Photographs that were never taken haunt the archive. What no one thought to photograph, and why, has much to tell us about what everyone did photograph, often in such predictable patterns – Egyptian men carrying crates of swaddled artefacts, or Western archaeologists looking busy with antiquities. Some photographic possibilities were forgotten or overlooked, or else deemed unnecessary or inappropriate – all the objects or angles that never made it in front of Burton’s lens, for instance, or identifiable portraits of the ru’asa Carter named in his books. There were other photographs that simply could not be, because there was no camera present, or conditions were inadequate, or the significance of the event was realized only after it took place. The unique and localized acts of discovery feted by conventional narratives of archaeology, and heralded in the media, present a photographic problem if no one thought to capture them at the time.
In the absence of the photographs that might have been, imaginative art helped fill the gap and feed the feverish interest the popular press took in the Tutankhamun excavation. The French weekly Le Petit Journal Illustré featured the tomb on the back page of its 11 February issue in 1923 (Figure 6.1). At the time, the magazine’s colourful covers were always illustrations; it restricted photographic prints to its half-tone interior pages. Photographs did provide source material for the publication’s artists, however. For the Tutankhamun cover, the illustrator R. Moritz (a Petit Journal regular in the 1920s) combined views of objects clearly inspired by four Burton photographs of the Antechamber, which had been published for the first time in the London Times on 30 January and appeared the following day on the front page of the daily Le Petit Parisien.1 These four photographs showed the right-hand guardian statue with a tattered textile still draped over its arm; the elaborately carved alabaster vases, in a close-up that isolates them from their setting; the chariots and couches at one end of the Antechamber; and the guardian statues, lion couch and painted box in front of the plastered doorway at the other (see Figure 1.2). For the illustration, the artist narrowed the space and added or removed objects to suit his composition. Along the right side of the image, he placed the elaborate alabaster vases, which were in fact on the other side of the Antechamber, as well as the chariot wheels from the opposite end of the room. The most striking artistic license – so effective in the red, green and yellow tints of the illustration – are the paintings added to the plain tomb walls, offset by the almost silhouetted figures of two men immediately identifiable as Western adventurers, thanks to a pith helmet and jodhpur-style trousers. The caption, written in the present tense, conveys the immediacy of the scene: ‘In Egypt, in the Valley of the Kings, an English archaeologist finds (découvre) a new sepulchre’, in a ‘state of perfect preservation’ and ‘still filled with precious objects’ deposited thousands of years ago. The men are as frozen in space as the ‘precious objects’ are in time. They rear back from the spectacular scene before them, even as readers of Le Petit Journal Illustré must have leaned in to absorb its details.
Figure 6.1 Back page of Le petit journal illustré, 11 February 1923. Illustrator unknown.
In the colourful illustration, the dazzling light from the archaeologist’s lantern casts a dark shadow on the tomb wall behind the guardian statue, making it appear even larger in scale. The shadow was not, or not only, the work of the artist’s imagination, however, but a striking visual effect in Burton’s close-up of the statue – one of the four photographs first published at the end of January, which was also the cover image of the Illustrated London News on 3 February 1923 (Figure 6.2). In this photograph, a beam of light from the mobile electric lamp created a sharp outline of the statue against the tomb wall, in a profile view that conformed to the conventions of ancient Egyptian two-dimensional representation, even as the photograph itself showed the statue in a more Western- or portrait-style angle – a three-quarter view just possible for Burton within the confined space of the Antechamber. Hand-drawn pictures were not the only images that offered dramatic possibilities. In book and periodical publishing during the early decades of the twentieth century, the difference between photography and pictorial illustration was not necessarily perceived by viewers as a choice between the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’, and both kinds of images depended for their meanings on the text and framing of the printed page as well.2 Drawing and engraving techniques had been used to reproduce photographs long before lithography and halftone printing made direct reproduction of the photograph possible, in the stippled dots of newspaper and magazine pages. As a result, audiences were well accustomed to viewing both illustrations and photographs with varying degrees of trust in their fidelity, not dissimilar to the way that archaeology itself continued to value drawings alongside photography, one technique reinforcing the other. The past could be represented in a range of modes and media, texts and images: the lurid scene of archaeological découverte complemented, rather than competed with, the stark stillness of the photographs that were its source.
In this chapter, I examine how photographs shaped the public presentation of the tomb of Tutankhamun by their presence, their absence and their inevitable entanglement with the very things – commerce, politics, self-promotion – that archaeology claimed to rise above. I focus primarily on the media coverage the excavators sanctioned in the London Times and the Illustrated London News, since this is where the ‘official’ photographs first appeared. Where possible, I weigh this against the coverage and visualization of the tomb in other print outlets, especially in Great Britain and the United States, but also in some of the Arabic-language press in Egypt. The fact that I do not read Arabic has limited how much I can say about the visual sources available to an Egyptian readership in the 1920s, but interest in the discovery was extremely high, attracting middle-class Egyptian tourists to the site and inspiring Egyptian cartoons, songs, poems, novels and plays. In any language, how images worked with – or against – the written presentation of the excavation depended in part on the availability of photographs, but also reflects contemporary discourse about both ancient and modern Egypt. The tomb, its treasures and its political ramifications often made for interesting bedfellows with other news stories of the day.
Figure 6.2 Cover of the Illustrated London News, 3 February 1923, with Burton’s striking photograph of one of the guardian statues (object 22; corresponds either to GI neg. P0321 or MMA neg. TAA 6).
Given the bitter issues of access and copyright that dominated the two field seasons preceding Carter’s so-called strike, the first section of the chapter revisits the question of The Times contract, considering its impact on other news outlets and on Burton’s own photography. A discourse of art and science dominated the sanctioned presentation of the tomb in The Times and, especially, the Illustrated London News, with the excavators keen to assert scientific rigour and disinterest.3 Burton’s photographs and the words – often Carter’s – that accompanied them were integral to this, but once published, photographs and other images (like rival papers’ drawings) were less easy to control; likewise the photographs that people took outside the tomb. The second section of the chapter considers how British press coverage in particular asserted the ‘modernity’ of the tomb equipment even as it drew on a bewildering range of cultural comparisons in its efforts to make ancient Egypt accessible to newspaper readers. More than mere journalistic style, these comparisons – from St George, to Charlie Chaplin, to Aboriginal Australians – speak to the by-then commonplace, even banal, worldview fostered under British imperialism, which persisted long after the empire itself began to wane. Modernity was an ambiguous phenomenon, however, and a yearning for imagined pasts already tinged interpretations of the tomb.4 Nostalgia also contributed to the narrative of domesticity that Carter, through the press, wove around photographs of objects from the tomb, even those with an overtly religious significance. In the interwar era, apprehensions of ancient Egypt made the ancient culture seem ever more familiar, even comforting, to Western audiences, just as the modern Egyptian state became ever more independent. The domestication of Tutankhamun included, and facilitated, its commodification. Photographs of the tomb and its treasures circulated as commercial products in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance through postcard packs and collectable cigarette cards. Whether at home or as tourists to Egypt (before the Second World War intervened), such products invited European and North American audiences to participate in the archaeological discovery by purchasing, viewing and sharing some part of it – in the process reinforcing a communal memory of Tutankhamun that would prove to be a deep and lasting one.
In a memorandum of agreement dated 9 January 1923, the Earl of Carnarvon appointed the Times Publishing Company Limited
as sole agents for sale throughout the world to newspapers magazines and other publications of all news articles interviews and photographs (other than cinematograph and coloured photographs both of which are excluded from this agreement) relating to the present and future exploration work conducted by the Earl and his agents in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings Luxor Egypt so far as they relate to the excavation of the several chambers already opened and yet to be opened of the tomb of Tutankhamen.5
The sentence continued in the same unpunctuated legal language, abjuring anyone connected with the excavation from divulging any news or photographs to any person or company other than The Times, and requiring them to take ‘all such steps such as shall be reasonably possible’ to prevent news or photographs leaking out. The next section of the contract specified the mechanics by which photographs would be supplied to The Times:
The whole of the photographs other than cinematograph or coloured photographs which may be taken by or on behalf of the Earl Mr Howard Carter his agent Dr Allen Gardner [sic] or by any other member of the staff of the Earl or anyone duly authorised by him or them shall be supplied to the Times representative […] as soon as possible after any exploration or discoveries […] being forthwith transmitted by the Times representative to the Times in London either by telegraph or by mail.6
The Times would endeavour to place both news articles and photographs in the world’s press, listed – in revealing order – as the London newspapers, British provincial newspapers, the newspapers of the US and Canada, newspapers of Continental Europe, newspapers of Egypt and newspapers published anywhere else in the world. Subject to Carnarvon’s approval, the paper also promised to ‘act with the utmost fairness’ towards all the British and Egyptian press, supplying articles free of charge to ‘such Egyptian native newspapers’ who were interested. Everything published in this way would bear the acknowledgement ‘The Times World Copyright by arrangement with the Earl of Carnarvon’, and the Earl retained the right to all the news articles and photographs ‘for the purpose of any lecture film caption or any book or books which he may hereafter deliver write publish produce or cause or authorise to be delivered written published or produced’.7 In return for this exclusive agreement, Carnarvon received £5,000 up front, and 75 per cent of all net profits accruing above that sum from the sale of rights.
