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The Race for Ancient Egypt Colour S01E01
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00:08Egypt, towering monuments, mythic tombs, and fabled pharaohs.
00:20Much of today's fascination with ancient Egypt was ignited a century ago
00:25with the discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb.
00:30It really set off the mass global phenomenon.
00:35This is a story that had everything.
00:37It was a discovery of treasure, it was gold, it was beautiful, precious metal.
00:42Extraordinary discoveries that fired the public imagination.
00:46The reaction was unprecedented and phenomenal.
00:50It unfolded during a time of political upheaval.
00:55As Egypt pushed for independence.
00:59Sparking a race to control Egypt's story that has repercussions that still play out today.
01:06There was this push-off, we're not only reclaiming the land, we're reclaiming the heritage.
01:13Thousands of black and white photographs and reels of film survive from those transformative years.
01:22Now, advanced restoration and colorization revive these rare images.
01:31Revealing the race for ancient Egypt like never before.
01:36These images speak to a moment in history when ancient Egypt becomes something that everybody wants a piece of.
01:57Here in the sands of Egypt, in Luxor and Giza, generations gazed in wonder upon the ancient structures.
02:06The pyramids, the pyramids, the Sphinx, Abu Symbol, and countless temples.
02:19Throughout the 19th century, foreign powers poured into Egypt, eager to uncover more of what this ancient civilization had left
02:28behind.
02:28It was really Napoleon's invasion in 1798 that brought Egypt into the horizon of Europe.
02:36And that started 120 years of intense interest in ancient Egypt.
02:41Napoleon brought back a ton of Egyptian artifacts and really initiated or ignited an interest in Egyptology.
02:50But by the early 20th century, while archaeologists were digging into Egypt's past, in Cairo, Egyptians were looking to their
03:00future.
03:01This is Tahrir Square in the center of Cairo.
03:06It's synonymous with moments of change in Egypt and was at the epicenter of the 1919 revolution when Egyptians rose
03:14against colonial rule.
03:17For over four centuries, Egypt had been under foreign control, under the Ottomans, the French, and the British.
03:28But in 1919, Egyptians were fighting for their country and control over their own history.
03:37Just off Tahrir is the Egyptian museum, built while Egypt was under foreign control and run by the French.
03:46And even though it housed the most important pieces of Egyptian heritage, it still showed that the colonial powers were
03:53here.
04:00Without control of their country, Egyptians had little say over their ancient heritage.
04:06They didn't even decide who was allowed to dig.
04:10The Egyptian Antiquities Service, who regulated archaeological digs, had been run by the French since the 1850s.
04:20Egyptians could do little to stop treasures from leaving the country.
04:26It is really difficult to fathom how much material was coming out of Egypt.
04:33The British Museum is almost full of Egyptian stuff.
04:37The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the Vatican museums are full.
04:42Millions of pieces have sort of been dispersed into both public and private collections.
04:51Some we'll just never see again.
04:56Reflecting upon it from an archaeological perspective, these are like belongings that were taken out of context that have been
05:03lost now forever.
05:05So, in the early 20th century, when Egypt rose to reclaim its country, it also sought to reclaim its history.
05:17There was a sentiment of resentment to the foreign domination.
05:22The heritage, how it was governed, how it was even interpreted and how it was narrated,
05:27because there was no way for the Egyptians to contribute to these stories in ways that could give them some
05:33sort of right to claim this heritage as their own.
05:36From 1919 and into the 1920s, all of these factors, revolution, colonial power and spectacular discoveries,
05:46intertwined, setting off a struggle over who would claim Egypt's ancient heritage.
05:54The battle lines were drawn.
05:58Such was the cachet of discovery.
06:01Wealthy institutions and even individuals tried their luck,
06:05investing vast sums of money in the hope of unearthing Egyptology's star prize.
06:12A pristine royal tomb.
06:15For a lot of antiquities in ancient Egypt, the things that we think of as the monuments were never lost.
06:21The pyramids were never lost.
06:23The Sphinx was never really lost.
06:25The Sphinx was never really lost.
