The G.E.M.

One hundred and three years ago, Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter were working to clear an unremarkable rubble filled sloping corridor in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Above them a flight of twenty-two steps was now perfectly unobstructed and led back to the sunlit dusty valley. 

The eighteenth dynasty Egyptian pharaohs created magnificent tombs within a natural pyramid shaped hill on the western bank of the Nile. With decorated ceilings, wall paintings, extraordinary long corridors and antechambers leading to their final resting places, even today they are still utterly wondrous. 
Sadly though, given they had been enormously wealthy and magnificent kings, their treasures and grave goods had long been lost to successive looters and explorers over several thousand years, often from soon after their burials despite the best efforts to obscure and conceal the tomb entrances as well proclaim curses to any who entered. 

However, Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter believed that one tomb had not been found – that of Tutankhamun – a minor Pharaoh forgotten in history and whose legacy had been literally submerged under the later Rameses dynasties. The few broken fragments of faience cups, jars with  hastily filled linens, were thought  by eminent archaeologists to be all that remained of his tomb, but Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter believed that such remnants pointed to the existence of the Pharaoh and his  tomb....

By this point in his archeological career, Lord Carnarvon estimated he had cleared up to 60,000 tonnes of rubble from the valley floor but this time, within just a short span of starting work, one of their team, a young local Egyptian, Hassan Abderasoul, hit his shovel on a stone cut step. 
 Lord Carnarvon had experienced many false leads over the course of the last sixteen years of his excavation work in Egypt but had continued every year in the hope that this year would be different. Tired from his battles with his health and continually worried about money, 1922 was to be his last year but here he was now, standing in an ancient corridor.

The first wall at the very top did have the seals of Tutankhamun on the  lower part of it  but they could also see that some earlier explorers had been there and left a small access route through the rubble in the tunnel, so hopes were mixed with realism.
 Perhaps a later sudden storm had covered the entrance route with rocks and debris and it had then been forgotten and of course the entrance was very close to the impressive tombs of the great Ramesses. However, as the world now knows, the story unfolded into one of the most inspiring and incredible discoveries of all time. A lost world, a forgotten young king, treasures beyond imagination.. and in the end Lord Carnarvon lost his life – for a number of reasons but there are eerie connections over the three thousand years linking these two men, the Pharaoh and the archaeologist. 

Before his death, Lord Carnarvon recorded his thoughts in diary and letters. Always respectful, he hoped that the King's actual body would be allowed to rest peacefully in his tomb and he wrote whatever the words in his concession to excavate, everything should stay in Egypt. 
 Now the most extraordinary new museum has opened near Cairo, a beautiful and enormous building sitting alongside the only wonders of the ancient world still extant. The Grand Egyptian Museum is a gem and for the first time gathers together for the wonders from a civilisation which still beguiles so many people.  Naturally, the centrepiece are the treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamun, still the most intact Pharaoh’s burial ever found: curiously practical every day items, works of art, jewels and gold - so much gold - all telling their stories about both the pharaoh’s  life and his hoped for life in death. 

I can’t wait to visit.