The tomb of Tutankhamun, which is today designated as KV 62, was number 4.33 in Howard Carter's sequence of discoveries since 1915. It did not take Lord Carnarvon
and Carter long to appreciate the enormity of the discovery and its
implications. While Arthur Callender, a close friend of Carter, had been
helping him, more assistance in clearing the tomb would certainly be
needed.
When, soon after the discovery, Albert Lythgoe, then Curator of
the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian Department, cabled his
congratulations and offered help, Carter took him at his word,
responding: "Thanks message [of congratulations]. Discovery colossal and need
every assistance. Could you consider load of Burton in recording in time
being? Costs to us. Immediately reply would oblige. Every regard,
Carter, Continental, Cairo."
Close ties had already existed between Carter,
Carnarvon and the Metropolitan Museum, and so Carter was granted his
request. In due course, the Metropolitan Museum's generosity would be
rewarded when Carter helped them acquire the Carnarvon collection.
However, within a matter of days, Carter received other offers of help. On December 9th Alfred Lucas,
a chemist with the Egyptian Government, came forward. With him aboard,
the clearance of Tutankhamun's tomb seems to have been the first ever
archaeological expedition to have its own resident chemist.
Then on December 12th Arthur Mace,
an Egyptologist with the Metropolitan Expedition, was also put at
Carter's disposal. Six days later, James Breasted, Director of the
Oriental Institute in Chicago arrived to begin work on the seal
impressions which covered the plastered blockings. The Metropolitan team
also provided him with Hauser and Hall, two architects who began work
on drawing a plan of the objects in situ. Then, on January 3rd, Alan
Gardiner, a British philologist, arrived to start work on the
inscriptions.
Others would eventually join the team, including Percy Newberry, another of Carter's
old friends. It became a showpiece of academic cooperation that would
in time also draw in Douglas Derry of the Cairo Anatomy School, and
Seleh Bey Hamdi of Alexandria to conduct the postmortem examination of the mummy, Battiscombe Gunn to work on the ostraca
for the final publication, L. A. Boodle, a botanist from Kew Gardens,
James R. Ogden, a Harrogate jeweler to report on aspects of the gold
work, Alexander Scott and H. J. Plenderleith of the British Museum for
analytical assistance, G. F. Hulme of the Geological Survey of Egypt,
and others.
Part of the reason that there was so much politics surrounding the discovery and excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun was that Howard Carter
was a very advanced excavator for his time. It is said that anyone else
would have had the tomb cleared and the objects it contained on display
within a month of the tomb's discovery, but it took Carter almost a
decade to carefully preserve and remove the treasures to Cairo.
The difference shows the caution with which Carter approached this
undertaking, which more resembles the efforts of modern excavators.
Of course, most of the political challenges came in the first two
seasons of work, creating distractions and difficulties, but afterwards,
Carter
and his team settled into a thorough and methodical routine,
maintaining complete records for each discovery and working to preserve
each antiquity as they were brought out of the tomb. The excavation used
the tomb of Ramesses XI (KV4) as a storeroom for supplies and for minor finds from the stairwell and corridor, and later the tomb of Seti II (KV15) was turned into a secure field conservation laboratory and photographic studio. Also, KV55, just across the path from the Tut's tomb, was made into a darkroom for Harry Burton.
Howard Carter
established a routine for processing what must have seemed like an
endless flow of treasures from the tomb. Each object or group of objects
was given a reference number. The main reference numbers ranged from 1
to 620, though there were subdivisions for objects within a numbered
group denoted by the use of single or multiple letters (a, b, c, etc).
Additional subdivisions were noted by bracketed Arabic numerals. Group
no. 620 is anomalous in that it was given subdivisions numbered from 1
to 123. (i.e. 620:1 to 620:123).
After objects in the tomb were provided with reference numbers,
photographs were taken of the items in situ with and without the
reference number cards. The camera was repositioned several times in
order to show every object at least once in one of the shots. A brief
description was also provided, as well as a sketch if appropriate, on a
numbered record card (by Carter
or Mace), and the place of the objects discovery was located on a
ground plan of the tomb (prepared by Hall and Hauser).
Afterwards, the
piece was removed to the laboratory for treatment by Lucas and Mace,
where more photographs were made. After the conservation of the object
was completed, a further photograph was made. This routine was carried
out for many thousands of objects, over several seasons, sometimes in
sweltering heat, and under pressure from the press, who were soon
complaining about the excessive time the clearance was taking. There was
also a constant flow of visitors to the tomb, including some 12,000 at
the height of the King Tut hysteria between January 1 and March 15th,
1926.
Clearance of the Antechamber was begun on December 27th 1922. It took
seven weeks to finish, and used up more than a mile of cotton wadding
and 32 bales of calico to secure the objects. Afterwards, and at the end
of each successive season, the objects were crated up with extreme care
using hundreds of feet of timber, and transported to the Nile river
using the human powered Decauville (narrow gauge) railway.
Though only a
relatively short distance, the train track was not permanent and Carter
was given only a meager number of rail-lengths that had to be
constantly "leapfrogged", so it took some 15 hours to move the train to
the river during the heat of the summer months. Only the gold coffin and mask were not transported by river. They
were conveyed by a train in a special "Service Car" with an armed guard
from the Egyptian army.
At the end of each season, for security against
not only theft but also floods, the tomb entrance was covered over with a
watertight wooden blocking erected over a wooden portcullis, and
guarded by a local policeman. Carter
would later tell us that: "It had been our privilege to find the most
important collection of Egyptian antiquities that had ever seen the
light, and it was for us to show that we were worthy of the trust."