06:25Carnac was never lost.
06:26But you have tombs clearly that are hidden.
06:30So there is a general suspicion among the Western arrivals that this ancient civilization has got lots more to reveal.
06:40And the most likely place to find a royal tomb was the Valley of the Kings at Luxor.
06:50The Valley of the Kings is the royal cemetery of the period of the New Kingdom.
06:55It's a time when it was ruled by pharaohs who were famous.
07:00Lots of Amenhotep's, Thutmose's, Ramesses the Great, his father Seti the First.
07:05So this was a time of celebrity pharaohs almost, who had great power, great wealth and therefore enormous lavishly decorated
07:15and appointed tombs.
07:19Archaeologists had a very clear idea of the names of the kings who reigned during that time.
07:25And so that list becomes like a checklist, not only of kings, but of tombs.
07:29Some of those tombs had been found, but there were gaps.
07:33The race was on to find these tombs.
07:38A front-runner was Theodore Davis.
07:42Theodore Davis, an American lawyer, late 19th century, is typical of a certain type of wealthy individual,
07:49usually Western European or American, who was in Egypt for his health and to kill time,
07:57and decided, do you know what, I'll take up archaeology or sponsorship of archaeology.
08:01He wanted the fame and the praise of someone who'd made discoveries.
08:07And he did indeed, or the people working for him, found some pretty spectacular pieces of evidence.
08:15Now in the museum in Cairo are the gold-topped funerary masks from his most significant discovery,
08:23the tomb of Yuya and Thuya.
08:25It was one of the first undisturbed tombs found in the valley.
08:30Intact tombs were rare.
08:32Grave robbers were commonplace.
08:35A lot of stuff had been emptied in antiquity, or disturbed in antiquity.
08:39So even if you went in and you thought you were opening it for the first time,
08:42chances are there wasn't going to be much in there.
08:46Yuya and Thuya were a powerful, noble couple.
08:51That undisturbed pharaoh's tomb remained elusive.
08:55Between 1905 and 1914, Davis' teams uncovered 17 more tombs.
09:03But most had been robbed.
09:06When you read accounts of Theodore Davis, you get this sense that he's frustrated.
09:11He feels something is eluding him, and maybe that thing is an intact, complete royal tomb.
09:19He declared the Valley of the Kings exhausted.
09:23There were no more royal tombs there to discover.
09:27But not everyone agreed.
09:31Howard Carter, a British archaeologist with over 30 years experience in Egypt,
09:38was convinced the Valley still held secrets.
09:42Howard Carter knew the Valley of the Kings very well.
09:45So working for various patrons, because he had no money of his own really to speak of,
09:49he methodically worked through various finds and excavations and surveys.
09:56So when Davis said,
09:58ah, the Valley is exhausted, there are no more tombs to find,
10:02Carter didn't believe him because he felt he knew the Valley better.
10:07Theodore Davis thought he had checked more or less all of the names off the list.
10:13And that includes, at this time, a relatively obscure pharaoh called Tutankhamun.
10:19Carter's also had the feeling that what Davis believed to be the tomb of Tutankhamun in fact wasn't,
10:25and that the tomb was still potentially awaiting discovery.
10:32Armed with this theory,
10:34Carter approached the Earl of Carnarvon
10:38and convinced him to fund digging in the Valley.
10:42Carnarvon was a very wealthy man, an aristocrat who had gone to Egypt
10:46and kind of fallen in love with the country and its archaeology,
10:49and it was a popular pastime for people who had the money to fund an archaeological dig.
10:56It was well known that if you put a spade in the ground,
10:58the likelihood is you'll find some nice things,
11:01and there'd be an expectation that you could take those nice things home with you.
11:07Carter began excavating in the Valley in December 1917.
11:13These photos record the years Carter and his Egyptian labourers spent working the Valley.
11:23This image depicts Carter overseeing the excavation.
11:31In the background, dozens of Egyptian labourers shifting sand and rubble in clouds of dust.
11:44But colourisation of such images must be done considerably.
