The British Empire and the Discovery of Tutankhamun’s Tomb

The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun by the British archaeologist Howard Carter on 4 November 1922 was, in a literal sense, an imperial product. The British had occupied Egypt since 1882; the British-controlled Egyptian Antiquities Service had granted the concession; the British press and public had funded the excavation. Yet the find has also become, in the post-colonial period, an object of dispute: about who owns the past, who has the right to interpret it, and whether the cultural inheritance of empire can be legitimately enjoyed in the museums of the metropole. The recent Egyptian campaigns for the repatriation of artefacts — including the controversial 2023 display of the Rosetta Stone alongside replicas in Cairo — have made the question unavoidable.

The Imperial Context of the Discovery

The Valley of the Kings in Luxor had been the subject of European archaeological investigation since the early nineteenth century. The British were particularly active: the Egypt Exploration Fund, founded in 1882, had sponsored work throughout Egypt, and the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of New York competed for the most spectacular finds. The British presence in Egypt in 1922 was the legacy of the 1882 occupation and the 1914 establishment of the British Protectorate. The Egyptian Antiquities Service, nominally under the Egyptian government, was supervised by British officials. The partage system — the formal division of finds between the excavator and the Egyptian state — was a key mechanism by which imperial-era archaeology enriched Western museums. It is, as Jeanette Greenfield has argued, the moral foundation of the contemporary restitution claim.

Howard Carter and the Valley of the Kings

Howard Carter (1874–1939) was a British artist and archaeologist who had been working in Egypt since 1891. The youngest of eleven children, Carter had been taken on as a tracer by the Egypt Exploration Fund at the age of 17, and he had worked with some of the most consequential archaeologists of the period, including Flinders Petrie, Percy Newberry, and Gaston Maspero. His career in the Valley of the Kings had been marked by frustration until Lord Carnarvon’s patronage changed everything. The two had been introduced in 1907, and the Carnarvon–Carter partnership had produced a series of discoveries. The first excavation concession that Carnarvon negotiated in 1914 included the right to excavate the area around the tomb of Ramesses VI, and it was this concession that would produce the find of a lifetime.

Carter’s relationship with the Egyptian authorities was tense. The partage system had been modified in the 1880s and 1890s to favour the Egyptian state, and the post-1914 period saw the Egyptian nationalist movement press for further restrictions on foreign excavation. Carter was, by reputation, a difficult and combative colleague. His work on the 1922 discovery was, however, technically brilliant: the careful clearance of the tomb, the meticulous documentation of the finds, and the multi-year conservation programme that followed were models of archaeological practice.

The Discovery (November 1922)

On the morning of 4 November 1922, Carter’s water boy accidentally uncovered a step cut into the bedrock while clearing the area in front of the tomb of Ramesses VI. Carter sent for Lord Carnarvon, who arrived from England on 20 November. On 23 November, Carter made a small breach in the sealed doorway, and Lady Evelyn Herbert was the first person to enter the tomb in more than 3,000 years. Carter’s famous words on 26 November, describing the contents of the tomb to Carnarvon, were “wonderful things” — a characteristic understatement, and the subsequent clearance produced a treasure of more than 5,000 objects, including the gold funerary mask that became the most famous object of ancient Egypt. The discovery reached the front pages of the Times and the New York Times within days; Carnarvon’s exclusive contract with the Times ensured a British press monopoly, and the resulting global sensation was the founding event of modern archaeological celebrity.

The Contents and Public Reaction

The tomb contained the pharaoh’s mummy, preserved in three nested anthropoid coffins of solid gold, and a series of shrines that had enclosed the sarcophagus. The minor artefacts were equally spectacular: the canopic shrine, the throne, the chariots, the furniture, the jewellery, and the food offerings that had been left for the pharaoh’s afterlife. The discovery produced a worldwide sensation: the story was picked up by newspapers and newsreels around the world. The 1972 Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum, the 1976 Treasures of Tutankhamun tour in the United States, the 2019–2021 Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh tour, which visited Paris, London, and the United States before being cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2025 Grand Egyptian Museum opening have drawn millions of visitors. The 2025 Grand Egyptian Museum, near the Giza pyramids, is the largest archaeological museum in the world, and Egypt has made the repatriation of Egyptian artefacts a condition of its international cultural policy.

The Curse and the Cultural Impact

The popular press promoted the myth of the Curse of Tutankhamun, which supposedly killed those who had disturbed the tomb. The death of Lord Carnarvon in April 1923 was the trigger for the curse narrative. The scientific consensus is that the curse is a modern invention: Carnarvon’s death was the result of a known medical condition, and the survival of most of those who were present at the opening of the tomb is strong evidence that the curse is a myth. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb inspired a wave of Egyptomania in popular culture, fashion, and design that has never really abated, and the cultural impact of the find is still being felt in the 21st century.

Historiographical Note

The standard account of the 1922 discovery remains the official biography of Carter by H. V. F. Winstone, Howard Carter and the Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun (1991). The scholarly literature is dominated by the British Museum’s series Tutankhamun’s Tomb and the 2013 The Tomb of Tutankhamun published by the Metropolitan Museum. The post-2010 scholarship has been shaped by the restitution debate: the 2018 Amsterdam Declaration on colonial collections, the 2019 Sarr-Savoy report on French collections, and the 2020 Benin Dialogue Group agreement on the return of the Benin Bronzes have all informed the discussion. The 2023 essay by the Egyptologist Monica Hanna in The New York Review of Books argued that “the imperial period of Egyptology is over, and a new one of co-curation and respect is beginning”; the British Museum’s response has been more cautious.

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