In August 1951, a crate containing twenty-four photograph albums arrived at Southampton on the S.S. Queen Elizabeth – at the time, the largest passenger ship in the world and, with her sister ship the Queen Mary, the pride of Cunard’s transatlantic fleet. The long-established shipping firm of Davies Turner handled the consignment of the crate from New York via Southampton to Oxford, at a total cost of £56.12s.8d. This included the cost of packing the albums (billed by Davies Turner’s American office to the Griffith Institute in Oxford for $22.43) and insuring them to the value of $1,500, roughly the price of a new Ford car. At Southampton, Davies Turner shepherded the crate through British customs. Its contents were exempt from import duty because they were considered educational materials: the albums contained prints of all the photographs the Metropolitan Museum of Art had among its records of Harry Burton’s work at the tomb of Tutankhamun.1
Waiting to take delivery in Oxford was Penelope Fox, assistant secretary of the Griffith Institute. The arrival of the albums was the culmination of a three-year-long correspondence between the Institute and the Metropolitan Museum, as both tried to get to grips with the legacy of an excavation whose main participants were dead. Almost three decades had passed since the tomb’s discovery, and the intervening world war had taken the polish off even Tutankhamun’s gold. It was the end of the war, and a shifting political landscape in the Middle East, that had first set the photograph albums in motion: in 1948, the Museum sent assistant curator Charles Wilkinson to Luxor to clear the dig house that had been the base of its Egyptian Expedition since 1913. Wilkinson also cleared Howard Carter’s long-empty house nearby, since Carter’s will had left the property and its contents to the Museum upon his death in 1939. Both houses were handed over to the Egyptian Service des Antiquités – still headed by a French Egyptologist, Emile Drioton, but increasingly run by a new generation of Egyptian Egyptologists.2
Dozens of albums and thousands of glass-plate negatives from Burton’s photographic studio at the dig house made their way across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to New York – together with some 500 Tutankhamun negatives (and other material) that Wilkinson retrieved from ‘Castle Carter’. They were going home, as the Museum saw it, and they would have to be made at home in the Egyptian Department somehow. That was what prompted the most junior member of the Department, Nora Scott, to get in touch with the Griffith Institute in the first place, initiating the process that would see the albums cross the ocean twice more. The plan was for Penelope Fox, in Oxford, to compare the Museum’s prints with the Institute’s negatives. The inconvenience, expense and the hours of work involved would be worth it, they reasoned. Knowing which institution had which photographs, and coordinating to ensure that the photographic record of the famous tomb was complete, would facilitate future research on the tomb and its objects. Egyptologists were aware that Carter had failed to produce a definitive scholarly publication of the tomb, which remained an unmet goal to those few people who still had some connection to the excavation, like Alan Gardiner. Sorting out the prints and negatives was not work for an Egyptologist like Gardiner to undertake, however. It was for clerical staff like Fox and Scott (whose title at the time was research fellow, not curator) – women’s work, and with a woman’s deadline, since Fox was engaged to be married in a few months and would be leaving her post as a result.
Ocean liners, customs duties and wedding plans may seem far removed from ancient Egypt or the tomb of Tutankhamun. But a fine mesh caught the personal, the professional, the political and economic, and the technological – snaring together entities as seemingly diverse as the registrar of marriages; international shipping and postal services; excise offices; money transfers; and Egyptology past, present and future. It was only through this mesh that the photographic archive from the tomb could move, and in doing so, the Tutankhamun archive was transformed. And continues to be: for all that the very idea of ‘archive’ seems to assert or aim for fixity, in practice, archives are never fixed and never complete. Archives change over time, not only in terms of what they contain (as new material is acquired or existing material reorganized and reproduced, for example through digital proxies) but also, and as importantly, in terms of how they are stored, worked on and consulted – or even ignored and overlooked. The significance of these archival processes and histories cannot be overemphasized. Our glimpse of crated photograph albums cruising with Cunard across the Atlantic is not just another anecdote in the tangled history of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Rather, it marks a fundamental stage in the making of meanings about the tomb, its photographs and the role Egyptology and archaeology have played in modern history.
This chapter follows the trajectories of the Tutankhamun photographs through the diaries, correspondence, reports and photographic objects housed today in the Griffith Institute in Oxford and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. These wider, documentary archives provide the tools needed to excavate the photographic archive itself, to borrow the metaphor Jennifer Baird and Lesley McFadyen deploy in analysing the formation and use of archives within archaeology.3 It is an apt metaphor, given that the most influential theoretical treatise on archives, Jacques Derrida’s Mal d’archive (Archive Fever), engaged explicitly with Sigmund Freud’s own archaeological metaphor for the stratification of history and memory.4 In the culminating sections of Archive Fever, the ‘Theses’ and ‘Postscript’, Derrida reflects on Freud’s dream analysis of a fictional character, the archaeologist Hanold from Wilhelm Jensen’s 1902 novel Gradiva. Hanold suffers from archive fever, says Derrida, because he dreams of ‘reliving the other’ and thus reaches the limits of archaeology, a science ‘committed to the production of archival evidence of the most solid, material kind’.5 What that solid, material evidence cannot yield is the past itself – only a representation, an imprint like the plaster cast Hanold sees in a museum or, for that matter, like the traces of light transmuted into a photograph.
In the next section, I consider further some of the theoretical implications of the archive for archaeology and photography. This discussion underpins my argument that archival practices are inseparable from photographic practices and that the archive, as an ongoing process, is one of the means by which disciplinary identity is formed and sustained – and with it, the dream of reliving ancient Egypt as an almost-other of Western culture. The following sections of the chapter trace the history of the Tutankhamun archives from Carter’s death to the early 1960s, when the last member of the team (as they were styled), Sir Alan Gardiner, died in Oxford. That was the point at which the excavation fell out of Egyptology’s living memory, and it provides a more or less natural caesura before the development of the Tutankhamun touring exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s, whose use of the photographs and implications for the archives are taken up at the end of the book.
Occasional ruptures in this timeline are inevitable because the archival voices themselves often make explicit reference to past actions or agreements, including the original excavation. The sequential structure adopted here helps reveal the rationales marshalled over time for the care of the Tutankhamun photographs. It also demonstrates that archaeological archives, broadly conceived, have a historical value not only as documents and images connected to a specific excavation, but also as documents and images connected to significant academic, economic and political developments over the course of the colonial and post-colonial eras. Howard Carter’s records of the Tutankhamun excavation were donated on the eve of the Second World War, whose aftershocks accelerated decolonization in the global south of former colonial and imperial territories, while Penelope Fox and Nora Scott’s post-war efforts to reconcile their respective collections coincided with the specific unravelling of British authority in Egypt in the early 1950s. It is only by delving through the strata that have accumulated over and around the Tutankhamun photographs, and their respective archives, that we can observe their implication in changing regimes of value, from the disciplinary and evidentiary, to the financial and legal, to the political and representational. Archives matter, but not for the reasons archaeologists usually think.
A researcher can see, and hear, a lot in an archive; more, perhaps, than she is meant to. In the course of research for this book, I spent a great deal of time in archives – primarily the Griffith Institute in Oxford and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but several other Egyptology-related archives in continental Europe and the UK as well. As I realized that the Tutankhamun archive was itself becoming the subject of this book, I could not help but reflect on my own participation in it as a researcher, and to contemplate the way that seeing and handling photographs, and simply being in an archival space, continues to shape what we can and cannot say about the present and the past.6
Conversations I took part in, or overhead, in the course of this research were sometimes unexpected but, in retrospect, illuminating. One batch of files said nothing about photography, I was assured by someone who had already been through them. Yet I came away with more than 30,000 words of notes and transcriptions that seemed to me to be about photography: what, I wondered, had other archive users been conditioned to think ‘photography’ looked and sounded like? Another institution had recently catalogued the personal papers of an Egyptologist who had been extremely well connected in the field. His papers yielded ‘nothing interesting’, a staff member said, which turned out to mean that his copious correspondence and diaries did not detail ancient sites or inscriptions. At a third archive, I joined a tour of visiting Egyptologists, during which we were shown a formal photograph of Service des Antiquités staff from the late 1930s, each official sharply dressed in a Western suit and a tarbush, their names neatly calligraphed in Arabic script, row by row. Some of our group marvelled at these features. From their comments and reactions, they seemed to assume that the presence of so many Egyptian men, and the inclusion of Arabic, was an anomaly, perhaps a kindness granted by one of the only Europeans in the photograph: Carter’s old nemesis, Pierre Lacau, head of the Service until 1936. But Lacau himself had always been well aware that he worked in a department of the Egyptian government, and an official photograph of state employees in the 1930s was bound to include effendiya and Arabic. The group’s surprise surprised me. Perhaps it shouldn’t have. Historic photographs normally appear in Egyptological publications or conference talks only to illustrate an unproblematic past, or else to characterize archaeology from that past as either ‘scientific’ or ‘unscientific’. This distinction, which is never questioned, is based on retrospective judgements about the extent and nature of the notes, drawings and photographs archaeologists made at the time. At one Egyptology conference I attended while writing this book, a doleful sense of ‘what might have been’ swept over the lecture hall whenever a speaker – often using an old photograph – lamented that the archives of past work on his or her site (I use the possessive advisedly) were not thorough enough, until the next slide moved us on to more modern, more ‘scientific’, methodologies, with palpable relief. Now we would get to ancient Egypt – without catching Hanold’s archive fever.
