Discovering King Tut: Heritage Key's Video Series with Earl and Countess Carnarvon at Highclere Castle

Submitted by MalcolmJ on Mon, 02/22/2010 - 15:23

Lord Carnarvon and his wife Lady Almina on a visit to Egypt in 1921. The fifth and final instalment of Discovering King Tut has now been posted on Heritage Key. It signed off the fantastic videos series – based around an exclusive interview with George and Fiona Herbert, Earl and Countess of Carnarvon, at their Highclere Castle home – with an illuminating look at some of the treasures from the boy king’s tomb that George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon and financier of the Tutankhamun tomb investigation, was able to view before his untimely death in 1923.

With all of Discovering King Tut – totalling almost half an hour of footage – now up online and ready to view, we figured it would be a good idea to put together a single round-up of the films in one handy blogpost. They’ve together yielded all kinds of fascinating, funny, strange, sad and sensational insights into the Tutankhamun tomb exploration. We’ve learned about all from the unique relationship Carnarvon and archaeologist Howard Carter shared, to the significance of the beautiful wall-paintings that covered the walls of KV62, the scandal in Carnarvon’s family that inadvertently helped keep cash for his dig flowing, and the tragic circumstances surrounding the aristocrat’s premature demise.

The exceptional educational content of these videos is plain to see, and they should prove a valuable learning tool for students of King Tut and the discovery and examination of his incredible tomb in the Valley of the Kings, not to mention the lives of the two remarkable men who brought its glittering contents to the world.

Part 1: Carter & Carnarvon

Carter and Carnarvon were from very different walks of life – the former was a working class lad out of a job and down on his luck; the latter was a monied, upper-class adventurer. Yet they forged a unique bond that would prove integral to history’s greatest archaeological success story. “The whole discovery of Tutankhamun needed both ingredients to make it work,” George Herbert explains in part one. “It wasn’t all Howard Carter, certainly not only Carnarvon. But it needed the two of them.”

A student of pioneering archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie, Carter brought much needed expertise and experience to Carnarvon’s expedition in Egypt. Carnarvon, meanwhile, backed the enterprise with intrepid spirit, passion and gusto, not to mention ludicrous sums of lucre. Herbert explains how the aristocrat shipped hundreds of tents, many tonnes of food and even the very bricks for Carter’s rest house direct from England to the Valley of the Kings. No expense was spared. When a vase with Tut’s name on it surfaced, Carter had the scent of an incredible find. Carnarvon’s investment was set to come good.

Part 2: Interior Decorating With Tutankhamun

One of the most-dazzling – and little documented – sights that greeted Carter and Carnarvon when they broke into Tut’s tomb in 1922 was the incredible set of wall paintings that adorned so much of the wall space inside KV62. Fiona Herbert, the 8th Countess of Carnarvon, and her husband, are themselves so enamoured with the spectacular artwork that they’ve had it replicated in the bowels of Highclere. In part two, the Countess – an author of two books on the Tut tale: Carnarvon & Carter and Egypt at Highclere: The Discovery of Tutankhamun – explains the meanings behind some of the paintings.

“They were in yellow because the tomb was thought to be the house of gold, the house of eternity,” Lady Carnarvon explains. Tutankhamun is shown in white, the colour of mourning. Black lines running along the top of panels represent the divide between earth and heaven – a divide Tut crossed with various gods at his back, including the deity of mummification Anubis, who in one picture is shown laying a comforting hand on the young pharaoh’s shoulder. “These walls and all these paintings are about guidance and protection,” adds Lady Carnarvon, “and because he was a pharaoh it’s reinforced many, many times over.”

Part 3: Lord Carnarvon’s Adventurous Life

“There is a bit of an Indiana Jones style to that portrait there of my great grandfather, and it perhaps sums up some of the character,” comments George Herbert of one of the many pictures of a dashing-looking 5th Early of Carnarvon that hang in his former home Highclere House, in part three of Discovering King Tut. Carnarvon had adventure in his blood – he was excited by aviation, and aided the famous aeronautics pioneer Geoffrey de Havilland in his work. He loved automobiles too, and was nearly killed when he crashed one at high speed in Germany in 1901.

