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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Howard Carter delicately, if somewhat theatrically, brushes the second of three coffins nesting one inside another within King Tutankhamun’s large quartzite sarcophagus. (The inner coffin, which held Tut’s mummy, was made of solid gold, while the outer two were made of gilded wood.) Carter made sure that the world learned of his spectacular 1922 discovery by inviting British photographer Harry Burton (1879‒1940) to document the finds.