By Simon Cherner
Posted 5 hours ago, updated 1 hour ago
British archaeologist Howard Carter examining Tutankhamun’s second sarcophagus, October 1925. Tallandier / Bridgeman Images
Unpublished letters provide evidence that the Egyptologist is said to have secretly plundered some small objects from the ancient Egyptian royal tomb.
Archaeologist Howard Carter spends happy days between London and Cairo in 1934. The researcher in charge of the British excavations that uncovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in November 1922 received a letter from Alan Gardiner, one of the most respected Egyptologists of his day. Are the two gentlemen discussing ancient hieroglyphs or current events in the Valley of the Kings? None of them. The specialist accuses Howard Carter of having shamelessly offered him a lead plundered from the pharaoh’s tomb.
This unpublished correspondence, preserved in a private collection, was discovered by American Egyptologist Bob Brier, a professor at the University of Long Island, as part of the preparation of a new paper on Tutankhamun to be published across the Channel in September . The 100th anniversary of the discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb in November 2022 offers an opportunity to revive the strings of Egyptomania in bookstores and museums for a while. One certainty: it won’t restore Howard Carter’s glory.
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“Carter was known to possess items from Tutankhamun’s tomb in one way or another,” Bob Brier told The Observer. The archaeologist and his team “entered the tomb before its official opening and items, particularly jewels, were sold after their respective deaths,” he added. Howard Carter would have taken advantage of this first foray into the tomb to hunt down some ancient pieces, including a funerary amulet offered some time later to Alan Gardiner, who had taken part in the study of the tomb inscriptions.
Faux pas among connoisseurs
But one fine day, Alan Gardiner shows the amulet to another colleague. This is Rex Engelbach, who runs the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The Egyptologist immediately recognized the object, which was made in the same style and form as other pieces from Tutankhamun’s tomb displayed in the Cairo institution’s collections. He takes offense at Alan Gardiner, who returns the courtesy to his purveyor of looted antiques: Howard Carter.
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“I am deeply sorry to have found myself in such an embarrassing position,” wrote Alan Gardiner in his letter to the archaeologist, telling him of the mishap that had lost him face. “Of course I didn’t tell Engelbach that you gave me the amulet,” the Egyptologist said calmingly. If he is not worried by his colleagues or the Egyptian authorities, Howard Carter had just been nicked from a prestigious college.
When the archaeologist died in 1939, his collection of Egyptian antiquities was liquidated. Several dozen pieces are in several prestigious museums, along with other objects that probably also passed through Howard Carter. For example, in 1967, the Louvre acquired an oukhabti – a funerary statuette – bearing the name of Tutankhamun. It logically comes from the tomb of the young king from the 14th century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of New York returned 19 grave goods to Egypt in 2010.
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