In the Valley of the Kings

by Daniel Meyerson

  Carter’s private explorations began here; he wandered in the desert every chance he got, every moment his duties left him a free hour. Over the years, his map became covered with hatched areas that he’d ruled out and circled, possibilities that became fewer and fewer. Nothing was overlooked. A coin minted by Ptolemy III, dropped in antiquity and still lying near a lonely desert path. A drawing at the base of a cliff: a man with his arms raised—an ancient “marker” for a tomb somewhere above? the rough beginnings of a tomb begun and then abandoned—perhaps the unstable shale caused the diggers to move nearby?

  He wrote in his journal: “I have marked HC and the date so that any future investigator will know that some attempt has been made to note or copy these tombs, or the places that might contain tombs.” Which was exactly what happened some eighty years later: “I saw a shiny vertical line at the precise spot on the wall I was seeking,” recalled archaeologist John Romer. “Next to that pencil mark were the initials ‘H.C.’ and the date. Few tombs escaped his attention. It was not surprising that Carter had been there before me.”

  But there was no time for such exploration when Carter first showed up at the beginning of 1894. He had been sent here not to look for tombs, but to copy the friezes that covered Hatshepsut’s temple—together with the long inscriptions found everywhere, behind doors and across walls and high up along the architraves. This part of the job was perhaps the most difficult. His copies of the rows upon rows of hieroglyphs must be exact if scholars were to rely on them. James Breasted, whose life was spent in such work, forever after suffered blind spells on account of it.

  Sitting high up on wooden rigging built by the temple sides, Carter squinted through glaring sun reflecting on white stone, day after day. There were thousands of hieroglyphic images to be recorded, sometimes in their ancient colors, which still remained. After which his copies had to be verified by colleagues or sometimes by Naville himself, who was greatly interested in this aspect of the work.

  Because if Naville was a “slovenly” excavator (as Petrie called him), he was meticulous when it came to his scholarship. An expert linguist, he impressed upon Carter that nothing must be left out—a few small strokes could alter a phrase’s meaning; a tiny horned serpent or loaf of bread could shift a grammatical mood or indicate gender.

  Before this phase of the work began, though, two years went by. The temple Carter saw when he arrived was half-sunk beneath sixty tons of debris. Its blocks were scattered, its chapels were filled with sand, and its rows of Osiride pillars had cracked and fallen. The heavy work of clearing and reconstruction must be carried out before Carter could take up brush and pen.

  It was an enormous job—which was why the fellahin had been flocking here, thinking many laborers would be needed. They had not counted on a new invention, though, which reduced the number of men who would be employed—the Decauville (or movable) railroad tracks with open wagons to cart away spoil, railroad ties that could be easily laid down and then quickly taken up again to be replaced in a different direction.

  As Carter appeared, riding along the sphinx-lined temple approach, his way was blocked by the crowd of men who had encamped on the dromos. More than a thousand had shown up so far, though there was work for only a hundred. Their shouts echoed in the silent desert as excavation guards tried to send them away, but there was nowhere for them to go. They had shown up here, and here they would remain, their numbers increasing by the day.

  For Carter, they were part of the scene, like the cliffs and the ruined temple rising above them. The shouting and shoving, the building violence, didn’t intimidate him, now or later, when the inevitable riots broke out. He took the situation as he found it. “He is absolutely fearless …,” Emma Andrews wrote in her diary, “carries no arms and rides about quite unattended all hours of the night.”

  Naville, however, did not have such fortitude. He had asked for soldiers to supplement the usual excavation guards, and he walked through two rows of them as he appeared from his large, luxurious tent to greet his new assistant. A dignified, white-haired man whose perpetually half-closed eyes gave him a supercilious expression, Naville was as different from Petrie as it was possible to be: in his philosophy, in his archaeological interests, in his lifestyle, and in his appearance.

