the tomb of tutankhamun howard carter book

Travelling in Germany he was nearly killed when he roared over the brow of a hill to find his road blocked by bullock carts: his Panhard somersaulted, trapping him underneath.Įveryone from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography down gives the date of this accident as 1903, and claims that it was what led Carnarvon to winter in Egypt and to take up archaeology there. He was an enthusiastic and incautious driver, only the third owner of a car in England and the possessor of a string of convictions for speeding.

The hefty income that went with it meant he was able to indulge his passions for horse-racing – he established Newbury racecourse and kept a very successful stud – and motoring.

Carnarvon began to settle down when, still in his twenties, he inherited the title. The earl’s early life was, if not conventional, certainly unsurprising for a hedonistic young nobleman in Victorian England: an undistinguished academic career which quickly gave way to a life of gambling, drinking and generally disappointing his father, the 4th earl. (So much more, indeed, that one has to ask whether Highclere, the Carnarvons’ ancestral seat, needs the “Real Downton Abbey” epithet in the book’s subtitle.) There was more to him that that, however, as the Countess of Carnarvon’s enjoyable new biography demonstrates. George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, is famous for two things: sponsoring Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of the boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings in 1922, and dying of septicaemia shortly afterwards, thus spawning thousands of pages of extraordinary guff about the Curse of King Tut.

The tomb of tutankhamun howard carter book