Past Perfect: King Tut, I Presume?

On November 26, 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter (1874–1939) and his patron, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, first glimpsed the dazzling contents of the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun (1336–1327 B.C.). Carter had arrived in Egypt nearly 30 years earlier to take a position with the Egypt Exploration Fund as an artist—a craft he learned from his father, an accomplished animal portraitist. The young man’s talents soon brought him to the attention of the most important Egyptologist of the time (perhaps of all time), the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie, who was then excavating at Tell el-Amarna. In 1899, […]