11:51One of the problems of colourising photographs today is that we're making assumptions about people's backgrounds.
11:59Egypt has always been a very multi-layered society, multicultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic.
12:06A collection of rare colour photos of Egypt from 1914 illustrate this diversity.
12:16So it's very, very difficult to decide how an Egyptian looks like.
12:20Being Egyptian is being all of these races or all of these ethnicities or all of these cultures in one
12:27single individual.
12:28How can you colour that?
12:31The modern colourisation techniques employed in this film allow for increasing distinctions between individuals.
12:41But there is always a degree of interpretation.
12:46So, where the identity of a recognisable figure is unknown, the decision has been made to leave the image untreated.
12:55The people working in these images, many just children, remain largely anonymous.
13:02What is known is the scale of their effort.
13:06Tens of thousands of tonnes of stone and sand moved entirely by hand.
13:12Carter's method is to basically remove all the rubble you possibly can and strip the sand and the rubble back
13:19to bedrock to establish the location of a tomb.
13:22And for several years there's not much. It's not yielding anything spectacular.
13:32By the spring of 1919, little had changed for Carter and his team in Luxor.
13:39But Egypt was entering a new chapter.
13:43Hundreds of miles to the north, in Cairo, frustration with decades of British rule, was spilling into the streets as
13:50a movement for independence gathered momentum.
13:54On the 15th of March 1919, this square, Tahrir Square, which was then called Ismailia Square, saw more than 10
14:03,000 people gather to protest against colonial rule.
14:08They came from all walks of life, from the factories, from the offices, from the nearby university.
14:14This was the biggest protest of its kind in modern Egyptian history.
14:20And it is something that had been brewing for quite some time.
14:25Egypt was a de facto colony.
14:28The British were making the big decisions here.
14:31Egyptians weren't really controlling their own country.
14:35And nationalist resentment began to grow.
14:40Five years earlier, Britain had dragged Egypt into the First World War.
14:47The First World War is the pivotal point.
14:51Because World War One is such a massive expense in terms of men, money and material, Egypt is co-opted
14:59into that.
15:00So that includes the requisition of food, animals, labour as well.
15:06Very many Egyptians are forcibly moved into that Egyptian labour corps.
15:12So there is that sense of, we have contributed hugely to your war effort.
15:19Now what do we get in return for that service?
15:24The calls for Egyptian independence grew louder.
15:29Egypt's nationalist movement saw their best chance to get it at the post-war peace conferences in Paris.
15:37And at its head was Saad Zakhloul.
15:42Saad Zakhloul, the charismatic leader and the founder of the Weft Party, wanted to send a delegation to the Paris
15:50Peace Conference in early 1919
15:53to make the case for Egyptian independence.
15:57The Brits weren't happy with this. They weren't having it.
16:00And he was detained. He was exiled to Malta.
16:05The reaction in Egypt was swift.
16:09Zakhloul's exile was the spark that lit the fuse of revolution.
16:14Protests erupted here and around the country.
16:19Strikes and demonstrations erupted in early March 1919.
16:25It lasted for weeks and more and more groups started joining.
16:30All of the Egyptian social groups took part.
16:32From all classes, from all genders, from all religious backgrounds, everyone took the streets.
16:40The British responded with force.
16:42According to UK government sources, 800 civilians were killed.
16:51But the Egyptians remained defiant.
16:55Saad Zakhloul's wife, Safia, supported by hundreds of other women, led more marches.
17:02And because of them, even more younger groups took the streets and went out and members of the public were
17:07more encouraged to take the streets.
17:12British authorities understood they had lost control of the situation.
17:18Something had to change.
17:21The British High Commissioner in Egypt argued that only Saad Zakhloul's return could restore calm.
17:30In April 1921, after months of negotiations, he returned to Egypt.
17:37To a hero's welcome.
17:40What we're seeing here is the Egyptian celebration of the return of Saad Zakhloul from the exile.
17:45It gives us also a glimpse of the revolution in the sense of all members of the Egyptian societies contributed
17:51to the revolution.
