In the Valley of the Kings

by Daniel Meyerson

  “I am hard at work,” he wrote to Lady Tyssen-Amherst, “trying to get to the bottom of the tomb I found at Deir el-Bahri last year. I trust to manage it soon though under difficulties—the men have now got down 97 metres [320 feet] vertical drop and still no end, but cannot help but think the end will come soon; then there are chances of a good find, it being untouched….”

  “Consider the circumstances,” he noted in his journal, “a young excavator, all alone except for his workmen, on the threshold of a magnificent discovery.”

  To really understand what this moment meant—it was everything for him, the reason for his existence—it is necessary to keep in mind what had gone into its making: the years of preparation, the work carried out in difficult conditions, the sweltering heat in the south, the swarms of insects in the Delta, the lack of creature comforts, the living in tents and tombs when no other shelter was available.

  By day, the labor was backbreaking, painstaking, grueling: There was the endless digging and sifting, often yielding nothing but a handful of dust; the crawling and clambering through suffocating underground passages filled with thousands of bats, centuries of their waste creating a poisonous atmosphere; the unstable shale under the solid limestone threatening to collapse. Death or crippling accidents were an ever-present danger.

  The work continued by night, though it was of a different sort. After doctoring the men, settling disputes, photographing finds, carrying out whatever immediate preservation was required for the most fragile finds, and so forth—after the countless tasks for which the excavator was responsible, there was the bookkeeping. Long hours in his tent or tomb going over the figures and writing out records of expenses: workmen’s wages, daily expenses—outlays for equipment damaged, food for the pack animals, rewards to the workers for anything found (to prevent pilferage), and the like. On a large dig with hundreds of workmen, especially when payments were made not by time but by the area cleared or the levels dug, the accounting could become bewilderingly complicated.

  This was followed by more bookkeeping, equally tedious, though of an archaeological sort: the careful, almost obsessive noting of every detail of the day’s work. Everything must be recorded, nothing was too trivial. For what at the moment may seem insignificant could take on an unimagined importance later on. A decorative pattern painstakingly preserved—the rishi, or feather design, on a coffin’s decaying wood; or the position of thousands of beads on a piece of linen that had fallen apart at the touch. The shape of pottery shards tossed into a burial shaft. An ancient workman’s mark scratched on the wall of a tomb; or the kinds of animal bones left from a funeral meal.

  This done, there was study. Carter learned his history and his Arabic on the job and whatever hieroglyphs were essential (he would never be proficient in the ancient language, his focus being on the terrain, the wadis and cliffs and valleys). Cramming like a schoolboy for a test, he put in long hours to understand the southern valleys that had increasingly become the center of his interest, the Valley of the Kings and the areas immediately bordering it: the Valley of the Queens, the Valley of the Nobles, Dra Abu el-Naga, the Assasif, the Birabi, the Deir el-Bahri.

  Here in antiquity a fateful innovation took place. The massive stone pyramids of the Old Kingdom (2680-2180 BC) had proven no barrier to the grave robbers’ skill and were finally abandoned. In their stead, hidden underground tombs were created. By the time of the New Kingdom (1550 BC), these tombs were the rule. As Thutmosis I’s architect Ineni boasts on his funeral stela, “I planned the tomb of the pharaoh secretly, no one hearing, no one seeing.” For over five hundred years, the Valley was the scene of such secret royal burials. The hope was that pharaoh, suitably provided for in death, would join his fellow gods in eternity and see to the well-being of the land.

  Huge chambers were hewn underground or in the desert cliffs and filled with treasure: jewels and gold and silver in amounts almost beyond belief. Egypt’s vast wealth was poured into these tombs—and Egypt was a country where “gold is as plentiful as dust,” as the king of Mitanni (an ally) wrote to Pharaoh Amenhotep III in a “begging” letter preserved in the ancient archives.

  It was not only the monetary value of this treasure that kept Carter at work into the small hours of the night, but also its beauty. For the artistic impulse was very strong in Carter—he was alive to the marvels of ancient Egyptian art. From the very beginning of his career, his notebooks are filled with comments about form and color and design.

