Discovering Tutankhamun...in Oxford

The Ashmolean's summer exhibition, Discovering Tutankhamun, recounts the story in 1922 of finding the tomb of this Eqyptian boy-king. Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter led the excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun and painstakingly began to document every object in the 4 hidden rooms. The exhibition begins with Carter's diary open at the page where, in November 1922, he recorded finding the stone steps leading down to the door of a royal tomb with its seals still intact. When he broke through a second door, and used a candle to illuminate the underground caverns, he reported seeing many "wonderful things". While we can only see drawings and some very old photographs of masks, beads, carriages and painted boxes, of originals which will never leave Cairo, there is a sense of the enormity of his find. Although Tutankhamun only ruled for 4 years, died in his late teenage years and never had children with his step-sister wife, there is a sense that this find gave him an international reputation that is larger than it could have been at the time of his death...