  Whereas Petrie was ragged, Naville was dressed impeccably in a dark suit and clerical collar (he was a pastor as well as a scholar). While Petrie’s ideas tumbled forth in an almost incomprehensible torrent, Naville spoke in a slow, soft drawl. And if Petrie scampered over excavation mounds like a sure-footed goat, Naville laboriously climbed the terraced temple on Carter’s arm, pausing to take snuff.

  He pointed out to Carter what must be done. A late Coptic monastery (fourth century AD) had been built at the end of one of the terraces. The monks had quarried many of its stones from the ancient temple, and the monastery had to be demolished and the stones put back. Retaining walls must be strengthened, chapels must be cleared, and large slabs of frieze must be fitted together.

  Some of these, sections from the “Expedition to Punt [Somalia]” series, were already in place. In one, the queen of Punt was depicted, a squat, “steatopygous” figure, to describe her “archaeologically” (that is, Her Majesty had an enormous behind). In the frieze, she stood next to the sweet-smelling myrrh trees she had sent as a gift to Egypt. Just below, in front of the first terrace, the stone-lined pits could still be seen where they were planted thirty-five hundred years before (during his work here, Carter would find some more pieces of the Punt frieze—scenes from the African marshes).

  Taking his new assistant through a recently cleared corridor, Naville showed him the secret places where Hatshepsut allowed her architect—and lover—Senenmut to inscribe his name (on the backs of doors opening inward, where it would never be seen). For the queen had showered Senenmut with honors, even granting him a tomb in the Valley. (In the end, though, she denied him the last gift: “eternity.” His name was scratched out everywhere in the tomb, while her name remained; he was not someone with whom she chose to spend eternity. After all, she was a queen, while what was he? A commoner—a one-lifetime stand.)

  High up on the surrounding cliffs, however, some naughty ancient artist had drawn them naked and making love—a find Naville most emphatically did not take Carter to see.

  It was one of the ironies of this first meeting that as the two men walked through the ruins, Petrie was telegraphing the Egyptian Exploration Fund, trying to prevent Naville from being given the site. Much would be lost, Petrie warned, it was nothing less than a crime to put the temple in the hands of such a man.

  But Naville had an established international reputation. He had had long experience in Egypt and influence both in Cairo and in Europe. Taking the temple away from him would cause a major rift, the fund’s directors knew. Not to mention the loss of financial support—for Naville had written extensively on biblical aspects of Egyptian finds, and such a tie-in was a major draw (an economic fact of life, pure and simple, of turn-of-the-century archaeology).

  Caught between the two, Carter was able to divide his loyalty without loss of principle. Though Petrie-trained, he realized there was much he could learn from Naville as well—if not about excavation, then about architectural reconstruction and the linguistic aspects of the inscriptions he was copying. Moreover, once Naville came to trust his assistant, he left Carter in charge for long periods of time and decamped to Cairo, where he spent his time in the khedival library.

  For Naville was addicted to his studies, though his writing would lead one to believe the opposite. “I believe that henceforth it is in the soil, in the excavations, that we shall find the solution of important questions which criticism has hitherto sought too exclusively in philological study,” he wrote (in The Discovery of the Book of the Law Under King Josiah: An Egyptian Interpretation of the Biblical Account, one of many such studies he produced). But even when he was out of his library and near the soil, he did not, like Petrie, get his hands dirty
.

  As Amelia Edwards ironically wrote to Petrie: “I regret to tell you that though you have been excavating for years, you do not yet know the correct manner. It takes five to do digging in the true (high and mighty) style. At Bubastis, there was Mr. Naville to preside (in his tent, bien entendu) where he probably spent his days in writing to Madame and the children; there was Mr. Macgregor to take photographs; Mr. Goddard to spend American dollars and curl his hair and mustachios; Mr. Griffith to rescue a few small objects and Count D’Hulst to talk Arabic and pay the men.”

  But if Naville proceeded at a more leisurely pace than Petrie, and in greater comfort, the Decauville railroad wagons kept running, and the mountains of spoil were removed from Hatshepsut’s temple day by day—riots or no riots. Over the months and then the years, as Naville came to respect Carter’s artwork and reconstruction skills, more and more responsibility was shifted to his shoulders.

