Howard Carter peered into Tutankhamun's tomb and saw "wonderful things"
On this day · 26 November 1922
On November 26, 1922, Carter cut a small breach in a sealed doorway and glimpsed a pharaoh's untouched golden hoard.
On November 26, 1922, the archaeologist Howard Carter stood in a Valley of the Kings corridor and, with a chisel, made a tiny breach in the top corner of a sealed doorway. Lord Carnarvon, his patron, waited behind him in the heat and the dust.
Carter held a candle to the hole. As warm air made the flame flicker, shapes resolved out of the dark: gilded couches, chests, the glint of gold. Carnarvon, unable to bear the silence, asked whether Carter could see anything.
“Yes, wonderful things.”
What Carter had reached was the antechamber of Tutankhamun, a boy-king dead some 3,300 years. The sealed burial chamber itself, guarded by two life-size statues, would not be opened until February 1923, and clearing the roughly 5,000 objects inside took nearly a decade. Yet that candlelit moment is the one history kept: a sliver of gold seen through a hole the size of a fist.
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