  This sensitivity extended to his natural surroundings as well, the desert landscape that he lovingly sketched and painted. In fact, it was this highly developed aesthetic sense that helped him to bear the solitude of the excavator’s life. For though Carter glossed over it quickly in his memoir—“a young excavator, all alone except for his workmen, on the threshold of a magnificent discovery”—this unrelieved solitude had led more than one excavator to quit because they found it unbearable.

  It was as much a spiritual solitude as a geographic one. An unbridgeable distance existed between the foreign archaeologists and the Egyptian fellahin, or native peasants, who worked for them. It was felt even by an excavator as close to his workers as Flinders Petrie, Carter’s most important mentor in Egypt. There are passages in Petrie’s memoirs where he admired the peasants’ exuberance and simplicity. He sympathized with their difficulties; he harshly criticized those archaeologists who dealt with them as if they were machines to sift and haul and dig; and he shocked his colleagues by having, in his words, “gone some way toward the fellahin” (that is, dispensed with formalities that most Europeans considered essential).

  In his description of Egypt at that time, Petrie described the alienation, even the menace, felt by excavators living in remote villages and at desert sites. “There is the lack of intercommunication, the suspicion of strangers; the absence of roads; and the mental state of the people…. The man who can read and write is the rare exception in the country…. There is gross superstition, innumerable local saints….

  “We [Europeans] cannot see the world as a fellah sees it; and I believe this the more readily because after living years among the fellahin … I yet feel the gulf between their nature and my own as impassable as ever….

  “In the villages, derwish parties are formed from a few men and boys, perhaps a dozen or twenty: they are almost always held in moonlight…. The people stand in a circle and begin repeating Alláh with a very strong accent on the latter syllable; bowing down the head and body at the former, and raising it at the latter. This is done all in unison, and slowly at first; gradually the rate quickens, the accent is stronger, and becomes more of an explosive howl, sounding afar off…. The excitement is wilder, hideously wild, until a horrid creeping comes over you as you listen and you feel that in such a state there is no answering for what may be done. Incipient madness of the intoxication of excitement seems poured out upon them all….

  “The children unintentionally reveal what is the tone and talk of the households in private; they constantly greet the European with wails of Ya Nusrani!, O Nazarene! The full force of which title is felt when your donkey boy urges on his beast by calling it, ‘Son of a dog! Son of a pig! Son of a Nazarene!’ Any abuse will do to howl at the infidel, and I have been for months shouted at across every field…. That a massacre of the Coptic [Egyptian] Christians was fully anticipated by them when Arabi drove out the foreigners [a failed revolt of 1882] should not be lightly forgotten.

  “This fanaticism is linked with an unreasoning ferocity of punishment. I have seen a coachman suddenly seize on a street boy and for some word or gesture lash him on the bare legs with the whip again and again with all his might….”

  The suppressed violence of desperate poverty and thwarted national hopes could be felt on every side. The archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson, a friend and admirer of Petrie’s, recalled a typical outbreak near an excavation (whose finds were eventually published as Tombs of the Courtiers and Oxyrhynkhos): “The season’s work coincide
d with a serious insurrection which caused anxiety in the camp, where the loyalty of our seventy to eighty workmen was uncertain. We could hear the rattle of the machine guns, 25 miles away, mounted on the roof of the American Mission Hospital in Assyiut defending itself (successfully) against a mob who had murdered three young British officers in a train and adorned the engine with their limbs. The mutiny was quelled, but not before Petrie had stocked the well-hidden hermitage [Christian, fifth century AD] with food and water, as a possible refuge.”

  This, then, was the atmosphere in which Carter had been living and working for a decade. Egypt was finally awakening politically. For more than two thousand years it had been, in the words of the Hebrew prophet, “a lowly kingdom” and “a broken reed”—a land dominated by foreigners. Its last native ruler, Nectanebo II, had fled to Nubia in 343 bc, where he spent his remaining years practicing magic and leaving Egypt to the conquerors who followed: Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Ummayads, Ayyubids, Fatimids, Mamluks, Ottomans, and finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, the hated British.

