Valley of the Kings, 1923

‘Yes, wonderful things’ is the oft-quoted response Howard Carter gave when, on 26 November 1922, Lord Carnarvon asked if the archaeologist could see anything through a hole in the inner doorway of the tomb of the young king Tutankhamun. These words are what Carter himself committed to print in his published account of the sensational Egyptian discovery. Yet, as a page of Carter’s expedition journal, a more contemporaneous document, suggests, the response may have been closer to ‘Yes, it is wonderful’. Carter, it appears, was not averse to editing his own words to capture the momentousness of the occasion, which is being celebrated 100 years on in a new exhibition in Oxford c