Howard Carter- 138th Birthday
Howard Carter was born in London, the son of Samuel Carter, an artist, and of Martha Joyce Carter. His father trained and developed Howard's artistic talents.
Howard Carter spent much of his childhood with relatives in the Norfolk market town of Swaffham, the birthplace of both his parents.[1][2] In 1891 the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) sent Carter to assist Percy Newberry in the excavation and recording of Middle Kingdom tombs at Beni Hasan.
Although only 17, Carter was innovative in improving the methods of copying tomb decoration. In 1892 he worked under the tutelage of Flinders Petrie for one season at Amarna, the capital founded by the pharaoh Akhenaten. From 1894 to 1899 he worked with Édouard Naville at Deir el-Bahari, where he recorded the wall reliefs in the temple of Hatshepsut.
In 1899, Carter was appointed as the first chief inspector of the Egyptian Antiquities Service (EAS). He supervised a number of excavations at Thebes (now known as Luxor). In 1904 he was transferred to the Inspectorate of Lower Egypt. Carter was praised for his improvements in the protection of, and accessibility to, existing excavation sites,[3] and his development of a grid-block system for searching for tombs. The Antiquities Service also provided funding for Carter to head his own excavation projects and during this period Carter discovered the Tombs of Thutmose I and Thutmose III, although both tombs had been robbed of treasures long before.
Carter resigned from the Antiquities Service in 1905 after formal inquiry into what became known as the Saqqara Affair, a noisy confrontation between Egyptian site guards and a group of French tourists. Carter sided with the Egyptian personnel.
Tutankhamun's tomb
After three hard years for Carter, in 1907 Lord Carnarvon employed Carter to supervise Carnarvon's Egyptian excavations in the Valley of the Kings.[6] The intention of Gaston Maspero, who introduced the two, was to ensure that Howard Carter imposed modern archaeological methods and systems of recording.
After several years of finding little, Lord Carnarvon (Carter's benefactor) became dissatisfied with the lack of results. In 1922, Carnarvon informed Carter he had one more season of funding to search the Valley of the Kings and find the tomb.
Carnarvon financed Carter's work in the Valley of the Kings to 1914, but until 1917 excavations and study were interrupted by World War I. Following the end of World War I, Carter aggressively resumed his work.
On November 4, 1922, Howard Carter's excavation group found steps Carter hoped led to Tutankhamen tomb (subsequently designated KV62) (the tomb that would be considered the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings).
He wired Lord Carnarvon to come, and on 26 November 1922, with Carnarvon, Carnarvon's daughter and others in attendance, Carter made the "tiny breach in the top left hand corner" of the doorway, and was able to peer in by the light of a candle and see that many of the gold and ebony treasures were still in place. He made the breach into the tomb with a chisel his grandmother had given him for his seventeenth birthday. He did not yet know at that point whether it was "a tomb or merely a cache", but he did see a promising sealed doorway between two sentinel statues. When Carnarvon asked "Can you see anything?", Carter replied with the famous words: "Yes, wonderful things."
The next several months were spent cataloging the contents of the antechamber under the "often stressful"
oversight of Pierre Lacau, director general of the Department of Antiquities of Egypt.On 16 February 1923, Carter opened the sealed doorway, and found that it did indeed lead to a burial chamber, and he got his first glimpse of the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun. All of these discoveries were eagerly covered by the world's press, but most of their representatives were kept in their hotels; only H. V. Morton was allowed on the scene, and his vivid descriptions helped to cement Carter's reputation with the British public.
Carter's own notes and photographic evidence, indicate that he, Lord Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn Herbert entered the burial chamber shortly after the tomb's discovery and before the official opening.
Death
The clearance of the tomb with its thousands of objects continued until 1932. Following his sensational discovery, Howard Carter retired from archaeology and became a part-time agent for collectors and museums, including the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. He visited the United States in 1924, and gave a series of illustrated lectures in New York City and other cities in the United States that were attended by very large and enthusiastic audiences, sparking Egyptomania in America.
He died of lymphoma in Kensington, London, on 2 March 1939 at the age of 64.The archaeologist's natural death so long after the opening of the tomb, despite being the leader of the expedition, is the piece of evidence most commonly put forward by sceptics to refute the idea of a "curse of the pharaohs" plaguing the party that might have "violated" Tutankhamun's tomb.
Carter is now buried in Putney Vale Cemetery in London.On his gravestone is written: "May your spirit live, May you spend millions of years, You who love Thebes, Sitting with your face to the north wind, Your eyes beholding happiness" and "O night, spread thy wings over me as the imperishable stars".
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