Rumors that the British archaeologist Howard Carter subtracted Tutankhamun’s tomb treasures have survived the hundred years that have passed since the discovery and have now re-emerged with the publication of a letter that seems to confirm the accusation.
The British newspaper “The Observer” released this Saturday fragments of a letter written in 1934 by the academic Alan Gardenerone of the members of the Carter’s team that helped him translate hieroglyphs of the 3,300-year-old tombin which he blames him for rewarding him with an object “undoubtedly stolen from the tomb”.
The famous archaeologist delivered to gardener a amulet used as offering to the dead. Carter had assured him that he did not come from the grave, but when he then director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Rex Engelbach, he looked at it, said that it was made with the same mold as others found in the tomb and was sure that that was its origin.
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Indignant, gardener he wrote to the head of the excavation, who had supervised the emptying of the tomb and the transfer of all the objects across the Nile to Cairo. “I am deeply sorry that I was brought into such an awkward position. Naturally, I did not tell Engelbach who had gotten the amulet from you,” the letter reads, part of a private collectionwhich will be published in its entirety along with other letters soon in the book “Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World (Tutankhamun and the tomb that changed the world)”, from American Egyptologist Bob Brier.
The expert assured “The Observer” that Egyptian archaeologists and authorities suspected from the start that Carter and some members of his team had penetrated the tomb and they had taken objects earlier than they left written in their notebooks. “It was suspected that they had entered the tomb before his official opening and they had taken artifacts, including jewelrywhich were sold after their deaths,” said Brier, for whom the new letter is “definitive proof.”