Howard Carter (9 May 1874 – 2 March 1939) was an English archaeologist and Egyptologist known for discovering the tomb of 14th-century BC pharaoh Tutankhamun.

Beginning of career

Howard Carter was born in London, England, the son of Samuel Carter, an artist and Martha Joyce (Sands) Carter. His father trained and developed his artistic talent.

Much of Carter's childhood was spent in the Norfolk market town of Swaffham (probably due to ill-health).

In 1891 Carter was sent out by the Egypt Exploration Fund to assist Percy Newberry in the excavation and recording of Middle Kingdom tombs at Beni Hasan. Although only 17 years old he was innovative in improving the methods of copying tomb decoration. In 1892 he worked under the tutelage of Flinders Petrie for one season at Amarna, the capital founded by the pharaoh Akhenaten. From 1894 to 1899 he then worked with Édouard Naville at Deir el-Bahari, where he recorded the wall reliefs in the temple of Hatshepsut.

In 1899, Carter was appointed the first chief inspector of the Egyptian Antiquities Service (EAS). He supervised a number of excavations at Thebes (now known as Luxor) before he was transferred in 1904 to the Inspectorate of Lower Egypt. Carter was lauded for improvements in the protection of, and accessibility to existing excavation sites, and his development of a grid-block system for searching for tombs. The Antiquities Service also provided funding for Carter to head up his own excavation projects, and during this time period Carter discovered the Tombs of Thutmose I and Thutmose III, although both tombs had been robbed of treasures long before. Carter resigned from the Antiquities Service in 1905 after an enquiry into an affray (known as the Saqqara Affair) between Egyptian site guards and a group of French tourists in which he sided with the Egyptian personnel.

Tutankhamun's tomb

Tomb of Tutankhamun

After three hard years, Carter was employed by Lord Carnarvon to supervise his excavations from 1907.The intention of Gaston Maspero, who introduced the two, was to ensure that Carter imposed modern archaeological methods and systems of recording.

KV62 in the Valley of the Kings

Carnarvon financed Carter's work in the Valley of the Kings from 1914, but it was interrupted by World War I until 1917, when serious work was resumed. After several years of fruitless searching, Carnarvon became dissatisfied with the lack of results and, in 1922, he gave Carter one more season of funding to find the tomb he was searching for.

On 4 November 1922, Howard Carter's excavation group found the steps leading to Tutankhamun's tomb (subsequently designated KV62), by far the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings. He wired Carnarvon to come, and on 26 November 1922, with Carnarvon, Carnarvon's daughter, and others in attendance, Carter made the "tiny breach in the top left hand corner" of the doorway, and was able to peer in by the light of a candle and see that many of the gold and ebony treasures were still in place. He made the breach into the tomb with a chisel his grandmother had given him for his seventeenth birthday. He did not yet know at that point whether it was "a tomb or merely a cache", but he did see a promising sealed doorway between two sentinel statues. When Carnarvon asked "can you see anything?", Carter replied with the famous words: "Yes, wonderful things."

Carter's house in the Theban Necropolis

The next several months were spent cataloging the contents of the antechamber under the "often stressful" oversight of Pierre Lacau, director general of the Department of Antiquities of Egypt. On 16 February 1923, Carter opened the sealed doorway, and found that it did indeed lead to a burial chamber, and he got his first glimpse of the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun. All of these discoveries were eagerly covered by the world's press, but most of their representatives were kept in their hotels; only H. V. Morton was allowed on the scene, and his vivid descriptions helped to cement Carter's reputation with the British public.

Carter's own notes and photographic evidence, indicate that he, Lord Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn Herbert entered the burial chamber shortly after the tomb's discovery and before the official opening.

Later work and death

The Grave of Howard Carter

The clearance of the tomb with its thousands of objects continued until 1932. Following his sensational discovery, Howard Carter retired from archaeology and became a part-time agent for collectors and museums, including the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. He visited the United States in 1924, and gave a series of illustrated lectures in New York City and other cities in the United States that were attended by very large and enthusiastic audiences, sparking Egyptomania in America.

He died of lymphoma in Kensington, London, on 2 March 1939 at the age of 64. The archaeologist's natural death so long after the opening of the tomb, despite being the leader of the expedition, is the piece of evidence most commonly put forward by sceptics to refute the idea of a "curse of the pharaohs" plaguing the party that might have "violated" Tutankhamun's tomb.

Carter is now buried in Putney Vale Cemetery in London. On his gravestone is written: "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" and "O night, spread thy wings over me as the imperishable stars".

In popular culture

Film and television

Carter has been portrayed by the following actors:

• Robin Ellis in the 1980 Columbia Pictures Television production The Curse of King Tut's Tomb
• Pip Torrens in the 1992 Lucasfilm TV movie Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal
• Pip Torrens in the 1995 Lucasfilm TV movie Young Indiana Jones and the Treasure of the Peacock's Eye
• Timothy Davies in the 1998 IMAX documentary Mysteries of Egypt
• Stuart Graham in the 2005 BBC docudrama Egypt

Literature

He appears as a character throughout most of the Amelia Peabody series of books by Elizabeth Peters (a pseudonym of Egyptologist Dr Barbara Mertz); and in much of Arthur Phillips's The Egyptologist.

In the book The Tutankhamun Affair by Christian Jacq he is a key character.

He appears as a main character in A Cloudy Day on the West Side, a novel by Egyptian writer Muhammad Al-Mansi Qindeel.

James Patterson and Martin Dugard's book The Murder of King Tut focuses on Carter's search for King Tut's tomb.

He is referenced in Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin, The Seven Crystal Balls published in 1944 by Le Soir. ISBN 2-203-00112-7

He is referenced in Wedding of the Season by Laura Lee Guhrke. In this historical romance novel, Carter's telegram to the fictional British Egyptologist the Duke of Sunderland reports discovering "steps to a new tomb" and creates a climatic conflict. Published 2011 by Avon Books. ISBN 978-0-06-196315-5

Music

In Search of the Pharaohs is a 30-minute cantata for narrator, junior choir and piano by composer Robert Steadman, commissioned by the City of London Freemen's School, which uses extracts from Carter's diaries as its text.

The Finnish metal band Nightwish mentions Carter in the song "Tutankhamun" on its début album Angels Fall First: "For Carter has come / To free my beloved".

Art

A paraphrased extract from Howard Carter's diary of 26 November 1922 is used as the plaintext for Part 3 of the encrypted Kryptos sculpture at the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

On 9 May 2012 Google commemorated his 138th birthday with a Google doodle.