In the Valley of the Kings (13 page)

Catching a thief hanging around the edges of the dig at night, Petrie remembered that “one worker held him down while I walloped him. He swore he would go to the Consul; that I had broken his leg. I let him crawl off on hands and knees some way and then, giving a great shout, rushed at him, when he ran off like a hare.” Other times the swift-footed Petrie chased the thieves into the desert jumping over irrigation ditches and canals. “A run of two to four miles is exercise valuable morally and physically,” he noted with satisfaction.

The ruins had to be saved and recorded, and the job had to be done quickly. There was no time to be scrupulous about a thief’s broken leg—or about Carter’s lack of credentials and experience. Working at a speed that would be inconceivable today, Petrie drove himself and his new assistant to the limit.

Carter was very much on his own here. All beginnings are hard,
the saying goes, but Carter’s was more difficult than most. Petrie was often remote and withdrawn, preoccupied with excavating the huge site. Carter had to build his own dwelling himself, a mud brick house at the edge of the ruins—rough quarters where he slept on palm fronds and was plagued by insects and scorpions. His command of Arabic was not yet good enough to permit him to communicate beyond basics with the workers. Deepening his sense of isolation, he had just received word from England that his father had died, but he had to put off the mourning until after he had made a few discoveries—that was what counted now.

And the discoveries did come. Slowly, it was true, but the main thing was that one by one they emerged from the huge pit (six hundred by four hundred feet and four feet deep), the finds recorded in Carter’s precise hand.

Fragment. Neck and shoulders of a figure. Fine limestone

Two hands with offering table

Mauve duck. Faience [nonceramic clay]

Leg, life size. Good stone. Fine work. Dry finish

Magician’s bronze serpent

Shoulder, bit of side. Double life size. Good stone. Fine work

Ear

Fragments of the king’s face: thick lips, long nose, feminine

breasts

Torso of the king. Pure white semi-crystalline limestone

Nefertiti, hands touching, offering flowers to the sun

There were broken glass vessels, imported Aegean pottery, scarabs, bezels of broken faience rings, some bearing royal names—the princess Meritaten, Baketaten, and Neferneferure-
tasherit
(that is,
junior
, to distinguish her from her mother, Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti Mery-Waenre).

And there were jars—small ones for eye salve; larger ones
marked honey, oil, and fat. And wine jars by the hundreds; their broken bits came up from the earth, along with their discarded seals—stamped with their day, month, and year.

There were capitals of pillars that supported the temple’s courtyard: palm leaf in form, their dazzling two-colored glazes separated by gold ribbing.

Vases were found, false necked, wide necked, and pear shaped. Bowls and jewel boxes. Amulets and whips.

Work stopped the minute there was a find. Carter climbed into the pit and had to judge how to proceed. Sometimes a delicate object would need on-the-spot conservation, without which it would turn to dust. Having the hands of an artist, Carter became known for his light touch (later, a dried floral wreath found on Tut’s coffin—a last farewell from his young wife?—survived only because of his care).

The large pieces presented different problems—the heavy, fragmented slab of a frieze with its portrait of Nefertiti on Akhenaten’s lap; or the altar table Akhenaten set up at the founding of his new capital. Moving them safely also required a skill he was beginning to acquire—God help him, he could not afford to be clumsy with Petrie just a few ancient blocks away.

The days passed to this rhythm: long periods of watchfulness followed by the sudden excitement of a find; followed in turn by the slow, painstaking process of preservation, recording, packing. Only after hours, or in the early morning before work began, could Carter relax.

Wandering among the desert cliffs, the eighteen-year-old sought the company of a group of beautiful virgins of thirty-three … centuries. For the courtiers’ tombs at Amarna were almost all virgins (in the archaeological lingo of the day)—that is, although the tombs had superbly chiseled entrances, and sarcophagus slides, and pillared chambers with friezes cut in intaglio on the plastered walls, the burials for which they were intended never occured.

