Weigall was at his most passionate and iconoclastic when writing about the tension between Western archaeology and native Egyptian sentiment. He advocated keeping Egyptian monuments in Egypt, and was much more outspoken than most contemporary commentators, declaring:
the craze for recklessly dragging away monuments from Egypt to be exhibited in western museums for the satisfaction of the untravelled man is the most pernicious bit of folly to be found in the whole broad realm of Egyptological misbehaviour . . . No curator should endeavour to procure for his museum any antiquity which could be safely exhibited on its original site and in its original position.37
He also argued fiercely against the trade in illicit antiquities, which he accused museums of fuelling: ‘It is felt . . . that the objects exhibited in European museums have been rescued from Egypt and recovered from a distant land. This is not so. They have been snatched from Egypt and lost to the country of their origin.’38
Budge, one suspects, would not have been amused.
In his views on the limitations of archaeology, Weigall was both ahead of his time and unfashionable: ‘The archaeologist, so eager to add to his knowledge by new discoveries, should remember that there is already quite enough material on hand to keep him busy for the rest of his life.’39 Why, he asked, ‘add to the burden of Egypt by increasing the number of monuments which have to be protected?’ In his opinion: ‘The longer an excavation is postponed the better chance there wll be of recording the discoveries adequately.’40 The Committee of the Egypt Exploration Society must have squirmed to read one of their own protégés advocating such views.
Weigall’s writings were deeply influenced by the trauma of the First World War. He found in ancient Egypt an escape from the horrors of the early twentieth century, and it was when describing the attractions of distant antiquity that he became most lyrical:
To the Past we must go as a relief from To-day’s harshness; for the Past is spread out before us as a children’s garden, where jolly laughter and sudden, quick-ended tears are to be experienced; where the waters are alive with mermen and the woods are filled with brownies; where nymphs and fairies dwell among the flowers, and enchanted castles crown the hilltops; where heroes die for fame, and the victors marry kings’ daughters. There in that garden we may forget the mature cruelty and the sins of the present time; for if there be wickedness in the Past, we may usually name it the thoughtless mischief of childhood . . . One contemplates with positive relief the tortures and massacres of the distant ages, for they are child’s play as compared with the reasoned brutality of these wicked olden days in which we now live.41
He was, at the same time, mindful of the modern Egyptians’ growing sense of their own nationhood – aspirations to which those who knew the country well could not be insensible: ‘In Egypt, where scientific excavations are conducted entirely by Europeans and Americans, one has to consider . . . one’s duty to the Egyptians, who care not one jot for their history, but who, nevertheless, as the living descendants of the Pharaohs should be the nominal stewards of their ancient possessions.’42
This combination of condescension towards other peoples and grudging acceptance of their right to self-determination characterized colonial attitudes towards Egypt in the years after the First World War. Ever since the Napoleonic invasion, Egypt’s traditional leadership structures had been steadily eroded under the pressure of Western influence. A succession of rulers, from Muhammad Ali to Fuad, had sought protection or investment from Western powers in return for ceding sovereignty. The British invasion of 1882 had met with only minor resistance, but the apparent Egyptian passivity towards foreign occupation had lulled the British into a false sense of security. Only a few in the British establishment recognized the inherent injustices of occupation, and could see the writing on the wall.
The colonial authorities had first attempted to contain Egyptian nationalism before the war, through Gorst’s more liberal approach; but this had been deemed a failure and had been replaced by Kitchener’s more traditional, paternalistic attitude. This did not work either. The nationalist uprising of 1919 caught the British authorities by surprise. So did the passive resistance led by Zaghlul in 1921, modelled on Gandhi’s civil disobedience in India. That same year, the British opened an airport at Heliopolis; the Royal Air Force began flying mail routes from Cairo to Baghdad, while Imperial Airways launched a Cairo to Karachi service. But even modern communications could not save the Empire.
