Carter, Howard | The Discovery of King Tut's Tomb

Carter, Howard

Autograph note, being the measurements for the four nested shrines enclosing Tutankhamun's sarcophagus. [n.d., but circa December 1923-February 1924, or later]

One page (205 x 123 mm), written in pencil, a few numbers erased or emended by hand, very lightly rumpled.  

The Discovery of King Tutankhamun's Tomb — "everywhere the glint of gold"

Beginning in the nineteenth century, Egypt held a special place in the Victorian imagination as a site of almost limitless discovery and wonderous decay (see lot 1024). The influence of "Egyptomania" can be seen in the poetic works of Shelley, or the photographs of Francis Frith, but nothing quite compared to the international frenzy the accompanied Howard Carter's 1922 discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the 18th Dynasty pharaoh who ruled from circa 1341-1323 BC. 

Carter was working under the auspices of his patron, the Earl of Carnarvon, who had secured the exclusive right to excavate in the Valley of the Kings from the Egyptian Antiquities Service in 1914. Following wartime delays, Carter's search began in earnest in 1917. After passing several seasons with minimal progress, Carter's team began the 1922 season with a exciting discovery: they uncovered an entrance staircase which led to a doorway bearing the seals of the royal necropolis. It marked the beginning of an immense undertaking — the clearance of the tomb, packing and removal of its contents to the Cairo Museum, took Carter and a staff of experts a full ten years to complete. 

Having worked their way through emptying and cataloging the antechamber in the first season, Carter and his team turned their attention to the Burial Chamber in the second season. As Carter chipped away at the stone and mortar that covered the doorway to to the inner chamber, he wrote that "The temptation to stop and peer inside at every moment was irresistible, and, when, after about ten minutes’ work, I had made a hole large enough to enable me to do so, I inserted an electric torch. An astonishing sight its light revealed, for there, within a yard of the entrance to the chamber, stood what to appearance was a solid wall of gold." (Treasures of Tutankhamun). Carter soon realized that he was looking at one side of a shrine that virtually filled the entire room, identified here as "First (Outermost) Shrine (No. 207) L. 520 W. 340 H.?"

The present note, which bears the diminishing length and width measurements of the four nested shrines covering Tutankhamun's sarcophagus, presumably dates from this second archeological season (1923-1924), when Carter and his team began dismantling the four nested shrines that held one of the world's great treasures — the pharaoh's coffin bearing his gold funerary mask. The omission of the height measurements is intriguing in that it indicates a lack of accessibility, perhaps dating this to the early period of the second season, before the shrines were dismantled completely. The note reads, in full:

"Base measurements of:—First (Outermost Shrine) (No. 207) L. 525 W. 340 H.; Second Shrine (No. 237), L. 382 W. 255 H.; Third Shrine (No. 238), L. 342 W. 209 H.; Fourth (Innermost) Shrine (No. 239) L. 292 W. 163 H.; Inside measurement L. 280 W. 151 See Sarcophagus; Sarcophagus 274 147.5= Max of cornice."

A record of of the greatest archeological discovery of the Twentieth Century

REFERENCE:

Treasures of Tutankhamun. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976, pp. 17-18; Who Was Who in Egyptology, p. 90  

PROVENANCE:

The Family of Howard Carter (RR Auction, September 2015, lot 8069)