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Chapter 1: What is the significance of Tutankhamun's tomb discovery?
OP Henkivakuutus on hyvä valinta elämäsi tilanteisiin. Luo taloudellista turvaa läheisillesi ja hyödynnä Osuuspankin omistaja-asiakkaan 25% alennus. Lisäetu vahvistetaan vuosittain. Vakuutuksen myöntää OP Henkivakuutus Oy, jonka asiamiehinä Osuuspankit ja Pohjola Vakuutus toimivat.
Hei, täällähän onkin vanhoja juomatuttuja. Morjens!
Ei olla koskaan nähty.
Eikö? No keitä te sitten ootte?
Me ollaan uutuusjuomii.
Jaha. No mistä te tuutte sitten?
No S-Marketista tietysti. Elämä on ruokaa. S-Market.
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Chapter 2: What were the initial reactions to the discovery of King Tut's tomb?
Hello. Hello. Abandon hope. All you who are here.
I'm so excited. I'm pretty excited as well. There's nothing I love more than a big fucking old and timey scary pasto Egyptian.
And that's exactly what we've got for you. And we're going to kick off with a quote that I'm going to read to you. With trembling hands, I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner. Darkness and blank space as far as an iron testing rod could reach showed that whatever lay beyond was empty, not filled like the passage we'd just cleared.
Candle tests were applied as a precaution against possible foul gases, and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in, Lord Cavarnon, Lady Evelyn and Calendar standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict.
At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist. Strange animals, statues, and gold. Everywhere the glint of gold.
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Chapter 3: Who was Howard Carter and what was his role in the excavation?
Those are the words of Howard Carter, the man responsible for the greatest archaeological find in history, the tomb of Tutankhamun, pharaoh, god-king and child-ruler of the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt. But... Almost as soon as the discovery was made, rumours started swirling in the press that the tomb was never meant to be found and that everyone involved was in danger.
of the curse of Tutankhamun. And then, a few months later, the expedition's main financial backer was found dead. And as for what killed him, if you believe the rumours, it was the little pharaoh himself claiming revenge against those who had disturbed his body. And this is the shorthand.
Yeah!
Now, before we get into the really exciting stuff about pharaohs and their curses, we need to set the scene. Who was Howard Carter? Well, in a refreshing turn of events for us at Red Handed, he seems to have been a pretty decent man. Oh, that's nice. It is nice. It's nice that when that happens.
Yeah.
Born in 1874, Carter was the youngest of 11 siblings, the son of artist and illustrator Samuel John Carter and his wife Martha.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Carter face during his archaeological career?
Despite coming from relative affluence, Howard Carter didn't really receive much of a formal education, probably because he was the youngest of 11, and he was mostly into art and adventure. As a teenager, Howard was a regular visitor to Didlington Hall, a mansion owned by the wealthy Amherst family. And Sean Combs. No. I'm kidding. Oh, right. It's because his nickname's The Diddler. Oh, right.
I just thought he'd bought this. No, no, no, no. No, he's in jail. That's true. This family, the Amherst family, not Sean Combs, though maybe he is, they were known to be collectors of Egyptian antiquities. And this sparked a curiosity into all things ancient and Egyptian for the young Howard Carter.
And when he showed his considerable artistic talent to Lady Amherst, she organised for him to be sent to Egypt to help a family friend excavate and record archaeological finds.
Chapter 5: What led to the belief in Tutankhamun's curse?
Saying he showed his considerable artistic talent to Lady Amherst makes it sound like he flashed her. Unconfirmed. Don't fact check.
Lady Amherst's artist flasher.
By the age of 25, Carter had been appointed Inspector of Monuments of Upper Egypt for the Egyptian Antiquities Service, and he was instrumental in the exploration of the Valley of the Kings. The Valley of the Kings is every bit as exciting as it sounds.
It's a set of valleys and hills in Luxor in northern Egypt, in which the new kingdom of ancient Egypt buried its leaders and high-ranking officials. As inspector of monuments, Carter revolutionised archaeology by introducing a new systematic method of exploration, as well as improving the protection of excavated ruins and making them more accessible to archaeologists.
Carter kept this prestigious appointment for five whole years until the Saqqara affair, which, despite its romantic name, was actually a messy, violent confrontation between a group of French tourists in the Valley of the Kings and the Egyptian guards who were employed to protect the site.
The tourists were being disrespectful to both the archaeological sites they were visiting and the guards themselves. Although it's not explicitly noted, it's widely assumed that the tourists were being racist towards the Egyptian guards when they couldn't have their way and things turned violent.
