There were several compelling stories in Vanity Fair’s remembrance of the Met’s landmark 1978 Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit: the fragile collaboration between Met head Thomas P. F. Hoving and National Gallery head J. Carter Brown, the international political intrigues that inspired and then complicated execution, and the way this modestly scaled show, with just fifty-five artifacts and a catalog the size of a comic book, became the first stand-in-line museum blockbuster. But the finest story is how Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. The moment he located its entrance, Carter stopped work and summoned his patron, Lord Carnarvon, from England, and photographer Harry Burton, who was in the country working for National Geographic. Only after Carnarvon arrived, two and a half weeks later, did Carter open the tomb. Burton photographed progress systematically, on that momentous day and then over the next eight years, as the team moved deeper into the mortuary. There are, in his collection of 1,847 photographs, archived at the Ashmoleon Museum, a record of the mortuary’s architecture, of all the objects recovered, and of the archaeologists at work.
The photographs have a romantic soft, silvery glow that many early twentieth-century photographs, with long exposure times, have, as well as a stunning formal directness. A photograph was a precious thing then, and each shot is composed deliberately by setting one or more very important things at the center of the frame. We see the slender stone passage at the entrance to the crypt, which has no apparent end. We see the the suburban-basement clutter of the antechamber, piled high with wooden chests, chariot wheels, alabaster vases, gilded furniture, and statues. We see the king’s tomb resting alone in the burial chamber, a stone monolith wrapped in clouds of cuneiform. We see, inside the tomb, a garland of tiny, pill-sized blossoms, which crumbled when Carter reached to remove it. And we see a peon – one of the boys that might have fixed tea for Carter and his team – modeling the king’s necklace. Tutankhamun ascended to the throne when he was nine years old and died when he was eighteen. The boy in the photograph, who looks as if he is nine or ten, wears a white cotton gown and turban that set off his dark skin dramatically, and a gentle, solemn expression, as if he’s reluctantly but obligingly making believe. This photograph brings to life more vividly than all the treasures that Tutankhamun was a boy, an African, and a king.
