Howard Carter (May 9, 1874 – March 2, 1939) was an English archaeologist and Egyptologist. He is most famous as the discoverer of KV62, the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt.
Howard Carter was born in 1874 in Kensington, London. He was the youngest son of eight children. His father, Samuel Carter, was an artist. Carter grew up in Swaffam, North Norfolk, and had no formal education. His father trained him in the fundamentals of drawing and painting.
Carter did much work in Egypt, starting in 1891 at the age of 17 where he worked copying inscriptions and paintings. He worked on the excavation of Basi Hassan, the gravesite of the princes of Middle Egypt , c. 2000 BC. Later he was to come under the tutelage of William Flinders Petrie.
In 1899 he was offered a position working for the Egyptian Antiquities Service from which he resigned as a result of a dispute in 1905.
After several hard years, Carter was introduced, in 1907, to Lord Carnarvon, an eager amateur who was prepared to supply the funds necessary for Carter's work to continue. Soon, Carter was supervising all of Lord Carnarvon's excavations.
Lord Carnarvon financed Carter's search for the tomb of a previously unknown Pharaoh, Tutankhamun, whose existence Carter had discovered. On November 4, 1922 Carter found Tutankhamun's tomb (subsequently designated KV62), the only unplundered tomb of a Pharaoh yet found in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor. On February 16, 1923 Carter opened the burial chamber and first saw the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun.
After cataloguing the extensive finds, Carter retired from archaeology and became a collector. He died in England in 1939 at the age of 65. The archaeologist's death at this advanced age is the most common piece of evidence put forward by skeptics to refute the idea of a curse plaguing the party that violated Tutankhamun's tomb.
Howard Carter is buried in Putney Vale Cemetery in West London.
Further reading
- T.G.H James, Howard Carter – The Path to Tutankhamun, London: Tauris Parke, 2001.
- Reeves, N. and Taylor, J.H., Howard Carter: Before Tutankhamun, London: British Museum Press, 1992.
- The History Of Howard Carter By Dr. Thomas Schwarz
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