Some Egyptologists have challenged Carter’s claim that the tomb’s treasures had been looted in antique times.

( Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images Howard Carter at the entrance to an Egyptian archaeological site in 1923. Over the next decade, Carter supervised their removal and transportation down the Nile to Cairo to be displayed in the Egyptian Museum.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery by Carter and his financial backer, Lord Carnarvon, of the tomb of the boy king, filled with thrones, chariots and thousands of objects needed in the next world. Its author, Bob Brier, a leading Egyptologist at Long Island University, told the Observer that suspicions about Carter helping himself to treasures have long been rumoured: “But now there’s no doubt about it.” The letters, now in a private collection, will be published in a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World Gardiner told Carter: “I deeply regret having been placed in so awkward a position.”īut he added: “I naturally did not tell Engelbach that I obtained the amulet from you.” Gardiner showed the amulet to Rex Engelbach, the then British director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and was dismayed to be told that it had indeed come from the tomb as it matched other examples – all made from the same mould.įiring off a letter to Carter, he enclosed Engelbach’s damning verdict, which reads: “The whm amulet you showed me has been undoubtedly stolen from the tomb of Tutankhamun.” Carter had enlisted Gardiner to translate hieroglyphs found in the 3,300-year-old tomb, and later gave him a “ whm amulet”, used for offerings to the dead, assuring him that it had not come from the tomb. It was written by Sir Alan Gardiner, a leading philologist.

Tomb pharaoh treasure