Money was the nub of the matter: by the time of the Tutankhamun discovery in 1922, Carnarvon had been funding excavations in Egypt for over fifteen years. It was more than an expensive hobby. It was an investment he hoped would pay off, or at least pay for itself. Hence the purchase and selling-on of antiquities – to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others – that he had long engaged in with the help of Carter’s keen eye and contacts in the trade. With money matters on his mind, Carnarvon was open to a direct approach from the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, who (according to Alan Gardiner’s eyewitness account) called on Carnarvon at his London residence to propose an arrangement similar to that the newspaper had had with the British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition the preceding year. At Christmas 1922, Carnarvon wrote to Carter that he was considering The Times option, as well as weighing up the possibility of a film contract with Pathé. The Times, Carnarvon wrote, was ‘the first Newspaper in the world’, and he thought the eventual agreement that he signed was focused enough not to appear ‘too common and commercial’.8 Carnarvon had already given the Illustrated London News a scoop as well, meeting with their illustrator Amédée Forestier – specially despatched for the purpose – at Marseilles on his way back to England from Egypt in December 1922. Forestier had worked for the News since 1882, and he too created an impressionistic drawing of the moment of discovery – based not on photographs (at least not Burton’s, which hadn’t yet been taken), but on ‘material supplied by Lord Carnarvon’ (Figure 6.3).9 There was no question of the find’s newsworthiness.
Both Carter and Carnarvon underestimated the damage The Times contract would do to their relations with the Service des Antiquités and with other press outlets – especially the Egyptian press and a handful of rival British and American papers. For his own part, Carter expressed concern about how to satisfy the overwhelming press interest, not only because of the demands this placed on his time and energies, but also because communicating to the press was properly the responsibility of the antiquities service. Nonetheless, he adhered strictly to the terms of the agreement once it was in force, even appointing The Times correspondent Arthur Merton to the official register of excavation staff, in a duplicitous move that angered Lacau. Carter also shrugged off warnings from the Egyptologist Arthur Weigall, a one-time colleague in Egypt who had since moved back to England and become an author and journalist. Weigall represented one of The Times’ rivals, the Daily Mail (though both were owned by Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe), but he was also more sensitive to the political situation in Egypt than Carter seems to have been. As Weigall cautioned Carter already in January 1923, it was a mistake to think ‘that the old British prestige in this country is still maintained’.10 From within the team itself, Arthur Mace held his tongue in public but committed his own thoughts on the matter to his journal: The Times contract ‘is much more drastic, now we have seen it, than we ever imagined’, he wrote that January, and in February, that the arrangement ‘has landed us in all sorts of trouble’.11 Other British papers, American journalists and several editors from the Egyptian press had appealed in the meantime to the Ministry of Public Works to halt the Carnarvon contract, but the move was successfully blocked, allegedly by Carnarvon’s threat to shut down work at the tomb.12 The government had more pressing concerns both at the national level, as it developed its own governmental apparatus, and locally at Luxor, where, in early February, an Egyptian employee at a sugar factory had been shot and killed by the firm’s European manager, while dragomen – the lifeblood of the tourist industry – had gone on strike in protest at their treatment in the separate investigation of a Canadian tourist’s murder. According to the New York Times, the dragomen blamed (unnamed) foreign archaeologists for high-handed tactics.13 At the moment of Egypt’s nominal independence, the violence of the colonial encounter remained all too real – and archaeology was omnipresent in the creation and reinforcing of its inequities.
Figure 6.3 Amédée Forestier’s drawing of the moment of discovery, based on his interview with Lord Carnarvon and published across two pages in the Illustrated London News, 22 December 1923.
Carnarvon’s agreement with The Times inevitably changed the excavators’ interactions with the press. Before the contract was signed, Carter – who was hardly as loathe to publicity as he sometimes claimed – seems to have enjoyed bantering with the assembled tourists and journalists outside the tomb. In early January 1923, the New York Times reported that he slowed the pace when walking with the Egyptian ‘bearers’ carrying a tray of alabaster vases towards KV15, the better to allow the crowd to see them.14 In contrast, a month later, with the contract in place, the same newspaper reported that the excavators threw a sheet over one of the chariots when it was carried from the tomb, to stop an American cameraman from taking moving picture film – even though movie film was excluded from The Times arrangement.15 Burton was making his own films for the Metropolitan Museum, and the idea of exclusivity had clearly taken hold. Visiting the tomb that first winter to report for National Geographic Magazine, Maynard Owen Williams described the air of waiting among the hampered press pack that gathered around
the new wall of irregular stones which hid the entrance to Tutankhamen’s mausoleum. Two correspondents sat there and another roamed about waiting for news. For weeks they had waited under the glare of the sun, compelled by the force of circumstance to be detectives rather than scribes. Suddenly and without warning some wondrous treasure would be brought forth in its rough but easy-riding ambulance, to be rushed to another tomb which was used as storehouse and preserving laboratory. Now and then some rumour would escape the portals, to be weighed and considered before it was put upon the telegraph wire or in the discard.16
One press photographer, Williams observed, had taken to wearing a tarbush ‘to render himself less conspicuous among Moslem crowds’. To illustrate his National Geographic article, Williams took his own photographs to use alongside other sources, and its photo credits include Edgar Aldrich, the Ledger Photo Service, the Luxor photographic studio of Gaddis & Seif, and the New York Times, given copyright credit for the Burton photographs that the magazine reprinted, which the paper itself had licensed from London.
Cameras were everywhere, which presented a difficulty from the start for The Times contract and its demand that the excavators take every precaution against news and images reaching other sources first. Luxor was not the Himalayas of the British Mount Everest reconnaisance expedition. The town had ample photographic facilities in and around the hotels, making it simple for tourists to have their negatives developed and made up as either plain prints or postcards to send home. The tomb’s location on the tourist trail, together with the intense media scrutiny that accompanied the find, meant that more photographs were taken of work on the site than for any other excavation in Egypt, especially during the first two fever-pitch seasons. From the parapet wall erected to separate the tomb from the Valley road, tourists and press correspondents aimed their cameras at the entrance some fifteen feet below, especially when objects were being carried out on open trays in the early months of 1923 – as the previous chapter discussed. This practice was abandoned in favour of closed crates (where possible) from the second season onwards, perhaps as much for the secure transport of the objects as to dissuade the crowds and their photographic interference.
The photography The Times and the excavators could control was what Burton carried out in the tomb itself and in the laboratory of KV15. This consideration influenced some of the photographic choices Burton made, such as many of the work-in-progress photographs considered in the previous chapter that appear to have had journalistic interest in mind – opening the burial chamber (Figure 5.2), demolishing the partition wall (Figure 5.4) or tending to the coffins (Figure 5.1). Even more obviously in the style of publicity shots is a series of photographs Burton made at the start of the second season, in late November 1923. In the best-known image from the series, Howard Carter, Arthur Callender and one of the Egyptian foremen frequently pictured in the tomb appear in sharp focus in the Antechamber (Figure 6.4).17
Figure 6.4 Carter, Callender and a ra’is posed in the process of packing the guardian statues. Photograph by Harry Burton, 29 November 1923; GI neg. P0491.
All three men must have been holding still for the exposure of the plate. Shadows cast by an electric light, positioned out of shot to the left, outline the guardian figure (object 29) still standing next to the opened burial chamber, where the gilded outer shrine is also illuminated. The deepest shadows fall to the right side of the scene, picking out the slats of the tray that holds the second statue of the pair, its walking stick removed from one hand and its number card (22) pinned to one of the bandages that wrap its body like a ‘war casualty’ or ‘a severely wounded man’, as the papers put it.18 Carter and his Egyptian co-worker are caught – we are meant to think – in the act of further wrapping or padding the statue, stretching a length of thickly folded cloth between them with one rolled end in each man’s arms. Behind, Callender holds a folding ruler, and around the tomb chamber, we see the tools of work that have replaced the antiquities it once held: a simple desk, a pair of long-bladed scissors, a couple of wheels propped against a wooden frame. The positioning of human figures and objects within the photograph sets up pleasing lines of arrangement: the rough side walls contrast with the plastered rear wall; the opening of the burial chamber frames Callender and, in the beam of the lamp, Carter; the slant of the statue’s carrying tray meets the slant of the part-rolled bolt of cloth at a right angle; and at the bottom end of the roll, the Egyptian ra’is crouches. It was a pose that Orientalist painters had long used to depict the passivity of indigenous Egyptians in the face of their ancient forebears, strangely similar to a grand 1890s oil painting of a mummy unwrapping in the old antiquities museum at Giza, in which an Egyptian man in turban and galabiya winds up discarded mummy bandages.19 Here wrapping, rather than unwrapping, takes centre stage to show the scientific care that Carter and his team are taking towards the treasures of Tutankhamun. Squatting at Carter’s feet, his Egyptian colleague occupies the least important role in this depiction of the work, even as the lamplight on his cheekbone echoes the sheen of the resin-painted skin on the guardian statues.