17:53Some of them were holding the union flags of what they represented, or the students would be the ones wearing
17:58the fez and the others, what we tend to call the Egyptian farmers, who would be wearing the traditional galabayas.
18:04And that was one of the main reasons of the success of the movement. All the members of the society
18:09took part.
18:11Seeing the strength of the movement, British officials decided they needed to placate the Egyptians.
18:19They offered independence. Of sorts.
18:24The Egyptians would be allowed to have elections and an Egyptian government.
18:29But one has to say that this was not full independence as such, that the British were still controlling the
18:36economy, they were still controlling the Suez Canal.
18:40Completed 50 years earlier, the Suez Canal created a shortcut from Europe to the Indian Ocean.
18:47It was vital for Britain's trade and communication to its vast empire.
18:53At this point, Britain could not have afforded Egyptian independence.
18:58It would always be with qualifying factors such as military encampments on the Suez Canal, the security of imperial communications.
19:08Britain sees Egypt as pivotal to its global defence system.
19:14So on paper, there's an element of independence, but in practice it's very much circumscribed.
19:23Britain declared Egypt independent in 1922.
19:29For Cairo, it was a turning point.
19:33But 600 kilometres to the south in Luxor, Howard Carter took little notice.
19:40He was still digging through rubble.
19:45After five years with barely anything to show for it, his patron, Lord Carnarvon, was running out of patience and
19:53money.
19:57He gave Carter just one more season to find something.
20:04The Griffith Institute in Oxford is home to Howard Carter's archaeological archive.
20:10Among the thousands of documents and artefacts are the diaries from his excavations.
20:20What we're looking at here is Howard Carter's diary from 1922-23.
20:26So what we see here is the entry for the 1st of November when the excavation season started.
20:30You can see there's nothing on the 2nd, on the 3rd and then on the 4th there is this line
20:35scribbled all over the page.
20:37Which says, first steps of tomb found.
20:41The moment when one of the team members discovered the first steps of a staircase that was cut into the
20:47rock.
20:48And this is the only time in the hundreds or thousands of pages we have from Howard Carter,
20:54that he's not staying neatly in the line with his tiny handwriting, but he scribbles this line all over the
21:00page.
21:00This is maybe the extent of this very reserved man to show how very excited he was.
21:08The stone steps led to a sealed door.
21:11A tomb entrance.
21:15Carter telegraphed Carnarvon.
21:17After a journey of almost three weeks, Carnarvon arrived in Luxor with his daughter.
21:25Meaning now, Carter could open the tomb.
21:28On the 26th of November, he cut a small hole through the top of the tomb's sealed doorway.
21:36Holding up a candle, he peered into a chamber untouched for millennia.
21:44Carnarvon says, can you see anything?
21:47And Carter is reported to have said, yes, wonderful things.
21:53Which, if anything, is an understatement.
21:55Although this is instantly the biggest news archaeology's ever had and ever would have,
22:02there's a delay before anybody else knows what's happened.
22:14Hidden away in a vast newspaper archive in England.
22:17So what we're going to look for is the 1922-23 files.
22:22The very first public mention of the incredible find.
22:27A news story published in the Times newspaper.
22:31This particular clipping is the first report of the discovery.
22:38So this is the very first reporting of the discovery of Tutankhamun's grave.
22:42It comes from the 29th of November, 1922, just three days after the tomb was first discovered.
22:47And it's from our Cairo correspondent, but I love this detail here where it says,
22:51by runner to Luxor, someone's running to give us this news.
22:55They don't have any images to work with at the moment.
22:58So they're trying to evoke the kind of glamour, the glory of the discovery using description.
23:03It talks about there being four chariots, the sides of which were encrusted with semi-precious stones and rich gold
23:09decoration.
23:10And they're already in the 1920s calling this the most sensational Egyptological discovery of the century.
23:16So they're calling it early.
23:18Breaking through the doorway, Carter opened the chamber.
23:23He had found what generations of archaeologists had chased for a century.
23:29An intact pharaoh's tomb.
23:37News of the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb raced around the world.
