'We had the impression of looking into the prop room of the opera of a vanished civilization,' Carter later described his first impressions. The men had stumbled upon priceless treasures that no human eye had seen in more than 3,000 years. 'Yes, wonderful things,' Carter answered back. 'Can you see anything?' the earl, standing in the dark passage, is said to have asked. But it wasn't until Lord Carnarvon arrived from England that Carter opened the tomb's antechamber on November 26, 1922, and the real breakthrough happened. They uncovered 16 steps in all and also found two seals with Tutankhamun's royal mark. Carter had been searching in the Valley of the Kings for six years Image: Erich Lessing/akg-images/picture-alliance 'Wonderful things'įrom then on, gripped with anticipation, the excavation team did not stop. In the process, he said, he hit the stone surface. Carter later liked to tell the story that the boy had wanted to emulate the archaeologists from Europe and had therefore poked around with a stick. Then, a local boy named Hussein Abd el-Rassul, who was bringing water to the workers, hit a stone step under the rubble. His financier, the Earl of Carnarvon, had become impatient, and Carter had one last chance to discover the crypt. For six years, the archaeologist Howard Carter had dug up the desert sands in the Egypt's so-called Valley of the Kings area in search of the tomb of the famed boy pharaoh Tutankhamunbut to no avail.

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