The clear focus and careful composition of the scene helped make this the most successful photograph of the sequence in terms of publication. It appeared in the London Times on 28 December 1923 and the Illustrated London News the following day.20 Bruce Ingram, the News’ publisher (who, with Burton, would be executor of Carter’s estate), partnered The Times in presenting the official coverage of the excavation, since the News’ weekly format, printing technology and healthy circulation figures were best suited to photographic reproduction. The Times often featured on a Thursday or Friday morning one of the photographs that the Illustrated London News would publish on Saturday, and the News borrowed some of the wording of its texts from features first trailed in The Times. From Luxor, Merton telegraphed stories to London on an almost daily basis in 1923 and early 1924, but photographs had to be printed and posted, with the result that two weeks might separate one of Merton’s articles and the publication of photographs depicting the events he described.21 This had the effect – surely familiar to readers at the time – of repeating similar information but by different means; it also increased the frequency and duration of publicity about a major story like the Tutankhamun discovery. The wrapping and removal of statue 22, for instance, was the subject of a Merton article in The Times on 30 November 1923 – published the day after the events it described.22 ‘A difficult task’, read the subhead over Merton’s description of the work involved in packing the first of the heavy statues, which Carter is credited with accomplishing in an ‘ingenious manner’ over two hours, by propping a tray behind the statue, using wedges to raise the statue beneath its plinth and lean it back into the tray, and finally swathing the statue in cotton wool and bandages until it ‘looked like a severely wounded man after treatment in a casualty ward’.
A Times article published the following day reported the successful removal of the second guardian statue (object 29).23 But only two weeks later, on 14 December, could The Times publish a photograph – probably taken by Merton – that showed it being manoeuvred up the tomb steps by Callender and three Egyptian workers (Figure 6.5).24 The image may show the destination of the bolt of cloth Carter and his ra’is had held rather ambiguously between them, which here seems to have been used to pad the space between the base of the statue and the side of the tray. A further two weeks would then pass before Burton’s staged photograph of the ‘wrapping’ appeared in late December, a delay perhaps caused by the timing of Burton’s own developing and printing work, or by internal decisions at The Times and the News. Whatever the reason, the fate of the two guardian statues, whose location in the Antechamber meant that they had featured so prominently in the press during the first season, thus occupied a full month of media coverage at the busy start of the second season at the tomb.
Figure 6.5 Egyptian workmen carry one of the guardian statues (object 29) out of the tomb. Press photograph, possibly by Arthur Merton, 30 November 1927.
True to its side of the agreement, The Times sought to sell on rights to news articles and photographs about the tomb, with enough success to pay Carnarvon’s estate beyond the £5,000 advance. This was the mechanism by which the Manchester Guardian published a story about the statue removal on the same day as The Times, clearly marked ‘The “Times” World Copyright’ beneath the headlines.25 The Guardian should also have credited The Times on 14 December, when it too published the photograph of a guardian statue being carried over the top of the tomb steps.26 The copyright information would have been clearly stamped on the back of the print, just like another surviving print of this same photograph that originated with The Times (Figure 6.6).
Purple-inked stamp impressions identify ‘The Times photograph copyright in all countries’ and give the instruction ‘Not to be published before’, with room for a date stamp – in this instance, 14 December. A typewritten caption affixed to each print sometimes underscored The Times’ control by heading the text, in uppercase lettering, ‘The Luxor Tomb: “The Times” Official Photographs’ and cross-referencing other Times coverage, though few newspapers included more than a brief description. For prints of Harry Burton photographs, such as the posed wrapping of statue 22, an additional stamp made explicit the requirement for copyright acknowledgement. It read in full:
THIS PHOTOGRAPH Must be Acknowledged as follows: “The Times” World copyright Photograph by Mr. Harry Burton, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Expedition, lent by courtesy of the trustees and the Director of the Egyptian Department.27
Crediting both Burton and the Metropolitan Museum was a mark of how important Burton’s work was to the excavation, but this was not unique to Burton’s Tutankhamun work: the Museum already credited him this way in press coverage of its own Egyptian Expedition.28 Nonetheless, Carter will have been minded of the benefit of displaying his gratitude to the Museum, which was also rewarded by press coverage on its home turf. The New York Times followed the Metropolitan Museum’s involvement in the tomb with interest, both on its own and by purchasing stories and photographs from the London Times. The Museum had posted a deficit of more than $300,000 in 1922, so positive news – a letter of thanks from Carnarvon, a marked increase in visitors to the Egyptian galleries, and a display of Burton’s Tutankhamun photographs in the spring of 1923 – was welcome.29 The gilded lustre of Tutankhamun covered many cracks.
Figure 6.6 The reverse of the press photograph in Figure 6.5, showing date and copyright stamps from The Times newspaper distribution service.
But not all, and the fissure between competing newspapers only grew larger as the work continued. Reporting that Carter had downed tools in February 1924, the Daily Express could hardly keep a sense of Schadenfreude out of its front page coverage (‘Evil of monopoly’, read the subhead), deigning to name the ‘London paper’ with which Lord Carnarvon had made his ‘unfortunate contract’.30 The same paper had been among the first to denounce Carnarvon’s memorandum with The Times, labelling it ‘Tutankhamun Ltd.’ already in February 1923 and deploring the Egyptian government’s apparent surrender to a ‘private venture’.31 Like other newspapers unable or unwilling to purchase images from The Times, the Daily Express made do by taking its own photographs from vantage points outside the tomb or by using artists’ illustrations.32 Carter protected his relationship with The Times after Carnarvon’s death, during the stoppage of 1924, and after work resumed in 1925, when the contract was no longer valid. In 1924, for instance, Carter threatened Arthur Weigall and the organizers of the British Empire Exhibition with litigation, until Weigall demonstrated that his personal drawings and photographs were the source of the popular reconstruction of the tomb that featured in the Exhibition. Even more people will have seen the reconstruction of the tomb than saw it in newspaper photographs: the Empire Exhibition was held at the new, purpose-built Wembley Stadium throughout 1924 and 1925, and attracted 27 million visitors – including Harry and Minnie Burton.33
Understandably, it was the Egyptian press who felt the slight of ‘Tutankhamun, Ltd.’ most keenly, banned from reporting on an archaeological discovery in their own country. The monthly magazine Al-Hilal, which covered arts, history, news and science from around the world, published a handful of features on the Tutankhamun excavation, accompanied by Burton photographs that may have been supplied by Carter, or else were re-photographed from other publications – such as the close-up of statue 22 still in its ancient wrapping, which had been a cover image for the Illustrated London News (Figure 6.7; compare Figure 6.2).34 Al-Hilal’s coverage over the course of the first two seasons included stories about the initial discovery, a notice of Carnarvon’s death, and a feature on the early Egyptian pioneers of Egyptology, and for all of these (as for its other stories) it drew on a range of visual sources. In addition to Burton’s published photographs, for example, it republished a drawing from a January 1924 issue of The Sphere, signed ‘D. MacPherson Luxor’, which was one of several MacPherson executed especially for this rival to the Illustrated London News (Figure 6.8).35 The MacPherson drawing depicts the structure of the shrines in isometric view, their constituent parts sliding apart like a three-dimensional puzzle and the imagined space around them peopled by multiples of the two Egyptian workmen seen in photographs. The interplay of graphic and photographic illustration was typical of many media publications at the time, not only because of the printing constraints some faced, but also because drawings allowed certain things to be visualized that a camera could not.36 Moreover, both kinds of images could be copied almost indefinitely, thanks to re-photography. This is one of several factors The Times contract miscalculated. Whether photographic images circulated as officially stamped prints or as published newspaper images, they were more difficult to control than Carnarvon – himself a keen photographer – seems to have realized. Perhaps they would prove more tractable in telling the stories that helped create an ancient Egypt fit for the modern world.
Figure 6.7 Burton’s photograph of statue 22, reproduced in Al-Hilal magazine’s feature on the discovery in 1923.
Figure 6.8 A drawing by D. MacPherson, from The Sphere (January 1924), reproduced in Al-Hilal magazine later that year.
‘When Modernity Fails’: this was the strap line on an advertisement for Craven tobacco, placed in the London Times on 14 February 1923, just as controversy over journalists’ access to the tomb of Tutankhamun raged in Luxor. It ran beneath a photograph of the site, labelled to show the tomb, the ‘dark room’ (KV55), the power station and adjacent sites, and photographs showing Carter and Mace packing a couch, and Burton filming with the Akeley.37 Crowded on the page with other photographs – the opening of parliament, pancake day, the Tibetan army ‘being built up on the British model’ – the Craven advertisement assured readers that the timeless taste of Craven tobacco would transport smokers back to the ‘deep, old-fashioned flavours of years gone by’, for the duration of a pipe. Modernity might have failed in some respects, and flavours, but it succeeded in commanding the past – or at least those parts of the past worth preserving or revisiting.