23:43Even without photographs, the mere idea of the treasures described grabbed the public's imagination.
23:50There's an almost instant reaction.
23:53Numbers at the British Museum, numbers of visitors to the Egyptian galleries there,
23:57the Met and New York suddenly skyrocket.
24:02There's a global hunger for more and more information about Tutankhamun and the treasures.
24:11While news of Carter's discovery of King Tut's tomb spread quickly,
24:16it was two more weeks before the first pictures, published in the Times, reached the public.
24:23So this is a real copy of the Times from the 12th of December 1922.
24:29We've got some lovely shots of Egyptian landscape here.
24:32We've got all these photos of people going in and out of the tomb.
24:37But what we're not getting is any shots of the interior of the tomb.
24:41And just a week later, we get a bit of an explanation why that is.
24:45So here, the Times again, reporting on the 18th of December,
24:48writes about the difficulties of photography and basically says they're having real trouble taking photographs of the interior of the
24:55tomb.
24:57But by now, the public were desperate for photos of the treasures.
25:03Carter had found thrones, chariots, alabaster vessels and countless other royal possessions.
25:12But all remained in the tomb.
25:16Good archaeological practice meant he needed to record every item in situ before removing anything.
25:25But in 1922, with primitive cameras, capturing artifacts in a pitch black tomb on a desert plateau was a skilled
25:34job.
25:36Carter and Carnarvon were both good photographers, but they simply know they were not good enough.
25:43And so it came in quite handy when a few days after the discovery,
25:46Carter received a telegram from the Metropolitan Museum who offered Carter any help that he might need.
25:53The Metropolitan Museum of New York funded a large excavation at the Temple of Hatshepsut,
26:00just over the hill from the Valley of the Kings.
26:07One of the team members the Met offered was their well-respected British photographer Harry Burton.
26:14He arrived at the tomb three weeks after the chamber was opened.
26:20Harry Burton worked with large-scale cameras that required glass plate negatives,
26:27so they were also very fragile.
26:28You had to handle them with extreme care.
26:31He had experience working in tricky environments, complicated by sand and dust.
26:38He set up his darkroom in an adjacent empty tomb and set to work.
26:44His remarkable photographs of the discovery are preserved today at the Griffith Institute.
26:53This picture was taken by Harry Burton about four weeks after Carter had his first look into the antechamber,
27:00after the electric light was installed.
27:02What we see is the centre of the first room of the tomb, the so-called antechamber,
27:08where we see one of the ritual couches, the one in the shape of the cow.
27:13In front of it, on top of it, are chairs, there are thrones.
27:16Howard Carter tells us, it really reminded him of the property room of an opera house of a banished civilisation,
27:24with this strange and beautiful medley of extraordinary things that were heaped upon one another.
27:33To get a better sense of what Carter saw when he first stepped into the tomb,
27:38colour has been added to Burton's original black and white image.
27:46Revealing the tomb's dazzling contents, just as Carter would have seen it in 1922.
27:58All these images that Harry Burton took inside the tomb are extremely valuable today,
28:04because these objects would of course have been removed out of the tomb.
28:08And we will never be able to recreate that site.
28:13By definition, archaeology is destruction,
28:16so photography offered a way of recording things which were going to disappear.
28:25It also was a means of publicity.
28:28And I think this was already an idea in the early 1920s,
28:33that you could use a photograph to tell a story,
28:37not just about the past, but about the present archaeological circumstances.
28:42Lord Carnarvon understood publicity could generate money.
28:46Money to help fund what was bound to be a long and costly project.
28:52In the early 1923, the Times signed a deal with Lord Carnarvon,
28:57£5,000 for exclusive rights to the photographs and to the kind of news coverage of the discovery of Tutankhamun's
29:04tomb.
29:04And this is one of the first times we've ever seen a kind of big paid scoop like this.
29:08While it didn't mean that no other newspaper could report on the discovery,
29:12it was deeply unpopular with the broader press.
29:16The Egyptian press were particularly frustrated.
