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GURU kicks off Nov 12. Join the 29,000+ marketers who showed up last year, 100% free and virtual.
GURU Conference, powered by Constant Contact, is back November 12–13. It's 100% virtual and 100% free, and it's packed with tactics you can use right away on newsletters, deliverability, design trends, AI, and what NOT to do with email.
What to expect:
Speakers including Molly Ringwald, Dan Levy, Amy Porterfield, Frank Vella + more
Sessions from world-class marketers at top brands
Networking every day
DJs, world-record breaking, and an alarming amount of rom-com fun!
Last year, 29,000+ marketers joined us. This year is even bigger, and spots are limited.
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—— ON THIS DAY ——
NOVEMBER 4, 1922
Valley of the Kings, Egypt
104 years ago
The tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, whose entrance steps were uncovered by Howard Carter's excavation team on November 4, 1922.
On the morning of November 4, 1922, workers clearing sand and rubble beneath the tomb of Ramesses VI in the Valley of the Kings exposed a cut stone step. By the following day the crew had uncovered a staircase descending to a sealed, plastered doorway. The British archaeologist Howard Carter, who had been searching the valley for the burial of a little-known pharaoh named Tutankhamun for several years, ordered the stairs refilled and sent a telegram to his patron in England.
That patron was George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who had been funding the excavation since before the First World War and had informed Carter that the 1922 to 1923 season would be the last he paid for. The valley was widely believed to be exhausted. Carnarvon sailed for Egypt and arrived in late November. On November 26, Carter made a small hole in a second sealed doorway, pushed a candle through, and looked in.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Tutankhamun, the boy king of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, a minor figure in his own time who became the most famous pharaoh in the world because his tomb survived nearly intact.
What the candle showed was a room packed with objects: gilded couches shaped like animals, dismantled chariots, chests, statues, and everywhere the glint of gold. Carnarvon, standing behind him, asked whether he could see anything, and Carter replied that he could see wonderful things. The tomb had been entered by robbers in antiquity, probably twice, but they had been interrupted and the burial had been resealed. It is the only royal tomb from the Valley of the Kings to survive with the great majority of its contents in place.
Clearing and recording it took about ten years. Carter worked with the photographer Harry Burton, whose documentation of the process is among the most important archaeological photography ever produced, and with chemists, draughtsmen and Egyptian workers whose contribution went largely unrecorded at the time. More than five thousand objects were catalogued. The burial chamber held a nest of shrines, a stone sarcophagus, three coffins, the innermost of solid gold, and the mummy wearing the gold and lapis mask that has become one of the most recognized objects on Earth.
The discovery set off a global wave of Egyptomania that reshaped fashion, architecture, and advertising through the 1920s. It also produced the legend of the pharaoh's curse, fed by the death of Lord Carnarvon in Cairo in April 1923 from an infected mosquito bite, and amplified by newspapers that had been locked out of the site by an exclusive deal Carnarvon had signed with The Times. Studies of those present have found no unusual mortality. Tutankhamun himself had been a minor king who died around the age of nineteen, and his historical importance is almost entirely an accident of the fact that nobody emptied his tomb.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
It is the only substantially intact royal burial found in the Valley of the Kings. Every other royal tomb there was stripped in antiquity. Tutankhamun's survival gave archaeology its single most complete picture of what an Egyptian royal burial actually contained.
It set new standards for excavation and recording. The decade-long clearance, with systematic cataloguing, conservation, and Harry Burton's photographic documentation, became a model for how a complex site should be handled rather than emptied.
It changed the global relationship with ancient Egypt. The discovery drove a worldwide wave of Egyptian-themed design and fed the curse mythology, while also sharpening Egyptian arguments about who controls the country's antiquities, a debate that continues.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
A step appeared in the rubble on November 4, 1922, in the last season Lord Carnarvon was willing to pay for. Three weeks later Howard Carter pushed a candle through a hole in a sealed door and saw gold. Tutankhamun had been a minor king. He is now the most famous pharaoh who ever lived because nobody finished robbing him.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“Yes, wonderful things.”
— Howard Carter, asked whether he could see anything through the hole in the tomb door, November 1922
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, the last season Carnarvon funded, what the excavation involved, and the origins of the curse legend?