On their walls, Carter could see whole the shattered faces and fragmented torsos he had been digging up. In one tomb, Akhenaten and Nefertiti rode out from the palace in gilded chariots, escorted by priests and courtiers and a heavy military bodyguard. In another, the king in the blue (khepresh) crown sacrificed to the Aten, grimacing as he severed the neck of a duck. The young princesses stood nearby, shaking the rattlelike sistrum during the sacrifice and prayer. And in all of the decorated tombs, the royal couple stood on “the balcony of appearances,” showering down golden collars to reward the tomb owners for their service: the steward Ipy #10; the general, Ramose #11; the royal secretary, Any #23; the king’s doctor, Pentu #5.

Clever, ambitious men, the courtiers abandoned Akhetaten at the death of the pharaoh, fleeing this doomed place of intellectual speculation and religious fervor. But though they returned three hundred miles south, ordering new tombs and reverting to old beliefs, even in those Theban tombs we can see that a change had taken place. Their tomb paintings displayed the new freedom of artistic expression seen everywhere at Amarna—in statue portraits of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, in the friezes from the Great Aten Temple, and most especially on a magnificent decorated pavement that Petrie uncovered one day.

So enthralled was Petrie with the discovery that from its first moments he sent away the workmen. He insisted on doing everything himself, not allowing even Carter to help.

On its painted tiles birds took flight with a vivid upward rush of motion that made the reeds tremble. Calves frolicked in the high grass and fish leapt from the waters of trompe l’oeil lakes. Amid its profusion of flowers were representations of Egypt’s enemies, Libyans, Nubians, and Asiatics, prostrate and bound.

Treading carefully on a specially constructed wooden walkway (that he himself had made), Petrie copied the scenes, though Carter, the better artist, could have produced a finer copy. While
Petrie worked, Carter sat idle for once, listening eagerly to his mentor’s ideas.

For it was worthwhile to hear Petrie conjecture, Carter wrote, even about a thistle—the thistle in this case being one drawn by the ancient artist “with admirable freedom of the branching,” as Petrie pointed out. He compared it with the lotus plant next to it, drawn “with all the formality of the stiffest Egyptian [style].”

“If one plant was naturally varied, why not the other?” Petrie asked (a question that found its way into Petrie’s publication of the pavement in Tell el Amarna in 1894).

“Here the artist’s education is seen,” Petrie deduced. “The artist had been brought up to draw the stock subject, the lotus, and he could not see it otherwise; whereas on plants to which he had not been trained, such as the thistle, he threw his full attention for copying.”

It was typical of Petrie that if he was alive to every ancient nuance, he was also alive to every modern expense. He interrupted himself to mention to Carter a forgotten detail of their arrangements: The price of Carter’s monthly ration of canned food and the paraffin lamp he had been given would be deducted from his salary. Then he returned to his all-consuming task—preserving the wonderful pavement.

Despite Petrie’s care, however, it was doomed to survive only in his copy. Word spread about the amazing find, and soon the luxurious dahabiyyas of the rich came sailing down from Cairo. The aristocrats trampled through the fields on their way to the site—what were a few pennies’ worth of sugarcane to them? Finally, one night a vengeful peasant farmer, sick of the arrogant khawagas, smashed the pavement beyond repair. Only Petrie’s copy and a few tiles remain to give us a sense of what once had been.

But still visitors continued to appear, drawn by word of another discovery: the tomb of Akhenaten found in a ravine to the east of the ancient city (a unique orientation—facing the rising, not the
setting, sun). The Service des Antiquités’ old steamer arrived among the pleasure boats. It brought Professor Archibald Henry Sayce, linguist, Egyptologist, and Assyriologist, who had come to join Petrie and Carter in their first visit to the tomb. For the discovery of the tomb, announced in Cairo, had caught even them by surprise. It was an example of the fiercely competitive politics of the time. It seemed that the French, in cahoots with locals who had been “disposing” of whatever they could sell, had known about the tomb for some years, not letting the British archaeologists in on the secret.