If Egyptologists today see themselves reflected in excavation archives, in other words, it is often selectively and in a freshly polished mirror, all surface and no depth. But the archive is always a glass seen through darkly. Like the sheen, known as mirroring, that appears on the surface of ageing silver gelatin prints, archives draw attention to areas of decay. For this reason, even brimming or expanding archives paradoxically trigger anxieties about loss – the loss of evidence, and with it, the potential loss of history, memory and identity. Where would we see ourselves then? The archives of Egyptology help define, for its practitioners, what Egyptology is and help determine what it does, especially since these archives remain for the most part within the care of sponsoring institutions (like the Metropolitan Museum) or institutions dedicated to the subject in other ways (like the Griffith Institute). This can make it difficult for anyone, within or without a discipline, to write critically grounded and aware histories. As Brusius points out, many archive holders ‘would rather not see their own disciplinary histories debated by others’, or, indeed, by an insider (which, as an Oxford-trained Egyptologist, I am, or perhaps was).7 An ethnography of the archive – as Nicholas Dirks proposed – is desirable, even necessary, if any researcher entering an archive is to avoid the pitfall of seeing archives as anything other than an accretion of documents and images shaped by actors, interests, and contingencies over time.8 Archives are not neutral.
As knowledge formations, professionalization standards and political landscapes shifted over the course of the twentieth century, so too did the conceptualization of archives like the Tutankhamun records, and just as importantly, the day-to-day work of looking after them. I argue here that archives have not passively reflected wider changes but have actively contributed to them, thanks to the constitutive role that archives play in disciplines like archaeology (in which I include Egyptology) that were intrinsic to colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East. Egyptology today has a significant popular presence – itself in large part due to the successful marketing of king Tut over the past century – but has struggled to see the extent and implications of its colonial embeddedness.9 This is not for the absence of the colonial in the archive, like those tarbush-wearing antiquities officials or the transport systems that allowed photographic supplies to be shipped with such ease between London and Luxor. Rather, it is a systemic failure to use archives critically – to see through the mirror, as it were, rather than gaze upon admiring reflections. For if archives are not examined and understood as the contingent, constructed and colonial collections that they are, then it is impossible to move beyond the positivist enterprise through which they were first formed.
Since the selection, organization and deployment of archives in colonial – and later, decolonizing – contexts is embedded in ontological and epistemological concerns, critical histories of colonial projects have much ‘to gain by turning further toward a politics of knowledge that reckons with archival genres, cultures of documentation, actions of access, and archival conventions’, as anthropologist and historian Ann Laura Stoler has argued.10 Such a politics of knowledge has been notably, and regrettably, lacking in archaeology in general and Egyptology in particular. Yet archaeological archives, and their hundreds of thousands of photographs, must be among the most substantial – and significant – archives formed during the colonial era and thus require informed critique. In part because excavation records are taken for granted as part of archaeological method, archaeologists tend to treat archives as sources of documentation and ‘stable repositories of trace’, rather than constructions that are implicated in archaeology’s own history and practices.11 This approach is also a function of a persistent positivism that characterizes the study of ancient Egypt in particular, as if there is a directly accessible past, a tangible ‘ancient Egypt’, if only we look hard enough. In its materiality, the archive echoes the materiality that is central to archaeological methods of collecting and analysis, but disciplines that study antiquity seem able to separate ancient from more recent history, as if the two were unrelated. Like artefacts in museums, however, the daybooks and photographs in excavation archives are inscribed with interlinked histories, in layers of field and museum numbers, carbon copies and Post-it Notes produced as generations of hands have worked through archives to organize the past and shape the future.12
To challenge empirical (and imperial) positivism and shape an alternative engagement with Egypt past and present, the archive must be both the site and the subject of research. The trajectories of the field and photographic records from the Tutankhamun excavation demonstrate that a physical archive, its creation and curation, and its distribution and digitization serve to sustain disciplinary formations and identity – and by extension, a range of assumptions rooted in the colonial era. Research in the archive and on the archive requires attention both to the top-down effect of institutional processes on the formation and the form of an archive, as well as bottom-up decision-making about what to record, what to keep and what to do with the results. Inclusion and absence result from each. These processes are so naturalized in archival – and archaeological – practice that they appear self-evident, contributing to ‘tacit narratives’ of professional proficiency.13 Unspoken expectations govern ideas about what an archaeologist should record and what an excavation archive should thus contain. Anything less or different constitutes an inadequate, hence ‘unscientific’, record or an archive deemed to lack interest because it does not address what a researcher thinks or hopes it will.
That is why archives, in Stoler’s well-known formulation, need to be read both along and against the grain.14 Photographic archives must also be viewed from a vantage point that encompasses inside and outside, since images circulate beyond the archives that nominally contain them – as we have already seen with The Times-licensed press coverage of the Tutankhamun discovery, and as we will continue to see throughout this book, which follows Burton’s (and others’) Tutankhamun photographs into our current digital age.15 This is one of several complications that photographic archives raise in archival theory and historical practice, together with issues of multiplicity. Conventional archival theory and practice have struggled to accommodate visual materials in general and photography in particular, as Joan Schwartz has argued.16 With few exceptions (like the daguerreotype), photographs are not unique objects, and were not designed to be. The usefulness of the technology was its reproducibility, thus the same photographic image can exist in several archives at once, or multiple versions of it may be found in one archive.17 Understanding the stratigraphic or familial relationships, between different positive and negative permutations of a photograph is a form of visual literacy and technical knowledge that has not been prioritized in either archaeology or in archives.
In the archaeological fieldwork of the early twentieth century, archival practices and photographic practices were built into each other: camera work may have involved some uncertainty, and trial and error, but it was undertaken with ideas in place about the use of the photographs and the immediate care of both negatives and prints. In the resulting photographic archives, research requires a certain amount of stratigraphic work to see the accretion of organizational layers, and with them, layers of meaning. The enduring myth of photographic objectivity, however, presents an obstacle to such work and helps explain the paucity of critically informed studies of photography in archaeology and Egyptology.18 To Penelope Fox, Nora Scott and their colleagues, the subject matter of the Tutankhamun photographs – what the surface of the prints or (in reverse) the negatives showed – was ostensibly their chief value, and certainly the source of their educational value. However, the photographs had other values as well, whether expressed in blunt financial terms for insurance purposes, or implied by the extensive efforts made to bring ‘home’ the photographic materials left in Egypt and reconcile them with what Carter’s niece had donated to Oxford in the meantime. Photography was just as central to Egyptological epistemology and authority in these later archival stages as it had been at the photographs’ point of origin – and thus central to the field’s very conception of itself.
Both archives and photographs are deeply implicated in memory and its counterpart, forgetting.19 As Elizabeth Edwards has argued, drawing on historian Pierre Nora’s conceptualization of lieux de mémoire, the archive functions in modernity as a form of externalized communal memory – with the corollary and caveat that its exclusions, gaps and oversights are as significant as what an archive actually contains, if not more so.20 Undoubtedly, some theorizations of the archive have overstated its totalizing effect and the structuring power of classificatory systems, in the process blurring the differences between the metaphorical Archive embraced in cultural theory and its lower-case cousin, the documents, filing systems and institutions out of which history is written.21 But this ambiguity can be productive, not least in encouraging both the owners and users of archives to reflect on the systems and patterns that archives do perpetuate. This is no less important where that perpetuation appears to operate within disciplinary praxis, given the reach and influence a discipline like archaeology has had on everything from popular culture to Freud’s psychoanalytic thought. In his ‘Freudian impression’, the imprint or trace that Derrida figured as inherent to the archive (and, elsewhere, the photograph) recalls Nora’s own formulation of memory and archive: ‘Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the survival of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image’.22 In other words, images are constitutive, not illustrative, of modernity, and archives repay close attention to what they contain as well as what they leave aside. The micro-history that I undertake here confirms that each archive has its own internal logic, and that amid the realia of correspondence files and ageing silver gelatine prints, meanings and memories have been ventured, refigured and revived, often mirroring along the way the vicissitudes of the twentieth century.
If archives take on new urgency where living memory begins to fade, then March 1939 was a crucial point in the history of the Tutankhamun excavation notes, card index and photographs. Howard Carter died a bachelor in London that month and left his estate to the only child of his sister Amy, Phyllis Walker, who had accompanied him to Egypt in 1931 and helped to nurse him through his final illness.23 Walker faced several issues with the estate, foremost being a number of Egyptian antiquities in Carter’s possession, some of which could only have come from the famous tomb and were therefore in England illegally.24 But dealing with Carter’s notes, photographic material and filed index cards from the excavation was no less a concern. In the summer of 1939, with war looming over Europe, she consulted Percy Newberry on the matter. Newberry advised her that the newly established Griffith Institute would make an ideal home, especially since another Carter acquaintance, Alan Gardiner (who lived in Oxford) was involved in the new Institute as well.
