Am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. Okay, let's vango. Hello, is anyone home? Hello, and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. My name is Lindsay, and I am your host for what is becoming Let's All Just Face the Music, a monthly podcast about art history. Like I always say two to three weeks, and it is never two to three weeks. But I'm trying my best. So. As you might have noticed from the title of the episode, this is part one, which naturally suggests the existence of a part two. Congratulations. You're a genius. I originally intended for this to be the sort of usual standalone episode, but that would have been way too long. And my podcasting stamina just isn't there yet. Besides, for the last episode, the episode on the Shroud of Turin, I smashed a lot of stuff into 45 minutes, and it felt rushed. Because it was rushed, and I just don't want to do that again. So you get two episodes on one topic. I will, however, be posting the episodes together. So if you are a binge listener and I salute you, you can listen to them both one right after the other. Or if you want to take a break, you can do that too. I'm not telling anyone what to do. All I'm saying is you got options. For these two episodes, I will be indulging my long-standing obsession with Egyptology. Yes, Egyptology, the study of ancient Egypt. I have been obsessed with all things ancient Egypt since I was a child. And I think that's pretty normal. Kids love mummies and gold and adventure because of course they do. It's amazing. But the thing with me was that I never quite grew out of that. In fact, I harbored the very real ambition to become an Egyptologist until I was in my teens, when I realized just how hard it is to become an Egyptologist and, you know, have a job and health insurance. And this should give you, you know, some insight into my line of thinking, which was that when I went to college, I decided that Italian studies and art history were a more rational career choice. Looking back now, I think that's what you call a lateral move. But even then, I've always stayed true to my love of Egyptology. When I studied abroad my senior year of college, oh my god, I forgot about this. When I studied abroad my senior year of college, I noticed that the university had an Egyptology department and thought, why yes, it is a fantastic idea for me to take Egyptology in Italian with a bunch of people who were training to be archaeologists. Like to me, that sounded like a great idea. Spoiler, it was not. When I decided to tackle an ancient Egyptian topic, only one really came to mind that combined things and stuff and stories oh so well. And that, my friends, is the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, more commonly and affectionately known as King Tut. Part one, this episode, will cover the events leading up to the discovery of the tomb, including some background on King Tut and ancient Egyptian burial practices. Part two will then commence with the discovery of the tomb and its contents. You're in for a rip roarin' good time. Most of us think that we know the story of the discovery of King Tut's tomb. But do we? I can't speak for you, I wouldn't dare. But I was wildly entertained by the research I did for this episode, and I was really surprised by many aspects of the story, which I thought I knew. But oh, I did not know. So grab a snack and something to drink, like, you know, a bottle of wine, and settle in. I am about to tell you the story of King Tut, Howard Carter, and the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century. Ba-ba-ba. Foist things, Foist? Who is Tutankhamun? Other than a guy with a really great name. I always like that he's called King Tut, but like technically shouldn't it be King Tut? Tutankhamun was a pharaoh, an Egyptian king, who lived during the 18th dynasty in ancient Egypt. Historians divide ancient Egyptian history into 30 dynasties over the course of 3,000 years. They do this because rule of ancient Egypt was intended to be hereditary, so the role of king slash pharaoh would pass down from father to son, though there were a couple of women in there, but not that many. Because we still share one tradition with ancient Egypt, the patriarchy. But this is neither the time nor the place for a feminist rant. Moving on. Obviously, there are always exceptions and complications, but the general idea is that one family would rule ancient Egypt, passing the throne down from father to son until the line ran out or someone usurped the throne and started a new dynasty. King Tut lived during the 18th dynasty, which was around 1350 before Common Era, 3,300 years ago. Despite the hullabaloo surrounding the discovery of his tomb, the fact of the matter remains that King Tut was not a particularly important pharaoh. In fact, Howard Carter, the man who discovered King Tut's tomb, would go on to say that the pharaoh's greatest accomplishment in life was dying and being buried. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what you would call a burn. But you know what? He's not wrong. King Tut was the son of King Akhenaten, the so-called heretic pharaoh. And that's because Akhenaten went a little, you know, cuckoo for Coco Puffs, and decided that rather than worship many gods, as the Egyptians had for centuries, that Akhenaten was going to start worshiping the one true god, the sun god Aten, and he was going to make everyone else do the same. Akhenaten was also responsible for moving the capital from Thebes, which is modern-day Lepsor, 250 miles north to El Amarna, which is about halfway between Thebes and Cairo. So not only does Akhenaten rob the ancient Egyptians of practicing their religion of polytheism, the worship of many gods, but he also makes them move, which, like, bleh, who wants to do that? Needless to say, it was a pretty big relief when our dude Akhenaten, Achin, ate it, leaving the throne open for King Tut, who was all of nine years old. Tut becomes the youngest pharaoh in Egyptian history, which is not necessarily a great superlative to aim for. Obviously, no one is going to let a nine-year-old run this empire, at least not alone, which I personally think was a very smart move. There are people who are ruling on his behalf, at least during the earlier part of his reign when he was still a child. One of those people guiding this young boy king was a military general by the name Horemheb, who would later become Pharaoh himself. And let's face it, is basically running the country for Tut along with a couple of other people. The greatest achievements of Tut's reign were the fixing of the problems caused by his father. Under Tut's reign, people were allowed to go back to worshipping all of their gods, and the capital was moved back to Thebes. King Tut was obviously young when he took the throne, he was nine years old, but even when he got slightly older, around you know 14 when he would have been considered a man by ancient Egyptian standards, he was not a healthy person, and it ain't hard to tell why, as Tut was the result of generations of royal inbreeding. As most of you know, we do have King Tut's mummy, but that can only tell us so much about his life and death. It has been made clear though that Tut had some kind of disability that made it difficult for him to walk, like a clubfoot, and that wasn't the only thing he suffered from. Other ailments might have included a cleft palate, a mild form of scoliosis, and a touch of malaria. While a little DNA variety would have done Tut's potential children real good, he married his sister, with whom he may have had two stillborn children. But as far as we know, Tut didn't have any surviving heirs. I assume that that wasn't for lack of trying, which is gross considering the whole wife-sister thing. Instead, Tut probably didn't have a family because there wasn't time. He was only 18 or 19 when he died, and he left the throne open for the taking. One of the greatest mysteries of Tut's life was, ironically, how he died. Now I vividly remember having a debate in the sixth grade about whether or not Tut was murdered and who done it. Looking back, that was a little bit macabre for a bunch of 12-year-olds, but hot damn, I enjoyed it immensely. King Tut's death is still very much a mystery. There have been CT scans done and x-rays on the mummy, but even those can only suggest a cause of death. What's more, it seems like every time there's a round of new testing, there are different theories that come out. So for example, for a long time there was this narrative that Tut might have died as the result of a chariot crash, but when you think about that logically, Tut had a disability that required him to walk with a cane. With that disability, he wouldn't even have been able to drive a chariot, which involved standing up and holding on to at least one horse. Like, that just isn't happening. The scientists who performed the CT scan on Tut's mommy in 2005 concluded that Tut probably died of complications due to a broken leg. Tough break, am I right? But at least he wasn't murdered, which my 12-year-old self was very much led to believe. Once Tut dies, R.I.P. Tut, except not really, this episode is all about the discovery of his tomb. But when he dies, his body and tomb must be prepared according to ancient Egyptian burial practices. Today we associate ancient Egyptians with tombs and mummies and death, which is natural because much of what we know from their life and culture comes from the discovery of tombs, such as King Tuts. To me though, the ancient Egyptians weren't so much obsessed with death as they were with life. Everything they did was an attempt to ensure that the soul would live on in the afterlife. And these people did it up, especially when a pharaoh was concerned. Ancient Egyptian burial practices revolved around the concept of the soul and its