The Staircase Under the Huts

At about ten o’clock on 4 November 1922, Howard Carter found a stair. It was not grand. It was a single cut in the bedrock, discovered beneath almost the first of the rough stone huts his men were removing in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. The step lay about four metres below the entrance to the much later tomb of Ramesses VI. Carter did not yet know whose staircase it was. He knew only that its shape belonged to an older kind of royal tomb.

The discovery that made Tutankhamun famous began as an obstruction being cleared away.

The last place left to look

Carter had been searching the Valley for years, backed by George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon. By the autumn of 1922, this was supposed to be his final effort. The valley had been excavated repeatedly, and the obvious ground had acquired the discouraging familiarity of a room searched for lost keys.

There was one reason not to stop. Near the tomb of Ramesses VI lay a heap of flint boulders in an older layer of ground. Carter thought the stones might be the sort used to fill the entrance to an Egyptian tomb. Above them stood the rough huts of the workmen who had built Ramesses’s tomb. If those workers had put their houses over an earlier burial, they had accidentally hidden it. Carter’s decision was not a flash of inspiration so much as an unwillingness to leave one patch of ground unexplained.

On 1 November he set his Egyptian staff to clearing the huts. Carter later recalled that about 120 men and boys began the work. On the fourth morning, beneath almost the first hut attacked, the staircase appeared. His diary entry for that day is notably restrained: “First steps of tomb found.” The sentence has the compressed calm of someone recording a fact before he permits himself to understand it.

The staircase descended into the rock. By the following evening, the excavation had reached the twelfth step and exposed the upper part of a plastered, sealed doorway. The seals showed the jackal god Anubis above nine bound enemies, a sign of the royal necropolis. Carter made a small hole beneath a wooden lintel and shone an electric torch through it. Beyond was a passage filled from floor to ceiling with stone and rubble.

Then he closed the hole again.

That pause is one of the most revealing acts in the story. Carter was close enough to look, but not yet entitled to destroy the evidence in order to satisfy his curiosity. He searched the seals for the name of the owner and found no clear impression. The door looked intact, but “intact” was only an appearance. He needed Carnarvon, witnesses, and a method.

A tomb that had already been visited

The famous image of Tutankhamun’s tomb is a room sealed for three thousand years, waiting without interruption for a British archaeologist. The real tomb was more interesting and less perfect.

When the first doorway was opened on 25 November, the passage beyond was still blocked with rubble. The blocking showed evidence of more than one filling and reopening. Ancient thieves had entered the outer parts of the tomb, taken what they could, and left the officials of the necropolis to repair the damage. The burial chamber and its nested shrines were in a far better state, but the complex was not an untouched time capsule. It was a place that had survived an early burglary, a hurried restoration, and then a second burial beneath the debris of later work.

That repair may have helped preserve it. The robbers had disturbed the entrance but had not emptied the tomb. The passage was filled again. Centuries accumulated over it. Then the huts of Ramesses VI’s builders rose above the hidden staircase, and more rubble covered the huts. The tomb was not invisible. It was concealed by layers of ordinary activity.

On 26 November, Carter made a breach in the second sealed doorway. Lord Carnarvon was present. Carter wrote that he first saw a mass of objects: gold-covered furniture, chariots, statues, caskets and ebony. Carnarvon asked whether he could see anything. Carter answered, “Yes, wonderful things.” The phrase has become the polished caption for the discovery, but the room itself was not polished. Objects were piled, collapsed, broken and pressed together. The work ahead would be less like opening a treasure chest than disentangling a roomful of history without losing its order.

The room was not the discovery

The first look lasted seconds. The excavation lasted nearly a decade.

The tomb contained four chambers, including an antechamber crowded with furniture, a burial chamber enclosed by gilded shrines, a treasury, and an annex in which oils, food, wine, furniture and ritual objects had been packed into an almost impossible store-room. The contents amounted to almost 5,400 individual objects. Every object had to be photographed, described, stabilised, removed and matched to its position in the room.

Harry Burton’s photographs made the excavation legible to people who could not enter the valley. His glass negatives recorded objects in place and then in the improvised laboratory where they were cleaned and conserved. The camera turned a sequence of slow, careful operations into the visual adventure the newspapers wanted. It also created a misleading cast list. Carter and Carnarvon are easy to name. The Egyptian workers who carried, sorted, repaired and cleared the tomb are much harder to see as individuals.

The surviving photographs often show them as anonymous figures at the edge of the frame. The Metropolitan Museum identifies four Egyptian foremen who worked closely with Carter: Ahmed Gerigar, Hussein Ahmed Said, Gad Hussein and Hussein Abu Awa. Their labour was indispensable, yet the period’s archaeological storytelling placed the director at the centre and treated the workforce as scenery. A discovery made by a large team became, in memory, the achievement of one man looking through a hole.

The objects changed more than a biography. Tutankhamun had ruled Egypt for only about nine years, and his reign had left a comparatively faint mark on the historical record. His tomb did what his political career had not: it made a small, damaged window into the New Kingdom impossible to ignore. Because the burial was substantially intact, it preserved not only luxury but arrangement, wear, repair, improvisation and the material habits of a royal funeral.

Buried in plain sight

The tomb survived for a reason that sounds almost comic after the fact. A later king’s builders put their huts over it, and the valley’s accumulated debris hid both huts and entrance. The greatest archaeological find of the twentieth century was protected not by a perfect seal but by construction waste, an inconvenient slope and the fact that one excavation had been built on top of another.

Carter’s achievement was not simply that he found gold. It was that he treated the unpromising layer as evidence. The huts were not rubble in the way a hurried digger might have understood rubble. They were a clue to what the valley had forgotten, and to how one generation can bury another without intending to.

The staircase was therefore both an entrance and a lesson in visibility. History does not always disappear into remote places. Sometimes it remains directly under the footprints of the people who came later, waiting for someone to ask why the obstruction is there.