29:19They saw this as, you know, a real outrage that an excavation that was happening on their soil,
29:23on their land, of their history, the British press was being given priority.
29:30Western archaeological interests in Egypt were about to collide with the nationalist tide unleashed by the 1919 revolution.
29:40There is this strong connection that Egyptians do feel regarding their ancient Egyptian ancestors.
29:47So for them, Tutankhamun was a grandfather.
29:51Some colonial scholars saw things differently though.
29:55Western perception, once you arrive to Egypt, you would see, let's say, the reliefs on the temples or in the
30:01tombs.
30:01But the Egyptians that you see today, in the view of the Westerners, they are speaking Arabic.
30:07Most of them, let's say, are Muslim.
30:09They do not look anything like those on the wall.
30:16And from this Western bias, this means that the line of continuity has stopped.
30:23It is this claim of discontinuity between the ancient Egyptians and contemporary Egyptians,
30:29that for the Westerners, it meant that the Egyptians had no right to claim this heritage of their own.
30:38An editorial in the Egyptian daily paper, Al-Ram, lamented the time's deal.
30:44Lord Carnarvon is exploiting the mortal remains of our ancient fathers before our eyes,
30:49and he fails to give the grandchildren any information about their forefathers.
30:55Not only there is a colonial occupation of the land,
30:59but there was equally a colonial occupation in the sense of controlling the narrative about the heritage of the Egyptians.
31:11But this appropriation of Egypt's past was nothing new.
31:15For decades, Western academics had tried to lay claim to this ancient civilization and its precious artifacts.
31:24There were several Egyptologists who would write in their books and in their reports that this was world heritage,
31:31that we are all owners of the heritage of Egypt.
31:34They made it pretty clear that it was the Europeans and the Americans, Westerners, who were joint owners in this
31:41heritage.
31:44Not only were foreigners taking Egypt's ancient treasures,
31:48the times deal meant Egyptians were restricted in even telling their own story.
31:54And the times wasted no time in making the most of their exclusive access.
32:01Two months after the tomb's opening, it published the first pictures of the treasure.
32:10So the image we see here shows the right corner of the antechamber.
32:15And that was actually the first big image that was published in the Times in late January 1923.
32:21It shows the two so-called guardian statues that are made of wood and in part gilded.
32:26So the discovery was, of course, a unique event. It was the first time a royal tomb from ancient Egypt
32:33had been discovered more or less intact.
32:36And it was the first time that an event like this was more or less shown in real time in
32:41the newspapers.
32:44The story of the find now brought to life with images reached a world hungry for good news after years
32:52of being fed little but the reports of the horrors of World War One.
32:57The reaction was unprecedented and phenomenal.
33:01In the 1920s, you had this huge explosion of technological advancement.
33:06So there was the telegraph, which meant that any news from Egypt could be rocketed back to Britain, you know,
33:11almost instantaneously.
33:13There was a real heyday of the newspaper.
33:17They were churning out copies. New publications were coming out all the time.
33:21Readership was massive.
33:25This was also the first time that cinema had really been able to be accessible.
33:30So people could go to cinemas, not just to see new feature films, but also news stories and newsreels.
33:36They fed the insatiable appetite for all things Egyptian.
33:40Carter and his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, began in 1922 to dig for the hoped for prize of an undisturbed Pharaoh's
33:47tomb.
33:48Across Europe and America, Tutmania had arrived.
33:55Spreading from the newspapers and newsreels into popular culture.
34:00The impact on fashion was almost immediate.
34:02Just two months in, February 1923, there were reports of fashion designers traveling to Egypt to get inspiration for their
34:09materials, their color palette, their designs.
34:12And this really tapped into a post-war need to live life a little bit more colorfully.
34:17To resaturate a kind of drab, depressing, grief-filled existence.
34:27As European fashion designers drew inspiration from Egypt, American vaudeville wasted no time jumping on the Tutmania bandwagon.
34:39They quickly released a handful of songs, like Old King Tut.
34:44A real Egyptian well-dressed man, wore nothing but a cold and tan.
