Now an accusation that Carter was handling property “undoubtedly stolen from the grave” emerged in an unpublished letter sent to him in 1934 by an eminent British scholar as part of his own excavation team. It was written by Sir Alan Gardiner, a leading philologist. Carter had enlisted Gardiner to translate hieroglyphics found in the 3,300-year-old tomb and later gave him a “whm amulet,” used for offerings to the dead, assuring him that it had not come from the tomb. Gardiner showed the amulet to Rex Engelbach, then the British director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and was disappointed to be told that it had indeed come from the tomb, as it matched other examples – all made from the same mould. Sending a letter to Carter, he enclosed Engelbach’s guilty verdict, which reads: “The whm amulet you showed me has undoubtedly been stolen from Tutankhamen’s tomb.” Gardiner told Carter, “I am deeply sorry that I have been put in such an awkward position.” But he added: “Of course I didn’t tell Engelbach that I got the amulet from you.” The letters, now in a private collection, will be published in a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World Its author, Bob Brier, a leading Egyptologist at Long Island University, told the Observer that suspicions of Carter helping himself to treasure have long been rumored: “But now there’s no doubt about it.” This year marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery by Carter and his financial backer, Lord Carnarvon, of the boy king’s tomb, filled with thrones, chariots and thousands of items needed in the next world. Over the next decade, Carter oversaw their removal and transport down the Nile to Cairo for display at the Egyptian Museum. Howard Carter at the entrance to an Egyptian archaeological site in 1923. (Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images Some Egyptologists have disputed Carter’s claim that the tomb’s treasures had been looted in ancient times. In 1947, in an obscure scholarly journal in Cairo, Alfred Lucas, one of Carter’s employees, reported that Carter secretly opened the door to the burial chamber himself, before appearing to reseal it and cover the opening. Brier said: “They were suspected of breaking into the tomb before its official opening, taking out objects, including jewellery, which were sold after their deaths. It is known that Carter somehow had items and people suspected that he might have helped himself, but these letters are dead proof. “He certainly never admitted it. We have no 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 planned to steal a wooden head of Tutankhamun found in his possession: “Egyptian authorities had entered and inspected the tomb of Ar . 4, which Carter and the team had used to store antiquities, and discovered a beautiful, life-size wooden head of Tutankhamun when he was young. “It was packed in a Fortnum & Mason crate, but was never mentioned in Carter’s records of the finds, nor in the volume describing the contents of the vestibule…. Carter maintained that it had merely been discovered in the ruins in the descending passage.’ Brier said: “Later, we find objects in the Egyptian antiquities market from his estate that clearly came from the tomb.” Some ended up in museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which announced in 2010 that it would send back to Egypt 19 objects it acquired between the 1920s and 1940s because they “can be confidently attributed to Tutankhamun’s tomb.” . In his 1992 book on Carter, the late Harry James drew on Carter’s letters to Oxford University’s Griffith Institute, which refer to a dispute with Gardiner that led to the return of a talisman to Cairo. The significance of the hitherto unpublished correspondence is that the accusation came from a leading expert who was actually involved in the first excavation. Carter would have a hard time challenging Engelbach, who had “too much power and really knew his stuff,” Brier said.