Indignant over French duplicity and cunning, Petrie was nevertheless as eager as a boy to visit the tomb, running ahead of his colleagues to be the first Englishman to descend into it. While Sayce copied its inscriptions, Carter sketched a scene in room gamma: Akhenaten, his wife, Nefertiti, and their entourage weep for their daughter Meketaten, who has just died in childbirth. The mourners pour dust on their heads, while in the background a royal nurse looks on as she holds the child. The scene Carter drew, more than three thousand years old, made first-page news in the
Daily Graphic
of March 23, 1892. A media craze was created over the ancient findings, though Carter privately wrote to a friend that the tomb, greatly vandalized in antiquity, was “a wash”—an opinion that may be considered a case of sour grapes, seeing as how Carter had had his heart set on discovering it since the days of the Hatnub fiasco.

But more important than the tomb from a historical point of view were the eighteen ancient letter-fragments Petrie turned up during Sayce’s visit, along with Egyptian/Akkadian word lists, or “dictionaries” (used to translate state documents into Egyptian from Akkadian, the fourteenth century
BC
language of international diplomacy). They were part of a cache discovered five years before by a peasant woman searching for fertilizer amid the ruins. As she tossed the rotting mud into her cart, she noticed something
hard in the earth—more than three hundred baked clay tablets covered in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script they were written in.

A specialist in cuneiform, Sayce had been working on the letters, difficult to translate because of the diplomatic jargon employed in their writing—words that had gone out of use even in the fourteenth century
BC
(old Babylonian formulas and logograms from Sumerian, a language that had ceased to be spoken a thousand years before Akhenaten’s reign)—not to mention scribal errors, words borrowed from Ugaritic, and unusual Canaanite constructions.

Despite all the linguistic problems, as Sayce read Petrie and Carter his first attempts, the ancient voices miraculously came alive. Taking just one letter—say, the message of Asshurbalit, king of Assyria, to Akhenaten—and putting it together with the colors of Petrie’s glazed tiles and the shapes of Carter’s fragmented statues; with bits of gilded pillars and inlays from temple walls—a moment from the court at Akhetaten magically came alive.

A letter had arrived in Egypt sometime in the 1370s
BC.
The men who carried it had crossed plains and rivers. They had navigated the Great Green (the Mediterranean) and finally made the long trip down the Nile. Great Assyrian nobles, they had vied for the honor of bearing their king’s message to Egypt’s strange new ruler.

Their very un-Egyptian appearance must have caused a stir as they made their way from the quay to the Great Palace: their long, flowing hair, their curled, perfumed beards, and the rich, heavy Assyrian state robes worn on such occasions.

The chief among them had the letter-tablet tied around his neck, its baked clay envelope stamped with the heavy royal seal.

They were kept waiting in the palace’s open courtyard. Enormous gilded pillars in the shape of papyrus stalks rose on all sides, their bud capitals opening to the sun that beat down on the Assyrian messengers. They stood amid the gifts accompanying their
king’s letter: exotic animals and gold vessels filled with perfumes; chariots, horses, and slaves, all duly recorded by pharaoh’s scribes.

What the message contained, we do not know. But what happened, now we know from the next letter Asshurbalit sends. Pharaoh had told the messengers to wait, and they obeyed. How long—one day? two? three? We can almost see them standing in the splendid courtyard, surrounded by their rich gifts, as one by one they stagger in their state robes, fall to their knees, and die.

Perplexed and offended, the Assyrian king wrote: “If staying out in the sun means profit for the pharaoh, then let my messenger stand in the sun till he dies. But there must be a profit to the king. Otherwise, why should he die in the sun?”

But this letter was ignored as well; for pharaoh, indifferent to politics, was obsessed by his great discovery—that there was only one God.

As Carter sat eavesdropping on the ancient voices, one wonders whether he was struck by the strangeness of his life. Only a little more than a year before, he was trudging through the English countryside, hustling to earn a living with his sketches of pet parrots and horses and dogs. And now the ancient world surrounded him; its rich fabric of human contradictions had become the subject of his waking hours, his preoccupation, and his passion.

But it was impossible to know Carter’s thoughts at this moment. Whatever they were, he kept them to himself. As Petrie later said, looking back on their time together at Amarna, “I little thought how much he would be able to accomplish.”