Wonderful Things: The Tomb of Tutankhamun Opens
1922 · event
After thirty-one centuries of silence and five fruitless seasons of digging, Howard Carter's water boy stumbled on a stone step in the Valley of the Kings. Weeks later, Carter widened a hole in a sealed doorway, held up a candle, and was asked if he could see anything. "Yes," he whispered. "Wonderful things."
Tutankhamun was a minor king who died at nineteen, but his was the only royal tomb the tomb-robbers of antiquity had essentially missed: five thousand objects, golden chariots, and the death mask that became the face of ancient Egypt itself.
The discovery ignited a worldwide Egyptomania that never fully cooled, and posed the question every museum still argues about: to whom does the memory of the dead belong? The boy-king, forgotten for three thousand years, is now the most famous pharaoh who ever lived.