First man to enter Tutankhamen’s tomb

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32880, 1 April 1972, Page 13

First man to enter Tutankhamen’s tomb

(By

JEAN STROUD)

Richard Adamson, a youthful 73-year-old Yorkshireman, does not believe in the curse of the Pharaohs. “No, there is ho such thingno, no, no!” he insisted emphatically. Then he paused. “All the same,” he added with a thoughtful smile, “many strange things have happened.”

Fifty years ago (November, 1922) Mr Adamson was serving with the military police in Egypt. He was sent from Cairo to the Valley of the Kings at Karnak to retrieve some military equipment which Howard Carter, excavating on behalf of Lord Carnarvon, had borrowed from the Army authorities. He was there with his camera when Egyptian workmen uncovered the first step which led to the discovery of the tomb of the 18-year-old boy king, Tutankahamen. Ten years later Richard Adamson was still there. “There were 16 rock-hewn steps going down into the hillside—l know that to my cost because I had to help uncover them,” he told me when we met the other day. At the bottom was a sealed doorway, a doorway which concealed the most spectacular archaeological discovery of all time. Everything gold “The first thing I saw through the doorway — through a small hole and by the light of a torch—were three huge animals, and beds made of wood covered all over in gold. There were chests, vases, chariots, miniature statues, thrones and everything there was gold, being reflected in the light of the torch. My mind would not register what I was actually looking at. It’s very, very hard to describe because I just couldn’t believe it. We found later that there were four chambers piled with treatures like that.” The tomb of Tutankhamen had been raided some 12 , years before the actual burial by tomb robbers who bored • a small hole and broke into the chamber. They had been disturbed by the priests who sealed the hole up again with plaster. When this was analysed by chemists some 4000 years later they were able to state that there was a difference of 12 years between the bottom plaster and the top plaster. Everything in the tomb was preserved, photographed and recorded before it was moved. It took three years to clear the two rooms—rooms full of incredible treasure; a vast fortune in gold and jewels. Over 700 objects were preserved. “We got used to the sight of gold. The only thing we found that was not made of gold was an iron dagger,” say Adamson.

3265 years. This was where the greatest treasures were found. “There were four oak shrines in the burial chamber —ll feet high, nearly touching the roof. The seals on the first one had been broken but when we opened the seals on the second and third they were intact, and in the fourth shrine we found the sarcoi phagus. The shrines had been taken down in panels and reerected inside the tomb. They were dovetailed and joined together with gold and silver pins. We had to saw through them. The sarcophagus con« tained three coffins one inside the other. The outer ones were made of oak and covered over in heavy sheet gold. The innermost, containing the mummy, was of solid 22-carat gold. It weighed over a ton and took eight of us to lift. fast in the coffin because Of the consecration liquid. We had to apply heat by means

After one such lecture recently at a girl’s school he was asked if he would sign autographs. “I was only too delighted,” he explained with that characteristically warm smile. “And I signed away for quite a long time. Suddenly one of the girls came back to me and said ‘You’re not, are you?’. I didn’t know what she was talking about until she showed me what I had written. Instead of my own name I had written ‘Tutankhamen’.” Richard Adamson, the only surviving member of those present at the 1922 excavation, keeps alive, the memory of a pharaoh whose only fortune, as Howard Carter said, was “to die and be buried."

of primus lamps, and gradually it melted. The gold funeral mask, an exact likeness of the King, inlaid with semi-precious stones and with the eyes and eybrows picked out in lapis-lazuli, still adhered to the head. We had to cut the head off at neck to remove it, and then pin it back on to the trunk.” It was at this time, in his role as security guard, that Richard Adamson moved his camp bed into the burial chamber and slept inside alongside the mummy every night for seven yean. The Curse of the Pharoahs, “Death shall come on swift wings to him who enters the tomb of the pharoah” did not worry Richard Adamson any more then than it does now. “Just a job’ “Later on, when the doorway was removed we did find an inscription at the bottom. It simply read ‘Tutankhamen.’ When I had to type out Howard Carter’s notes I put a piece of wood across the sarcophagus and used that as a resting place for my typewriter. It was just a job of work for me. It didn’t hit me until long afterwards.” Richard Adamson was demobilised in 1930 and took up a job as a coding officer in the Portsmouth Dockyard. He has never been back to Egypt. He is now a widower and gives lectures to cluhs and universities.

Babies’ coffins Furniture and equipment designed to help the King on his journey through the nether regions were stacked around. There was an elegant cabinet and a decorated chest; the King’s golden throne with a black panel depicting a scene bf his girl-queen annotating him with oil from a jar. No trace of Queen Ankh-Es-En-Pa-Aten has been found but there were the small coffins of two babies, girls aged five and seven months; and the preserved organs of the King in four gold mummiform containers covered by an alabaster chest and guarded by four goddesses. “The burial probably took place between March and April,” Richard Adamson told me. “There was a bunch of flowers resting against the wall—wild flowers, celery and lotus leaves. They were all withered, of course, but they had been in blossom, and these plants only blossom between those two months. They must have beer, gathered freshly that morning because the dew had made a stain on the wall.” Two life-size statues in black wood covered over with sheet gold facing one another like sentinels guarded the sealed entrance to the burial chamber where Tutankhamen had rested for