Carter never married and had no children. Contemporaries found him difficult to categorise: courteous and charming when he chose to be, but also touchy, obstinate, and quick to take offence, traits sharpened by his sensitivity about his modest origins and lack of formal education ^[3]. The 1905 Saqqara affair and the 1924 quarrel with the Egyptian authorities both turned, in part, on his refusal to compromise when he believed himself in the right.

His closest professional bond was with Lord Carnarvon, a relationship that survived strains over money and publicity, including Carnarvon's controversial decision to sell exclusive press access to The Times of London, which enraged rival newspapers and Egyptian nationalist opinion alike ^[2]. In Egypt Carter lived for many years in a domed mud-brick house he had built at Elwat el-Diban, on the west bank at Luxor near the entrance to the Valley of the Kings. The house, known as Castle Carter, still stands and is now open to visitors ^[4].

Away from the trenches Carter remained a painter, a keen observer of Egyptian birdlife, and a knowledgeable dealer and collector. In later life he acted as a purchasing agent for museums and private buyers, including American institutions, drawing on an unrivalled eye for Egyptian antiquities ^[3].

After the last objects left the tomb in 1932, Carter's active career effectively ended. He divided his time between London and winters at the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor, working intermittently on notes for the definitive scholarly publication of the tomb that he never completed ^[1]. He undertook lecture tours, including a successful visit to the United States and Canada in 1924, where he spoke to large audiences and received an honorary doctorate of science from Yale University, one of the few formal academic honours ever granted him ^[3].

Official recognition in Britain was strikingly absent. Despite leading the most famous excavation of the century, Carter received no British state honour, an omission his biographers have attributed to his prickly reputation and to lingering resentments from the disputes of the 1920s ^[3]. The Egyptian government, by contrast, had awarded him the Order of the Nile in 1926.

His health declined through the 1930s as Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymphatic system, took hold. Howard Carter died at his London flat in Albert Court, near the Royal Albert Hall, on March 2, 1939, at the age of sixty-four ^[2]. Only a handful of mourners attended his funeral at Putney Vale Cemetery. His niece Phyllis Walker inherited his estate, and his excavation records eventually passed to the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford ^[5].

Few discoveries have altered the public standing of a discipline as thoroughly as Carter's. The opening of Tutankhamun's tomb set off a worldwide craze, often called Tutmania, that stamped Egyptian motifs onto 1920s fashion, jewellery, cinema, and architecture, and it turned a minor boy king into the most recognisable figure of ancient Egypt ^[4]. Touring exhibitions of the tomb's treasures, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, drew millions of visitors and confirmed the find's unmatched hold on popular imagination. Most objects are now destined for permanent display at the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza ^[6].

Within archaeology, the excavation's method proved as influential as its contents. The systematic photography, card indexing, and on-site conservation that Carter insisted upon over ten years of clearance became a model for the careful excavation of complex deposits, and his complete records, preserved at the Griffith Institute in Oxford, still support new research on the tomb a century later ^[5]. The centenary of the discovery in 2022 prompted fresh scholarship, along with franker discussion of the Egyptian workforce whose labour made the excavation possible and of evidence that Carter retained some small objects from the tomb ^[6].

For readers of any Howard Carter biography, the essential Howard Carter facts hold their fascination: a Norfolk painter's son with no degree who rose through skill and persistence to make the defining archaeological discovery of the twentieth century. His story has been retold in biographies, documentaries, and drama, and his name remains permanently joined to Tutankhamun's, the excavator and the king each rescuing the other from obscurity ^[3].