Dan Snow's History Hit - 2. Tutankhamun: The Discovery of a Lifetime

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

2/4. Dan dives into Carter’s obsession with Tutankhamun and the trials and idiosyncrasies that made him the right man for the discovery. Dan visits the house Carter built where he conducted his search. There, architectural historian Nicholas Warner tells Dan about the many frustrating years of finding nothing...until water boy Hussein Abdel-Rassoul stumbled upon a square stone that looked like a step. They dug down and discovered a tomb door with the royal seal. No one could have imagined the treasure that lay inside...Listen to Episode One Tutankhamun: The Valley of the Kings.This podcast was written and produced by Mariana Des Forges and mixed by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

We're just climbing onto the jetty, the floating pontoon on the west side of the river, surrounded by a fleet of little sunset ships that go out with exciting names like the New Titanic and Hatshepsut and Tutankhamun, lots of names connected with two of the most famous pharaohs. And immediately on this side you're away from the big city energy on the other side it's much more rural much more small town and we're about to head out into the desert if you have ever looked a satellite image of e, which I expect you have, you'll see enormous swathes of barren desert, beige sand and rock for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Obviously running from top to bottom through the middle is an astonishing green artery. It's the River Nile, flanked on either side by verdant banks of vegetation, trees and farmland. I'm staying now on the edge of that farmland

where the green ends and the desert begins. I've got a good view of that exact transition from green, from farmland, desert right now because I'm in Luxor, the modern city built on the ruins of ancient Thebes and the location for the wondrous Valley of the Kings. I don't think any of us in this place isn't left awestruck by the

history here. As a result, for hundreds of years, explorers and archaeologists from across the globe have ventured to this place seeking to uncover lost tombs. The most famous and prolific, of course, was Howard Carter, who 100 years ago in 1922 made the discovery of a lifetime, the magnificent burial chamber of the teenage pharaoh Tutankhamen. I'm now standing in the garden of a lifetime the magnificent burial chamber of the teenage pharaoh tutankhamen i'm now standing in the garden of his former home it's on the west bank of the nile just across from luxor and that's where he based himself during his mission to find the tomb it sits right on the edge of the lush greenery fed by the nile and the barren rocky desert i can see to my right hand side the entrance to the Valley of the Kings is just

meters away really. It was uninhabited and sort of overlooked decades after Carter left Egypt and died but this house and its contents reveal a lot about who Howard Carter really was and what motivated him during his stay in Egypt and how he was the man who would find the most famous tomb of them all. From Egypt, we're telling the dramatic story of the Valley of the Kings, of how the tombs of this royal cemetery disappeared under shifting desert sands. Howard Carter was sure that he was going to find something impressive. And he was sure it was going to be a tomb. So he kept looking and finding things. But five years, nothing.

And he was almost losing hope. Hope became a battleground of a gold rush. Adventurers, robbers and nations who raced to uncover lost tombs and lost treasure. The rivalries and crushing disappointments. who raced to uncover lost tombs and lost treasure, the rivalries and crushing disappointments, and the discovery that captivated the world, and still does to this day.

No other king at no other time could have made quite the impact. It was just the right time to catch the mood. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. This is our special miniseries marking 100 years since Tutankhamen's tomb was unearthed. Episode 2. The Discovery of a Lifetime. Two previous explorers, Giovanni Belzoni and Theodore Davis, had declared that there was nothing else to find in the Valley of the Kings. They'd found the lot. No intact tombs anywhere. But Howard Carter was convinced there was something still to be discovered.

He was so consumed by his mission to find Tutankhamun's tomb that he set up a permanent camp as close to the Valley of the Kings as possible, where he lived and worked. It was a world away from the home he knew growing up. So I'm walking into the house now. Above all, I'm just thinking what a strange place it is for a boy who spent most of his time in the Norfolk town of Swatham. He grew up in this fairly remote part of the English provinces. His father once painted a famous Egyptologist and Carter seems to have got to know that Egyptologist and developed a great love of Egypt. I've walked into the hall where all the other rooms seem to feed off from. It's got its domed

ceiling, very Islamic. Let's go into his study here. This is very Spartan. Mud brick walls, very, very dark, just one window. My goodness, he must have been hot in here. But he developed his love of Egyptology from this man whose father painted. And he also lived near enough to Didlington Hall, which belonged to the Amherst family. And they had a huge collection of Egyptian artef Egyptian artifacts which seems to have fired his imagination. It was through the Amherst in 1891 that Carter got his break. He was just 17 years old and Lady Amherst thought he was a great artist, thought he was keen and she prompted a friend at the Egypt Exploration Fund to send Carter, this teenage boy, to assist a family friend in recording an excavation in the Middle

Kingdom tombs of Beni Hassan. So Howard's role was what we'd now employ a photographer to do, or even a LIDAR, a laser scanner. He was there to draw the archaeological findings, draw the artefacts. He drew some of the images on the walls of Hatshepsut's temple, and they are remarkably true to the originals and you obviously did something right because he was appointed inspector of monuments for upper egypt in the egyptian antiquity service in 1899 and that meant really for the next few years carter worked around upper egypt which is the area here around luxor today at different archaeological sites including dahil bahari amarna thebes ab Abu Simbel and Edfu.