The distinct horizons of time that newspapers marshalled on behalf of the modern age were horizons of space as well, from the tobacco plantations of Virginia, to the Valley of the Kings, to Pall Mall, and thence to the suburban living rooms of 1920s England. Modernity itself had emerged in the shared geographies of colonialism, as Wilson Chacko Jacob and Timothy Mitchell have argued with specific reference to Egypt.38 To recognize the colonial embeddedness of the most banal media imagery is to recognize modernity’s debt to colonialism – and to the image economy in which both ‘Western’ and ‘foreign’ press shared, as the examples from Al-Hilal suggest. Further, reading the news stories and advertisements that flank and surround the Tutankhamun coverage highlights the wider concerns of the day, and the distinctly imperial character of the British press in particular.39 Weeklies like the Illustrated London News or The Sphere combined society and political coverage, science and theatre news, a bit of sports and motoring, and regular features on art, history and archaeology – just as they combined photography and drawings in their efforts to bring the ‘modern’ world, with all its paradoxes, to readers. The rarity of the Tutankhamun discovery lent it particular prominence, but the tone of discourse surrounding it did not develop in isolation. Seeing news photos, reading headlines, following Carter’s progress in the press: all of these brought ancient Egypt and Tutankhamun into an ambit of the everyday, and in 1920s Britain – where the tomb was reported on most intensively, as a point of national pride – the everyday was, like the Craven tobacco ad, of two minds about the value of the modern. For every sign interpreted in a positive light, as modern by virtue of novelty, discovery or progress, there were reminders of ‘the primitive’ at Europe’s own edges, of earlier life-ways that were disappearing (for good or ill), and of the destruction wrought by modern warfare.40 Readers of the illustrated press encountered these contrasts in rapid succession, never viewing ancient Egypt on its own: in 1923, the Illustrated London News featured one of Howard Carter’s delicate paintings of an Egyptian tomb scene, made earlier in his career, and on the next page, ‘the great silence on Armistice Day’ in Trafalgar Square and Whitehall.41 Time was not chronological, in the modernist age, but collapsible – and the particular fascination with ancient Egypt articulated in interwar Britain offered an enchanting escape from the disillusions of the post-war present.42
Accordingly, in British, and to some extent American, press coverage of the tomb, references to other times and other places pepper the headlines, stories and captions for Burton’s photographs. These varied cultural references worked in tandem with page layouts and the content of the photographs themselves to guide readers in how they should ‘see’ and think about ancient Egypt. Familiarizing the ancient, exotic and strange seems to have been a common tactic: one article promised to tell readers ‘how the ancient Egyptians did the things we do’.43 The resulting melange of cultural comparisons could be attributed to the jaunty, conversational style of middlebrow journalism in the interwar era. But in light of the geopolitical context of the find, the controversies and legal actions that shadowed its early seasons, and the assertions of scientific probity made in part through Burton’s photographs, it is worth looking more closely at the comparisons used in presenting news and images of the tomb. In words and pictures, the discourse of science allowed the excavators and their supporters in the British press to argue that contemporary Egyptians were unable to appreciate, care for, and be entrusted with antiquities, or for that matter with anything deemed to require expertise. It followed that contemporary Egyptians could not be ‘modern’, a word that, at the turn of the twentieth century, began to encapsulate what it was to be current and in charge of one’s own self-fashioning.
When the Egyptian government – including Pierre Lacau and Rex Engelbach from the antiquities service – reopened the tomb in early March 1924, after Carter’s abrupt departure, the largest English-language newspaper in Egypt, The Egyptian Gazette, dripped its scorn on Sa’ad Zaghloul, other Egyptian politicians, and Egyptians in general. Sa’ad’s youthful supporters, cheering the overnight government train when it departed Cairo, were smashers of street-lamps and shop windows; ‘leathern Saidi throats’ disturbed travellers en route with their shouts of greeting and calls for Egyptian control of the Sudan; and ‘dusky faces pressed against the carriage windows’ confirmed the writer’s view that Zaghloul had done nothing but ‘[teach] them the power of the mob’. The unnamed correspondent continued:
The essentially political character dominating the earlier proceedings remained equally marked throughout, while, on the other hand the absence of archaeological interest was indicated equally pointedly by the absence from yesterday’s ceremony of a single Egyptologist of note, excepting M. Foucart, the head of the French Egyptological Mission [Georges Foucart, director of the Institut français d’archéologie orientale].
The sprinkling of distinguished British and European guests – Lord and Lady Allenby, Major-General Sir Lee Stack, a Prussian prince, and the Duke and Duchess of Aostan – could not make up for the presence of so many effendiya and their families, even ‘Moslem ladies’ as well as Copts. After visiting the tomb and taking tea in a special tent nearby, hosted by minister of public works Murqus Hanna and his wife, the Egyptian government hosted a banquet at the Winter Palace Hotel, followed by a fireworks display and a procession of illuminated boats on the Nile, which ‘made an extremely effective finale to the day’s outing, and incidentally provided a conclusion entirely in keeping with the character of the whole proceedings, which from first to last were quite unrelated to scientific effort, being entirely in the nature of a fête’.44
What sounds like an exuberant (and hastily put-together) official occasion, punctuated by predictable tea tents and banquet speeches, had a fatal flaw in the eyes of the Gazette’s reporter and other Britons: it was an Egyptian event, organized by Egyptians, and attended for the most part by Egyptians. That was the ‘political’ element, in British eyes, and that was the rub. Egyptians – and other populations subject to colonialism – insisted on their modernity, and on the autonomous statehood that went with it. Tutankhamun entered the news when the aftershocks of the First World War were still being felt: in the first weeks after the discovery, it shared headlines with France’s occupation of the Rhineland, after Germany defaulted on war reparations; with the Lausanne Conference necessitated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s victory in Turkey; and with troubled efforts to draft a constitution for Egypt, following Britain’s unilateral granting of limited Egyptian independence in February 1922.45 On the same February 1923 Daily Express front page that lamented ‘Tutankhamen Ltd.’, the paper ran a ‘stop press’ reporting that the most recent Egyptian prime minister to resign (Nasim Pasha, a loyal Fuad courtier) had blamed British interference for the problems facing the fledgling government. In other words, Egypt modern as well as ancient regularly made the news – but coverage of the Tutankhamun discovery was one area that brought the two together. For The Times, Arthur Merton fawningly documented visits to the tomb by English aristocrats, minor royals and significant colonial officials like High Commissioner Allenby, the Sirdar Major-General Lee Stack, or Sir John Marshall, head of the antiquities service in India.46 A single newspaper column could report approvingly visits by George V’s equerry Sir Charles Cust and Sir William Garstin, a director of the Suez Canal company and former undersecretary of public works for the British administration in Egypt – yet deride the ‘considerable delay’ caused by the visits of Hafez Hassan Pasha, Under-Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior; Abdel Rahman Rida Pasha, procurer general of the Native Courts; and a party of students from the Giza Polytechnic Institute, some of whom carried their own cameras.47 Some visitors were clearly more welcome at the site than others.