The colonial authorities calculated that significant concessions to the Egyptian nationalists might yet prevent an all-out revolution and preserve a degree of British influence. London’s proposal was for the protectorate to be replaced by an Anglo-Egyptian treaty, granting Egypt independence as a constitutional monarchy. Britain would retain the right to maintain an army in Egypt, a financial adviser, and a permanent official in the ministry of justice, and to protect the rights of foreigners resident in Egypt. It was, in other words, self-determination in name only. With great fanfare, Egyptian ‘independence’ was declared on 28 February 1922. Two weeks later, Sultan Fuad assumed the title King Fuad I.
Archaeology was not immune to these political developments. The director of the Antiquities Service, Lacau, immediately announced that henceforth all finds would be claimed for Egypt, with only duplicates given to the excavators at the Service’s discretion.43 The measures were not universally popular. Petrie, predictably, railed against the new strictures, seeing in them the latest skirmish in the Anglo-French rivalry that had characterized Egyptology since the days of Young and Champollion:
The issue of new and arbitrary conditions by Lacau was a repetition of what former French Directors of Antiquities had tried to do, by ignoring their subordination to the Ministry in Egypt, and trying to establish an autocracy . . . This attempt had been checked before . . . by the strength of British management. Now that Britain was leaving much more to Egyptian direction, there was not the same check, and French autocracy was left uncontrolled.44
The new regulations meant that, without the prospect of new acquisitions, foreign museums would no longer be interested in supporting digs in Egypt. For Petrie, this was intolerable. In a fit of pique he decided to stay in England for the winter season of 1922–3 to tackle a backlog of publications and muster opposition to Lacau’s decision. He called a joint meeting of the Egypt Exploration Society, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British School of Archaeology in Egypt, resulting in a formal protest being sent to the Council of Ministers in Cairo, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Lord Allenby, and Lacau himself. In response, the introduction of the new law was suspended for two years.45 Even so, Petrie decided to confine himself in future to ‘excavations in which there was little likelihood of finding anything of value’.46
Not that the prospect of discovering further treasure beneath the sands of Egypt was thought particularly likely. As Weigall noted that same season: ‘There is painful disillusionment awaiting the man who comes to dig in Egypt in the hope of finding the golden cities of the Pharaohs or the bejewelled bodies of their dead.’47
Digging in the Valley of the Kings seemed to many a particularly thankless task. As far back as 1869, Mariette had written: ‘There is every reason to believe that the excavations . . . however persevering, will not yield results commensurate with the difficulties caused by the remoteness of the location and the want of a water supply.’48 Over half a century later, Weigall summed up the task thus: ‘There is much drudgery to be faced, and for a large part of the season’s work it is the excavator’s business to turn over endless masses of rock chippings, and to dig huge holes which have no interest . . . At other times a tomb-chamber is reached and is found to be absolutely empty.’49
In the autumn of 1922, after five seasons of systematic but fruitless work, Carnarvon’s reluctance to persevere was understandable. One final season, and he would call it a day.
Carter arrived in Luxor on 28 October and excavations resumed on 1 November. Just three days into the dig, the workmen uncovered a step cut into the valley floor. Twenty-four hours later, a flight of twelve descending steps had been exposed, leading to a blocked doorway covered in plaster and impressed with the seals of the ancient royal necropolis. Carter could scarcely believe his eyes: ‘The design was certainly of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Could it be the tomb of a noble buried here by royal consent? Was it a royal cache, a hiding place to which a mummy and its equipment had been removed for safety? Or was it actually the tomb of the king for whom I had spent so many years in search?’50
On 6 November, Carter ordered the staircase to be refilled with rubble and he sent the now-famous telegram to his patron in England: ‘At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival; congratulations.’ Carnarvon cabled back the reply: ‘Possibly come soon,’ followed, a little later, by, ‘Propose arrive Alexandria 20th’.51 That gave Carter and his excavation team ‘a fortnight’s grace’, and they devoted it ‘to making preparations of various kinds, so that when the time of the re-opening came, we should be able, with the least possible delay, to handle any situation that might arise’.52
Carnarvon, accompanied by his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, arrived at Luxor by train on 23 November, to be greeted by Carter and the provincial governor. The next day, patron and archaeologist watched together as the staircase was cleared to its full depth, revealing the whole of the plastered doorway. Now there could be no doubt what they had found: ‘On the lower part the seal impressions were much clearer, and we were able without difficulty to make out on several of them the name of Tut.ankh.Amen.’53 In due course, the blocked doorway was dismantled, only to reveal a sloping tunnel, filled from floor to ceiling with limestone chippings. As workmen struggled in the dusty confined space to clear the tunnel, a second doorway was encountered, likewise covered with sealings naming Tutankhamun. To Carter and Carnarvon’s horror, this inner doorway, like the first, showed signs of earlier forced entry. Robbers had clearly entered the tomb in antiquity. The question was, had they left anything behind?
