3,500 km away at his home in Highclere Castle in England, Lord Carnarvon received a telegram: “At last have made wonderful discovery: a magnificent tomb with seals intact. They did not yet know it, but they had just made one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20 th century.Ĭarter immediately ordered his workers to block up the hole again and rushed off to inform his patron. They came to a blocked door at the bottom. The next day, 16 steps plunging four metres underground were excavated.

Throughout the day, the group worked ceaselessly with pickaxes, small brushes and blowers to clear what resembled the stairs to a hypogeum. Had his team finally found something? Carter believed so. On 4 November, the archaeologist was therefore on the point of giving up when, in the early morning, one of his workers discovered a step cut into the rock. Nearest airport : Cairo International Airport.Howard Carter finally discovers the young pharaoh’s tomb The British Egyptologist knew that this campaign, which had begun the month before, was the last: his patron, the Earl of Carnarvon, had decided to no longer fund his largely fruitless excavations. Since digging up earthenware jars inscribed with Tutankhamun’s name five years earlier, Carter had been relentlessly excavating the Valley of the Kings in search of the child king’s tomb. In Southern Egypt on the right bank of the Nile near Luxor, archaeologist Howard Carter and his team of workers were hard at work on the desert’s rocky slopes. Five years of fruitless excavations in the Valley of the Kings The pharaoh owes his fame to an event that occurred 30 centuries after his death: the discovery – under 150,000 tons of rock and debris from another tomb – of his untouched sepulchre and its virtually intact treasures. And yet, this young sovereign from the 18 th dynasty, who died when he was a teenager around 1327 B.C.E., barely made an impression during his lifetime. Tutankhamun and his tomb are universally renowned.

The tomb of tutankhamun howard carter