Press coverage rarely related the tomb and its objects to modern Egypt in any historical or cultural terms, excepting occasional references in the mode of Orientalizing or primitive ‘survivals’ from the distant past. One of Burton’s photographs of baskets found in the Antechamber drew comparisons to baskets in use ‘today’ in Egypt, and the Egyptian workmen’s chanting as they backfilled the entrance drew comparison to an unspecified past – reminiscent of the records of workmen’s songs that several archaeologists in Egypt had kept.48 A press photograph of the men and basket-boys carrying out the work described the scene as ‘doubtless […] similar to that three thousand years ago when the tomb was excavated’.49 For the most part, references to modern Egypt and Egyptians were disparaging, especially in the immediate aftermath of Carter’s break with the antiquities service in February 1924. The Egyptian Gazette report quoted above was not alone in its mockery and scorn: the New York Times ran a story sourced from the London Evening Standard about an Egyptian official being disappointed to realize that Tutankhamun’s outer coffin was gilded wood rather than solid gold. ‘Little appreciation of scientific value’, ran the sub-head, while the article pointed out that this anecdote illustrated ‘the attitude of the average Egyptian toward the archaeological researches’ at the tomb.50
Instead, other cultures around the world provided comparisons for the ancient Egyptian finds, as journalists sought to characterize the nature and splendour of the objects in Burton’s photographs. The painted box (21) so prominent in Burton’s first photographs of the Antechamber ‘excell[ed] in beauty and minute detail the finest Chinese or Japanese art’, according to one picture caption, while the duck heads carved on the legs of a folding stool ‘might excite the admiration of the best Japanese craftsmen’.51 Later in the 1920s, the Illustrated London News would compare throw-sticks from the tomb – non-return boomerangs – to ‘those of Australian blacks’.52 But the British press did not need to look to the reaches of empire for apt comparisons. It found plenty at home as well. The first published photographs inside the burial shrines equated them to the Old Testament ‘Tabernacle of the Covenant’; the chariots were a state coach such as the King used at openings of Parliament; an alabaster lamp was ‘like the three-branched candelabra of the Christian trinity’; Tutankhamen spear-hunting from a skiff was a ‘prototype of St George’; and one of the last repaired objects from the Annexe, a folding chair (the ‘faldstool’, object 351), was compared to an ecclesiastical throne.53 The goddess Isis became ‘the “Madonna” of ancient Egypt’ in a News headline, under a Burton photograph taken with the goddess’s body turned away from the canopic shrine for the purpose (Figure 6.9).54 This was the exact opposite of how the figure had faced when the shrine was discovered, and to reposition it, the archaeologists had to lift it off the shrine (to which it was fixed by a tenon), turn it around and re-slot the tenon. In the new position, the figure’s outstretched arms did indeed resemble the welcoming embrace of the Virgin Mary, rather than the protecting arms of Isis for the dead. Many of these Christian and contemporary allusions came from Carter himself. In a Royal Institution lecture, he described gold and silver walking sticks as the ‘prototype of the Gold-Stick and Silver-Stick in Waiting of our Court of to-day’ – but they were entirely in keeping with the tone of contemporaneous journalism, which revelled in the trappings of imperialism, including militarism.55 Even the New York Times was happy to draw comparisons between General Allenby’s First World War campaign ‘against the Turks’ and the battles of Tutankhamen’s own era, ‘past and present joined’.56
Figure 6.9 Burton’s photograph of the goddess Isis guarding the canopic shrine in the Treasury; corresponds either to Griffith Institute Burton neg. 1149 or MMA neg. TAA 968. Cover of The Illustrated London News, 22 January 1927, with the subtitle ‘The “Madonna” of Ancient Egypt’.
Situated within a familiar cultural landscape of Christian symbols, Venetian gondolas and Queen Anne style, some of the objects found in Tutankhamun’s tomb could also be ‘modern’ – or nearly so, and in a praiseworthy way. Furniture and clothing in particular inspired comparisons to the ‘modern’, which was in turn borne out by 1920s fashions in clothing and home decor that drew on some ancient Egyptian designs. The Illustrated London News again felt compelled to speak of ‘prototypes’ of modern furniture when publishing one of Burton’s photos of a chair from the Antechamber.57 The same paper described beaded jewellery from the Treasury as modern, too, when it reproduced tinted colour versions of Burton photographs of bracelets and a stole in 1927.58 By then, however, the argument from a design point of view was circular – ancient Egypt looked ‘modern’ because to some extent, it had influenced modernist taste. Besides, since ‘modern’ and ‘Western’ had been conflated with each other in Euro-American discourse, there was something cozy and comforting in this version of modernity, as even the advertisers of Craven tobacco might concede. Tutankhamun – boy-king, warrior-king, pharaoh – had been made to feel at home.
Tutankhamun was tamed by cultural references that located him within an imperial imaginary, with the support of photographs that rendered the tomb paraphernalia legible within an artistic canon indebted to Western traditions, at least for the most materially and visually arresting objects. But another striking aspect of the tomb’s public presentation was its emphasis on the imagined personality of its hitherto unknown occupant, in a way that combined tropes of domesticity and masculinity, even as it emphasized the young age at which he died (around eighteen) and even younger age at which he became king (around ten). Nothing in the tomb inspired serious discussion of religious practices in ancient Egypt beyond standard, and rather banal, observations about the god Osiris, mummification, or kingship – despite the rare evidence offered by objects like the shrines with linen-wrapped statuettes, or the clearly purposeful positioning of tomb goods, shrines, statues and model boats, for instance. In fact, Carter – speaking through Merton – likened the tomb and its shrines to a house, a ‘domicile’ in which the king could live on after death with everything close to hand that ‘he possibly might require on emerging from his abode’.59
Domesticity explained away death, and as many of the tomb goods as possible were presented, in pictures and in words, to conjure vignettes of hearth and home – from a burial site. Ahead of the start of the second season, in September 1923, The Times presented a full page of Burton photographs with the headline ‘Domestic life in Egypt: a royal wishing-cup’.60 The coverage followed on from Carter’s sell-out lectures in London the same month. Many of the photos of ‘domestic life’ appeared in the following day’s edition of the Illustrated London News, including the cedar chair described as ‘modern’ and a walking stick compared to Charlie Chaplin’s, right down to the ‘bowler hat’ and facial features of the ‘Asiatic’ prisoner carved into it. Even a wooden snake emblem clothed in linen, which had been found in a shrine in the Antechamber, could be pictured among these ‘domestic’ items, although no attempt was made to characterize it as droll or quotidian. However, a more elaborate shrine – of wood covered by embossed gold sheets – did fit easily into the domestic narrative, thanks to its scenes of Tutankhamun and his wife, queen Ankhesenamun. Understood today in terms of its visual and verbal plays on sexual intercourse and fertility, at the time of its discovery, the shrine was described as ‘an example of naive art’, and the depiction of a wife tending to her husband – seen in Burton’s side-on photographs of the object – was read as a straightforward depiction of conjugal devotion.61 This overtly religious artefact, in which several enigmatic objects had been found (including an empty statue plinth), was instead described as follows:
Delightful little scenes represent homely incidents in the life of the King and Queen, and the atmosphere of affection is apparent. Especial value is attached to these discoveries as illustrating the domestic life of the ancient Egyptians rather than religious beliefs, of which much has already been learned from other Royal tombs.62
Nor was the trope of young love, and young widowhood, confined to the first two years of the tomb’s discovery: in June 1925, the Illustrated London News tinted some monochrome Burton photographs for colour printing, to stunning effect. These were photographs he had taken during the short third season, after Carter had negotiated a return to the site. Time spent at KV15, instead of the tomb itself, allowed Carter to catch up on cataloguing and Burton to play with photographic effects, such as lighting one of the alabaster lamps to recreate how it would have looked when lit in antiquity. This revealed painted decoration sandwiched inside the lamp’s double-walled oil well, depicting the queen offering hieroglyphic signs for ‘years’, hence a long life and reign, to the enthroned king. The caption reduced this to a ‘charming picture of the boy-King Tutankhamen and his young bride’, while a double-page spread of the outer coffin, also tinted in colour, drew attention to the ‘pathetic little wreath’ looped around the protective vulture and cobra on its forehead, ‘believed to have been placed there by the widowed girl-Queen as a farewell offering’.63
The familial connections of Tutankhamun extended back in time beyond his consort, who was known to be the daughter of the previous king, Akhenaten, and queen Nefertiti. Tutankhamun’s own parentage was a mystery, but objects in the tomb that evoked his childhood or family heritage were also presented, with photographs, to fill out the bare bones of his biographic details. A scarf found in the painted box (object 21) in the Antechamber was dubbed a ‘hood and tippet’, the latter word in use at the time for women’s fur stoles or the stoles worn by clergymen (Figure 6.10). Its small dimensions were, by some logic, ‘evidence of a pharaoh’s age’, and the press speculated that the garment had been used to swaddle Tutankhamun in infancy.64 The photographs spoke – almost literally, thanks to the captions sent with them through the post – and what they told was a plangent story of the king’s youth, followed so closely by his death. A linen glove found in the same box as the ‘tippet’ caused excitement both for its small size and because it was the first glove archaeologists had ever found from ancient Egypt. As the Illustrated London News put it:
Figure 6.10 The ‘hood and tippet’ (linen textile with spangles, object 21cc), found in box 21 in the Antechamber. Print corresponds either to Griffith Institute Burton neg. P0394 or MMA neg. TAA 808.
A note supplied with the photograph says: ‘This glove is made of the finest linen fabric, and is unique, not only as a memento of the king’s youth, but as the first ancient Egyptian glove ever discovered. Thus it is the oldest specimen known of its kind, and opens up quite new ideas as to the civilisation of the period. From this interesting relic, together with other unique clothing found bundled into the casket, it is evident that royal children cannot have been nude, as they are commonly shown in the mural decorations of ancient monuments’.65
To the New York Times, the ‘child’s glove suggests a mother’s care for youngster’, and the paper also fancied that a slipper found in the casket ‘belonged to some Cinderella of the long ago’.66 Fairytales were woven, like fine linen, between what were often quite detailed explanations of the materials, workmanship and significance of the finds. Anyone who followed the story in print, and especially in photographs, became familiar with the biographies and personalities not only of the scientists involved, but of the long-dead adolescent at the centre of it all.