  “It is certainly quite remarkable how well that difficult work of rebuilding is done by Mr Carter,” Naville reported to the Egyptian Exploration Fund. “The whole of the execution … has been done admirably. He has a very quick eye for finding the places where the stones belong; besides, as he has a thorough command of Arabic, he can direct and superintend the men, or rather teach them what they are to do.”

  “I have been able to judge what Mr. Carter can do,” he wrote to a colleague once the clearance had proceeded far enough for the copying to begin. “He certainly has much talent. His drawings are very good, and in this respect I do not think we could have a better artist. His copies when reproduced in colour or in black will make very fine plates….” Which they did. When it was published, Carter’s many-volumed record of Hatshepsut’s temple set a new standard for archaeological art. It was one of his most significant accomplishments in Egypt.

  But Carter wanted more—he wanted to excavate. “Due possibly to Petrie’s training, [that] was my great desire,” he would say later, understating the matter. For it was not simply Petrie’s training that spurred him on—he had caught Petrie’s digging fever. The beauty of Hatshepsut’s temple, the surroundings at Deir el-Bahri, left their impression. He never forgot “the temple setting … the delicate sculptured reliefs upon its walls. In those six years,” he wrote, “I learnt more of Egyptian art, its serene simplicity, than at any other time or place.” But he was haunted by the excitement of excavation.

  AS 1900 APPROACHED, THE TURN OF THE CENTURY BROUGHT Carter a great surprise. The excellence of his work for the last five years had been noted by Gaston Maspero, director of the Service des Antiquités. He was requested to join the department as chief inspector for the south, a vast area including the Sudan (then an Egyptian province). Though his duties included all kinds of official obligations and administrative work (which Carter took very seriously), and though there was much work to be done in the many temples included in his new domain (especially in the Ramesseum and at Abu Simbel and Edfu, where the ancient structures needed shoring up), at last he was able to concentrate on “his” tombs.

  For the next four years, from 1900 on, he spent more time underground than in the light of day, working on a long list of tombs, both royal (Seti II; Amenhotep II; Ramesses I, III, VI, and IX) and nonroyal (Maihipri, warrior companion of Amenhotep II; Hatshepsut’s wet nurse; Sennefer, mayor of Thebes—among others).

  Though these tombs were already “opened,” some recently, some since antiquity, the work of thoroughly exploring them demanded everything Carter had—stamina, patience, skill. He would file many reports about the southern temples, but it was in the tombs that he really came alive.

  Each one had its unique challenge, some requiring a more delicate hand—the murals, reliefs, and fine architectural details were, after all, more than three and a half millennia old. Others called for the sheer strength of will to keep slugging away—tomb KV #20, unidentified when Carter first tackled it, showed him at his best: a fighter “with heart.”

  “The tomb proved to be 700 feet long …,” he remembered. “With the exception of the first portion cleared by former explorers [Denon, 1799; Belzoni, 1823; Lepsius, 1845] almost the entire length was filled to the roof with rubble, most of which had been carried in by water from spates of past centuries.

  “The filling was cemented into a hard mass by the action of water. To excavate, it needed heavy pickaxes, and the whole of this rubble had to be carried to the mouth of the tomb by a continuous chain of men…. Half way down its corridor the white limestone stratum came to an end, and a stratum of brown shaly [shalelike] rock of uneven fragile nature commenced. It was here when our difficulties began, for the latter stratum of rocks was so bad there was a serious danger of its falling in upon us.

  “To add to our troubles the air was also very bad [from centuries’ accumulation of bat dung and the like]; candles would not give sufficient light to enable the men to see to work….”

  Undeterred, Carter set up an air pump and ran an electric line down to replace the candles that kept flickering out. Sometimes they passed over rubble that had reached up to two feet of the ceiling—crawling on their stomachs as bats fluttered by or the sudden screeching of an eagle-owl they had disturbed shocked them into a moment’s pause.