ability to exist comfortably and forever in the afterlife. For ancient Egyptians, the soul was literally multifaceted, with each part playing a different but essential function. I won't go into all of the different parts and their functions here, but I'll rather employ a pretty clunky metaphor, which is to consider the soul as a system of parts all working together. If you disrupt one part of that system, it all goes down. This concept of the soul was key to the Egyptian burial practices. Virtually everything that they did concerning the burial was done with the aim of preserving the soul and ensuring it had an enjoyable afterlife in eternity. Now we all know about ancient Egyptian mummies, how the ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to ensure that the body remained intact for centuries and millennia after death. Then there were all the things that accompanied the mummy into the tomb. You know the phrase, you can't take it with you? Well, the ancient Egyptians firmly believed that you could. Everything that was put in a pharaoh's tomb was not merely an offering, but an assurance that the soul would have everything it needed in the afterlife. Jewelry? Sure. Daybeds? Heck yeah. Entire boats? Definitely. Food? Hell yeah. More is more is more is more. The more stuff that is put in the tomb, the better equipped the soul is to have a happy and healthy and comfortable and well-fed eternity in the afterlife. Boom. You now have a certificate in Lindsay's crash course in ancient Egyptian burial practices. It's about the body, it's about the soul, and it's about the stuff. Speaking of stuff, as I'm sure you can imagine, the tombs of the pharaohs were packed with super, super nice stuff. And super nice stuff attracts robbers. By the time that Egyptology became a science in, you know, the 19th century, give or take, many of the royal tombs and non-royal tombs had been raided over the years by tomb robbers. And that was especially true of sites that had more than one royal burial, such as the Valley of the Kings in Thebes, which is where much of our story going forward plays out. The Valley of the Kings is so named because it is a valley where a bunch of kings were buried. Simple to the point. I like it. There have been around 80 tombs discovered in the valley, most of which have multiple, if not dozens, of rooms. So you can imagine that this limestone valley is just a web of chambers that were intended for the dead. And it seems like it'd be a pretty good place to go and, you know, be dead for all of eternity. It's got this kind of bleak beauty to it that I would imagine feels quite isolating when you stand at the bottom, gazing up at the limestone cliffs. The perfect place to sleep for thousands of years in your golden coffin. Sure, why not? The thing is, when you bury Pharaoh after Pharaoh after Pharaoh in the same location, all of the thieves know where to go to find their tombs. By the time archaeologists started on this site in the 19th century, most of the tombs were empty or trashed by tomb raiders centuries, if not millennia ago. And that was particularly wrenching for archaeologists who were uncovering tombs that had been buried over the centuries, thinking they'd found something wonderful, and they'd open the door to find nothing. Or maybe worse, a desecrated mummy broken on the floor, the body picked over for the amulets that embalmers would tuck into the linens. Tomb robbing really was a nasty business and is a nasty business, but it was a lucrative one that kept people coming back to this place to plunder the treasures of the dead. By the time the 1900s rolled around, archaeologists were almost certain that the Valley of the Kings had nothing left to give. But at least two people believed that there was one more tomb left to find, one that they hoped had escaped robbers, treasure hunters, and archaeologists alike. And if it had, that meant that it still contained its secrets. All of us, I would think, grew up knowing the story of the discovery of King Tut's tomb. It's a classic story, complete with adventure and mystery, and even maybe the curse of the mummy. But the accounts of the discovery that you hear often go straight to the moment that the tomb is discovered. You don't get the background story. In reality, the discovery of the tomb was a long and arduous process that lasted for years. It was also a process beset by the challenges of its time, including a world war, the breakdown of colonialism, the rise of nationalism, all of which affected the story as it played out and how it was consumed when the news hit the world. The rest of this episode will cover all of those things that you rarely hear about, but that made the discovery of King Tut's tomb all the more incredible. The discovery of King Tut's tomb obviously starts with King Tut himself back in the 18th dynasty, but we've already talked a little bit about him already. So let's move on to the