It is fantastically hot. People are taking a break. The workers are restoring this house to how it would have been 100 years ago. They're taking a break. They're hiding under the palm trees, drinking sweet tea. I'm Nicholas Warner. I'm the Director of Cultural Heritage Projects for the American Research Centre in Egypt. Nicholas, this is a really ambitious project. You're returning this house to how it looked 100 years ago. When we started work on the project, the building did not look at all like what it used to look like when Carter was here. What did Egypt look like at the time, as it were? How did Egyptologists go about their work? Who funded them and who decided where and how the site should be divided up? Well, the government funded a lot of the work

done by the Antiquities Service. Although it was dominated by the French, there was money coming from the government, which at that time was controlled by Lord Cromer and his predecessors. So they were representatives, if you like, of the British protectorate. Egypt was not a colony. And in a place like Luxor, there were also a large number of wealthy individuals who had caught the bug of ancient Egypt, if you like, and had put in their own money into excavating sites. The system was that they applied to the Antiquities Department for a commission to work at a certain area, a concession,

and they were also granted a percentage of the fines. When Carter was working here initially in the 1890s it was more or less a complete desert at the edge of the West Bank. There was a settlement here called Gurna which was a local settlement that was about 100 years old, a kind of expanded village hamlet of mud brick houses that were built on top of the tombs that the excavators were so interested in discovering. So there's always been a clash if you like between the interests of those who live in a place and the archaeologists who are interested in getting to the material that's underneath them. Sometimes of course the clash is exacerbated by the fact that the people who live on top of the tombs are in fact tomb robbers themselves. So this is a classic tale

that has probably been going on for millennia in Egypt. And you mentioned desert. You've just shown me a picture of this house would have been … In full desert. It's got a lush garden now but it was in full desert. There was no water here no electricity obviously no greenery whatsoever all the water would have been brought in by hand by donkeys on donkey carts or by eating people carrying it by hand so it was a very very precious resource as far as carter was concerned

i don't know how often he bathed but he was wearing a very heavy tweed suit you see in most of the photographs and probably a flannel belt. Does that tell us about why he chose to just build this mud brick house in the desert as close as possible to where the finds were, when lots of people, including his patron, tended to stay in the nice Nile-fronted hotels of Luxor? It does seem to suggest a particularly driven, focused man. Yes, I don't think he was

very sociable. He did socialise certainly in the 1910s and 20s with representatives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art who are also working here, the archaeologists on their team. Your description of him as a sociable youngster who becomes a more ascetic loner into his middle age is very relatable. I think his experience of foreigners was not always good and I think he had a good relationship with his Egyptian workers. Carter worked in the Antiquities Department

in a variety of roles in a variety of places. So he worked also in the Delta and famously he worked in Saqqara which is just to the south of cairo and when he was working in sakara as a chief inspector there he was involved in an incident where a fight broke out between a group of french tourists and his local egyptian inspectors who were his team and he sided with his local inspectors and this didn't go down too well with his seniors who were all French, of course.

So he was in fact expelled at that time, so this is early 1900s, and expelled from the Antiquities Service and that's when he came back to Luxor and I think had a few hard years scratching out a living mostly by selling watercolours, as far as I can see, to rich tourists who were coming to visit Egypt. These were tough years for Howard Carter, that almost certainly took their toll on him psychologically.

Expelled from the antiquities service and destitute, his dreams of finding Tutankhamun's tomb were rapidly slipping away. finding Tutankhamun's tomb were rapidly slipping away. For five years, he sold souvenirs in Luxor's market, on the opposite side of the Nile, to where he was desperate to be. But then, in 1907, Carter was given an introduction that changed everything. Gaston Maspero, a French Egyptologist, introduced him to Lord Carnarvon, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, an aristocrat and amateur archaeologist. Carnarvon had power and wealth. Carter had experience and knowledge.

