The Tomb of young pharaoh of egypt – Tutankhamun was excavated by Howard Carter and Carnarvon. The tomb of Tutankhamun, which is today marked as KV 62, was numbered 4.33 in Howard Carter's series of discoveries since 1915. It did not take Lord Carnarvon and Carter long to realize the sheer size of the discovery and its implications. While Arthur Callender, a close friend of Carter, had been helping him, more support in clearing the tomb would certainly be needed. When, soon after the discovery, Albert Lythgoe, then Curator of the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian Department, send his congratulations and offered help. In due course, the Metropolitan Museum's generosity would be rewarded when Carter helped them acquire the Carnarvon collection.
However, within a few days, Carter received other offers of help. On December 9th Alfred Lucas, a chemist with the Egyptian Government, came forward. With him aboard, the clearance of Tutankhamun's tomb seems to have been the first ever archaeological expedition to have its own resident chemist.
Then on December 12th Arthur Mace, an Egyptologist with the Metropolitan Expedition, was also put at Carter's disposal. Six days later, James Breasted, Director of the Oriental Institute in Chicago arrived to begin work on the seal impressions which covered the plastered blockings. The Metropolitan team also provided him with Hauser and Hall, two architects who began work on drawing a plan of the objects in situ. Then, on January 3rd, Alan Gardiner, a British philologist, arrived to start work on the inscriptions.
Others would eventually join the team, including Percy Newberry, another of Carter's old friends. It became a showpiece of academic cooperation that would in time also draw in Douglas Derry of the Cairo Anatomy School, and Seleh Bey Hamdi of Alexandria to conduct the postmortem examination of the mummy, Battiscombe Gunn to work on the ostraca for the final publication, L. A. Boodle, a botanist from Kew Gardens, James R. Ogden, a Harrogate jeweler to report on aspects of the gold work, Alexander Scott and H. J. Plenderleith of the British Museum for analytical assistance, G. F. Hulme of the Geological Survey of Egypt, and others.
Part of the reason that there was so much politics surrounding the discovery and excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun was that Howard Carter was a very advanced excavator for his time. It is said that anyone else would have had the tomb cleared and the objects it contained on display within a month of the tomb's discovery, but it took Carter almost a decade to carefully preserve and remove the treasures to Cairo. The difference shows the caution with which Carter approached this undertaking, which more resembles the efforts of modern excavators.
Of course, most of the political challenges came in the first two seasons of work, creating distractions and difficulties, but afterwards, Carter and his team settled into a thorough and methodical routine, maintaining complete records for each discovery and working to preserve each antiquity as they were brought out of the tomb. The excavation used the tomb of Ramesses XI (KV4) as a storeroom for supplies and for minor finds from the stairwell and corridor, and later the tomb of Seti II (KV15) was turned into a secure field conservation laboratory and photographic studio. Also, KV55, just across the path from the Tut's tomb, was made into a darkroom for Harry Burton.
Howard Carter established a routine for processing what must have seemed like an endless flow of treasures from the tomb. Each object or group of objects was given a reference number. The main reference numbers ranged from 1 to 620.
After objects in the tomb were given reference numbers, photographs were taken of the items with and without the reference number cards. The camera was repositioned several times in order to show every object at least once in one of the shots. A brief portrayal was also provided, as well as a sketch if appropriate, on a numbered record card (by Carter or Mace), and the place of the objects discovery was located on a ground plan of the tomb (prepared by Hall and Hauser). Afterwards, the piece was removed to the laboratory for treatment by Lucas and Mace, where more photographs were made. After the conservation of the object was completed, a further photograph was made. This routine was carried out for many thousands of objects, over several seasons, sometimes in sweltering heat, and under pressure from the press, who were soon complaining about the excessive time the clearance was taking. There was also a constant flow of visitors to the tomb, including some 12,000 at the height of the King Tut hysteria between January 1 and March 15th, 1926.
Clearance of the Antechamber was begun on December 27th 1922. It took seven weeks to finish, and used up more than a mile of cotton wadding and 32 bales of calico to secure the objects. Afterwards, and at the end of each successive season, the objects were crated up with extreme care using hundreds of feet of timber, and transported to the Nile river using the human powered Decauville (narrow gauge) railway. Though only a relatively short distance, the train track was not permanent and Carter was given only a meager number of rail-lengths that had to be constantly "leapfrogged", so it took some 15 hours to move the train to the river during the heat of the summer months.
Only the gold coffin and mask were not transported by river. They were conveyed by a train in a special "Service Car" with an armed guard from the Egyptian army.
At the end of each season, for security against not only theft but also floods, the tomb entrance was covered over with a watertight wooden blocking erected over a wooden portcullis, and guarded by a local policeman.