other players in this story. First up is a man named Howard Carter. The name Howard Carter is synonymous with Egyptology, and for a good reason. Howard Carter found the tomb of Tun Common. Duh! Howard Carter was born in 1874 to a working middle class family. His dad was actually a painter who taught Carter the skills that would earn him a ticket to Egypt at the age of 17, when Carter went to go assist on a British-funded dig in central Egypt, where he was tasked with sketching objects and copying inscriptions from temples and sculptures. Over the course of his late teens and early 20s, Carter went on to work on the digs of some of the most significant Egyptologists of his day, learning from them but also teaching himself until he was just as talented as the rest of them. I don't know why, but I always assumed that Howard Carter had like the best Egyptology training, that he went to Oxford or Cambridge. But no, he was completely self-taught. His expertise in Egyptology eventually got him a job in the Egyptian Antiquities Service, a government-run institution aimed at protecting and preserving the cultural heritage of Egypt. Unfortunately for Carter, he ended up resigning from that very nice job after he got into a literal fist fight with some rich French tourists who complained about it. Carter's boss told him to apologize. Carter refused and quit. Carter was a bit of a difficult personality. He had a legendary temper, as we will see, and he was a bit of a social outcast, partly because he was kind of a butthead, but also because he wasn't from a high-class family. He was working class, and that caused him a lot of agita. After all, the British social system was very much built on class, and Carter, even after the discovery of King Tut's tomb, would never be accepted into British high society. But being from a working class background, Carter knew how to use the talent that he had to earn a buck when he needed it. After resigning slash kind of being fired from his job with the Egyptian Antiquity Service, Carter paid the bills by being a painter and dealing in antiquities. But that was all about to change. In 1907, a man named get ready for this one. George Edward Stanhope Mulliner, Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon. That's George Edward Stanhope Mullina. Don't think I'm saying that one right. Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, came into the picture. From here on out, I will be calling him Lord Carnarvon, though I do love that his childhood nickname was Porchy, short for the Lord of Porchester, which was his title as a child. Lord Carnarvon was an English aristocrat who, from everything I've read, was the polar opposite of Carter. He was outgoing and jolly and deceptively smart. That's a backhanded compliment, if I've ever heard one. Lord Carnarvon became interested in Egyptology in 1903 when he was in his mid-30s. He had gone to Egypt for his health, as the desert air was said to be good for an ailing body. Even though he was only in his 30s, Carnarvon was recovering from a car crash from which he would never quite fully heal. While he was in Egypt, Carnarvon was bored, so he naturally decided to get into some Egyptology, you know, to pass the time. He started pouring money into archaeological digs, but he wasn't having much success because he didn't really know what he was doing, nor did he have an experienced Egyptologist to help him manage a digging crew, which, you know, you would assume would be necessary, but apparently was not. The result was a bunch of underpaid Egyptian laborers digging holes wherever he told them to. But that higgledy-piggledy style of excavation came to an end in 1907, when a mutual acquaintance suggested that Lord Carnarvon look into hiring a guy named Howard Carter. Lord Carnarvon hires Howard Carter to run his yearly digs in Egypt, where prime digging season went from October to April. And the two strike up a good working relationship. Carter manages the digs, and Lord Carnarvon pays for them. And now you might be thinking, ooh, this is where it gets good, and Carter actually finds King Tut's tomb. No. I didn't realize when I started to research this episode just how long it took Carter and Lord Carnarvon to find the tomb. They worked together for 18 years before that happened. These years were called, quote, barren labor, which is to say that they were spending time and money and energy on all of these excavations that yielded virtually nothing. Now, nothing is a bit of a strong word. They had found some stuff and some important stuff. Tablets, a few minor tombs that were mostly empty, etc. But there was no significant return on investment, so to speak. Now I've been in grad school for five years now, and while I wouldn't call that barren labor exactly, I sympathize with the concept of working super hard without guaranteed return on investment. And Carter and Lord Carnarvon and their revolving crew of