The French government got involved, Howard Carter backed the guards in the official investigation, and he ended up unemployed in Egypt for several years. So, with nothing else to do, Carter sold watercolours and sketches on the Valley of the Kings just to make ends meet.
If you're waiting for me to make a derisive comment about French people, I'm not taking the bait. Luckily for Carter, and archaeology on the whole, he didn't stay unemployed forever.
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Chapter 6: What were the reported deaths connected to the curse of King Tut?
In 1907, Carter was recommended to George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon. Herbert was wealthy and obsessed with ancient Egypt. So the pair struck up a partnership, working together to hunt down and excavate tombs across Egypt. The pair were responsible for some considerable finds. And Carter's dedication to preservation means that many of those pieces are still viewable to this day.
But by 1922, the pair had been working together for 15 years and the discoveries were dwindling. There was a growing sentiment across the archaeological community that everything that could be found in the Valley of the Kings had been found already.
there was actually some pretty sound reasoning behind this conclusion. Archaeologists had a reasonably good idea of the lineage of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, especially in the New Kingdom, which was the time when the Valley of the Kings was used, and they were pretty sure that they tracked down tombs for all of them.
Plus, it wasn't just modern-day explorers tracking down and carefully chronicling these tombs. Tomb raiders had been ransacking them for centuries. Still, Howard Carter did have a hunch that there might be one more tomb lurking down there somewhere. Tutankhamun wasn't a particularly well-known name within Egyptology at the time.
His burial had actually already been accounted for quite some time ago, but it had never quite satisfied Carter. At a previous site, some ceremonial offerings had been found with Tutankhamun's name inscribed on them, but they'd never found a body.
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Chapter 7: How did the media influence the narrative of the curse?
For the wider community, this was enough to call it a day. But Carter suspected this wasn't everything that had been laid down for the pharaoh.
Regardless, George Herbert was ready to pull the plug on any more excavations. He'd spent a fortune over the last decades, and the finds weren't coming in as hot and fast as they once had. However, Howard Carter convinced him to give him one more year, or a season, in Egypt. And they called them seasons because Egypt is really, really hot so you can only dig for a small portion of the year.
Carter had systematically gone over almost the entirety of the Valley of the Kings, in some cases more than once. But he was a completionist, and there was one last site that they hadn't looked into. A collection of ruined huts that had been used by ancient Egyptian labourers, the ones who'd built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Wasn't much, but it was worth a look.
And it's a testament to the long-standing friendship between the two men that Herbert agreed to finance Carter's one last season, so that Carter could leave feeling satisfied. Egypt completed.
Carter's final season in the Valley of the Kings began earlier than normal, on the 1st of November 1922. A lot had changed over the 16 years that he'd been working with Herbert. For a start, Egypt was now an independent country.
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Chapter 8: What was found inside Tutankhamun's tomb and why is it important?
This wasn't a big deal for Carter. He got on well with his Egyptian peers. In fact, he'd lost his job to back them. However, it did make archaeology in Egypt a lot more complicated than when it had been under British occupation. Mostly because Egypt wanted to keep a proportion of what was found, which is fair enough.
The other big challenge was Egypt had done a great job of bolstering its economy with tourism, which made excavations a lot more difficult. And that was one of the reasons that they'd started their season off so early.
Pretty quickly into this final excavation, Howard Carter's feeling that there was more to be found was validated. On the 4th of November, a stone step was found near the ancient workers' huts. Some say that this step was found by a worker on the dig, others say it was found by an Egyptian boy who was playing nearby. Either way, it was a big deal.
The step was unearthed, and another step was found, then another, and so on, until a stone staircase was revealed that led down to the entrance of a tomb. From the outside, this tomb was not all that remarkable. It was smaller than you would expect for a pharaoh, more likely for some sort of dignitary instead.
Or a boy king who doesn't need that much room.
Actually, the tomb seemed so unimportant that it had been covered thousands of years ago, when workers building another tomb had just chucked dirt over the entrance. and that dirt chucking had kept it hidden for about 3,000 years.
Once the plaster door was fully uncovered, Carter cut a small hole and peered through. On the other side was a big pile of rubble. Not exactly what he'd been hoping for, but it looked interesting enough to warrant a look. So he ordered the staircase to be covered and sent a telegram to Herbert in the UK, asking him to get over there pronto.
Because it was the olden times and Uber hadn't been invented yet, it took Herbert 19 days to arrive. By which point Carter had recruited another of his friends to come along. This man was called Arthur Callender. And he was always on time.
In reality, the only reason we're including Arthur is A, to make that joke, and B, because Carter mentions him in that opening paragraph, and we didn't want you to think that we'd missed out someone important.
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