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[kat newkirk]

_http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/jul/18/tutankhamun-website-howard-ca
rter-tomb_
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/jul/18/tutankhamun-website-howard-carter-tomb)

Tutankhamun – the secrets of the tomb go online

Howard Carter spent years documenting the thousands of artefacts from
Tutankhamun's tomb. Now, thanks to the efforts of an Oxford archaeologist, this
remarkable archive of pictures and notes can be viewed online
Jo Marchant
The Observer, Sunday 18 July 2010


From the circular main hall of the Sackler Library in Oxford, an
unassuming corridor leads to a staircase that takes you down below street level.
Through a door marked "archive", office ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights
stare down on a cheap blue carpet and a row of grey rolling stacks.

The hum of the air-conditioning lets slip that this ordinary-looking room
is hiding something special. The temperature is held at 18.5C (65F), several
degrees cooler than the sunny July day outside, while a humidifier keeps
the moisture level tightly controlled. For those grey stacks contain the
forgotten secrets of the most famous find in Egyptology, if not all of
archaeological history: the tomb of Tutankhamun.

This is the Griffith Institute – arguably the best Egyptology library in
the world. One of its most prized collections incorporates the notes,
photographs and diaries of the English archaeologist Howard Carter, who
discovered Tutankhamun's resting place in 1922. The only intact pharaoh's tomb ever
discovered, it contained such an array of treasures that it took Carter 10
years to catalogue them all. Yet despite the immense significance of the
discovery, the majority of Carter's findings have never been published, and
many questions surrounding the tomb remain unanswered.

Jaromir Malek is the soft-spoken keeper of the archive whose own
Tutankhamun project is nearing completion. By making all of Carter's notes available
online, Malek wanted to ensure that the public would have access to the
full extent of the discovery – and to spur Egyptologists into finishing the
job of studying the tomb's contents. He has ended up creating a model that
other researchers hope will transform the field of archaeology.

The effort has taken even longer than Carter's gruelling excavation. It
began in 1993, when Malek says he realised that fewer than a third of the
artefacts from Tutankhamun's tomb had been properly studied and published, a
situation he describes as "unacceptable".

A total of 5,398 objects were found in the tomb, covering every aspect of
ancient Egyptian life, from weapons and chariots to musical instruments,
clothes, cosmetics and a treasured lock of the royal grandmother's hair. A
few, like Tutankhamun's gold burial mask, are instantly recognisable, but many
are not well known, even to experts.

Part of the reason is that Carter died in 1939, just seven years after his
excavation ended, and before he could fully publish his findings. "He
started working on the final publication, but he was physically and mentally
exhausted after a very hard 10 years," says Malek. By all accounts a difficult
man to work with, Carter had no collaborators left to continue his work
when he died. And while the artefacts themselves are held in the Museum of
Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, Carter's notes were donated to the Griffith
Institute, where they have lain largely undisturbed ever since.

The sheer size and importance of Carter's haul seems to have discouraged
scholars from tackling it. "I often say that the real curse of Tutankhamun is
that Egyptologists have tended to shy away from working on the material,"
says Marianne Eaton-Krauss, an expert who has written three books about
objects from the tomb. "These pieces are beautifully made. To study them takes
a lot of work, and requires expertise not only on the symbolism, but also
the technology."

So Malek decided that the best way to ensure that Carter's discoveries saw
the light of day was to post the entire archive online. "We can't make
Egyptologists work on the material if they are not inclined to do so," he says.
"But we could make sure that all of the excavation records are available
to anyone who is interested. Then there will be no excuse."

A simple idea, but still a daunting task, particularly as a lack of funding
meant that Malek and his handful of staff had to carry out the entire
project in their spare time. Carter recorded his finds on more than 3,500
densely written cards, with additional notes by Carter's chemist and conservator
Alfred Lucas, and more than 1,000 images taken by his photographer Harry
Burton. There are also around 60 maps and plans of the excavation site, plus
hundreds of fragile pages from Carter's journals and diaries.

A succession of secretaries scanned and transcribed Carter's notes in
between other work, then Malek proofread the results at evenings and weekends.
Jonathan Moffett, head of IT at the affiliated Ashmolean Museum, built a
database that could hold images of the original material as well as
transcripts, so the text could be easily searched. In 1995 the team started posting
the records in one of the first websites dedicated to Egyptology. They
called it Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation .

More than 15 years later, the internet has been transformed: a Google
search for Egyptology now returns more than 3 million results. And Malek's
project is almost complete. Around 98% of the material is available, with the
last pages to follow within the next three months.

Among the highlights is Carter's diary from the period in which he
discovered Tutankhamun's tomb. When I ask to see it, Malek's assistant Elizabeth
Fleming pulls the yellowed notebook from a stiff cardboard case, and with
white-gloved hands settles it on a pillow on the table in front of me.