Egyptian laborers did that for a 18 years. The concept of barren labor was further underscored by the site where Carter and Carnarvon dug for nearly 10 years, the Valley of the Kings. Carter and Lord Carnarvon were spending over six months a year in a sea of beige rock, empty tombs, and dwindling hope. Barren indeed. That was made worse by the fact that Carter and Lord Carnarvon didn't start digging in the Valley of the Kings until 1914. By that time, all of the archaeologists who had been excavating at the site for years, if not decades, weren't finding anything either. The valley, they thought, had divulged all of its secrets. But every time someone was ready to give up, someone would find something. An empty tomb, a nice vase, whatever. And that would make it nearly impossible to walk away. Because what if, what if there was something there to be found? Fortunately for Howard Carter, Lord Carnarvon liked to gamble. Carter believed that there was something more to find, that the best had yet to be uncovered. He believed that there was still a royal tomb lurking in the valley, a royal tomb that he believed was still intact, which is to say, sealed with all of its contents inside. Now, I don't think that Carter actually knew that he was looking for King Tut's tomb, at least not in the beginning. But he did have a hunch that there were more pharaohs from the 18th dynasty whose tombs were still waiting to be found. Now you might be thinking, well, didn't they have like a checklist of the pharaohs from the time and they could just, you know, go down and see who was accounted for? Nice try. No such list existed because Egyptology was still very much in its infancy as an academic medium. The archaeologists were literally creating this list as they went, going off of names and dates that they uncovered in their digs. One major obstacle to creating that list was the fact that pharaohs often attempted to erase their predecessors from history, especially if there was a change in the dynasty. They would literally order people to go around and chisel their predecessors' names off of things. That is exactly what happened to Tutankhamun. Shortly after Tut died, his advisor Horumheb took the throne. And Horumheb, it turns out, wasn't that fond of Tut because he ordered that King Tutankhamun's name and all of the names of his family members be struck from historical record. Thankfully, this campaign wasn't as thorough as it should have been, but thorough enough that no one really knew anything about Tutankhamun until around 1905. In that year, an Egyptologist found a tablet at the Temple of Karnak that had presumably come loose from whatever it was placed on and fell into the sand, thus evading Horemheb's human erasers. That tablet bore not only King Tut's name, but a short description of his reign. Specifically, that Tut had restored traditional worship practices and moved the capital back to Thebes. Before this tablet was found, the name Tutankhamon had been found inscribed on a couple of things here and there, but no one really knew anything about him other than the fact that he was, number one, a pharaoh, and number two, probably buried in the Valley of the Kings. It was the 1905 find of that tablet that confirmed to Carter that there was indeed a pharaoh from the 18th dynasty whose tomb was unaccounted for, Tutan Commons. Carter was convinced of it. A couple others were convinced of it as well, including the patron and excavator Theodore Davis, whose own team of archaeologists had already uncovered Tut-related artifacts in the valley. The first was around 1905, around the time when that tablet was found, when Davis's chief archaeologist discovered a small ceramic cup that bore the name of Tutankhamun. In 1907, Davis's team found a pit containing burial debris also stamped with Tut's name. And in 1909, Davis discovered a small, undecorated chamber strewn with small sculptures and bits of gold that once again bore the name of Tutankhamun. And Davis assumed that this small chamber was the looted tomb of Tutankhamun himself. Now, in reality, the chamber and its objects were actually associated with one of King Tut's advisors, not King Tut himself, which makes sense. But at the time, no one knew that. And after finding what he assumed was Tutankhamun's tomb, Theodore Davis famously made the declaration, I fear that the Valley of the Tombs is now exhausted. Howard Carter disagreed, now more than ever. Unfortunately, Howard Carter didn't have permission to dig in the Valley of the Kings. That required a permit, which he and Lord Carnarvon didn't have. Permits were rationed, only given to so many digs at a time. And so Carnarvon and Carter had to wait until someone gave up. And guess who gave up first? Davis. Carnarvon bought Davis' permit in 1914. After digging elsewhere in Egypt for seven years, Carter finally had his green light to return to the Valley of the Kings. The site everyone