The objects, too, took on personal traits, their forms rendered familiar thanks to Burton’s photographs or, in the first season, the impressions that viewers gained from snapshots of the porters carrying artefacts out of the tomb on trays. Media coverage was less intensive and frequent in later seasons, to be sure, but the illustrated press maintained an interest in the find – and an interest in the domestic angle on Tutankhamun’s life. Newspapers cropped Burton’s photographs close in to objects like boxes, tables and head-rests, and described their materials and workmanship in detail, as well as their presumed functions in a home, rather than the tomb.67 Where something personal or biographical could be ascribed to the objects, that became the focus. Speaking to his preferred outlet the Illustrated London News in 1929, Carter described boxes from the Annex as ‘interesting mementoes of the King’s youth’, comparing them to panniers. Perhaps it was their small size – both fit side-by-side in front of Burton’s curved paper backdrop – that suggested childhood to Carter. Certainly, the small dimensions of a white-painted wooden chair and footstool, also from the Annex, indicated that they had been designed and made for a child. But which child, and why they were deposited in a burial, was of less concern than the headline that they were from the ‘Royal Nursery’.68 The childlike appeal of the boy-king, and of ancient Egypt more generally, made it a popular subject in children’s newspapers, too. In 1925, the American magazine The Companion for All the Family ran a story by Egyptologist Caroline Ransom Williams, using photographs of boxes and furniture from the same era as Tutankhamun’s to illustrate an account that made ancient Egyptians sound like characters from a Sinclair Lewis novel: they ate three meals a day and ‘had commodious armchairs with backs into which the body fitted comfortably’ – though alas, no rocking chairs.69
Domestic or not in their ancient context, the objects from the tomb, its chambers, the coffins and mummy, in a word, Tutankhamun himself, all became domestic in a modern context by virtue of the way images of them circulated outside of the press. Burton’s and others’ photographs were not limited to the printed pages of newspapers and magazines. Newsreels and lantern slide lectures brought them to audiences around the world, and as we have seen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed Burton images in its galleries, taking advantage of increased interest in ancient Egypt. But the photographs could also be purchased as postcards or collectors’ cards, which were the same format and dimensions. The Illustrated London News sold collectable packs in the early 1930s, all based on Burton photographs (Figure 6.11). Printed on good quality, coated paper stock, and numbered so as to encourage the acquisition of multiple sets, each packet of these ‘real photographic postcards’ contained twelve cards, at three shillings plus postage in the UK; shipping to ‘British possessions’, the US and overseas was also available. The full set of sixty could also be bought outright, for ten or fifteen shillings – a small price for items that were marketed as ‘essentially works of art’ in themselves, the images having been chosen ‘under expert supervision’.69
Figure 6.11 A Bruce Company postcard from the 1930s, based on photographs by Harry Burton of the daggers found on the mummy of Tutankhamun. The corresponding negatives may be GI neg. P0872, P0873 and P0870; Burton took several exposures of these objects.
In the 1920s and 1930s, tourism to Egypt – boosted immediately after the 1922 discovery – continued to thrive, with Tutankhamun-themed postcards available through a number of outlets, often adapted from Burton photographs without any credit or licensing arrangement. At Luxor, firms like Gaddis & Seif sold such cards, while in Cairo, the established firm of Lehnert & Landrock dominated the market.71 The photographs that tourists, journalists and enterprising photographers had taken of porterage during the excavation also found a market as postcards. One series, apparently sold during the 1920s, had printed on the front of the postcard image a series title, ‘The Exploitation of Tutankhamen’s Tomb’ – a telling linguistic slip for ‘exploration’, perhaps (Figure 6.12).
Figure 6.12 Postcard from a series entitled ‘Exploitation of Tout-ankh-amon’s tomb’, based on press or tourist snapshots taken in early 1923. From the archive of Alexandre Varille, copyright Biblioteca e Archivi di Egittologia, Università degli Studi, Milan.
From stereoscope views to children’s newspapers to cigarette cards, protean images of king Tut filtered into the most commonplace areas of interwar life, turning photographs of iconic objects and ‘discovery’ into consumable commodities. A popular form of advertising for tobacco companies since the late nineteenth century, cigarette cards were issued in collectable packs, in multiples of ten or a dozen; the stiffened board was integral to the packaging, with an image on one side and a descriptive caption, plus company identification, on the other.72 Some subjects were suitable for children, for instance illustrating the letters of the alphabet, and some, like garden flowers, might be construed as female-oriented, but many were targeted to male consumers, with sporting heroes or ‘famous beauties’ as a theme. Collecting many themed series of cards – ‘Flags of the Empire’ or ‘Celebrated Bridges’ – inevitably meant collecting those parts of the world envisioned as areas under the dominion of empire. Although cigarette cards often relied on illustrations, these were based closely on photographs, and cards could also be printed directly with photographs, too. A Sarony Cigarettes series from the late 1920s, called ‘National Types of Beauty’, used ‘thirty-six actual photographs’ of attractive and youthful women: Egypt was no. 17, depicting ‘the beautiful Egyptian of the better classes’.
In 1926, British firm Wills’ Cigarettes issued a fifty-strong set called ‘Wonders of the Past’, two of which used coloured drawings based on well-known Burton photographs: the right-hand guardian statue (object 22) and the hippo-headed couch (object 137), from the first season’s work (Figure 6.13). Into the 1930s, the tomb of Tutankhamun was still memorable enough to warrant inclusion in sets of cigarette cards.73 Churchman’s Cigarettes issued at least three Tutankhamun-themed cards, as part of its 1935 ‘Treasure Trove’ series and perhaps a subsequent series as well (Figure 6.14). All are illustrations based on press images from more than a decade earlier. There was Amédée Forestier’s imagined view of the discovery, ‘The First Inspection’ that no camera ever caught. There were the guardian statues, forever standing either side of the sealed-up burial chamber – just as they had been in one of the first of the 3,000-odd photographs Burton would take. And there were Carter and his unnamed Egyptian colleague, holding still for the camera in 1925 with their tools poised over the solid gold inner coffin, its gleam still part-obscured by resin. When Tutankhamun could fit so neatly into a pocketbook or cigarette case, it mattered less where the artefacts had wound up, or who owned the copyright to Burton’s photographs. Thanks to photography, Tutankhamun was everywhere, and everyone’s.
Resin and ritual had not given Tutankhamun his long afterlife: he owed it instead to the artist’s pencil, the camera lens and the printing press that made images like the ones we have seen in this chapter so cheap, memorable and portable. The visual impact of the print media, together with the narratives woven around the discovery, meant that European and American audiences formed a particular communal memory of the boy-king – one which created a personality for him alongside that of his credited discoverer, Howard Carter. Carter’s books on the tomb continued to sell well, into the 1930s. The third volume, which appeared in 1933, ‘apparently had quite a good sale’, according to Burton – who added, ‘but I’ve seen none of the proceeds’, well aware by then of the impact his photographs had had on public consumption of the tomb.74 International press, but particularly the British press, followed Carter’s progress at the tomb to the very end. The re-erection of the shrines in the antiquities museum in Cairo took up several pages of the Illustrated London News in January 1933, using the photographs Burton had taken a few weeks before (see Figure 1.7).75 Even with the excavation complete, Tutankhamun remained newsworthy. For example, for the silver jubilee of King George V in 1935, the News commemorated the discovery of the tomb as one of the highlights of his reign, in a colour supplement based on a profile photograph Burton had taken of the mask in December 1925.76 Perhaps the mask in left-facing profile recalled the royal profile used on British postage stamps. Either way, in Great Britain, Tutankhamun represented two kinds of royalty: his own, and the British monarchy, in which the entire identity of empire was vested.
Figure 6.13 Wills’ cigarette cards from the ‘Wonders of the Past’ series, 1920s date. The illustrations are based on Burton photographs of statue 22 and the hippo-headed couch (object 137).
Figure 6.14 Churchman’s cigarette cards from the 1930s, based (top to bottom) on Forestier’s 1923 drawing of the discovery, a Burton photograph of the Antechamber (such as GI neg. P0007), and Burton’s 1925 photograph of Carter and a ra’is working on the innermost coffin (GI neg. P0770).
The press closely followed details of craftsmanship, materials and function as the tomb objects emerged from restoration – and appeared in Burton’s photographs. They also followed debates about their ownership, with regular, if brief, news bulletins throughout the 1920s revisiting the question of whether any ‘duplicate’ objects would find homes in England or New York.77 In the end, however, the destination of the physical objects hardly mattered, for the steady flow of photographs and news stories meant that British and American audiences already ‘owned’ Tutankhamun in their imaginations. Egyptian views did not enter into this picture, for only ancient, not contemporary, Egyptians mattered. Antiquity was not the opposite of modernity in this discourse but a crucial part of it, because being ‘modern’ meant being able to control, understand and appreciate the remains of the distant past. This was an illusion, but an endemic and persuasive one, as Sigmund Kracauer observed of the illustrated press of the time:
In the illustrated publications, the public sees the world, the perception of which is hindered by these very publications. […] There has never been a time that has known so little about itself. In the hands of ruling society, the institution of the illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful weapons in the struggle against knowledge.78
The quantity of photographs taken, the way they were juxtaposed and disseminated in multiples on the printed page, and the disruption caused by this quality of easy, endless reproduction to a sense of human time: these, Kracauer thought, were neutralizing history and creating a popular culture detached from deeper forms of memory, knowledge and critique. What looked like appreciation for the past, or art and science, or other people and places, was in fact shallow and inward-looking.