  One humiliation had followed another as Egypt descended into chaos and poverty. But now young Egyptians were determined to claim their birthright, and the situation was tense and explosive. Anything could trigger a furor.

  In the search for a national identity, Egypt’s pharaonic treasures became a central symbol. The time was over when Empress Eugénie of France could deck herself out in the jewels of an ancient Egyptian queen, or the American millionaire Theodore Davis could use the skull of a Ramesside prince as a paperweight. When the great nationalist leader Sa’ad Zaghlul died, the royal mummies lay in state with him in the huge mausoleum honoring his memory. How delicate was the position of the foreign archaeologists and their backers, the brash, treasure-seeking capitalists counting on a “fair division” of the fabulous spoils.

  Thus, Carter’s great discovery would become intertwined with national politics: In death, the boy-king Tutankhamun would find himself in the middle of a national upheaval, just as he had in life, when his name was changed from Tutankhaten and he was brought from his heretic father’s court to Wast (Thebes, modern-day Luxor) to symbolize the national revival.

  If, as Carter wrote in his journal, he was “standing on the edge of a magnificent discovery,” he was also standing at the edge of a precipice. The royal tomb belonged to Egyptians and to Egyptians alone, it would be claimed: Despite all their backbreaking labor and toil, the foreigners had no rights at all.

  Such thoughts, though, were far from Carter on that glorious day in 1901. Poised for victory, he stood next to the royal tomb he had discovered. A silence fell over the crowd as he and his foreman descended into the tomb.

  The two climbed down unaided into the rocky passage, but a kind of basket-cradle had been arranged for the descent of the consul and the other distinguished visitors. First, though, the burial chamber’s blocking had to be removed, and Carter had to enter and survey the find.

  “I had everything prepared,” he later remembered. “The long wished for moment had arrived. We were ready to penetrate the mystery behind the masonry. The foreman and I descended, and with his aid I removed the heavy limestone slabs, block by block. The door was at last open. It led directly into a small room which was partially filled with rock chips, just as the Egyptian masons had left it, but it was otherwise empty save for some pottery water jars and some pieces of wood. At first glance I felt that there must be another doorway leading to another chamber. But a cursory examination proved that there was nothing of the sort. I was filled with dismay.”

  As everyone waited above, he frantically searched the passage, looking for some indication of a hidden staircase or tunnel or shaft leading—he hardly knew where, since by all indications and signs, this should be the burial chamber. It had been carefully sealed, hidden hundreds of feet underground, protected with a twelve-foot-thick wall—but it was empty. His searching uncovered only a tiny miniature coffin secreted in a wall. Its inscription indicated the king for whom the tomb was dug: Mentuhotep I, one of the first kings of the Eleventh Dynasty, a pharaoh who reigned at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2010 BC).

  Perhaps the tomb had been dug in antiquity to throw would-be robbers off the scent. Perhaps the statue wrapped in linen represented some arcane ritual burial, a magical rite to ward off death. Perhaps building the huge mortuary temple at the foot of the cliffs (erected by this same king) caused him to change his plans and dig his tomb elsewhere in the cliffs. Or perhaps the tomb was abandoned for some other reason lost to history.

  Whatever the reason, Carter now had to climb into the brilliant sunlight to publicly acknowledge his defeat. Among the onlookers were those only too ready to laugh at the presumption of this outsider, for jealousy among excavators and scholars was as intense as among opera divas—or thieves.

  Covered with dust, he began to make his apologies, but quickly the compassionate and fatherly Maspero intervened. As Carter was to say of the moment: “I cannot now remember, all the kind and eloquent words that came from Maspero, but his kindness during this awful moment made one realize that he was really a worthy and true friend.”

  Maspero’s private feelings matched his public stance. He wrote in a private letter: “Carter had announced his discovery too soon to Lord Cromer. Lord Cromer came to be present at his success and he is now very saddened at not having been able to show him anything of what he foretold. I console him as best I can, for he truly is a good fellow and he does his duty very well.”

