From the circular main hall of a University of Oxford library, a short corridor leads to a staircase that takes you down below street level. Beyond a door simply marked “Archive” is what looks like a normal office: fluorescent lights, cheap blue carpet and a row of plain gray rolling stacks. It doesn’t seem like the most fertile ground for archaeological discovery. But the hum of the air conditioner lets slip that this modest room is protecting something special. The temperature is held at 65 degrees Fahrenheit, while a humidifier keeps the moisture level тιԍнтly controlled.
This is the archive of the Griffith Insтιтute, arguably the best Egyptology library in the world and home to the legacy of Howard Carter, the British archaeologist who led the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb 100 years ago this November.
The story of Carter’s incredible find has been recounted so many times that it becomes more like a myth with every retelling. Some of the details wear ever deeper, like ruts, while others have faded from memory. But the notebooks, sketches, diaries and diagrams held in these dull-looking stacks contain the firsthand thoughts and impressions Carter recorded at the time.
That’s what brought me here a few years ago, while researching my 2013 book, The Shadow King, which investigates our modern obsession with the elusive Pharaoh Tutankhamun. I wanted to look afresh at Carter’s discovery, working from original sources to recover lost details and bring the story back to life.
I visited the archive accompanied by its soft-spoken keeper, Jaromir Malek, and his ᴀssistant, Elizabeth Fleming. On the wall hung a somber portrait of Carter, his small, piercing, black eyes gazing irritably down. He looked less like a pioneering Egyptologist than an accountant or a banker. But Fleming ᴀssured me the man had vision and a sense of beauty. To prove it, she brought out perhaps the archive’s most aesthetically pleasing items—a collection of graceful watercolors painted by Carter himself during the last decade of the 19th century.
Carter’s artistic ability was what brought him to Egypt in the first place. He was born in London in 1874, the youngest of eight surviving children, and his father painted animal portraits—mainly dogs and horses—for rich local clients. Through his father, Carter met an Egyptologist named Percy Newberry, who in 1891 arranged for Carter, then only 17, to travel to Egypt to help record the extensive artwork being uncovered in tombs and temples around the country. Carter soon showed great promise as an archaeologist in his own right, learning rigorous methods from Flinders Petrie, who pretty much invented the idea of archaeology as a science and is today perhaps the only Egyptologist who can rival Carter’s fame.
In the watercolors Fleming showed me, Carter copied ancient Egyptian depictions of various animals and birds, painting them alongside their modern-day equivalents—inhabitants of the desert around him, from the scimitar-horned oryx and Nubian ibex to the Egyptian vulture, falcon and red-backed shrike. The pictures are elegant and effortless, with the attention to detail of someone who is both knowledgeable and pᴀssionate about his subject.