As it turned out, war would intervene between the Griffith Institute’s initial acceptance of the Carter deposit and its arrival in Oxford. In the meantime, and in the immediate post-war climate, a new concern had arisen: the Griffith Institute wondered whether it could or should own the Tutankhamun records – and specifically the photographs – at all. Protracted worries over questions of image copyright, as well as the stance the Egyptian government might take, suggest that the 1920s conflict over the tomb was well remembered in British academic circles, even though the relevant parties avoided explicit mention of it. Anxieties about what claim Egypt potentially had on the records also speaks to the shift in geopolitics in the Middle East during and after the war, and specifically the changing management of archaeology in Egypt itself. Although still headed by Drioton, the antiquities service of the 1940s was markedly different than the 1920s. The Egyptian government had made a concerted effort to train and promote indigenous scholars, appointing Selim Hassan as assistant director in 1936.25 It was a moment of transition, and the choices that the Griffith Institute and, separately, the Metropolitan Museum made concerning their respective share of the Tutankhamun records arguably helped shape the direction of mid-century ideas about the position of ‘ancient Egypt’ in Europe and America.
In this section, I explore this transition through correspondence in the Griffith Institute concerning Phyllis Walker’s donation and the Institute’s efforts in the 1940s to establish its legal – not to mention moral, intellectual and financial – position with respect to the Tutankhamun records. Important as the Tutankhamun material was recognized to be, its exact purpose was by no means a certainty in the minds of the academics who found themselves in possession of it. Through the archival correspondence, we see institutional positions, disciplinary values and collective memories taking shape – positions, values and memories which reverberate in the curation and use of the Tutankhamun archives and photographs down to the present day.
The history, management and staff structure of the Griffith Institute are an important part of this story. The Institute had been set up through a bequest of Francis Llewellyn Griffith, the university’s first professor of Egyptology, with the aim of promoting the subject at Oxford.26 Griffith left his own excavation records and correspondence to the Institute, along with investments to fund it. The Institute also became the home of an encyclopaedic (and ongoing) project known as the Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Texts, Reliefs, and Paintings, which Griffith initiated in the 1920s and a later professor described as the ‘Scotland Yard of Egyptology’.27 Although the ‘Top Bib’, as it is known in Egyptology, did not commission photographs specifically for its bibliographic work, it made use of them, alongside drawings and other site documentation. Thus, the Institute from its origins was attuned to images as tools from which to extract information – in its case, primarily ancient inscriptions. From 1939 until 1999, the Griffith Institute shared space with the Ashmolean Museum library in an extension to the back of the museum; both were rehoused in 2001 in the Sackler Library constructed on the same site. From its founding, the Institute has been governed by a Management Committee comprising selected staff of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University academics, and other UK academics or museum curators active in Egyptology or the study of the ancient Near East. Since the late 1990s, leadership of the Griffith Institute has taken the form of a Directorship that rotates between Ashmolean curators and academic staff in the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Previously, the museum’s Keeper of Antiquities held this role ex officio with the title of Secretary, answering (like today’s Director) to the Management Committee. The Institute was set up at a time when university museums and academic teaching and office space were less rigidly separated from each other in physical and administrative terms, although these were always in flux. The Secretary was expected to fit his (the appropriate pronoun) oversight of the Institute into the duties of his primary, salaried post. In this, he had the support of a full-time Assistant Secretary at the Institute, a clerical post always held by a woman.
On 29 August 1939, it thus fell to the first Secretary of the Griffith Institute, Anglo-Saxon specialist Edward Thurlow Leeds, to acknowledge the receipt – on loan – from Phyllis Walker of ‘[t]wo green painted steel filing-cabinets containing card-indices, photographic records and other manuscript material, referring to the excavations of the Tomb of Tut-ankh-amen, and compiled by the late Mr. Howard Carter’.28 In May 1945, Walker moved to make this loan a formal gift, and to add to it the glass negatives and lantern slides still in storage in London’s East End, where they had escaped bomb damage. She wrote to Alan Gardiner, who sat on the Institute’s Management Committee, expressing her wish that all of Carter’s Tutankhamun records be ‘presented to the Ashmolean Museum as a memorial to him and his work’.29 An archive could function as a repository of memory in many ways.
However, the visitors who comprised the Ashmolean’s governing body had reservations about accepting the donation, as did Leeds himself. Their concerns were articulated around the issue of copyright in the photographs that were being added to the existing loan, with everything reconfigured as a gift. As early as 1941, Leeds asked Percy Newberry to clarify who owned the copyright and could therefore give permission to reproduce the Burton images; Newberry replied that the copyright was Walker’s, as Carter’s heir. In 1943, Newberry and Gardiner discussed the matter over lunch in London, at which point Gardiner offered to buy the copyright for £200 and donate it to the Ashmolean. Newberry passed this offer on to Walker, who declined on the grounds that the museum already held the copyright – apparently unaware that they thought the copyright was hers.30 In June 1945, Leeds wrote to the director of the British Museum, Sir John Forsdyke (‘Dear Forsdyke’, was Leeds’ opening to his old acquaintance). Being head of a national museum gave Forsdyke considerable authority in the hierarchy of British museums, hence Leeds asked him for advice about copyright – specifically whether the Egyptian government might have a claim:
The Egyptian Government, as I understand, purchased the whole of the collections including Lord Carnarvon’s share of the spoils, but they do not appear to have made any attempt to secure the records, and at the initial stages of the offer of the gift I was given to understand that the copyright would pass to the Museum, since the records were entirely the property of Howard Carter. The question really is, has the Egyptian Government any right over the records for the purposes of the Service des Antiquités?31
Forsdyke replied swiftly and confidently (‘Dear Leeds’), though not correctly, that copyright in photographs and manuscripts belonged ‘to the person who paid for them to be made’, which would be the Carnarvon family. He thought it unlikely that they were part of Carter’s settlement with the Egyptian government and advised that the university should assert its own copyright. In any case, he added in handwriting, a penalty for breach of copyright would only be relevant if the images were used commercially: ‘Nobody is likely to make money by publishing this material – more likely to lose it’.32
A month after receiving Forsdyke’s reply, Leeds contacted Gardiner, saying that the Visitors of the Ashmolean were still ‘hung up’ about copyright questions should they accept the gift.33 To Leeds and the Egyptologists involved in managing the Griffith Institute, the question of image copyright bled into the question of whether and how to publish the Tutankhamun material, which seems to have presented both an anxiety and an obligation. Consensus among Egyptologists, especially in Britain, was that Carter had failed to produce an adequate publication of the tomb, along the lines he himself had often hinted was in the works. Leeds had heard second-hand reports that Drioton considered it an ‘obligation d’honneur’ for someone, somewhere to produce a definitive study of the tomb of Tutankhamun. But if the Griffith Institute, now that it had the Carter records, were to do this, ‘might [it] give the Service a definite lien’ on them, as Leeds voiced his concern to Gardiner: ‘I have never been clear in my mind as to the position in which the Egyptian Government stood, or may stand, in relation to the documentary material covering the excavation of the tomb’.34 It was not only past agreements or expectations that were at issue here, but a sense of instability in present-day relations with the Egyptian authorities, who were, in the mid-to-late 1940s, exercising ever more autonomy.
The copyright question also indicates the extent to which the Tutankhamun photographs, and other records of the excavation, were seen by scholars in the post-war years as equivalent to, or inseparable from, the tomb artefacts. What had not occurred to Carter or the Service des Antiquités in the 1920s now occurred to Leeds, Newberry and Gardiner: did the Egyptian government and its antiquities arm have a moral or legal claim on the images and index cards as well? And if not (or if such a claim was not forthcoming), was there anyone else who might? The obvious answer to the last question was yes: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with whom the Griffith Institute seems not to have been in touch about the Tutankhamun material until 1946, sparked – as many things were – by a tip-off from the well-networked Newberry. In October 1945, Leeds heard from retired Oxford professor of ancient history John Myres, who had heard from Newberry, that Belgian Egyptologist Jean Capart was preparing a second edition of his 1923 book (in French) on the tomb of Tutankhamun. The first edition had been illustrated with Burton photographs copied and adapted from the Illustrated London News and Carter’s Tut.Ankh.Amen books.35 For the new edition, Capart first approached the Metropolitan Museum, Newberry explained, who had said they could not give permission to publish the photographs since copyright was held by Carter’s heir. This satisfied Leeds, who recounted the entire exchange in a handwritten memorandum for the Griffith Institute, as if he could not let his worries over copyright and publication rest.36
Leeds retired in 1945 and was succeeded as Keeper of Antiquities (and thus Secretary of the Griffith Institute) by Donald B. Harden, a Roman glass specialist and able, amiable administrator.37 Harden took up the copyright matter directly with Capart, and the Belgian scholar supplied copies of his own exchanges with Ambrose Lansing, curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptian department. Lansing had explained to Capart that the Metropolitan had a ‘duplicate set of negatives’ for its own use and that it could only permit publication of prints with the permission of Carter’s heir, Phyllis Walker. With the Metropolitan correspondence in hand, Harden wrote to reassure Capart about the Ashmolean Museum’s own intention: it had long been the practice of the antiquities department to levy a small charge for supplying a print and to request an acknowledgement ‘by courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum’. ‘It was no more and no less than this that we wished to reserve for ourselves in the matter of the Howard Carter copyright’, Harden explained, concluding, ‘I do hope this will clear up the matter and make you believe that we are not grasping or monopolistic’.38 Charging for photographs was a matter of professional and academic honour, evident in Harden’s soothing tone and emphasis on the museum’s financial disinterest in the images.