Funded by the Egypt enthusiast Lord Carnarvon, Carter had been searching
the Valley of the Kings – ancient Egypt's royal burial ground – for seven
years. A few objects bearing Tutankhamun's name had been found in the area
and the two were convinced that his tomb lay somewhere beneath thousands of
years' worth of limestone rubble. Yet season after season of arduous
digging, during which their workmen cleared large areas of the valley down to
bedrock, produced nothing.

Then on Saturday 4 November 1922, the dig revealed a step cut into the rock
of the valley floor, beneath the foundations of a group of huts. It was
the beginning of a stairway that led to a walled-up doorway: Tutankhamun's
resting place had been found. Fleming shows me two words from the next day's
entry – "seals intact" – the crucial sign that the tomb had lain
undisturbed since the second millennium BC.

Carter's handwriting, in small, neat pencil, suggests a disciplined,
down-to-earth man, not inclined to florid outbursts. A typical diary entry reads
simply "two donkeys" – a reference to the transportation that Carter and
his assistant took to the dig site each day.

On Sunday 26 November, however, after his first glimpse inside the
3,300-year-old antechamber, Carter could no longer contain himself. As he peeped
through a newly burrowed hole, he later wrote in his journal that "the hot
air escaping caused the candle to flicker". As his eyes became accustomed to
the light, "the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one, with
its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects
heaped upon one another". Strange ebony-black effigies of the king, gilded
couches, exquisitely painted caskets, flowers, shrines, chests, chairs and
chariots glinting with gold gave the appearance of "the property room of an
opera of a vanished civilisation".

Elizabeth Fleming also shows me one of Carter's plans – the valley's
contours, neatly conveyed in sparse yet graceful black-ink lines. The dig site
was located in the deepest point of the valley, where floodwater dumps debris
when it rains. This, along with the fact that the later tomb of Ramses VI
was built almost on top of it, kept Tutankhamun hidden from robbers over
the centuries, and from the wholesale dismantling of royal tombs by Ramses XI
in the 11th century BC.

The real meat of the archive, however, is in the notes and photographs that
record every item found in the tomb in painstaking detail. Any other
archaeologist working in the 1920s might have bundled the treasures out of the
tomb in a matter of hours, but Carter worked methodically and meticulously.

Burton's black-and-white photographs show the team's progress through the
tomb, and these too are available online. Despite the difficult lighting
conditions, these images – acknowledged as some of the best in archaeology –
capture the eerie stillness of the tomb when it was first opened. Chairs
and chariot wheels have been casually propped against the wall, while statues
stand in their linen shawls as if placed there hours before.

I'm struck by how messy and jumbled the objects look. This is partly
because Tutankhamun died unexpectedly, so his belongings had to be crammed into
a much smaller tomb than would have been intended, and partly because the
tomb was robbed shortly after the unfortunate king was buried, and the guards
seem to have done a rather careless job of righting the ransacked contents
before resealing the doors.

"We can see things missing," says John Taylor, who looks after the Egyptian
mummies collection at the British Museum in London. "We have the plinths
for gold statuettes but not the statuettes themselves. They broke the gold
fittings off furniture. And we can see fingermarks inside a jar where a
robber stuffed his fingers in and scooped out a sticky mass of very valuable
scented oil."

Burton's photos document each artefact after removal from the tomb: a quick
browse of the database reveals some charming treasures – from a
leopardskin cloak with a golden head and silver claws to a collection of green and
blue draughtsmen and even a folding bed. A search for "mummy" returns 68
photos taken at various stages of the unwrapping process, from plump outer
bandages to fragile bone.

For Malek, a principal aim of the project is to bring the forgotten details
of the tomb to as many people as possible. "We felt this was important
because the discovery is so well-known," he says. "This doesn't belong to
Egyptologists only, or even to Egypt only. Everybody should have the right to
see what's there."

Taylor agrees that the failure of Egyptologists to publish the discovery in
its entirety has left the public in the dark about much of what was in the
tomb. "A lot of the objects will be very unfamiliar to people," he says.
"What is needed is for schools and people with a more general interest to
have access to the basic data and see what's there."

In this, the website appears to be succeeding. It has informed countless
school projects and even an interactive DVD being produced by the BBC to
accompany an Egypt-themed episode of Doctor Who. Semmel, the German event
promoter, has used Carter's technical diagrams to make exact replicas of many of
the treasures from Tutankhamun's tomb for an exhibition that is currently
touring Europe.

But Malek also hopes to put "moral pressure" on Egyptologists, to encourage
them to study this immensely important collection. Tutankhamun's is the
only royal tomb that we have that wasn't gutted by tomb robbers. If we want
to know what an Egyptian pharaoh took with him to the afterlife, he says,
"it's the only one we can look at". Everything in the tomb was there so that
the king could continue living in luxury, from the food he would eat and
clothes he would wear, to ceremonial items such as huge animal-headed couches
on which he would have been carried into the afterlife. "Nothing in the
tomb was accidental," says Malek. "We will not be able to understand the tomb
as a unit until all of the objects are properly explained."