By tapping into an array of cultural, royal and Judeo-Christian comparisons to present the finds to readers, the print media mapped the tomb onto an imperial worldview in which Britain and Europe were modern and the rest of the world was not. Through the mouthpiece of the Illustrated London News and The Times, in particular, Carter’s own presentation of the tomb created twin narratives, one emphasizing Western scientific rigour, the other the boyishness, domestic life and regal pageantry of Tutankhamun – the now-familiar ‘boy-king’ or, in popular culture (never in Carter’s own words), ‘King Tut’. Seeing a newsreel, reading a news magazine, writing or receiving a postcard, and buying or trading cigarette cards: these acts helped cement a visual memory of Tutankhamun and create a collective one, perhaps all the more potent for being tinged with a certain nostalgia for the fading glories of expansionism and discovery. Discovered as Europe and the Middle East emerged from one world war, Tutankhamun would sink back into a certain obscurity in the course of a second war, but the memories – and Burton’s photographs – were only dormant, awaiting rediscovery. Sounded live from Cairo for the BBC in April 1939, a month after Carter’s death, Tutankhamun’s military trumpets fell silent until they were needed once again.79
1 The photographs in question are GI negs. P0007, P0010, P0012 and P0321; associated MMA negs. are TAA 4, TAA 6 and TAA 10. ‘Interior of Tutankhamen’s tomb: first photographs’, The Times, 30 January 1923: 14; ‘Lord Carnarvon décrit quelques-une des richesses de Tut-ank-amen’, Le Petit Parisien, 31 January 1923, front page (http://gallica.bnf.fr/
2 See Collier, ‘Imperial/modernist forms in the Illustrated London News’; Gretton, ‘The pragmatics of page design’; and Mussell, ‘Cohering knowledge’. Both focus on nineteenth-century periodicals, but Gretton considers the early twentieth-century as well. On the use of images in the illustrated press, see also Beegan, The Mass Image; Hockings, ‘Disasters drawn’; and Sinnema, Dynamics of the Picture Page, as well as Belknap, ‘Through the looking glass’, for the role of photographs in presenting science as an imperial project in the nineteenth-century press. Other examples of imaginative illustrations inspired by the work at Tutankhamun’s tomb include a cover of L’Illustrazione del Popolo, 2 March 1924, depicting coffins being lifted out of a setting that bore little relationship to the Burial Chamber. In contrast, La Domenica del Corriere, 24 February 1924, used a cover illustration clearly inspired by Burton’s photographs of Carter, Callender, Mace and the ru’asa peering into the shrine doors.
3 Cox Hall, Framing a Lost City, 20–2, 86–102, also discusses the role of scientific discourse in National Geographic Magazine’s presentation of American exploration at Machu Picchu, pre-World War I. The National Geographic Society sponsored the Yale Peruvian Expeditions, and each issue of the magazine was estimated to reach a million readers at the time, who were invited through text and photographs ‘to travel with the scientific expedition on its journey’ (96).
4 See Fryxhell, ‘Tutankhamun, Egyptomania, and temporal enchantment’, for a similar argument about Tutankhamun’s escapist appeal, based largely – as she points out – on replicas, visual and written representations and commodities.
5 For the contract and its implications, see James, Howard Carter, 277–82, 290, 303, with a transcription at 480–5 (quoted passage at 480). A portion of the contract is illustrated (but not transcribed) in Carter and Reeves, Tut-Ankh-Amen, xxii, and see pp. xviii–xxiii for discussion.
6 James, Howard Carter, 481.
7 Ibid., 482–3.
8 Ibid., 278.
9 ‘The first glimpse of the great Egyptian treasure’, Illustrated London News, 23 December 1922: p. 1022–3. For Forestier’s work and the News’ interest in archaeology under Bruce Ingram’s editorship, see Phillips, ‘“To make the dry bones live”’.
10 James, Howard Carter, 280, but see the fuller account in Hankey, A Passion for Egypt, 262–8, which draws on Weigall family archives unavailable to T.G.H. James.
11 James, Howard Carter, 282–3.
12 ‘Protests fail against Carnarvon’, New York Times, 12 February 1923: 15.
13 ‘Americans indignant at treatment’, New York Times, 10 February 1923: 15.
14 ‘Pharaoh’s vases give off old scent’, New York Times, 5 January 1923: 3 (‘Mr. Carter courteously instructed the bearers to walk slowly in order to allow the visitors to examine the vases without touching them. Mr. Carter laughingly informed the ladies that the vases contained perfumes of the King’.)
15 ‘Protests fail against Carnarvon’, New York Times, 12 February 1923: 15.
16 Williams, ‘At the tomb of Tutankhamen’, 469.
17 GI neg. P0491; on a similar negative in the Metropolitan Museum, TAA 715, Callender is obscured by shadow.
18 Respectively ‘Tutankhamen’s statue guardian: Delicate removal feat’, Manchester Guardian, 30 November 1923: 9 (subhead: ‘Borne like a war casualty from the tomb’; the article itself is Times copyright), and ‘Tutankhamen’s statue: Removal from the tomb’, The Times, 30 November 1923: 12.
19 See Riggs, ‘Colonial visions’.
20 ‘In Tutankhamen’s shrine: The first work of the season’, The Times, 28 December 1923: 12; ‘Tutankhamun trove: A gold chariot panel; packing a statue’, Illustrated London News, 29 December 1923: 1198.
21 See Riggs, Tutankhamun: The Original Photographs, 3–5, 7–9.
22 ‘Tutankhamun’s statue’, The Times, 30 November 1923: 12.
23 ‘Tutankhamun’s tomb’, The Times, 1 December 1923: 10.
24 ‘Removing Tutankhamen statues. Royal theatre party’, The Times, 14 December 1923: 18.
25 See n. 15.
26 ‘A statue of Tutankhamun’, Manchester Guardian, 14 December 1923: 7.
27 Further examples in Riggs, Tutankhamun: The Complete Photographs, 6 (fig. 2), 109 (fig. 145).
28 E.g. ‘In 2000 B.C.: A slaughter-house, brewery, and bakery in Egypt’, Illustrated London News, 2 April 1921: 449, credited ‘By courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photographs by Mr. Harry Burton, of the Expedition staff’.
29 ‘Crowds at Museum see Egyptian tombs’, New York Times, 5 February 1923: 3; ‘Tut-ankh-amen views in Museum’, New York Times, 5 May 1923.
30 ‘Women barred from the tomb’, Daily Express, 14 February 1924: 1.
31 ‘Tutankhamun, Ltd.’, Daily Express, 10 February 1923: 1.
32 For example, ‘With the explorers at Luxor. In special “Daily Express” photographs’, The Daily Express, 17 Febraury 1923: 8 – a column of images headed by an artists’ reconstruction of the discovery used courtesy of the Illustrated London News.
33 See Hankey, A Passion for Egypt, 286–7; Collins and McNamara, Discovering Tutankhamun, 76–9; and Fryxhell, ‘Tutankhamun, Egyptomania, and temporal enchantment’, 530–2. The Burtons visited the Exhibition while in London, before their trip to the United States: ‘After lunch to Wembley by Paddington. Round in Radiotoc. Saw Burmah, Canada, & to performance of conjuring in Indian Pavilion, etc.’ (GI/MBdiary, entry for 27 May 1924, at http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/
34 Al-Hilal 31 (1923), 562; see also coverage in Al-Hilal 32 (1924). I am grateful to Mahmoud Hassaan Al Hashash for reading the relevant articles on my behalf and translating the image captions.
35 ‘The sections composing the great outer shrine in the burial chamber,’ The Sphere, 26 January 1924: 20–1. MacPherson contributed to a range of coverage in The Sphere, but for drawings specifically related to the Tutankhamun discovery, see the following: 24 February 1923: 6–7; 12 January 1924: 7; 19 January 1924: 66–7; 3 February 1923: 12; 10 February 1923: 22; 24 February 1923: 184–5; 8 March 1924: 15; 22 March 1924: 24–5; 24 May 1924: 19; 28 November 1925: 22–3.
36 Another example is the exclusive use of line drawings by Hamza Abdallah Carr in an English-Arabic booklet rushed into print in Cairo, by Saleh Lutfi, in January 1923. See Raph Cormack, ‘Pictures of Tutankhamun’, On Paper, 15 December 2017: https://wordpress.com/
37 ‘At the pharaoh’s tomb. The King opens parliament’, The Times, 14 February 1923: 16.