By four o’clock in the afternoon on 26 November, the corridor had been fully cleared. Carter, watched by Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn, an English engineer Arthur ‘Pecky’ Callender, and the Egyptian overseers, prised some of the stones out of the top of the second doorway. Carter’s journal entry for that ‘day of days’54 relates what happened next:
Candles were procured – the all-important tell-tale for foul gases when opening an ancient subterranean chamber – I widened the breach and by means of the candle looked in, while Ld. C., Lady E, and Callender with the Reises waited in anxious expectation. It was sometime before one could see, the hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker, but as soon as one’s eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one, with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another. There was naturally short suspense for those present who could not see, when Lord Carnarvon said to me ‘Can you see anything’ I replied to him Yes, it is wonderful.55
In Carter’s published account of the discovery, which appeared the following year (written with the ‘literary help’ of the novelist Percy White, professor of English Literature at the Egyptian University), the episode had acquired a touch more drama and panache:
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.’56
Carnarvon, with more typical British understatement, described it as ‘a most extraordinary sight’.57
Breaking through the doorway, Carter entered the chamber beyond. Even for a man who prided himself on his meticulous, detached professionalism, the experience conjured up powerful emotions:
Three thousand, four thousand years maybe, have passed and gone since human feet last trod the floor on which you stand, and yet, as you note the signs of recent life around you – the half-filled bowl of mortar for the door, the blackened lamp, the finger-mark upon the freshly painted surface, the farewell garland dropped upon the threshold – you feel it might have been but yesterday. The very air you breathe, unchanged throughout the centuries, you share with those who laid the mummy to its rest.58
Carter summed up that day as ‘the most wonderful I have ever lived through, and certainly one whose like I can never hope to see again’.59 As the first person to enter the tomb of Tutankhamun in modern times, he experienced ‘the exhilaration of discovery, the fever of suspense . . . the strained expectancy – why not confess it? – of the treasure-seeker’.60 Soon, however, other thoughts came to the fore, as the magnitude of the discovery – and of the work that lay ahead – began to dawn. In Carter’s words, ‘our brains began to reel at the thought of the task in front of us’.61 Neither archaeologist nor patron had been prepared for ‘the greatest find ever made’,62 and they were ‘wholly unprepared to deal with the multitude of objects’63 – 5,398 in total. As Carnarvon put it: ‘There is enough stuff to fill the whole Egyptian section upstairs of the B. M. [British Museum].’64 ‘Carter,’ he confidently predicted, ‘has weeks of work ahead of him.’65
Fortunately, Egyptologists around the world were quick to offer assistance. Breasted, who had visited the tomb shortly after its discovery, helped in the clearance and worked on the seal impressions. Albert Lythgoe, curator of the Egyptian department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, cabled Carter as soon as he heard about the discovery, to offer any assistance needed. Carter gratefully accepted, and was soon joined in the Valley of the Kings by the museum’s photographer, Harry Burton, and two architects, Walter Hauser and Lindsley Foote Hall, who drew all the objects in situ. (Hauser and Hall subsequently left, finding Carter difficult to work with.) Gardiner arrived within weeks, to start work on the inscriptions. Eventually, the excavation team comprised an unprecedented, multidisciplinary team of experts: alongside Carter, Callender, Breasted, Burton, Hauser, Hall and Gardiner, there were Arthur Mace (Lythgoe’s associate curator at the Met), Alfred Lucas (director of the chemical department of the Egyptian government), Newberry (now honorary reader in Egyptian art at Liverpool University), Douglas Derry (anatomist at the Cairo Anatomy School), L. A. Boodle (botanist from Kew Gardens), G. F. Hulme (Geological Survey of Egypt), James Ogden (jeweller), and Battiscombe Gunn (epigrapher and philologist). It would take them seven weeks to clear the antechamber, and a total of seven seasons to record, conserve and clear the entire tomb.