34:48And Old King Tut, Tut, Tut, Tut, Tut, Tut, Tut, Tut, Tut, Tut.
34:56Egypt's heritage was being commodified.
34:59Perfume bottles and perfume that really explicitly evoked ancient Egypt are called things like Ramses.
35:06Companies were in a race to capitalize on any perceived connection with Tutankhamun's tomb.
35:12They wanted to capitalize on the value that people placed on ancient Egypt and, you know, to make their stuff
35:20sell.
35:21During the Roaring Twenties, a time of growing affluence and opulence, the public soaked it up.
35:28But as much as this was appreciation of ancient Egypt, it was also appropriation.
35:33It was an interest in capitalizing on, kind of commercializing ancient Egypt.
35:39And really, modern-day Egypt wasn't benefiting much from this, you know, massive global phenomenon.
35:47And it kept growing.
35:50Drip-fed by new discoveries and images coming from the tomb.
35:56As Burton meticulously recorded the artifacts, Carter's team prepared them for transport.
36:03But the tomb had yet to reveal the king's mummified body.
36:08It's very striking to think that many of the most famous objects that come from the tomb of Tutankhamun actually
36:16weren't visible and weren't known to Carter for quite some time.
36:21Carter was aware from very early on that the likelihood was that over to the right as you enter the
36:27tomb, the north wall, in fact, is a false wall, probably concealing a burial chamber.
36:33And much as the temptation would have been to take that blocking down straight away and go into the burial
36:37chamber,
36:38Carter, as a very good archaeologist, knows that they can't do that until they have cleared the antechamber.
36:50It takes Carter's team two months to clear the antechamber of Tutankhamun's tomb.
36:59Only then can they break into the next room.
37:06It is very important to understand that this is not an accidental picture.
37:11This is very carefully staged to capture that moment.
37:16Preparations for these kind of shots were very extensive.
37:19Harry Burton, of course, first had to see the space where he could put the electric light, how he positioned
37:25the people.
37:26And although you had the electric light installed in the tomb, it was very often the light was too low.
37:32So due to these light conditions and the extreme length of the exposure it took to take a photograph could
37:40take up to several minutes.
37:41So in particular, the shots with people in it were a certain challenge because they were not allowed to move
37:48for several minutes.
37:51Behind the wall, the burial chamber.
37:54In it, a huge shrine decorated with gold and blue stone inlays. The final resting place of King Tutankhamun.
38:05Having an exclusive deal with the times gave the archaeologists the opportunity to present themselves how they wanted to be
38:13perceived.
38:14So Harry Burton, the vast majority of his images are classical, traditional, archaeological photographs, but he also took some photographs
38:24that you could describe as publicity shots that were supposed to end up in the Times newspaper.
38:30Evocative images of the ongoing excavation of the pharaoh's tomb drove the Times circulation to new heights.
38:41But this image of the burial chamber reveal would be the last photo of Carnarvon inside the tomb.
38:50Only a few weeks later, in April 1923, he died of an infected mosquito bite.
38:58The death of Carnarvon is a big blow to Carter.
39:03Carnarvon not only is the permit holder and the money, he'd shielded Carter in the early days when the tomb
39:12was first a great sensation from all of that noise, I guess, that was going on outside the tomb.
39:19And things were only getting noisier.
39:23Egypt's revolution was about to impact Carter's work for the first time.
39:29Two years after the country had gained independence, in early 1924, Egyptians voted in their first parliamentary elections.
39:42Revolutionary leader Sa'ad Zakhlou and his Waft Party won in a landslide.
39:49The Waft Party had an overt intention to make Egyptian heritage link to Egyptian unity and Egyptian independence.
39:57Trying to reclaim Egyptian heritage as a way of reclaiming Egyptian politics.
40:06It felt that taking charge of its heritage was a step toward true independence.
40:13Archaeology offered this avenue for soft power, not direct military conflict, but asserting control over your own heritage was a
40:23real way to send a signal to these Western powers.
40:25By the early 1920s, there was deep interest within the Egyptians to claim the Egyptian heritage as their own.
