In 1923, just a year after the Earl of Carnarvon and Mr. Howard Carter uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith published Tutankhamen and the Discovery of His Tomb by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Mr. Howard Carter. Being a fan of Egyptology, I decided to read this historical documentation of the recovery of one of the most widely recognised subjects of ancient history.
The book is pretty short, with just 8 chapters over 130 pages. Having been written while the famous tomb was still being catalogued and processed, the book certainly doesn't have any additional insight into what was found or even how it was found. By contrast, Carter's personal notes (not included in this book) are very procedural, describing the very moments of discovery and opening of the tomb. In this book, Smith offers more commentary than witness account, but mostly the book provides context on Egypt, and goes to great lengths to promote both archaeology and Egyptology.
The book has two modes. There are chapters about why the general public should care about Tutankhamun (or "Tutankhamen", as Smith spells it), and there are chapters about who Tutankhamun was and where in history he appeared. The argument for the former is frequently the usual stuff about why history is an important study. The latter turns out to be a truly outstanding example of a concise and surprisingly comprehensive history lesson.
As a casual fan of some ancient history, I do find it difficult to internalise the timeline, the times when certain empires were important and when they were in decline, which culture was famous for which innovation, and so on. Smith does a nice job of providing an overview of the ancient world, the major cultures involved, and what role major societies played. I've already forgotten most of it, but that's not his fault.
Tutankhamun was part of what historians consider the 18th dynasty, during the 14th century BCE, in the New Kingdom of Egypt. Relatively speaking, he's a kind of a recent pharaoh. By the time he was alive, the Great Pyramid of Giza had already existed for a whole millenium (it was built around 2600 BCE).
At the time of discovering the tomb, the world didn't know a whole lot about Tutankhamun. In fact, compared to the great Pharaohs like Seti I and Ramses II, Tutankhamun wasn't terribly significant. Smith talks about how Tutankhamun restored Egypt's traditional religion of Amun worship after his father had converted to worshiping Aten.
Beyond that, Smith and Carnarvon and Carter didn't know much about the Pharoah whose tomb they'd uncovered. They already had plans to X-ray the mummy (this was back in 1923!) but there weren't really any written records about Tutankhamun, so they had to make educated guesses. To be fair, that's still the case today. Studies and research have continued, but we'll never know everything about Tutankhamun, and probably we'll only be able to theorise about even the basics. Something as simple as whether he was club-footed or not still eludes us (either he was born with a deformity, or the coffin he was placed in was too small). In other words, the book is less outdated than one might expect, and ancient Egypt really is as long ago as we think it was.
I wasn't sure what to expect before reading Tutankhamen and the Discovery of His Tomb by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Mr. Howard Carter. The book was written over 100 years ago, before modern Egypt had gained independence from Britain and when modern archaeology techniques were still being developed. I was pleased to find that the book provides a tidy little history lesson about the ancient world, and some interesting insight into the state of Egyptology back in the 1920s. It's an interesting read from a historical perspective, but it doesn't have much to offer on what it's titled after.
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