Following the official opening of the tomb on 29 November 1922 and the official inspection by Lacau the following day, Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn left for Cairo and made their way back to England. Carter, too, repaired to Cairo for ten days while bespoke steel gates were made for the tomb. The discovery had made headlines around the world, and as a result the site was plagued with visitors. As Breasted remarked, the discovery:
broke upon a world sated with post-First World War conferences, with nothing proved and nothing achieved, after a summer journalistically so dull that an English farmer’s report of a gooseberry the size of a crab-apple achieved the main news page of the London metropolitan dailies. It was hardly surprising therefore that the Tutenkhamun discovery should have received a volume of world-wide publicity exceeding anything in the entire history of science.66
Back home in London, Carnarvon was invited to a private audience at Buckingham Palace where he recounted the adventure to King George V and Queen Mary. Unused and ill-suited to worldwide media attention, Carter expressed the forlorn hope that: ‘Whatever our discoveries next season may be, we may be allowed to deal with them in a proper and dignified manner.’67 It was not to be. Instead: ‘The seasonal volume of mail at the Luxor post office was doubled and trebled . . . The two leading hotels of Luxor set up tents in their gardens’ to accommodate the hordes of visitors.68
The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb had a profound impact on the Egyptians themselves. Coming just eight months after Egypt’s declaration of independence, it was inevitable that the find and its aftermath should become entangled with nationalist politics. To Egyptians, the richness and sophistication of the boy-king’s treasures offered ‘vindicating proof of past glory and inspiration at a critical moment in their struggle for independence’.69 Interest in Egypt’s pharaonic past, which had hitherto been the preserve of Western archaeologists and a few native scholars, was suddenly propelled into the mainstream of Egyptian cultural and political thought.70 The teaching of pharaonic history was introduced in government schools, a state university was founded, programmes were introduced to train Egyptian Egyptologists, and the Antiquities Service and Museum – for so long bastions of Western influence – were steadily Egyptianized.71
Above all, the unearthing of a tomb so extraordinarily rich in objects marked a turning point in the history of Egyptian archaeology, when the old system of dividing finds between the archaeologist and the state came to an end. Carnarvon’s 1914 permit to excavate in the Valley of the Kings had specified an even distribution of finds, except in the event of an unrobbed tomb being found. The Egyptian authorities now invoked that exception, and sought to retain the entire contents of the tomb as part of Egypt’s patrimony. Carter, Breasted and their ilk were aghast, believing that only trained (Western) Egyptologists could properly appreciate and care for Egyptian antiquities. Moreover, they regarded the moves by Fuad’s government and Lacau’s Antiquities Service as ‘either nationalist political posturing or crass opportunism in anticipation of future tourist revenues’.72 But the world – and Egypt with it – had moved on since the days of Champollion and Lepsius. Mariette’s vision – for a national museum that would curate and safeguard pharaonic artefacts on behalf of the Egyptian people – had come to pass. In an era of renewed Egyptian national pride, in a newly independent country with a spring in its step, figures like Petrie and Budge looked like relics of the past. When the first object was removed from Tutankhamun’s tomb on 27 December 1922, it was taken not to Highclere Castle or the British Museum, but to the Egyptian Museum in the heart of Cairo.
Exactly a century after the decipherment of hieroglyphics first opened a window on remote antiquity and allowed the ancient Egyptians to speak again, the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, coming hot on the heels of Egyptian independence, prompted the country’s modern inhabitants to rethink their relationship with their own past and chart a new course for the future. It would be a future which the Egyptians themselves, rather than Westerners, would determine.
EPILOGUE
The future of the past
Carter with King Fuad I and Egyptian officials in the Valley of the Kings.
