100 years after the discovery of the tomb of the boy king, a previously unpublished letter backs up long-held suspicions
Without being flippant or ignoring the thread of colonialism that very well may have fed into his actions, to me the most impactful thing here isn't that Carter could have been unscrupulous, and that items associated with him may not have had proper provenance; it's the implication that Tutankhamun's tomb could have actually been a wholly intact one, never raided before it was opened by Carter and Carnarvon.
Some Egyptologists have challenged Carter’s claim that the tomb’s treasures had been looted in antique times. In 1947, in an obscure scientific journal in Cairo, Alfred Lucas, one of Carter’s employees, reported that Carter secretly broke open the door to the burial chamber himself, before appearing to reseal it and cover the opening.
Brier said: “They were suspected of having broken into the tomb before its official opening, taking out artefacts, including jewellery, sold after their respective deaths. It’s been known that Carter somehow had items, and people have suspected that he might have helped himself, but these letters are dead proof.
“He certainly never admitted it. We don’t have any official denial. But he was locked out of the tomb for a while by the Egyptian government. There was a lot of bad feeling, and they thought he was stealing things.”
In his book, he writes that the Egyptians were unable to prove their suspicions and were convinced, for example, that Carter had been planning to steal a wooden head of Tutankhamun found in his possession: “The Egyptian authorities had entered and inspected Tomb No. 4, which Carter and the team had used for storage of antiquities, and discovered a beautiful lifesize wooden head of Tutankhamun as a youth.
“It had been packed in a Fortnum & Mason crate but it had never been mentioned in Carter’s records of the finds, nor in the volume describing the contents of the antechamber…. Carter argued that it had simply been discovered in the rubble in the descending passage.”
(Although that wouldn't necessarily explain the expensive elements of larger artifacts that were broken off or oils and unguents that are talked about as missing. They would have had commercial value as objects in ancient times but nowhere near as much significance in the 20th century.)