38 Jacob, Working out Egypt; Mitchell, Rule of Experts.
39 Compare the observations made by Robson, ‘Old habits die hard’, for press coverage of the excavation of Nimrud in Iraq in the 1940s–1950s.
40 Two examples among many that juxtapose primitive/modern and ancient/modern, both from the Illustrated London News: ‘Primitive nomads in modern Europe: Sarakatchans and Albano-Vlachs’, 18 July 1931: 101; ‘China – backward, yet progressing. Ancient ways and a modern road-to-be’, 26 July 1930: 155.
41 Illustrated London News, 17 November 1923: 893, 894.
42 Fryxhell, ‘Tutankhamun, Egyptomania, and temporal enchantment’.
43 ‘How the Egyptians did the things we do today’, Illustrated London News, 29 March 1930: 524.
44 ‘At the tomb of Tutankhamen: The government’s hospitality’, by a ‘special correspondent’, The Egyptian Gazette, 8 March 1924. The article’s subtitle is deeply sarcastic, when read in light of the content and tone of the article. For a sense of the grand occasion, see the Agence Rol photographs in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, online at ark:/12148/btv1b53127370j and ark:/12148/btv1b531273710.
Such sarcasm was not a factor of press authorship alone. In his own journals, Carter continued to be scornful of the Egyptian press and Egyptian visitors, for instance in this entry from 10 February 1925, shortly after the Service re-opened KV15 for him: ‘No work today on account of the Government visitors. They were about forty in number, none of which had any real interest in seeing the tomb further than curiosity. Up to the present no [Egyptian] newspaper correspondents have shown any interest nor demanded any news. The absence of Egyptians among the visitors today was also significant of the pretended interest last year’. (GI/HCjournals)
45 One example: in the prominent top half of the front page of the Daily Express, 5 February 1923, headlines included ‘Turks refuse to sign’, ‘Was it pharaoh’s protest? Tempest rises as the excavators dig’, and ‘New French march into Germany’. The initial invasion of the Ruhr valley had taken place on 11 January.
46 For photographs of these visits, see Riggs, Tutankhamun: The Original Photographs, 89–95. On Marshall, see Guha, The Marshall Albums.
47 ‘Pharaoh’s chariot’, Manchester Guardian, 5 February 1923: 7, with copy credited courtesy of The Times. Some of the Giza students were pictured with other tourists, and a pile of cameras, in National Geographic Magazine’s May 1923 issue, which featured a long story on the tomb by Maynard Owen Williams and used Williams’ own photography.
48 Basket: ‘3,500-year-old treasures after treatment at Luxor’, The Times, 25 May 1923: 16 (‘The basket is similar to those made and used in present-day Egypt’); ‘Now at Cairo: Tutankhamen treasures’, Illustrated London News, 26 May 1923: 914 (‘similar in make to those of modern Egypt’). Chanting: ‘The closing of Luxor tomb’, The Times, 28 February 1923: 12 (praising the ‘rapidity and industry’ of the boys and men who worked ‘in a continuous chain for several hours on end to the peculiar sing-song chant without which Eastern labourers seem unable to work’). On the practice of collecting workmen’s songs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeology in Egypt, see Clément, ‘Rethinking “peasant consciousness”’.
49 ‘Luxor tomb sealed. Dublin outrage. Cambridge at Putney’, The Times, 9 March 1923: 16. The photograph used is that reproduced in Riggs, Tutankhamun: The Original Photographs, 83 (fig. 110).
50 ‘Set fabulous value on pharaoh’s tomb’, New York Times, 2 March 1924: 17.
51 Box 21: ‘Mummified food for the king’s “ka”: Tutankhamen’s “larder”’, Illustrated London News, 3 February 1923: 169; folding stool (object 83): ‘Research at Luxor’, The Times, 13 February 1923: 12. The Illustrated London News, 24 February 1923: 282–3 (a special ‘Egypt Number’ of the paper), published Burton photographs of these two objects together under the headline ‘Tutankhamen treasures: Unsurpassed Egyptian craftsmanship’, repeating the comparison to ‘Chinese or Japanese decorative art’; GI negs. P0081 and P0353.
52 ‘Tutankhamen’s boomerangs – like those of Australian blacks’, Illustrated London News 12 October 1929: 627.
53 ‘First photographs taken in the shrine of Tutankhamen’, The Times, 11 January 1924: 14; ‘Like the Ark of the Covenant: the pall on Tutankhamen’s shrine’, Illustrated London News, 26 January 1924: 148; ‘A pharaoh’s “state coach”: one of Tutankhamen’s chariots’, Illustrated London News, 12 January 1924: 60; ‘Tutankhamen treasures: a sacred goose, lamps, a wine jar’, Illustrated London News, 27 June 1925: 1292; ‘The pharaonic prototype of St. George and the dragon’, Illustrated London News, 23 April 1927: cover; ‘New treasures from Tutankhamen’s tomb’, Illustrated London News, 23 May 1931: 856.
54 GI neg. P1149, MMA neg. TAA 968.
55 ‘Tutankhamen’s “Gold-Stick-in-Waiting”: evidence of his youth’, Illustrated London News, 27 June 1925: 1291.
56 ‘Allenby’s Egyptian campaign fought on same lines before Tut-ankh-amen’, New York Times, 25 March 1923: 4.
57 ‘“Seats of the mighty” in ancient Egypt: A Tutankhamen chair’, Illustrated London News, 29 September 1923: 563.
58 ‘Suggesting the modern stole: Tutankhamen’s ceremonial scarf’, Illustrated London News, 16 July 1927: 109; ‘Tutankhamen’s “modern” wrist-bands’, ibid.: 110.
59 ‘The Luxor tomb’, The Times, 7 January 1924: 12.
60 The Times, 28 September 1923: 14.
61 See Eaton-Krauss and Graefe, The Small Golden Shrine.
62 ‘Domestic life in Egypt: a royal wishing-cup’, The Times, 28 September 1923: 14.
63 ‘Tutankhamen’s palace lamp: Colour brought out by light’, Illustrated London News, 27 June 1925: 1293; ‘The golden coffin of the boy-king Tutankhamen’, ibid.: 1294–5.
64 Object 21cc, illustrated by GI neg. P0394: ‘Egyptian craftsmanship: The pharaoh’s golden sandal’, The Times, 23 February 1923: 16; likewise, ‘Tutankhamen treasures: The earliest glove; children’s clothes’, Illustrated London News, 24 February 1923: 281.
65 As above (n. 59), from the Illustrated London News.
66 ‘Tomb has given up rarest of old art’, New York Times, 18 March 1923: 4.
67 ‘New Tutankhamen relics: head-rests; “shirt box”; linen-chests’, Illustrated London News, 6 July 1929: 14.
68 ‘From Tutankhamen’s nursery: A high-backed chair and stool’, Illustrated London News, 20 July 1929: 119.
69 Ransom Williams (Mrs. Grant Williams), ‘Egyptian life in the time of Tutenkhamon’, The Companion for All the Family, 8 January 1925: 22–3.
70 An advertisement appeared to this effect, with sets at ten shillings, in the Illustrated London News, 29 March 1930: 540. The following year, the same paper advertised complete sets of ‘real photographic postcards’ at the higher price of fifteen shillings almost every week between 30 May 1931: 938 and 29 August 1931: 3.
71 For the firm’s history, see Geraci, ‘Lehnert & Landrock of North African’. The company still trades today, through its Cairo bookshop.
72 The New York Public Library has a useful resource based on its holdings of the genre: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/
73 See Collins and McNamara, Discovering Tutankhamun, 76.
74 Letter from Burton to Winlock, 27 March 1934 (MMA/HB: 1930–5).
75 ‘The wonders of the Tutankhamen shrines revealed’, Illustrated London News, 7 January 1933: front page and pp. 3–5.
76 Illustrated London News, 17 April 1935, supplement colour pl. XIII (‘The most complete archaeological discovery of the reign’).
77 For example, ‘Carter sets out tomorrow to reopen tomb’, New York Times, 14 January 1925: 1, reporting that his new arrangement with the antiquities service still allowed the possibility of duplicates (a similar report ran in the London Times the same day). As late as 1931, the British Museum made a request through the British High Commissioner to Egypt, asking the Egyptian government to give it first refusal of any duplicates from the tomb that it decided to release and send abroad: ‘Tutankhamen: New exhibits in Cairo Museum’, The Times, 27 May 1931: 11.
78 Kracauer, The Past’s Threshold, 39 (‘Photography’, originally published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, 28 October 1927).
79 ‘To be heard on the wireless: Tutankhamen’s 3000-year-old trumpets in a unique musical broadcast’, Illustrated London News, 15 April 1939: 633. Alfred Lucas gave a brief talk preceding the trumpet blows. The moment was recalled twice in the pages of the weekly BBC magazine The Listener, first in 1946 (‘Did You Hear That?’, 19 December 1946: 875+) and again during the British Museum Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition, by the trumpeter: Rex Keating, ‘Blowing Tutankhamun’s Trumpet’, 13 April 1972: 479.