Both had an unstoppable passion. Their partnership would lead to the most astonishing discovery the world had ever seen. I'm walking up now to the front door of one of the most famous buildings in the world, most recognisable buildings at present. That's because of its place in popular culture. It is Downton Abbey, home of the Crawleys in Yorkshire. In fact in real life it's Highclere Castle. It is home of the equally aristocratic but real Carnarvons, the Carnarvon family, Earl of Carnarvon. And the current Earl's great-grandfather, who was Lord Carnarvon, who went out, met with Howard Carter and decided to take him on and support him

as he undertook archaeological investigations on the west bank of the Nile. And I'm here to meet the current Earl's wife Lady Carnarvon who is the family historian. She's written books about our illustrious forebears and I've been to her a few times here before and there's always some fantastic new album, new bit of information that she's discovered so I'm looking forward to hearing what she's got for me Right, here I am at the front door Here I go

How does an aristocrat in these rolling green hills become an Egyptologist and a man with a passion for all things Egyptian? It's that restlessness, isn't it, in all of us where you're perhaps trying to look for that still, small voice of calm, but you seem to have to travel miles to find it. How did he get on with Harcast? Because it feels like they're quite different in many ways.

They became really good friends and colleagues, and Lorcan Oven just enjoyed such a Catholic mixture of friends, from racing, shooting, archaeology. So he obviously was a man of great passion, he had money, but he needed these archaeologists, these professionals to complete the project. He knew that

he didn't know that much to begin with, and what he was able to do, because of his position and his confidence, if you like, was gather around him some of the best archaeologists from whom he absorbed so much knowledge information and he read phenomenally do you think there was a particular moment that he really got the bug for Egyptology when he started excavating and doing the excavation himself which was in 1906 and there he was and he writes

saying I was sitting on this dust heap excavating madly for whatever it was six weeks and I thought I'd found two or whatever else he was actually the rubbish heap and he'd just find a mummified cat it was quite a big cat coffin actually and he donated it to the Cairo Museum so that's where it went and he then was immediately coming back the next year. He'd already been chatting up some of the locals over thick coffee, which I love too, and he next worked at the tomb of Teteke, the mayor of Thebes,

and we've got some beautiful photographs from that and beautiful artefacts. Like Carter, Carnarvon was convinced there were at least one or two more royal tombs to be found in the valley. He finally got permission to start looking in 1914. But quickly, things were halted by the war, and both he and Carter were called in for diplomatic duties. Carter was still in Luxor during that First World War period. He may have been employed as a spy, I'm not sure.

There's a famous story that archaeologists like to tell here, which is how in 1914 he blew up the German archaeological excavation house, which is also not located very far away from here, as part of the war effort. This story, though apocryphal, gives a little insight into the deep rivalries that existed here between nations over the years, all vying to make the next big discovery many stooping to nefarious means to do so. As Giovanni Belzoni found when he was shot at by French archaeologists in 1819, Carter and his team returned to work in 1917, digging into the valley rock in places they thought might yield a tomb. In 1907, Theodore Davis, a wealthy American who financed archaeological excavations in the valley,

discovered a pit with a few pots, animal bones and bags of natron, the chemicals ancient Egyptians used to embalm mummies. In there were some linens with the name Tutankhamun. The writing showed that this pharaoh, almost unknown, had ruled in the 18th dynasty, over 3,000 years ago. So Carter had something to go on, but it was still like searching for a very small needle in a very, very large haystack. Weeks soon turned into months. from America's past to help us understand the United States of today. Join me as I head back in time to witness Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence, head to the battlefields during the Civil War, visit Chief Poitin as he prepares for war with English colonists, tour Central Park before it was Central Park, and a city in Tennessee which helped build the

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Yes, I mean, after the house was built in 1910, it was obviously used as the base for continuous annual searches for the tomb in the valley. They were systematic about it. Carter was very systematic about clearing down to the bedrock in all cases. And so it was just many, many years of actually not finding things. I don't know quite how they filled their time if they weren't finding things. I think it must have been quite a frustrating period for both men. Carter was quite meticulous about recording things, even if they weren't finding things. I think it must have been quite a frustrating period for both men. Carter was quite meticulous about recording things even if they were not of massive significance. You've got a guest bedroom there. Did Lord Carnarvon come and stay here?

Yes, I'm sure he stayed here also. I'm sure that rather than going back to the other side, which would have been quite a trek, today, with modern transport, it takes at least an hour, I would say, to get from here to the river and then on across the river to wherever you're staying. So in those days, it would have taken a lot longer. Although Carnarvon did have his car. It appears in some of the archival photographs that we have, and he must have used it.

How was Carter able to live out here in the desert? I mean, there's a garden around it now, but surely it was just a complete barren desert when he was here. There's a garden around it now, but sure, it was just a complete barren desert when he was here. When I started working on this project, I rapidly became quite interested in how the water was provided to the house, because here we are quite a long way away from anywhere, a long way away from the wells, the Nile. So water must have been brought in here on a daily basis. Water is one thing that's of interest. How you keep the food fresh is another subject of great interest. And there's a very tiny little zinc-lined container

at floor level next to the kitchen, which is not a dog kennel, as often the guides say. This is the kennel for Lord Carnarvon's dog, Susie, and accompanied Lord Carnarvon wherever he went, from what I understand. So this is not a kennel, it's a fridge. It's a very early form of frigidaire. He would have been able to get hold from probably an ice factory relatively close to the river, a block of ice, which would actually go into this zinc-lined container, small, and it would have had shelves on it and you would have put your meat or your perishables in there. But I suspect he also lived a lot like many archaeologists on canned food.

