When Howard Carter Was Caught For Stealing A Coin From Tutankhamun’s Treasure

The archaeologist Howard Carter flows in 1934 happy days between London and Cairo. Responsible for the British excavations which exhumed, in November 1922, Tutankhamun’s tomb, the researcher receives a letter from Alan Gardiner, one of the most respected Egyptologists of his time. The two gentlemen exchange on some ancient hieroglyphs or on the news of the Valley of the Kings? None of that. The specialist criticizes Howard Carter for having offered him a vestige shamelessly pounded in the pharaonic tomb.

Preserved in a private collection, this unpublished correspondence was discovered by the American Egyptologist Bob Brier, professor at the University of Long Island, within the framework of the preparation of a new work on Tutankhamun to be published in September across the Channel. The centenary of the discovery of his tomb, in November 2022, offers the opportunity to revive for a time, in bookstores and in museums, the strings of Egyptomania. One certainty: it will not restore the luster of Howard Carter.

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“Carter was known to possess, in one way or another, objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb“, told Bob Brier for The Observer . The archaeologist and his team would have “entered the tomb before its official opening, carrying away objects, in particular jewels, sold after their respective deaths”, he added. Howard Carter would have taken advantage of this first foray into the tomb to hunt down some ancient pieces, including a funerary amulet, offered some time later to Alan Gardiner, who had participated in the study of the tomb inscriptions.

Faux pas between connoisseurs

But, one fine day, Alan Gardiner shows the amulet to another colleague. This is Rex Engelbach, who directs the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The Egyptologist immediately recognized the object, made in the same style and the same mold as other pieces from the tomb of Tutankhamun exhibited in the collections of the Cairo institution. He takes offense to Alan Gardiner, who returns the courtesy to his purveyor of looted antiquities: Howard Carter.

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“I deeply regret having been put in such an embarrassing position”says Alan Gardiner in his letter to the archaeologist, telling him about the accident that made him lose face. “I naturally did not tell Engelbach that I had obtained the amulet through you”, nevertheless reassured the Egyptologist. If he is not worried by his peers or by the Egyptian authorities, on the alert, Howard Carter had just been pinched by an eminent college.

When the archaeologist died in 1939, his collection of Egyptian antiquities was dispersed. Several dozen pieces can be found in several prestigious museums, alongside other antiquities that probably also passed through Howard Carter. An ouchebti – a funerary statuette – stamped with the name of Tutankhamun, for example, was acquired by the Louvre in 1967. It logically comes from the tomb of the young king of the XIV^e century before our era. The Metropolitan Museum of New York returned 19 grave goods to Egypt in 2010.