But photographic objects did have a financial value, as Harden himself had to concede when he arranged the long-anticipated transfer first of Carter’s glass negatives and later the lantern slides. This took place in the spring of 1946 – almost seven years after Walker had first offered her uncle’s Tutankhamun records to the Institute. Harden instructed a firm in Oxford’s Turl Street to collect three large and ten small cases from the Mincing Lane depository in the East End and deliver them to the Ashmolean. As if organizing the insurance had reminded him of what could go wrong, Harden described the case contents to the transport firm in words that rely on the aura of Tutankhamun and assert the specific value of photographs as evidence:
You will, however, I know, take every precaution with these negatives as they are irreplaceable should they get damaged or lost. For your information, they are the original photographs taken during the excavations on the tomb of Tut-ankh-amen in Egypt, and therefore a priceless record of the original condition of the objects found therein.39
The arrival of some 990 glass negatives and more than 500 slides in Oxford coincided with the first communications between the Griffith Institute and the Metropolitan Museum regarding the Tutankhamun material. Thanks to the Capart quandary, Harden began to correspond directly with Ambrose Lansing about their shared interest in Burton’s photographs, since these, unlike the notebooks and index cards in Oxford’s possession, were believed to be held as two ‘duplicate’ sets. Lansing explained that the Metropolitan Museum used Burton’s photographs in lantern slide lectures and ‘educational publications’, as agreed with Carter and confirmed by Walker; only if an image were to be used ‘purely to promote the sale of a book’ did they bother Miss Walker for further permissions. Lansing thought copyright in the Burton photographs was likely to become less of an issue because the Egyptian Museum in Cairo now sold its own prints of the objects and allowed visitors to photograph them in the galleries without charge. In other words, Lansing assumed that the interest lay in the subject of the photograph, not in whether the photograph was one of Burton’s or dated to the time of the discovery.40 Harden replied to explain, as he had done to Capart, that the Griffith Institute charged only the cost of a print if its use was educational, but would levy a copyright fee for commercial use. If the Griffith and the Metropolitan Museum adopted the same approach, each should then keep whatever fees they earned in this way from the photographs.41
This was, Lansing replied, ‘a logical solution’, adding that ‘both objects and records should be considered as for the information of the public and if the popularization of ancient Egypt is one of the results so much the better’ [emphasis added].42 From the American’s perspective, more than a copyright fee was at stake: encouraging the public to take an interest in ancient Egypt could only benefit Egyptology and its institutions. Lansing seems to have hit on the specific appeal photographs could play in this, whether through illustrated books and lectures, or through postcard sales and tourist snapshots. The point was not inconsequential, given that the decade following the Second World War saw Egyptology sidelined in many museums, for different reasons. In the United States, civic museums established to bring ‘art’ to the urban masses – the Metropolitan in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, for instance – were questioning whether ancient Egypt fitted comfortably into ‘fine’ arts, and sought to reduce the size of their collections by sale or transfer. In the UK, where many collections, including the Ashmolean’s, had been stored off-site for safety, factors including post-war austerity, the delayed arrival of a modernist display aesthetic, and a turn, in regional museums, towards local archaeology similarly cast doubt on whether, where and how ancient Egypt belonged in the public eye.43 And in continental Europe, German Egyptology, which had long dominated study and publishing in the field, was shattered by the war, the exile of Jewish and resistance scholars, and the taint of Nazism among several scholars who remained in, or were restored to, their posts.44 Wherever they were based (including Egypt), Western Egyptologists trained in the interwar years must have wondered, like Lansing, what might help secure the future of their field in these uncertain times.
Was Tutankhamun a possible solution? It was worth a try: in 1947, the Ashmolean displayed a selection of Burton’s photographs on the bare interior walls of the sandstone Shrine of Taharqa, which dominated one of the museum’s ground-floor galleries.45 This was one of several photography exhibitions the Ashmolean’s antiquities department ventured in the late 1940s, some of which proved extremely popular – although whether the Tutankhamun exhibition was one of these, is not mentioned in museum reports. No academic institution wished to seem ‘monopolistic’ or money-driven, as Harden had been at pains to make clear to Capart, but the potential of photographs to play an explicit role in promoting an institution or a subject (and generating income) was becoming clear. Questions of copyright, insurance value and competition from other image sources, like the antiquities museum in Cairo, meant that directly or indirectly, finance was now linked to these photographic objects in a different way than it had been in the 1920s, when The Times contract and the cost of Burton’s time and supplies were the primary concern. With the arrival of the negatives and lantern slides in Oxford, and fruitful lines of communication opened between the Metropolitan and the Griffith, the idea began to take shape that – if properly organized – the two photograph collections might help Egyptology meet its scholarly aims as well as its populist ambitions, two aspects of the discipline that have always been intertwined.
Lansing and Harden thought it would be straightforward to coordinate research and publication strategies on either side of the Atlantic, a collegial undertaking to the benefit of both. Their institutions each had a duplicate set of the Tutankhamun photographs, or at least that was what each understood based on a collective memory, and received wisdom about how Burton had carried out photography at the tomb. Memory was fallible, however, and photography was a technology characterized by replication and multiplication, which was not at all the neatly contained, ‘duplicate’ set of records that Lansing and Harden had in mind. As the next section will show, any excavation of the archive means seeing several strata of time at once – and taking seriously the numberings, search tools and systems by which caretakers have tried to give shape to the archive which, in turn, shapes them.
In the press and in academic publications, those directly involved in the Tutankhamun excavation had always emphasized the collegiality of the team members and their single-minded dedication to science. But by 1945, only a handful of the British participants were still alive (Gardiner, Newberry and Alfred Lucas, who died that December), while those most closely involved from the Metropolitan Museum (Burton, Albert Lythgoe and Herbert Winlock) had died. To understand why Lansing and Harden assumed they had identical sets of photographs, and why Lansing fully expected this to be the case, I present three glimpses into the archives of both the Griffith Institute and the Metropolitan Museum. These snapshots, as it were, criss-cross time and space from the 1920s to the 1940s and between Egypt, Oxford and New York. In doing so, they show how even ‘facts’ are lost in archives, and how archival practices strive for a fixity that belies the fluid arrangements through which the Tutankhamun photography took place – not to mention the contingencies that inevitably characterize the archival processes of numbering, ordering and accumulation. In this way we will return, with the third glimpse, to the photographic objects themselves.
The first glimpse is a black-bordered memorial service card from The Queen’s College, Oxford, dated 1945 and paper-clipped to an (apparently) unrelated letter in the Griffith Institute archives.46 On the back of the card, Percy Newberry pencilled a note about Herbert Winlock’s reaction to the settlement Carter had negotiated on Lady Carnarvon’s behalf in 1930, which saw the Egyptian government pay her almost £36,000 in compensation for the excavation costs. According to Newberry’s information, Winlock was bitter that Carter had not secured or offered any compensation to the Metropolitan for its substantial contribution to the dig, which included not only Burton’s ten years of photographic work but also Arthur Mace’s full-time dedication in Seasons 1 and 2, and Lindsley Hall and Walter Hauser’s drawings in Season 1. The note alleges that Winlock sought reimbursement directly from the Egyptian government himself, without success. It is a surprising claim, since Winlock never publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome of Carter’s negotiations; however, the accuracy of the account is in many ways less important than what it reveals about old resentments, score-keeping and bill-tallying in the ‘disinterested’ science of Egyptology. Newberry subsequently typed up the note, naming Lucas as his source, and kept it in his copy of Carter’s privately printed Statement of 1924.47
The second glimpse comes from Ambrose Lansing’s correspondence with Capart and Harden about the question of copyright in Burton’s Tutankhamun photographs. Faced with two sets of photographs that were presumed to be identical or equivalent, how could Oxford and New York respect each other’s ownership and not overstep the rights of Carter’s heir, Phyllis Walker? Lansing outlined his understanding of the situation in almost identical words, first to Capart in August 1945:
When the services of Harry Burton were lent to Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter, the agreement included the specification that the Museum should obtain a duplicate set of negatives for its own use.48
And then to Harden at the Griffith Institute over a year later, in November 1946:
My understanding of the arrangement which Mr. Lythgoe made with Howard Carter is that Burton should do the photography, making duplicate negatives of all subjects, and that these duplicates should come to us.49
Neither Lythgoe nor Carter were alive to shed light on their ‘arrangement’, which was never more (or less) than a gentleman’s agreement in any case. Read in light of Winlock’s alleged unhappiness at being excluded from the Carnarvon settlement, and keen awareness of how photographs could generate both income and publicity, Lansing’s formulation stakes a subtle claim on the Metropolitan’s behalf. The Metropolitan had received its own bequest from Carter’s estate – several antiquities, plus his Luxor house and all its contents, including further Burton negatives. But in the absence of explicit compensation from Carter, much less any settlement from the Egyptian government, the Museum seems to have retrospectively configured the Tutankhamun photographs it possessed as payment-in-kind for its contribution. In the Museum’s institutional memory, the informal and ad hoc arrangements between Carter and Lythgoe had taken a definite shape, and Burton’s photographic practice as well.
