Sharon Janet Hague

The Tutankhamen Friendship Sharon Janet Hague

The discovery of Tutankhamen in 1922 sparked a phenomenon of public interest in ancient Egypt. The achievement of the artist and the playboy, Carter and Carnarvon, who did the unthinkable by pipping academics to the post, remains one of the most dazzling feats of archaeology, on par with the conquest of Everest, or landing on the moon. It is a tale which reveals how the uneducated Carter's patronage under a series of gentlemen and world-class scholars prepared him for his work in a way no formal education could have possibly done. The empathy between the earl and the commoner allowed history's only intact royal tomb to be cleared by a group of international experts using technology light years ahead of their time. It was a world event where the barriers of class, culture and education dissolved to restore a page of history to mankind.