We know that he had some food shipped in by Fortnum and Masons. Maybe that was Carnarvon. It sounds more likely to be Carnarvon. But archaeologists pride themselves on being tough. You know, so they have a very tough attitude towards food. You know, people eat sardines for a year without any complaint and that sort of thing. So I don't think he was particularly worried about a restricted diet. And there would have been fresh food here. Fresh fruit and vegetables would have been available.

So I notice you're an excellent Arabic speaker. Would Carter have spoken Arabic? How sub-acculturated was he? I suspect Howard Carter spoke the same level of Arabic as myself, which is to say very, very poor Arabic. I'm what I would call a functional illiterate, and I think that he was too. But I'm sure that he communicated in Arabic, entirely in Arabic, with all of his staff and his workforce. And like many of the archaeologists here who've spent a long time in Egypt, we have a very good specialised vocabulary,

but we might not necessarily be able to discuss metaphysical concepts and high culture. But in terms of getting things done, I think he would have been certainly quite, quite capable of doing everything in Arabic. I mean, by the time this house was built, he'd been already in Egypt for 20 years. So it's a long time. Yes.

Carter and his team searched meticulously for four years. Hope and patience were running out. In 1921, Carter was called to Carnarvon's English home, Highclere Castle. Carnarvon had had enough and was calling it a day. Carter was devastated. He wasn't ready to give up. He pleaded with Carnarvon, asking for one more chance. Carter even said he'd pay for the work himself if Carnarvon held onto the permit. It was a gamble. There was no way Carter would have been able to afford it, as family historian Lady Carnarvon can testify. You've been through the archives.

I'm sure there's a few accounts in there. What do you think it cost him, all this Egypt stuff? Well, his wife, Amina, referred to £45,000. So I think you're looking at about £20 million. Something in that region of today's money. But as our currency goes down, my number will go up. And then subsequently to that, you know, his widow, Amina, from 1923 to the conclusion of 1927, 28, spent £36,000.

And that was repaid to her by the Egyptian government. So we're talking about tens of millions of pounds in today's money. Yes. It was a totally ridiculous offer. But Carnarvon was impressed by Carter's dedication. He agreed to one more throw of the dice. It was the last chance. In November 1922, Carter started to dig. On the 1st, Carter started to clear rubble at the bottom of the valley.

Day one, nothing. Day two, again, nothing. Day three, well, I'll let Egyptologist Alia Ismail pick up the story from here. What was interesting was that Howard Carter searched in different areas but he was not noticing the area where the tomb was until this water boy came with his donkeys and he had those vessels that were made out of clay and basically they'll be dripping water and he told him to stand in a specific spot as this spot would be the one where there would be nothing found. So he's like, are you just going to stand over there?

I'm sure there's nothing there. Yes, and little did he know, just because of that boy standing there and the water dripping, Carter was able to make the biggest find of the century. Is that because the water just eventually just moved dirt and dust away and something emerged? Well you can imagine many days of the excavation and the water is dripping dripping on one spot then what happened was it caused a movement in the ground and basically the ground went down in this area and so Carter knew there was something and when they did just little removal of rubble,

they were able to recover the first step. The boy was Hussein Abdul Rasool, a 12-year-old employed to bring water to excavation teams in the valley. On that Saturday morning, he arrived on site as normal and began to set up. He would dig holes in the sand to make space for the water jars to sit upright. That day as he brushed the sand away he noticed a stone that looked different from the other rocks around it. He ran to tell one of the workers and soon Carter was on his hands and knees clearing the area and giving out instructions. It didn't take them long to uncover a smooth stone.

It didn't take them long to uncover a smooth stone. A step. They cleared away more sand. Another step. They cleared a whole staircase. At the bottom was an intact entrance to a tomb. On the door, the seal of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. In tomorrow's episode, Carter and his team peer into the tomb.

Candles were procured, the all-important tell-tale foul gases when opening an ancient subterranean excavation. I widened the breach and by means of the candle looked in. The story of this discovery is well known around the world. But how much do we actually know about Tutankhamen's life and rule? He ascended to the throne at just nine years old, in the shadow of his deeply unpopular father Akhenaten, who tried to change the very fabric of Egyptian society. Akhenaten is taking control of everything.

He's totally concentrating this on himself and on his capital city. It would be this child pharaoh's job to fix it. Make sure to look out for episode three of the Tutankhamun story tomorrow, wherever you get your podcasts. If you've been enjoying the series, please do rate and subscribe or even leave us a review. This episode was written and produced by Marianna Deforge and mixed by Dougal Patmore. I'm Dan Snow. Goodbye.