40:33So the Waft Party recognized that the Egyptian heritage or Egyptian archaeology was the tool of unity between the various
40:41Egyptian social groups and religious groups that exist in the nation.
40:45So there was this push of, we're not only reclaiming the land, we're reclaiming even the narrative around what Egypt
40:52is and part of it and a crucial part of it was the heritage.
40:57The new Egyptian government wanted to upend a tradition that had begun when Napoleon first arrived.
41:04It wanted to make sure none of Tutankhamen's treasure would be shipped out of Egypt for display in Western museums.
41:15By the 1920s, the rules for foreigners excavating in Egypt were well established and quite clear.
41:23If you found things, and you were very likely to find things, there was an expectation on the part of
41:30the excavator that they could ask for and might be entitled to take away a portion of the objects.
41:38Archaeologists were expecting that you could take home up to 50% of what you found, so the rest of
41:44what was found went to the National Museum in Cairo.
41:48In the case of Tutankhamen, the Waft government urged the French-led Antiquities Service to block Carter from taking any
41:57treasures.
41:59It all hinged on whether a tomb was found intact.
42:06If a tomb was found to be intact, because there was such value in all of the objects forming a
42:13whole, the 50-50 split would not apply.
42:16Those things would all have to be kept together and they would stay in Egypt.
42:19The narrative so far had been that Carter had discovered exactly that, an intact tomb.
42:28The tomb of Tutankhamen, it wasn't actually completely undisturbed.
42:31It had probably been robbed twice in antiquity, but had been resealed.
42:36But everything was in there that they had expected.
42:41Keen to bring things back to Britain, Carter believed it was the wriggle room he needed.
42:49But the French head of the Antiquities Service, Pierre Lacau, sided with the Egyptian government, informing Carter and Carnarvon's widow,
42:59who was now funding the dig, that all Tutankhamen tomb artifacts must remain in Egypt.
43:07For Lacau, I think his support for the nationalist agenda comes from the rivalry with the British on who gets
43:13to own Egyptian heritage.
43:15Obviously, this is a major find. Britain retaining any of these artifacts meant that the French are losing absolute power
43:23over the publicity.
43:25He was controlling the museums in Egypt and even though he himself was not Egyptian, he wanted to retain more
43:33for Egyptian museums.
43:34So there was an old political rivalry there for sure. He just didn't want the British to get the last
43:40laugh on Tutankhamen.
43:42The entirety of the Tutankhamen treasures remained in Egypt.
43:49Then, Lacau set about tightening supervision of the tomb's management, including sending a government overseer.
43:58The increasing restrictions frustrated Carter, who believed these actions breached previous agreements.
44:07Carter eventually finds that he cannot work anymore and abandons the excavation midway through the process of opening the sarcophagus.
44:22So many of the objects are still in there. The enormous value in archaeological terms seems unthinkable now, given how
44:32important all that material was.
44:36There was an expectation at this point that Carter's work on the tomb was done and the new Egyptian government
44:43would take over the project, not only be able to claim the objects for the national collection, but it would
44:49be able to take control of the whole narrative as well.
44:53When Carter left the tomb, there was an Egyptian celebration, because this is the first case that we have documentation
45:00of the Egyptians mobilizing for the heritage not to be removed from Egypt.
45:06So, while we tend to celebrate it as the discovery of the first intact ancient Egyptian tomb, I think from
45:13an Egyptian perspective, this is the case where Egyptians were successful to retain all the belongings from one tomb for
45:20themselves.
45:20This was a huge leap in the fight of Egyptians to reclaim the narrative and to physically reclaim the heritage
45:27as their own.
45:32Excavations at the tomb stopped for now. Egypt was in possession of all the ancient relics uncovered.
45:44But the race for Egypt's ancient past was far from over.
45:49Western archaeologists were not ready to give up on the work they had spent decades pursuing.
45:55The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb had shown that incredible finds could still be made in the rocks and sands of
46:04Egypt.
46:07Now, archaeology was no longer just about uncovering history.
46:13It had become political, bound up with questions of national identity.
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