In the Valley of the Kings, on Saturday 4 November 1922, Howard Carter wrote diagonally across his diary page, ‘Men found first step’.
Carter had a reasonable hope that this first step would lead down to the tomb of an obscure king of the 18th Dynasty (c.1550-1069 BC) who had been born with the name Tutankhaten (marking him as a member of the family of the ‘heretic’ pharaoh Akhenaten) and who, when he ascended the throne of Egypt, changed his name to Tutankhamun (‘the living image of Amun’) and restored the worship of the great god Amun-Re, who had been the particular target of Akhenaten. Nonetheless, due to his association with Akhenaten, even this changed name was systematically erased by later kings from monuments and objects across Egypt – with variable degrees of success, as it turned out – in an attempt to remove all mention of Tutankhamun and his immediate family entirely from history.
What Carter and his Egyptian team found at the bottom of the stairs and along a short corridor stunned the world, of course – especially those countries barely beginning to recover from the dreadful losses of the First World War. Within Egypt itself, the magnificence of the treasures of the young king and the distinctly colonial quirks of the primary figures associated with the excavation also served as rallying points for the post-war independence movement. However, the 1920s were not the last time that Tutankhamun would be resurrected in the 20th century in the cause of politics.
Excavating the Hebrides