The third glimpse takes us back in time and gives us Burton’s own input into the fate of his Tutankhamun photographs. In 1931, when Nora Scott joined the Metropolitan’s Department of Egyptian Art as ‘Assistant’, one of her tasks was looking after the growing number of negatives and photographic prints.50 When a shipment of large-format glass negatives arrived from Carter, in ‘badly dented’ tin boxes, Scott drew up a list of queries to be passed on to Burton, in particular to ask his advice about replacing the thirteen negatives that had arrived broken. Burton responded to Scott’s queries, via assistant curator Charlotte Clark, three months later: he annotated Scott’s list in red ink and enclosed a print ‘of Carter’s neg. no. 412’, so that a replacement negative could be made in New York by photographing the photograph – creating a copy negative.51 Burton’s annotations to Scott’s list reveal the different fates his Tutankhamun negatives had met with over the years, at Carter’s disposition. Some were in London, at Carter’s apartment, while others were with Carter at his house at Gurna, opposite Luxor. Of the latter, Carter gave four negatives to Burton to pass on to New York in due course: three from the 1925 mummy unwrapping and one with a striking view of the jackal shrine in the Treasury doorway.52 Burton seems to have followed through, since corresponding original (not copy) negatives are in the Metropolitan collection. The Museum did not, however, take his advice to make a copy negative of no. 412: only the print exists in New York, mounted on an album page like the others and labelled ‘412’ with the prefix ‘TAA’ the Museum used for its Tutankhamun photographs (Figure 2.1). Carter’s own 18 × 24 cm negative, from which this print was made, is now in Oxford and bears the number P1304 instead.
Figure 2.1 Tutankhamun Albums, page 702, mounted with the print Burton sent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1933 as a replacement for lost negative TAA 412.
These three glimpses – today in two different archives, and each from a different source – point in their own ways to the centrality of photography not only during the clearance of Tutankhamun’s tomb, but in the afterlives of the excavation records, with all the confusion, hassle, potential and responsibility they brought to their respective institutions. Much depended on the idea that each had a duplicate set, as Lansing asserted in his 1945 and 1946 correspondence, and the fact that Burton could substitute for broken negative 412 a print made from a second negative numbered 1304, still with Carter, appears to suggest that this was the case. Two negatives, two numbers – but one subject, one ‘record’ for archaeological posterity. The photographic objects, and the Metropolitan and Griffith Institute files, tell a different story, however, and in doing so, they highlight how deeply ingrained the idea of the photograph-as-record has been (and remains) in the identity and practice of archaeology – alongside the idea of the ‘duplicate’, which refers either to images or to objects so similar to each other that no qualitative difference between them exists. Or for that matter, no quantitative difference: the figure of either 1400 or 1850 usually given as the number of photographs Burton took for the Tutankhamun excavation is around half the number of negatives that he in fact exposed.53 By my own count in the course of this research, Burton took well over 3,000 photographs during the ten-year project; the two archives together contain evidence of some 3,400, including photographs taken by Carter or other, unknown photographers.
Burton himself had explained the problem of the ‘duplicate’ set in a second letter he wrote to Nora Scott, in January 1934. By the mid–1940s, however, Burton’s letter lay overlooked in the museum files. Scott herself may have forgotten his explanation, given everything that had transpired between the early 1930s and the mid–1940s, when she returned to the problem of cataloguing the Egyptian department’s photographs. I quote Burton’s 1934 comments about the Tutankhamun photographs in full, for it is the most complete statement he ever made about his ‘duplicate’ negatives and the numbering of the negatives – which had fallen not to him (as it did in his usual work for the Egyptian Expedition) but to Carter:
I saw Mr Carter a few days ago and went into the matter of the Tutankhamen negatives. He said that you have all the red number negatives. The red nos. were put on especially for N. Y. He also said that you have all the duplicate negatives that exist. In some cases the negatives although called duplicates were not actually so [emphasis added]. Sometimes a particular object was taken from different positions and the best position was chosen for the regular negative and the other was called a duplicate, although in the strict sense it wasn’t so. It wasn’t possible for the Museum to have a complete set; the idea was for the Museum to have all the duplicates, and these you have with the exception of the broken ones and these Mr Carter will have made in London, but should there be a delay perhaps you would send him a reminder.54
Perhaps Burton’s succinct explanation meant little to someone less familiar with photographic methods, or perhaps the idea of a duplicate that was equivalent, but not exactly identical, to a similar object was so fundamental to archaeological and museum practice that it was not seen as important. What constituted a ‘duplicate’ in an excavation archive underscores the primacy of the photographic surface – its subject matter – in archaeological research. At the same time, however, if photography was meant to provide a unique record of the destructive practice of excavation, the idea of the ‘duplicate’ photograph, like the ‘duplicate’ artefact, sits uncomfortably alongside the discipline’s rhetoric of a unique and fragile material past.55 The expediency of having duplicates won out: Carter passing on ‘second best’ negatives to his New York supporters was not so different from how Flinders Petrie divided pottery, scarabs and every other type of find among subscribers to his work, or sold them at public exhibitions to raise funds.56 The entire partage or division system that operated in the colonial-era Middle East worked on similar lines. Artefacts that were ascribed inalienable and supposedly universal values, by virtue of being turned into archaeological objects (in most cases, destined for museums), had also to be conceptualized as interchangeable and exchangeable in order for archaeology to do its work.
That there were two parallel systems of Arabic numbers was a quirk of Carter’s separation of the ‘best’ (black-number) and ‘duplicate’ negatives. The red numbers that Burton describes to Scott may survive in red ink on three or four negatives in Oxford and the Metropolitan Museum, while a typed list of the red numbers – its first page well-worn, repaired with sellotape and headed, in an unknown hand, ‘Burton’s List’ – survives in a binder at the Griffith Institute in which other information on the photographs has been gathered over the years.57 The Metropolitan Museum also has in its archives a partial list on notebook sheets, written in Burton’s hand and with the notation, ‘H. Carter Photo. Cat. – Keep!’ at the top, which the museum has done.58 The negatives Carter gave to the Metropolitan during the clearance of the tomb, numbered from 1 to 835, are organized with a logic that could only be applied once the clearance was complete, since they are numbered first in order by room (Antechamber, Burial Chamber, Treasury, Annexe), and then by object type, from A to W in English alphabetical order. The ‘A’ sequence, for instance, includes Adzes, Amulets, Anubis Emblems, Anubis, Aqal and Arrows – an ‘aqal’, the band that held a Bedouin man’s headscarf in place, being used for the twisted textile wreath around the head of the royal mummy. The series ended with Wine Jars and Writing Implements, by way of Vessels (although one had to see ‘F’ for Faience Vessel and ‘S’ for ‘Stone Vessel’). To this sequence, the museum subsequently assigned numbers 836 to 874 to its share of the large-format glass negatives Burton made in 1932 and January 1933, depicting the shrines re-erected in Cairo and the sarcophagus in the tomb. After the war, when Charles Wilkinson shipped some 500 negatives to New York from Castle Carter, Nora Scott was responsible for numbering them, starting from TAA 875 (up to 1375) and grouping them by subject matter as much as possible. Among these, which were Carter’s ‘best’, there were inevitably black-number negatives as well, some 250 by Scott’s reckoning.59
The photographic material that had been in Carter’s London home reached the Griffith Institute with numbers he had already assigned, unifying his negatives, lantern slides, some loose prints, and – once they followed in 1959 – a set of prints Burton had mounted for Carter in ten albums. These are not necessarily the numbers by which the Griffith Institute has since catalogued the Burton negatives, however, thanks to another quirk of Carter’s numbering system. In the first one or two seasons, where a negative showed two or more objects, he assigned black-ink negative numbers to each object on the plate, rather than a single number to the plate itself. The black-ink numbers, in his neat script, sometimes survive on the negative, but not always; thus only one number is now used for each negative plate, giving the impression that several numbers in the sequence are missing.60 To complicate matters further, Carter (or Burton) may also have assigned separate numbers to individual prints, at least on the loose prints that Oxford received from the estate.61 The multiple numbering of the glass plates carried through to Carter’s albums, which isolate each artefact by physically cutting a print down to the individual object itself. Designed as a consultation set, Carter’s albums do not contain photographs of objects from the Treasury or the Annex, suggesting that they were compiled before the clearance of the Treasury began in 1926. But the albums do reveal something of the logic behind his sequencing of Arabic numbers, similar to that later applied to the negatives he gave to the Metropolitan. Although there is some chronological structure – photographs taken before the 1924 cessation of the work form one ‘lot’, with photographs taken when work resumed having higher numbers – the negatives were not numbered by the order in which Burton had taken them. Instead, they are grouped by room (clearing the Antechamber), by subject matter (the mummy unwrapping), and, across four of the albums, by object type, using an alphabetical order slightly different than that in the Metropolitan Museum photograph collection – ‘Vases’, rather than ‘Vessels’, for instance. In Burton’s hand, each print in the object albums has its unique negative number at the top and object number at the bottom (Figure 2.2).62
Figure 2.2 A page from one of the photograph albums Burton made for Howard Carter, around 1924: Carter Album 4, page 39, in a section headed ‘Vases – alabaster’.
