In the Valley of the Kings Read Online Free PDF

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 coincided 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 determinedto 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 longwished 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