Tutankhamun Centenary
Howard Carter Before the Discovery of Tutankhamun
Struggling with Autism
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| Howard Carter c1900 |
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story: Howard Carter, the co-discoverer with Lord George Carnarvon of Tutankhamun's Tomb , first went to Egypt in 1891. The shy, introverted 17-year- old ( who was plagued with a condition like autism) worked tirelessly drawing and
tracing for the Egyptian Exploration
Fund at Beni Hasan and Deir-el-Bersha assisting
Percy Newberry, and later he excavated for a number of veteran archeologists including Sir
William Flinders Petrie, the grand old man of
Archeology and Egyptology.
Carter was
well liked by Petrie and Gaston Maspero, the Frenchman who headed the
Antiquities Section of the Egyptian government. By the 1901-2 season the 27-
year- old Carter was eventually rewarded for all his hard graft, when appointed as Chief Inspector for Upper Egypt, based at
Luxor. In 1904 he was became Chief Inspector for Lower Egypt, based at
Cairo.
On 8 January 1905, Carter’s whole world fell apart after a fracas at the sacred site
of Sakkarah. He
subsequently left the Antiquities
Service forever in October, 1905 and spent a
few years in Cairo and Luxor in self –imposed exile.
Research for a new book “
Carnarvon, Carter and Tutankhamun
Revisited…… “ by William Cross ( author
of Lordy! Tutankhamun’s Patron As A Young Man” ) suggests that several figures in the
Executive and within Egyptology circles resented
Howard Carter’s rapid rise within the Egyptian Antiquities Service and were
behind his professional
assassination of 1905.
Carter struggled his whole life with autism, a condition only now
understood as one where often the sufferer is seen as obstinate, unco-operative
with a
tendency to rage
NEXT POSTING
A Dramatis Personae of those who were
caught up in the Sakkarah
incident of 1905
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