In this sea of numbers and negatives, we may seem far adrift from the tomb of Tutankhamun and the empirical research prioritized by Egyptology. Many people (including myself) have tried to correlate the competing systems of numbers assigned to the negatives at different times, or to determine a more precise logic than the general observations I have been able to make here. Having a complete list of every photograph Burton took, and every negative that survives, is a temptation the archive holds out – then withholds. Perhaps just as well, since striving for a ‘total archive’ overlooks the larger issues these near-doubled collections raise. As we saw in the three archival glimpses that opened this section, the idea that two duplicate, separate-but-equal sets of photographs existed was a necessary fiction in the relationship between the Metropolitan Museum and the Griffith Institute thanks to earlier, unspoken tensions between the museum and Howard Carter. Notions of pure scholarship and disciplinary unity took precedence over personal or institutional resentments, with the care of the Tutankhamun photographs helping to foster a sense of shared values and efforts. The moment when the Carter negatives and slides reached Oxford, and Lansing and Harden began to correspond about the Tutankhamun archives, was also (and not coincidentally) a moment when Egyptology sought to reposition itself after the disruption of the war. Facing uncertain prospects for fieldwork in Egypt, and questions about the legitimacy of owning both objects and excavation records from the discovery, the Metropolitan Museum and the Griffith Institute could not help but wonder how best to serve the academic and popular interests of Egyptology. These two aspects of the discipline may have been more interconnected than scholars cared to admit, but the ‘priceless’ photographs – as Harden had characterized them – now had two secure homes, and would soon have two homemakers to look after them.
Like the crate of photo albums that crossed the Atlantic on the S.S. Queen Elizabeth, we have arrived now in Oxford in 1951. Ambrose Lansing and Donald Harden’s initial discussions about their ‘duplicate’ sets of Tutankhamun photographs broke off late in 1946. They had established that there was no ‘complete catalogue’ of Burton’s negatives (as Harden had hoped), nor did the Metropolitan have a ‘full set of duplicate negatives’, or even prints from all the negatives it did own (which was Lansing’s hope).63 But in 1948, Nora Scott resumed the correspondence from New York, where she had been cataloguing the Burton negatives that had recently arrived from Carter’s home in Egypt and checking them against the museum’s existing holdings. She had identified 425 negatives already represented in the museum – ‘duplicates’ of the same subject – and the Metropolitan offered to send these negatives to Oxford if the Griffith Institute could pay for shipping and insurance.64 It fell to the new Assistant Secretary of the Griffith Institute, Penelope Fox, to arrange the practicalities, and the negatives arrived ‘safe and sound’ in Oxford in January 1949. They included 136 images of the Annex and its objects, which were especially welcome in the Griffith Institute.65 Until then its collection had not included any photographs from the Annex, the last room cleared in 1927, suggesting that Carter had kept those negatives with him in Egypt.
Over the course of 1949, other occasions would arise for Scott and Fox to communicate about their respective collections of Tutankhamun photographs – a matter which they took directly in hand as part of their normal responsibilities. Although Scott was educated to MA level (Fox’s qualifications are not known), both women occupied professional posts, and salary grades, well below university lectureships or museum curatorships. Scott’s title at the time was ‘research fellow’ (she appeared at the bottom of the staff list in the museum’s annual report for 1946), while Fox began her secretarial post at Oxford by sorting and classifying material in the ‘Record Room’.66 Dealing with photographs and other records was a clerical duty, and in museums and academia in the twentieth century, such work was largely done by junior female staff.
The correspondence between Scott and Fox developed a warm and informal tone, especially after they were able to meet in person on the occasion of Scott’s visit to England in November 1949. Between them, they organized additional exchanges of negatives and prints, not only of the Tutankhamun photographs but also of photographs Burton had taken inside Theban tombs, which helped Rosalind Moss, editor of the Topographical Bibliography, continue to collect and compile data on behalf of the Griffith Institute. Scott sent another eleven glass negatives to Oxford, which arrived in January 1950, while Fox could help Scott with queries about specific objects in New York’s Tutankhamun photographs, since Carter’s notes and index cards in the Institute had information not otherwise available to researchers. One example of such an exchange is a query from Scott concerning a photograph of beads, which were tagged in Carter’s hand (in the photos) as 256o and 256bb: did Fox know, she asked, where on the mummy the beads had been found?67 Fox replied by enclosing her own hand copy of Carter’s notes about the beads – plus prints she had had the Ashmolean Museum’s photographic studio make by photographing Howard Carter’s drawings of the mummy unwrapping. She emphasized that the photographers had made the prints the same size as the drawings, to preserve Carter’s scale.68
Photographic technologies thus complemented the archival technologies the two women were using in their day-to-day work on the Tutankhamun records, which was construed not as research, but as facilitating research. The multiplication inherent in photography was integral to their ambitious plan to collate the two collections by using the Metropolitan’s more sizeable range of album-mounted prints, many made by Burton at the time of the excavation. By establishing – they hoped – the ‘complete catalogue’ of Tutankhamun photographs that had not existed to that point, Scott and Fox then aimed to convince their institutions to use photography to make two truly equivalent sets, first by printing from existing negatives where one or the other collection had gaps, and then by making copy negatives of the many prints for which negatives had been lost or damaged. Hence the precious cargo aboard the Queen Elizabeth in 1951.
That autumn, Fox undertook the work for which the Tutankhamun albums had made their journey, comparing as best she could the prints in the albums with the loose prints and glass negatives in the Griffith Institute’s own collection. Fox also conferred with Alan Gardiner over photographs of the shrines, since he seemed to own the only set of prints of the innermost shrine; neither the Institute nor New York had the corresponding negatives.69 To Nora Scott, Fox wrote of her frustrations at having to work mainly from negatives, since the Institute did not have prints of every negative it owned. Furthermore, she remarked, it was almost impossible to be certain of comparisons between the museum albums and the Oxford material, ‘with often so many similar views of the same object’.70
As 1951 gave way to 1952, the exchanges between the two women reveal the deadline by which Fox needed to complete her collation of the photographs: she was soon to be married and would be moving to Liverpool with her husband. The women corresponded on at least a monthly, sometimes weekly, basis throughout this period, trying to reach a cost-effective solution. Fox knew that it would be ‘costly and unsatisfactory’ to make copies of prints that had no corresponding negatives, ‘for the copies are never as good as the originals’.71 Instead, she devised a scheme that combined new printing and an exchange of existing multiple prints, which would calibrate the two sets of photographs in Oxford and New York. To this end, and to secure the necessary funds, she submitted a report to the Management Committee of the Griffith Institute and circulated a selection of Burton photographs for inspection by committee members, most of whom would never have seen them except as reproductions in Carter’s books or in the press.72 The timing of the meeting – 24 January 1952 – would prove in retrospect to be a watershed for British authority in Egypt, falling two days before anti-British riots that presaged the revolution of July 1952.
Fox’s sixty-five-page tabular guide to the Tutankhamun photographs, presented at that 24 January meeting, would remain a consultation document in the Griffith Institute until the creation of an online database in the late 1990s (Figure 2.3). It is in some ways still a helpful working guide, since neither institution has fully digitized its negative and print collections. Because Fox noted whether a print or a negative, or both, existed in the Oxford archive at the time, it potentially would allow further reconstruction of the exchange process – and identification of older prints among the many generations of prints stored in the Griffith Institute. The Egyptian department in New York kept a copy of Fox’s guide as well, but has tended to rely on its own set of albums and a typed register prepared by the dig-house secretaries and updated in New York.
To create her schema, Fox had broken the two photograph collections down into groups: negatives owned by one but not the other (124 in the Metropolitan, 201 in the Institute), and single (91) or duplicate (93) prints with no corresponding negatives in the Institute, which were missing from the Metropolitan’s collection (a total of 184 prints). The Institute also owned 476 negatives for which it held no prints at all, but which the Metropolitan Museum did – these were probably the ‘best set’ negatives found at Carter’s house at Luxor after the war. By taking into account this last group, Fox calculated that the two institutions could fill the gaps in their collections on a ‘print for print exchange basis’, making new prints for each other from their own negatives and gifting duplicate prints as well. This avoided the cost and time of making copy negatives of the ninety-one single prints in the Griffith Institute for which no negatives existed. It would cost the Griffith just over £25 to prepare and ship its share of new and existing prints for the Metropolitan, with a further £50 or so required to print all of its own negatives – work that would be carried out by the Ashmolean Museum’s photographic service, established just five years before.73 At that January 1952 meeting, the Committee voted to approve these expenses, which were in addition to the cost of transporting and insuring the Metropolitan albums to and from Oxford.
Figure 2.3 First page of Penelope Fox’s guide to the Tutankhamun photographic archive, comparing prints and negatives in the Griffith Institute and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; dated 6 February 1952.