  They descended to the lowest depths, reaching the entrance of the burial chamber. Here they discovered that the ceiling had collapsed, filling the room with fallen rock. Digging their way in foot by foot, there, finally, was the prize: A huge stone sarcophagus carved and covered with spells was revealed; one at first, and then a second sarcophagus, both royal, both empty, though inscribed with their owners’ names: Hatshepsut and her father, Thutmosis I.

  Carter emerged covered with sweat, black dust darkening his face and hands, sick from bad air—and jubilant. For the real prize was the knowledge. The royal names that allowed him to scratch two more rulers off his list. Each such find took him a step closer to Tut, over whose tomb he unknowingly walked almost every day as he performed his duties, sometimes extraordinary, more often routine.

  A sample, from the Egyptian Exploration Fund archaeological reports:

  Report, 1901: “Ramesseum. Northeast Wall of 2nd Temple Court, West face of which bears support about to fall.”

  Report, 1902: “Tomb #42 Fine yellow mud, now dry, carried in by flood.”

  Report 1902-1903: “Kom Ombo Temple. Repairs to the end enclosure wall in progress.

  “The tomb of Merneptah has been completely excavated.

  “Sheik Abd el Qurneh. Mr. Robert Mond [industrial chemist; amateur Egyptologist; patron] has cleared twelve tombs already known.

  “Quft. A naos [shrine] of Nectanebo [last native pharaoh] has been obtained from sebakh-digging [peasants searching for fertilizer].”

  Report, 1903: “Tomb #60. Found: Hairpins. Fragment of alabaster vase. Late, intrusive burial: 4 rough wooden coffins, Christian Coptic; skeleton of a child.”

  Carter lived alone in a house at the edge of the desert. His pets kept him company; his donkey, San Toy, was so attached to him that startled visitors reported he pushed open the door and came searching through the rooms, braying, until he had found Carter. He had two gazelles, tame enough to eat from his hand. He had a pigeon house and got to know them so well that he recognized the individual sound of their cooing. On a photo he sent to his mother, he noted at the bottom that “the pigeon on the right … has a mournful note different from ordinary pigeons.”

  But the gazelles sickened mysteriously, and Carter buried them under the acacia trees just outside his window. A cobra—which he shot—bit his donkey, and he was left alone with his mournful pigeon and his conjectures.

  Sometimes he ferried across the river to Luxor. During the fierce summer heat the town was deserted by Europeans, but that did not disturb Carter, who in any case was a habitué of the Egyptian cafés (his status-conscious colleagues would never allow themselves to be seen in such places). In the summer, the pace of life slowed, especially when the Nile rose and the ancient rhythm of life asserted it
self. The high dam at Aswan did not yet exist to check the flood. The waters turned the low-lying desert basins into huge lakes and half covered the temples.

  Lying in a small boat, covered up with straw, Carter floated over the desert; he watched and sometimes sketched the great flocks of birds brought here by the inundation. Thousands of pelicans swooped down to fish among the ancient pillars, while jackals and hyenas roamed at the water’s edge.

  But even during inundation, thieves, dealers, and vandals continued their work. It was Carter’s duty to be vigilant, and he was vigilant, whatever the season. The hapless thieves he caught were locked up inside rooms of the Karnak temple, where wine and incense were once stored.

  If he was sometimes too zealous, that was his nature. An astonished colleague (Arthur Mace) found him hiding behind a temple portico like a jealous lover, watching and ready to pounce. A little girl had arranged the pieces of a broken jug in front of her. As visitors to the temple approached, she began to cry over her “misfortune.” But before they could toss her some coins, Carter jumped out to foil the ploy. Another colleague (Arthur Weigall) told of him chasing a man who had been begging in the ruins. Carter jumped his horse first over a canal and then over a garden hedge in hot pursuit.

  But though he could be “rabid,” his workmen liked and respected him, even those he had treated harshly. James Breasted recounted that when Carter lost his post, “the reis [chief] of the guards whom Carter had dismissed took him into his house, fed him, gave him money, tided him over until he had painted some pictures to sell….”