  Though Carter would later remember Maspero’s kindness with gratitude, at the moment he was shattered. Nothing could console him. He remained at the tomb until late at night, going over and over the underground rooms in his bewilderment.

  The echo of chatter and speculation faded as the intruders went their way. They left the place to the heartbroken excavator on the threshold of his magnificent discovery—and to its tutelary goddess, Meretsinger, She Who Loves Silence.

  Carter was inconsolable—but the irony was that he would also be inconsolable later, when he was finally granted his heart’s desire. For twenty years after this fiasco—two full decades later, in 1922—he would find his tomb. But then it would not come to him by beginner’s luck, the accident of a fallen horse, or by any other gambler’s sleight of hand. It would come through grueling work and suffering and faith: faith in the powers that he knew had been granted him, though the world looked at him askance.

  He would be the first to uncover a tomb that had been sealed for thousands of years. He would stand in the presence of a pharaoh lying in a solid gold coffin under a gold mask of incomparable beauty: Tutankhamun Nebkheperure—Lord of the Manifestation of the Sun, the Strong Bull, Victorious, Eternal.

  Here, in the small, dark rooms of this tomb, he would labor for ten long years, carefully bringing out thousands of precious objects, among them some of the most moving works of ancient Egyptian art. After which he would spend the rest of his life famous, wealthy—and embittered.

  He would never excavate again. A solitary figure, idle, angry, withdrawn, he would live out his last days on the terrace of Luxor’s Winter Palace. With a touch of madness? Or perhaps with truth? He would tell anyone who would listen that he knew where the much-sought-for tomb of Alexander the Great could be found. But, he would add with spite, he would take that secret with him to the grave: The world did not deserve to know it.

  Between the young boy sketching his smelly lapdogs and the raging old man was a lifetime spent in grueling, unsparing work. Yes, he would discover his tomb. But the gods would give him glory, not peace. He would fulfill the words of the New Kingdom tomb curse: “Let the one who enters here beware. His heart shall have no pleasure in life.”

  1* With the establishment of the Egyptian Antiquities Service in 1858, permission to excavate had to be sought from the Department of Antiquities. Such permission, called a concession, marked out the area to be explored and stipulated the terms under which the excavator could di
g and how he or she had to proceed in the event of a tomb being discovered. In 1902, the American banker Theodore Davis took on the concession to dig in the main Valley of the Kings, a concession he would not relinquish until shortly before World War I.

  PREVIOUS PAGE: Sir Flinders Petrie standing beside a table with some of his rare archaeological findings. © CORBIS

  1892

  Cairo: The Hotel Royale, where Carter, just off the

  boat from England, is introduced to Petrie

  THE FIRST TIME THE YOUNG CARTER MET HIM (IN A CAIRO HOTEL), Petrie was dressed in his “city” clothes: a worn but still passable suit. It was buttoned up, showing just a bit of the cravat, which was knotted anyhow beneath the high white collar in fashion then. He was unforgettable with his large, generous features; his full beard and shock of black hair brushed back over a high, swarthy brow; his enormous dark eyes set wide apart; his thick lips compressed in thought. His expression was very alert—his features were stamped with intellectual passion as surely as greed or lust can be read on other men’s faces.

  In all the photographs from this decade, Petrie seems always to be wearing this same suit! Somehow there is an incongruity about these respectable clothes of his, as if someone had dressed up an Old Testament prophet in a suit, cravat, and high collar. It is as if at any moment his large, athletic body will burst open the worn-out cloth, revealing his larger-than-life presence.

  It is more fitting for him to be naked, like some heroic figure sculpted by Michelangelo. When working inside one or another of the pyramids, at Giza or Hawara or Lisht, he would sometimes have to wade through half-flooded chambers (the water level having risen over the centuries). Or to crawl through lower passages where the heat was unbearable. At such times—for example, when measuring Khufu’s great pyramid at Giza, he would “emerge just before dawn, red eyed, oxygen deprived, smelling of bat dung”—and in his birthday suit.