A century after the discovery that would captivate the world, the British archaeologist at the centre of the find remains an enigmatic figure—much like the pharaoh himself.

The moment Howard Carter was ᴀssured everlasting fame can be pinpointed to five syllables, uttered breathlessly in a H๏τ, dusty tunnel outside Luxor at around 2 p.m. on November 26, 1922. The British Egyptologist had just made a small hole with an iron spike through the top left corner of a wall of ancient mortar. His hands shook; The wall was actually a door, bearing the funerary seal of the pharaoh Tutankhamun.

Carter waited for the foetid flow of warm air to disperse from the hole before inserting a candle and peering in after it. It was the first light to fall on the room that lay beyond for over 3,200 years—and Carter’s the first gaze. He remained silent as he watched the candle dance over glimmers of gold in the dark. Then came a question from his companion, George Herbert: “Can you see anything?”
“Yes,” Carter replied. “Wonderful things.”

Both the scene and the soundbite are the stuff of historical gold, in every sense. But for many, the discovery of KV62—otherwise known as the resplendently intact tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun—is also where the story of Egyptology’s most famous excavator begins, and ends. A century after the find that would change history, the story of Howard Carter himself remains peculiarly obscure, a slight picture of a gifted but polarising individual.

Inspiration close to home

Born in Kensington in 1874, Howard Carter was from a generational family of artists who worked around the Norfolk town of Swaffham. His father Samuel John had relocated to London and become a modestly successful painter of rural pursuits and animals. Art was a talent exhibited by several of the future Egyptologist’s siblings, as well as Howard himself.

The youngest of eleven children, three of whom died in infancy, as a child he too was considered ominously sickly—enough for his parents to move his upringing from London to Norfolk, where he was raised largely by a nurse in the family’s Swaffham home. There young Howard spent much of his childhood, nurturing a love of nature. His official education was obscure, and probably took place at a ‘dame school’—a kind of informal facility run by local women common in Victorian times. It was also evidently brief, with Carter noting in later life that he ‘earned a living from the age of fifteen.’

Learning artistic skills from his father, he was almost certainly destined to follow a similar path were it not for an acquaintance with the wealthy Amherst family—some of whom his father had been commissioned to paint. The Amherst home of Didlington Hall was a sprawling testament to the family’s enthusiasm for antiquities and artistic ephemera from Egypt, with which the young Carter became fascinated. This led to his intoxication with the country, and his first ᴀssignment there—as a junior draughtsman under the tutelage of archaeologist Percy Newberry—in 1890, at the age of 16. His first work was as a ‘tracer’—inscription copier—at Newberry’s Beni Hasan digs.

Later basing himself seasonally in Luxor, Carter would rapidly galvanise his reputation with a role in the Egyptian Antiquities Service and through his work as a documentarian, a skilled epigraph artist, and his handling of the more practical aspects of excavation. Working under the wings of archaeologists such as Flinders Petrie, Edouard Naville and Theodore M. Davis, Carter made several significant early finds, including the tombs of Thutmose IV and Hatshepsut—the latter, in 1903 within chamber KV60 in the Valley of the Kings, yielding a mummy many today believe to be the great queen herself. His work, even then, was that of a methodical and tenacious excavator.

“Personally, I view Carter as a game changer in Egyptian history,” says Nora Shawki, an Egyptian archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer. “His qualifications were debatable, [and he was] initially commissioned as a site artist for an archaeologist. But his methods were extremely detailed and meticulous, and his documentation in his journals extraordinary. They’re still helpful to modern day archaeologists.”

Committed, loner

As to Howard Carter’s personality, what records there are paint a sometimes austere picture of the world’s most famous—yet curiously uncelebrated—archaeologist. He lived as a bachelor in a series of cavernous desert properties, was fond of cigars and whisky, kept pets including a series of dogs, a gazelle and a canary, and owned a horse named Sultan. He spent time with his siblings and their families, though never married or had children.

His early career in Egypt was notable for the odd professional skirmish, notably the ‘Saqqara Affair’ in 1904—a well-publicised clash between Egyptian tomb sentries and allegedly drunk French tourists. While crotchety relations in the murderous heat and bureaucratic quagmire of Egyptology were common, Carter did seem to have a knack for finding himself in conflict.

In his scholarly 1992 biopic of Carter, TGH James—a former Keeper of Antiquities of the British Museum—described him as a man of ‘uncertain temper and generally unforgiving nature,’ and this did seem to impact his professional relations. Following Saqqara—for which Carter was criticised for his principle of supporting the guards—he resigned from the Egyptian Antiquities Service in 1905. Remaining in Luxor, Carter painted for tourists and undertook the occasional archaeological commission.

A turning point came in 1907, when he formed an alliance with George Herbert, otherwise known as the 5^th Earl of Carnarvon—a socialite, aristocrat and enthusiast of all things Egypt. In Carter, Carnarvon found his ‘man’ in Luxor; in Carnarvon, Carter found a financier.

With the departure of an ailing Theodore M. Davis in 1914, Carnarvon had bagged the coveted concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings. World War One saw Carter remain in Egypt, engaging in intermittent service in intelligence as a translator, and communications courier. There then followed four years of systematic searching for a tomb of an obscure pharaoh named ‘Tut.ankh.amen’ which, from pottery fragments bearing his name found in 1909, Carter was doggedly convinced lay unfound. This fruitless but persistent searching would have enough to sear both Carter and Carnarvon’s names as a footnote into the history of Egyptology. As history proved, their discovery in November 1922 would grant them worldwide fame.

Everywhere the glint of gold

Tutankhamun himself was a brief and largely unremarkable leader. As such—relatively speaking—he had a rather poky tomb that bore all the hallmarks of a hasty and unexpected burial, interred as he was at the age of 19. But the level of decadence given even to this pharaoh in death hinted at what might have been bestowed on grander leaders – Rameses II, say—whose cavernous tombs were emptied by thieves centuries before archaeologists came looking.

It would be these unprecedented treasures, Carter’s ‘strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another,’ that would captivate the world. He would later famously write of that first vision, ‘details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold… everywhere the glint of gold.‘

Stocked as it was with provisions to allow Tutankhamun to continue a lively and privileged existence in death, the time-capsule tomb turned our shadowy knowledge of ancient Egyptian life into technicolor. From burial customs and offerings, to armaments, to the domestic minutiae of everyday life, the tomb at a stroke became a repository of knowledge Carter and his team would spend over a decade documenting.