claimed was exhausted, and he was going to prove them all wrong. Can anyone name anything else that happened in 1914? Oh yeah, a world war. During World War I, excavations were basically stopped during that time, especially given that many of the Egyptologists working in the Valley of the Kings were French and British and needed to, I mean, you know, aid in the war efforts. For his part, Carter worked as a translator for the English government, though he was allowed to return to his work in the Valley of the Kings in 1917. But even then, things weren't the same as they had been. Egypt was experiencing the rise of nationalism, which naturally resulted in anti-British sentiments. Without going too much into the country's history, Egypt was part of the English colonial empire, and it did not want to be. Anti-British sentiment was not only growing, but showing, and it made working in Egypt all the more difficult and dangerous than it had been before. Now that's a lot to be dealing with, but Carter and Carnarvon soldier on and continue digging six months a year in the valley. But the enterprise had lost its original hope. Now there was just desperation and even despair. By 1921 22, Lord Carnarvon had put a boatload of money into the Egyptian excavations. We are talking tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's in the early 1900s. So big, big money. By the way, shout out to all the Egyptian laborers who did all of the brunt work for these digs while getting paid virtually nothing. You are the real MVPs and deserve recognition. Snaps to you. By the time that 1922 rolls around, Lord Karnarvin starts asking himself the big questions. Chief among them, how long can you dig for nothing? Remember, Lord Carnarvon was a bit of a gambler, and every digging season is another pull of the lever, and each next pull promises a jackpot. But what if the machine is empty? Obviously, Egyptology is slightly more systematic than a slot machine, but still, the metaphor stands. Carnarvon may have been a gambler, but he wasn't stupid. He knew it was time to let the gamble go. In 1921, he makes the decision to shut things down. He can't afford to keep putting money into something that not only isn't paying off, but hasn't paid off after 18 years of trying. After he returns to England following the 1921 digging season, Carnarvon calls Carter in and he delivers the blow. There will be no more money. Carnarvon is done. And Howard Carter is devastated. I mean, how could you not be? This is not only the breakdown of an 18-year partnership, but Carter truly believes, despite there being very little evidence, that something is there in the valley and he feels so close to finding it. Carter begs Lord Carnarvon for one more season. Just one more. And he makes the very good point that Carnarvon has already paid for a permit that would last through the next season. It'd be foolish to waste it. At one point, Carter gets so desperate that he says he'll pay for the dig himself if he can just use the permit. And Lord Carnarvon is like, peasant, stop being ridiculous. I know what I pay you, and it's not enough to pay for a dig. Ultimately, Lord Carnarvon does cave and he tells Carter that he will bankroll one more season. But this is it. Carnarvon did not return to Egypt in anticipation of the 1922 dig season. He was the one who had decided that it was time to let this dream go, and he didn't want to be in Egypt watching Carter dig for what surely could not be found. The final attempt to uncover something in the valley commenced on November 1st, 1922. On the night of November 4th, 1922, Lord Carnarvon's dinner was interrupted by the arrival of a telegram from Egypt. It was from Carter, who was barely four days into what was supposed to be the final dig of their partnership. Carnarvon read the telegram. It would contain the most important 20 words that he would ever receive. The telegram's message, however, could be summed up in a single word. The final word of the message. Congratulations. I think that that's a good place to stop for today, but fear not, this has not all been Baron Listening. I will continue this story in episode 15, which should already be up and waiting for you in your podcast feed. Given that this is part one of a two-part episode that I am recording all on the same day, I am going to save my usual outro stuff for part two. For now, let me just say that I appreciate you listening and I hope that you'll go on to listen to the rest of this magnificent story. As always, sources, pictures, and extra content will be posted on the episode's show notes page, which you can find at stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. If you are going to continue listening, I will meet you over in part two in just a little bit. But if this is where you are leaving me today, then I hope that you take the time to look at something beautiful today. And I also hope that you come back soon.