With the funding secured, Fox wrote to Scott in early February with the good news, enclosing the guide she had compiled to correlate the two sets. She explained the abbreviations (she hoped not ‘too trying’) that she had used to indicate where a photograph was represented by only a print, only a negative, or both. In the course of the collation, Fox had found another fifteen ‘duplicate’ negatives, which she would pack for return with the albums. There were a number of queries, too, which Scott would only be able to answer once she had the albums back. Finally, Fox apologized for the extra work: ‘I am afraid it is rather complex; I have tried to simplify it as much as possible, but it remains nevertheless somewhat involved’.74
This is an example of British understatement: what Fox had undertaken, and produced, was extraordinarily complex, and Scott recognized the effort when she received the guide: ‘You have had a job about this’, she wrote to Fox in March, confirming that Lansing had approved the print exchange and offering a number of corrections and clarifications to the list. Scott also asked for more details about Fox’s fiancé and advised her, ‘You’d better just forget Egyptology and become a housewife’.75 But her tongue seems to have been firmly in her cheek, since in the next paragraph she praised Fox for her recently published book, Tutankhamun’s Treasure – featuring photographs by Harry Burton, many reproduced for the first time and all from the Griffith Institute’s collection.76 Although only a ‘picture-book’, in the words of the Institute’s annual report for 1951, Tutankhamun’s Treasure was intended as a ‘partial substitute’ for Carter and Mace’s three-volume The Tomb of Tut.Ankh.Amen, which had been out of print for many years.77 It was hoped that sales of the book would generate income for the Griffith Institute, perhaps even replicating the success of Carter’s books a generation earlier. Fox’s steady and in-depth work on the Tutankhamun photographs may not have been recognized as scholarship, but both her book and her collated guide were the most tangible accomplishments of the Griffith Institute’s post-war years. Moreover, the transatlantic exchange of albums, prints and negatives that she and Nora Scott undertook helped create an equitable, reciprocal partnership between the Griffith Institute and the Metropolitan Museum.
One of the last things that Fox did before marrying and leaving her post that spring was organize the return of the Metropolitan albums to New York. They were packed in a wooden case 63 inches (1.6 m) long, 23 inches (0.58 m) high and weighing 412 lbs. (186.9 kg), and Davies and Turner once again handled the shipment. For their return journey, the albums still had an insurance value of $1,500, but their sojourn in Oxford had created a different kind of value for the Tutankhamun photographs – by cementing their future promise, as records whose potential for producing knowledge about the tomb could at last be realized.
Reciprocity and aspirations for the future: both these outcomes of the photographic exchange were part of a larger reconfiguration of knowledge economies about the ancient Middle East, at a point when the modern Middle East seemed to be slipping further from Western influence. Writing to Ambrose Lansing before she left her post, Fox had conveyed the Griffith Institute’s gratitude to him for enabling the collation:
for if the definitive publication becomes possible, it will be invaluable to whoever carries out the work. Whatever happens – and in spite of the political situation we continually receive encouraging reports from Egypt which give us every reason to be hopeful – we believe that this work has carried the plans a stage further.78
This is a near-unique reference to overtly political matters in the correspondence, but the topic could scarcely be avoided in early 1952. During the same months Fox was working away on the collation, a series of anti-British demonstrations and guerrilla attacks on British interests in the Suez Canal Zone had destabilized King Farouk’s government. The force of British military reprisals, in particular a deadly attack on Egyptian police barracks in Ismailia, saw riots erupt in Cairo: on 26 January 1952, the city went up in flames as buildings linked to foreign interests were hit by arson. The Opera, Shepheard’s Hotel and Barclays Bank were among the hundreds of buildings destroyed before the Egyptian Army restored order – two days after Fox circulated sample photographs to the Griffith Institute’s Management Committee.79
In the climate-controlled archive room of the Griffith Institute today, a wooden system of ‘lateral filing’ made by Ashmolean technicians in the 1950s still holds hundreds of prints of the Tutankhamun photographs – several likely made by Burton in the 1920s as well as those dating to Nora Scott and Penelope Fox’s exchange, and many more besides. Staff refer to these long, low shelves as ‘the coffins’, and the prints are rarely consulted now, in favour of a set made in the 1980s after the glass negatives had been cleaned by the Ashmolean’s photographic studio – and yet another set made in the 1990s and early 2000s, in conjunction with the digitization project. Archives are places that accrue not only time, but ways of thinking, being and doing. Something as seemingly simple as English alphabetical order persisted as a way of trying to order multiple prints and the many artefacts and events they represented: Carter had one alphabetical system in his albums, Burton another in the dig house albums, and the Griffith Institute yet a third, when its administrator for almost thirty years (from 1964 to 1992), Fiona Strachan, relied on her own alphabetical ordering of the ‘coffin’ prints and other sets.80 It was the only way she could locate the photographs she needed, Strachan explained when introducing new staff members to the system – besides which, people who requested Tutankhamun photographs did so by subject matter, not by numbers. Only in the 2000s did the Institute create a consultation set of modern prints in order by negative number, which is how the online database arranges the scans available there. Millennial technology encouraged the use of a running numerical order of the kind that no one, even Carter himself, had consistently applied to the Tutankhamun photographs before.
Numerical or alphabetical order may seem minor points, but they reveal how persistently the archival choices of the past influence archival practices, disciplinary frameworks and knowledge creation in the present.81 From their creation and initial ordering in the 1920s, through the effects of duplication in the post-war era, to the digital presence they occupy today, the Tutankhamun photographs exemplify how archaeology has used and viewed photographic objects – as surface and subject matter, rather than material forms whose own histories draw into question the histories of archaeology and antiquity alike. In their institutional transformation from ‘records’ to ‘archives’, the Tutankhamun photographs reflect a wider search for preservation and totality in twentieth- (and now twenty-first-) century archival undertakings. The documents of history, with their irreplaceable evidentiary value, were increasingly seen as fragile, susceptible to damage or decay: it was a lesson the Second World War had taught well. During the post-war era and its decolonizing decades, institutions such as record offices and research institutes became more conscious of their own role in preserving a past that was slipping out of living memory. Museums, too, took seriously this archival impulse, even if, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they were thinning out their collections of antiquities at the same time. The excavation records, personal archives and library holdings that resided with Western institutions allowed these institutions to reconfigure – and reconfirm – their influence in Egyptology, even as the Egyptian state asserted its nominally independent control of archaeological concessions and museums within the country. Maps, plans and, especially, photographs could give Egyptologists access to at least some of ‘ancient Egypt’, even if the instabilities of modern Egypt threatened to disrupt fieldwork and recording in the present day. Archives were insurance, in a sense. They were also a source of power, not in the top-down direction that Foucauldian interpretations of the archive might imply, but in the bottom-up of institutional behaviour, from how academic research was conducted (and by whom) to how much time and money went into classification and conservation efforts. When we excavate the archive, these mundane processes become significant within larger schemes of value.
The Burton photographs, the Carter archive, the Tutankhamun records: these are just a few of the names by which this material has been known over the past century, and what exactly each name encompassed was, and to some extent remains, in flux. From the start of Burton’s work on the excavation, distinctions between original, copy and ‘duplicate’ photographs complicated the content and the character of what I refer to – in full recognition of its fuzzy boundaries – as the photographic archive of the tomb. Rather than seeing the multiplicity of photographic objects as a problem to be solved, however, or ‘duplicates’ to be weeded out, such multiplicity must be understood as inherent to photographic technology and the archives it produces. That is one reason why photographic practices are inseparable from considerations of archival practice, all the more so in a field like archaeology that was self-consciously creating a photographic record alongside the artefact record it located and recovered from the earth. Persistent and protracted efforts made in the post-war era to try to square the two collections in Oxford and New York thus arose out of earlier practices – and have informed current ones, replicating disciplinary praxes and priorities in the process. The notion that a complete photographic archive of the tomb exists still shapes the digital presentation of the Tutankhamun photographs online, for instance, but as this chapter has argued, without a critical approach to the history and operation of the archive itself, such efforts only serve to reinforce the empirical positivism that underpinned the colonial project in which archives, and knowledge, were originally produced. Rationales for the ownership and care of the Tutankhamun photographs have changed over time, following the twists and turns of modern history. But with its stratigraphy cut cleanly through, the archive will allow us now to look more closely at the Tutankhamun images to see how Carter, Burton and their colleagues used photography in the course of the excavation – already keenly aware that history was watching.
1 Penelope Fox, ‘Photographs of the Tutankhamun Finds’, report to the management committee of the Griffith Institute, 24 January 1952, plus relevant invoices (GI/NYMMA: Acquisitions MMA photogr. TUT Corres. 1951).
2 Reid, Contesting Antiquity, 263–94.
3 Baird and McFadyen, ‘Towards an archaeology of archaeological archives’.
4 Derrida, Archive Fever.
5 Derrida, Archive Fever, 83–101, ‘reliving the other’ quote at p. 98. The second quotation is from van Zyl, ‘Pscyhoanalysis and the archive’, 57. See also Downing, After Images, 102–3.
6 Thus also Rose, ‘Practising photography’.
7 Brusius, ‘Hitting two birds with one stone’, 385.
8 Dirks, ‘Annals of the archive’.
9 Riggs, Unwrapping Ancient Egypt, esp. 7–19, 32–5, 201–26; see also Carruthers, ‘Introduction: Thinking about histories of Egyptology’; Elshakry, ‘Histories of Egyptology in Egypt’; and Colla, Conflicted Antiquities, for its overall approach.
10 Stoler, ‘Colonial archives’, 88.
11 Baird and McFadyen, ‘Towards and archaeology of archaeological archives’, 25.
12 Riggs, ‘The body in the box’.
13 Ketelaar, ‘Tacit narratives’; see also Cook and Schwartz, ‘Archives, records, and power’ and Yakel, ‘Archival representation’.
14 Stoler, ‘Colonial archives’; Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.
15 Thus also Hayes, Silvester and Hartmann, ‘“Picturing the Past” in Namibia’; Hayes, Silvester and Hartmann, ‘Photography, history and memory’; Hevia, ‘The photography complex’.
16 Schlak, ‘Framing photographs, denying archives’; Schwartz, ‘“We make our tools and our tools make us”’; Schwartz, ‘“Records of simple truth and precision”’; Schwartz, ‘Coming to terms with photographs’.