Carnarvon lived an opulent life in various large homes around England, but as we discover, there was a side to him that craved foreign lands and experiences too. Egypt – where he went to recover after his car accident – became his new fascination, and he began to pour all of his energy and resources into paying archaeologists such as Carter to investigate ancient sites.

Herbert reveals how a scandal in the family helped Carnarvon to finance his new passion. His wife Almina Wombwell was secretly the illegitimate daughter of banking tycoon Alfred de Rothschild. Rothschild quietly doted on his Almina, and gave her and her husband untold riches to plough into their shared ambition to make a find of world-renown in the Egyptian desert.

Part 4: Carnarvon’s Tragic Death

The so-called Curse of Tutankhamun – which is said to kill off all who tamper with the boy king’s tomb – is patently a load of nonsense. But in other, more mundane ways, Tut was the architect of Carnarvon’s demise. Already a frail man after his car accident, Carnarvon’s passion for the boy king’s tomb gradually sapped his strength as it became all-consuming. The tall, frail aristocrat had heated run-ins with the press and politicians, as excitement over the glittering contents of KV62 reached fever-pitch back in England. Likewise, Carter struggled too. “They were both exhausted by the time the tomb was opened,” says Countess Carnarvon in part four.

After a battle with septicaemia – brought about by an untreated mosquito bite – then another with pneumonia, Carnarvon finally succumbed to ill-health in April 1923, aged just 56. Worse still, the once wildly-wealthy earl’s Egyptian adventure had sapped almost all of his finances too. “By the time he died,” says the Countess, “he had spent his fortune out there.”

Ever loyal to his friend and colleague, Howard Carter continued to work for Carnarvon’s widow Almina until 1930, carefully removing, recording and documenting every artefact from the tomb. But without the savvy mind of Lord Carnarvon to fight off the politicians, not one of Tut’s treasures ever made it back to Britain, nor was compensation paid to his estate. Perhaps the saddest part of all in the tragic sting to this tale was the fact that Carnarvon died without ever having had a chance to see such dazzling centerpiece objects as the Golden Death Mask or the Golden Throne.

Part 5: The Artefacts

Even if Carnarvon never got a chance to witness them, what has been the legacy of the many gorgeous items found inside the tomb of Tutankhamun? For one thing, they’ve taught us a heck of a lot about the boy king himself.

As Countess Carnarvon explains in part five, KV62 didn’t actually escape robbery altogether as is sometimes said – as much as 60% of the jewellery in the tomb was stolen during ancient times. The fact that KV62 evaded further plundering came down to – besides a large slice of luck (see Zahi Hawass explain more about the here) – the fact that he was a relatively obscure figure in the grand scheme of ancient Egypt. For all our enthusiasm for him over 3,000 years on, Tut was in fact quite a minor pharaoh who died after just a few years of rule, and that’s why no one went in search of his tomb before Carter and Carnarvon.

Engravings on the king’s chest – a replica of which, among many other artefacts, the Carnarvon’s have in their basement at Highclere – tells us a bit about the gung-ho spirit of Tut. Perhaps this was the very thing that brought about his untimely demise, if he really did suffer a fatal wound from falling from a chariot, as some believe? “He’s wrapping the reins round his waist,” says Lady Carnarvon, pointing to an image of Tut riding a chariot, “which looks blooming dangerous to me!” The pharaoh is shown crushing two of Egypt’s greatest enemies – the Hittites, who threatened from the north, and the Nubians who loomed to the south. It’s doubtful he ever actually fought them in his lifetime, “but maybe this was a representation of what he would have done,” Lady Carnarvon suggests.

Precious inlays on the back-panel of the Golden Throne, meanwhile, speak of a more humble quality of Tutankhamun’s – his love for his wife, Ankhesenamun. “He wasn’t a great general,” says Lady Carnarvon, “just a boy who’d married a girl.”

Check out Tutankhamun’s tomb – and some of the incredible discoveries made within it by Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter – first hand in Heritage Key’s King Tut Virtual.