Egyptologists are particularly excited about what the objects from the tomb
can tell us about the technology of the ancient Egyptians. "We can study
how these objects were made, the materials and techniques that were used,"
says Malek. "That is quite rare. There is a great difference between being
able to look at a representation of a chair on the wall of a tomb or a
temple and being able to study that particular object in reality."

Although researchers will always want to study objects directly, gaining
access to many of the most priceless items from Tutankhamun's tomb can be
difficult. Carter's archive is a useful source of back-up information. But it
also provides a lot of data that would be difficult or impossible to glean
from studying the objects today.

For a start, Carter recorded exactly where items were found in the tomb,
and how they were positioned relative to each other. This has helped
researchers to make sense of the jumble of objects in the antechamber. "It seems
like just a pile of things, but there is a system," says Malek. "You can see
what the thinking behind it was." For example, items of food should have
gone into another room but the space was too small, so at the last minute
they were placed into the antechamber.

Marianne Eaton-Krauss recently used the Griffith Institute website in a
study of how Tutankhamun was buried. "It's a mine of information," she says.
Eaton-Krauss was able to tell from Carter's excavation journal that the
innermost shrine of Tutankhamun's tomb was too small to fit properly around his
sarcophagus, suggesting that the sarcophagus had in fact been intended for
someone else – something that it is impossible to tell from the objects as
they are set up on display in Cairo.

Eaton-Krauss points out that many objects from Tutankhamun's tomb seem to
have originally belonged to other kings, and says she hopes the website will
stimulate other Egyptologists to investigate further. "If these were all
studied, it would be of great historical significance."

Also crucial for researchers is the fact that Carter and his colleagues
recorded the artefacts almost immediately after the tomb was opened. "They
were the first to see the objects, and therefore saw them in the best
condition possible," says André Veldmeijer of the PalArch Foundation in Amsterdam,
who used the website in a recent analysis of the footwear found in
Tutankhamun's tomb. This is particularly important for finds made of organic
material. One pair of leather sandals, delicately embellished with gold leaf and
coloured beads, is shown perfectly preserved in Burton's photographs, yet
Veldmeijer says his visit to the Cairo museum revealed an oozing black mess.
He describes the online archive as "one of the best things in Egyptology".

As Malek's project edges closer to completion, the Carter archive offers
researchers an unprecedented view of the collection as a whole. "What's
really interesting is to see the totality of what is in the tomb," says John
Taylor of the British Museum. "There tends to be a lot of focus on the mummies
and the jewellery, but these are just part of a complex of objects. Only
if you study the whole lot together can you see why they are there."

"You can easily compare different types of object because you have that
overview," agrees Veldmeijer. "It's a good example of how you can get so much
more from archaeological research." He is now pushing for archaeologists
working in other areas to take a similar approach, instead of leaving their
dig notes on huge collections of record cards that soon become too unwieldy
for anyone to study. Veldmeijer notes a dig at Qasr Ibrim in southern Egypt
that is recorded on 20,000 separate cards. "So many excavations have not
been properly published," he says.

Sitting in front of those grey rolling stacks, Malek tells me that after
going through every single page of Carter's excavation notes he has a new
appreciation of the archaeologist's strength of character. "He was not easy to
work with," says Malek. "He was quite often short tempered, perhaps not
always tactful. But what I find really impressive is that there was this
massive task, and in spite of all the difficulties, he finished it." Something
that Malek himself hopes to live up to within the next few months.

What killed Tutankhamun?

Tutankhamun came to the throne as a young boy and ruled for just nine years
before he died, aged 18 or so. His early demise has sparked intense
speculation about what killed him.

The mummy was first unwrapped in 1925 by Douglas Derry, an anatomist, but
the poor state of the remains meant that he was unable to suggest a cause of
death – much to Howard Carter's disappointment. In 1968, anatomist Ronald
Harrison took a series of radiographs of the mummy. Signs of trauma to the
back of the head and an unhealed broken leg led to much excitement about
whether the king had been kicked by a large beast, or even murdered. In his
1990 book The Complete Tutankhamun, the archaeologist Nicholas Reeves
suggests he was killed by his advisor Ay, who became king after Tutankhamun's
death.

Earlier this year, after x-rays and genetic analysis, Egypt's chief
archaeologist Zahi Hawass concluded that an inherited bone disorder had weakened
the king, before an attack of malaria finished him off. But German
geneticists suggested last month that the bone damage might have been caused by
sickle cell disease.

Robert Connolly, an anatomist who worked on Harrison's 1968 study, points
out that inherited disease does not account for the extensive damage that
Tutankhamun's body suffered. Connolly believes that the young king died
violently, most likely in a hunting accident.

Jo Marchant is author of Decoding the Heavens, a book about the Antikythera
mechanism