17 See Edwards and Morton, ‘Between art and information’, who suggest the inter-generational family as a metaphor for photographic reproductions; see also Riggs, ‘Photography and antiquity in the archive’.
18 See further Bohrer, Photography and Archaeology, 726, 4164; Guha, ‘Beyond representations’. On objectivity and photography, see Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 125–38, 161–72; E. Edwards, ‘Tracing photography’, 161–72; Tucker, Nature Exposed; Tucker and Campt, ‘Entwined practices’.
19 Bate, ‘The memory of photography’; Cross and Peck, ‘Editorial: Special issue on photography, archive and memory’; Hayes, Silvester and Hartmann, ‘“Picturing the Past” in Namibia’; Hayes, Silvester and Hartmann, ‘Photography, history and memory’; and the influential argument in Sekula, ‘Reading an archive’.
20 E. Edwards, The Camera as Historian, 110–21; Nora, Realms of Memory; Nora, ‘Between memory and history’.
21 See Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 45–6, and the different responses (in different ways) explored in Rose, ‘Practising photography’ and Steedman, Dust.
22 Nora, ‘Between memory and history’, 13.
23 James, Howard Carter, 452, 458.
24 For Carter’s dealing activities and the arrangements made for his estate, see Reeves and Taylor, Howard Carter, 170–85; James, Howard Carter, esp. 447–50, 460–1, 469–71.
25 Reid, Contesting Antiquity, 279–91; Goode, Negotiating for the Past, 119–26.
26 There is no published history of the Griffith Institute, but see Simpson, ‘Griffith, Francis Llewellyn’, as well as James, ‘Moss, Rosalind’ for biographies of two pivotal personalities involved in its founding and operation.
27 History, downloadable files, and online presentation at http://topbib.griffith.ox.ac.uk//project.html. ‘Statues’ were added to the title, and remit, of the project for the publication of Volume 8: http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/gri/3statues.html.
28 Typed receipt, 29 August 1939 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
29 Letter from Walker to Gardiner, 10 May 1945 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
30 In 1944, Percy Newberry detailed these earlier exchanges in a memorandum for Gardiner, which Gardiner then gave to Battiscombe Gunn, the Professor of Egyptology at Oxford University. The memo, with Gunn’s pencilled annotations, is in GI/Carter 1945–6, together with other correspondence referred to here.
31 Letter from Leeds to Forsdyke, 8 June 1945 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
32 Letter from Forsdyke to Leeds, 15 June 1945 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
33 Letter from Leeds to Gardiner, 19 July 1945 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
34 Letter from Leeds to Gardiner, 19 July 1945 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
35 Capart, Tout-ankh-amon.
36 Dated 10 October 1945 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
37 See Hurst, ‘Donald Benjamin Harden 1901–1994’.
38 Letter from Harden to Capart, 14 December 1945 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
39 Harden to Charles Scott’s Road Service, Oxford, 25 April 1946 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
40 Letter from Lansing to Harden, 23 January 1946 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
41 Letter from Harden to Lansing, 31 May 1946 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
42 Letter from Lansing to Harden, 7 June 1946 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
43 See Stevenson et al., ‘Introduction – object habits’; Stevenson, Scattered Finds.
44 Schneider and Raulwing (eds), Egyptology from the First World War to the Third Reich.
45 Ashmolean Report (1947), 5.
46 In memoriam Hermann Georg Fiedler, Taylor Professor Emeritus of German Language and Literature, for a service to be held in The Queen’s College, 28 April 1945 (GI/Carter 1945–6). I thank Francisco Bosch-Puche for checking this information for me in the archive file.
47 Blue sheet of paper with typewritten notes, 2 July 1939, emended in pencil by an unknown hand on 10 October 1945 to say that it was in Newberry’s Statement (GI/Carter 1945–6).
48 Carbon copy of a letter from Lansing to Capart, 22 August 1945 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
49 Letter from Lansing to Harden, 13 November 1946 (GI/Carter 1945–6).
50 Scott’s hiring: MMA Report no. 62 (1931), 5.
51 Letter from Burton to Clark, with enclosures, 6 January 1933 (MMA/HB).
52 It is difficult to identify these three negatives from the mummy unwrapping amongst the several now in New York. The view of the Treasury may be MMA neg. TAA 54, TAA 54A or TAA 55; the suffix ‘A’ may indicate that that particular negative is the later addition.
53 Allen, Tutankhamun’s Tomb, 12 states 1400; Collins and McNamara, Discovering Tutankhamun, 10 gives 1850.
54 Letter from Burton to Scott, 6 February 1934 (MMA/HB: 1930–5).
55 Riggs, ‘Photography and antiquity in the archive’.
56 See Stevenson, ‘Artefacts of excavation’.
57 Plates preserving red ink numbers: GI neg. P0113 (13 × 18 cm); MMA negs. TAA 414 and 523 (both 18 × 24 cm). The typed list is in a ring binder, GI/Black, 66–89, giving red numbers up to 835; these correspond to the first 835 TAA numbers in the Metropolitan Museum archive. A follow-on list (GI/Black, 90–109), probably typed by Nora Scott, gives the continuation of the sequence from 836 to 1352; these are the TAA numbers she assigned in New York, as discussed in the rest of this paragraph.
58 Harry Burton’s handwritten list of Carter numbers is housed with the Museum’s register of Tutankhamun photographs. It correlates ‘C[arter]’ numbers and ‘TAA’ numbers, presumably meaning the black and red numbers, respectively. However, I have not been able to reconcile these handwritten lists with each other in full; perhaps Burton was referring to another list or register.
59 A typed note from Scott, enclosed with a letter from Lansing to Harden dated 13 November 1946, describes what sense she had been able to make of the numbers, and gives the 250 figure (GI/Carter 1945–6).
60 For example, GI neg. P0185, a glass half-plate showing six small stone vessels from box 32, originally had six negative numbers, one for each vessel: negative 185 (for object 32j), 186 (for object 32k), 187 (for object 32l), 471 (for object 32f), 480 (for object 32h) and 481 (for object 32i). In the Griffith Institute’s online database, a scanned print made from this plate is catalogued again as GI neg. P0481, preserving one of the ‘phantom’ numbers – but in the physical archive, the single plate is housed as P0185.
61 A letter from Harden to Lansing, 22 October 1946 (Carter 1945–6 file) makes this observation, and a handwritten note in an unknown hand notes that loose prints were numbered up to 620, but there were no negatives for photos 337 to 620.
62 For more detail on the Carter albums, including a similar set of five albums now in the Universitäts Bibliothek, Heidelberg, see Riggs, ‘Photography and antiquity in the archive’.
63 Quotes, respectively: letter from Harden to Lansing, 25 October 1946; letter from Lansing to Harden, 13 November 1946 (both, GI/Carter 1945–6).
64 Carbon copy of letter from Wilkinson to Moss, 12 August 1948 (GI/NYMMA Acquisitions – gifts accepted. MMA: Tutankhamun material, 1948–9).
65 Letter from Harden to Wilkinson, 1 February 1949 (GI/NYMMA Acquisitions – gifts accepted. MMA: Tutankhamun material, 1948–9).
66 MMA Report 75 (1946), x (as ‘junior research fellow’); Ashmolean Report (1948), 58.
67 Letter from Scott to Fox, 23 November 1949 (GI/NYMMA Acquisitions – gifts accepted. MMA: Tutankhamun material, 1949–50).
68 Letter from Fox to Scott, 13 December 1949 (GI/NYMMA Acquisitions – gifts accepted. MMA: Tutankhamun material, 1949–50).
69 Letter from Fox to Gardiner, 6 January 1952 (GI/NYMMA Acquisitions MMA photogr. Tut Corres. 1952–).
70 Letter from Fox to Scott, 15 March 1952 (GI/NYMMA Acquisitions MMA photogr. Tut Corres. 1952–).
71 Letter from Fox to Scott, 6 February 1952 (GI/NYMMA Loans).
72 The circulation of the photographs appears in a pencilled note on a copy of Fox’s report to the Management Committee, 24 January 1952 (GI/NYMMA Acquisitions MMA photogr. Tut Corres. 1951).
73 See Dudley, ‘Chief photographers’, and Ashmolean Report (1947), 4.
74 Letter from Fox to Scott, 6 February 1952 (GI/NYMMA Loans).
75 Letter from Scott to Fox, 6 March 1952 (GI/NYMMA Loans).
76 Penelope Fox, Tutankhamun’s Treasure.
77 Respectively: Ashmolean Report (1951), 71 and (1950), 63, both during Harden’s tenure as Secretary.
78 Letter from Fox to Lansing, 5 February 1952 (GI/NYMMA Acquisitions MMA photogr. Tut Corres. 1952–). The same file contains paperwork for the March 1952 return shipment.
79 Kerbouef, ‘The Cairo fire’.
80 Strachan started work at the Griffith Institute in 1964 and retired in 1992. See Ashmolean Reports (1964), 1, 85; (1993), 60. I thank Elisabeth Fleming for explaining the alphabetical system to me.
81 Thus also Stefanie Klamm, ‘Reverse–cardboard–print’, complemented by the more wide-ranging discussion of nineteenth-century visualization and archival practices in her book Bilder des Vergangenen.