In the valley of the kings Howard Carter and the mystery of King Tutankhamun's tomb

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Meyerson (The Linguist and the Emperor) delves into the career and psyche of Howard Carter, the British archeologist who in 1922 discovered the 3,300-year-old gold- and jewel-laden tomb of the boy king Tut. Lower-class and lacking a formal education, Carter worked with his father, a painter of animal portraits for the aristocracy. He was discovered and hired in 1892 by the Egyptian Exploration Fund to copy paintings, ancient inscriptions and friezes in Egypt's dark tombs. Carter debuted as an excavator under the tutelage of Flinders Petrie, the single-minded father of modern archeology, at Amarna, the capital of Tut's father. Intense, irascible, brooding and obsessed, Carter searched for Tut for seven years, funded by the fifth earl of Carnarvon, a bon vivant millionaire who came to excavations with fine china and table linens and who died from septic poisoning after nicking a mosquito bite while shaving. Although Meyerson favors a playful writing style that can be intrusive and rambling, his work is also well researched and entertaining, and brings to life the ancient pharaohs and their tumultuous reigns as well as the excavators who disturbed their eternal sleep. Photos. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

The subtitle here is misleading: Meyerson devotes only a small portion of his narrative to the discovery and clearance of Tutankhamun's tomb, with no suggestion of a mystery. Instead, he focuses on Howard Carter's early career and his eventual partnership with Lord Carnarvon, which led to their excavating in the Valley of the Kings. The reader is introduced to late 19th- and early 20th-century Egypt, when scientific excavation was in its infancy. Ancient Egypt is Meyerson's avocation (his M.A. is in comparative literature), and he writes in a popular style for the nonspecialist. Unfortunately, there are a number of inaccuracies, e.g., Upper Egypt did not include Nubia, a foreign land that came under Egyptian control when Egypt was strong; "upriver" on the Nile is south toward its source, not north; and the approach to Hatshepsut's temple was not "sphinx-lined" when Carter worked there. An optional choice for general readers, who might prefer Thomas Hovings's 1978 tell-all Tutankhamun: The Untold Story. (Most illustrations, map, family trees, and index not seen.)-Edward K. Werner, St. Lucie Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Pierce, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A sprightly look at the grand era of tomb plundering. Meyerson (The Linguist and the Emperor: Napoleon and Champollion's Quest to Decipher the Rosetta Stone, 2004, etc.) presents an enjoyable portrait of the megalomaniacal British artist and antiquities excavator Howard Carter (18741939), whose discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922 became the greatest find in the fabled Valley of the Kings and marked the culmination of years of dogged work and punishing setbacks. In Meyerson's digressive study, which dashes erratically among the movements of the various players, Carter emerges as an irascible, determined, brilliant man who truly cherished the ancient art and artifacts he unearthedthat they also fetched a good price on the antiquities market was certainly appealing as well. A largely uneducated son of a working-class family, Carter learned to sketch and paint from his artist father, and got his break at age 17 when he was sent to Egypt to work as an apprentice copyist at the Beni Hasan tombs under the aegis of William Flinders Petrie, "the father of modern archaeology." Meyerson embarks on a dizzying exegesis of the reign of renegade pharaoh Akhenatonwho ruled during the 1300s BCE and was married to Nefertitihis son Tut and their mutable entombments. The author also scrolls through the nascent field of Egyptology. Only after his partnership with his wealthy patron Lord Carnarvon did Carter finally make his life's discovery. The many years prior were plagued by fruitless digging, a world war and the suspicionby everyone but Carterthat the Valley of the Kings had already been exhausted of its booty. Even after the Tut discovery, Carter was denied access and credit. Meyerson makes a valiant case for this strange, compelling character in a breezy gambol through the annals of Egyptology. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter One New Year's Day 1901 Deir el-Bahri, Southern Egypt Everyone who was anyone was in the desert that day. an excited crowd had gathered beneath the stark cliffs that rose dramatically behind the two ancient temples. One was dedicated to the soul of Queen Hatshepsut, 1550 bc, and the even older one next to it, Mentuhotep I's, had stood there in the relentless sun for four thousand years. It was a place of great desolation and silence. Behind the temples towered the lifeless cliffs; and before them, the blinding white sand stretched endlessly to meet the empty sky. Djeser djeseru, the ancients called it, the holy of holies, the dwelling place of Meret?singer, the cobra goddess: She Who Loves Silence. And it was here that the noisy crowd descended, chattering, speculating, filled with the nervous restlessness of modernity. In search of sensation, treasure, beauty--how could the goddess bear them as she watched from her barren heights? First and foremost was the British viceroy, Lord Cromer, a man whose word was law in Egypt. He'd dropped everything, leaving Cairo in the midst of one of Egypt's endless crises. After ordering his private train, he'd traveled five hundred miles south, then taken a boat across the Nile, and then a horse-drawn calèche out toward the desert valley. The price of Egyptian cotton had plummeted on the world market, pests were ravaging the crops, and starvation stalked the countryside. But what did that matter next to the fact that a royal tomb had been discovered? After months of laborious excavation, the diggers had finally reached the door of a burial chamber with its clay seals still intact--and His Lordship wanted to be present at the opening. As did an assortment of idle princes, pashas, and high-living riffraff from the international moneyed scene . . . along with the usual hangers-on of the very rich: practitioners of the world's oldest profession. Which in Egypt didn't refer to--to what it usually does, but meant grave robbers (or archaeologists, as they are more politely known). To dig with any success ("to excavate," in the polite lingo), one needed knowledge. And one needed money--a great deal of it. Thus, they often came in pairs, the archaeologists and their sugar daddies. There were famous "couples"--inseparables for all their differences of temperament and background. For example, looking back on turn-of-the-century Egyptology, can one think of the American millionaire Theodore Davis apart from the young Cambridge scholar Edward Ayrton? Together they discovered a long list of tombs and burial shafts, Pharaoh Horemheb's, Pharaoh Siptah's, and "the golden tomb" (KV #56)* among them. As well as the mysterious Tomb Kings Valley #55--and the animal tombs (#50, #51, and #52): the mummified and bejeweled pets of Amenhotep II. The beloved crea- * The tombs in the Valley of the Kings are numbered from one to sixty-two. The general rule is that tombs with lower numbers have either lain open since antiquity or were discovered earlier than those higher in the sequence. The tombs in the adjoining valleys (the Valley of the Queens, the Nobles, the West Valley, and Deir el-Bahri) are referred to by their own numbering sequences. DB #320, for example, refers to tomb number 320 from the Deir el-Bahri sequence. It is to John Gardner Wilkinson that we owe the numbering system still in use. In the 1820s and 1830s, Wilkinson lived in Gurna, at the edge of the Valley of the Kings, where he studied those tombs that were accessible and devised his numbering system. tures had been stripped of their jewelry by ancient robbers who had even decided to create a "joke"--perhaps the oldest in existence--leaving pharaoh's monkey and dog face-to-face. Which was how Davis and Ayrt Excerpted from In the Valley of the Kings: Howard Carter and the Mystery of King Tutankhamun's Tomb by Daniel Meyerson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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