Howard Carter

Howard Carter (1874–1939) was born into modest means in England, and started his career in Egyptology the age of 17, working as a artist copying inscriptions and paintings in tombs and temples. He worked under the auspices of famed Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, and by 1899 was working for the Egyptian Antiquities Service as Inspector General of Monuments for Upper Egypt, and this at the age of only 25.

Carter unfortunately was compelled to resign his post in 1905, after an altercation between a group of drunken French tourists and Egyptian site guards. After a lean period, in 1907 Howard Carter made the acquaintance of George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, an extremely wealthy British aristocrat and noted collector of Egyptian antiquities. Carter soon found himself in the employment of Lord Carnarvon supervising his archaeological excavations in Thebes.

World War I delayed Carter’s excavation work, but he went on to discover several tombs in the Valley of the Kings for Lord Carnarvon. Carter, however, was obsessed with finding the lost tomb of a little known pharaoh: Tutankhamun. Artifacts bearing Tutankhamun’s name provided tantalizing clues to his tomb’s existence, but Carter’s searching proved futile. Lord Carnarvon, in fact, was growing frustrated with Carter’s lack of results, and delivered an ultimatum declaring that 1922 would be the last season that he would fund Carter’s work.

Fortunately, Carter found the long sought-after tomb in November of that year, and by doing so made the most dazzling archaeological discovery of the 20th century. It took a decade for Carter and his team to catalogue and remove all 5,000 artifacts from KV62 to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Now famous, Carter also occupied himself on the lecture and media circuit spawned by the intense worldwide interest in his find and the resulting Egyptomania.

In later years Howard Carter retired from field archaeology and became a collector of Egyptian antiquities. Declining health led him to return to England, and he died at the age of 65 in 1939 in London of a heart attack caused by lymphoma.

His gravestone in London’s Putney Vale cemetery bears these inscriptions from Tutankhamun’s alabaster wishing cup:

May your spirit live,
May you spend millions of years,
You who love Thebes,
Sitting with your face to the north wind,
Your eyes beholding happiness.

O night, spread thy wings over me as the imperishable stars.