A Collège de France - CNEDcoproduction
Abstract
" This brief exchange is part of the golden legend of our discipline. It took place, seventy-eight years ago in one month's time, on the afternoon of Sunday, November 26 1922, on one of those luminous late autumn days when the Thebaid sun enriches the soft shadows it casts on monuments and landscapes. The anxious, attentive man asking questions is Lord Carnarvon, the patron, protector and friend of archaeologist Howard Carter. The latter has just laid the first brick sealing the antechamber to Tutankhamun's tomb. He had discovered the entrance three weeks earlier. At the end of a long quest, which had left most of his colleagues skeptical. It was only four days later, on November 29 , that the antechamber was solemnly opened to reveal the tomb's treasures. History has nevertheless preserved the beautiful image of this dialogue between a man who hoped and another who, to tell the truth, must not have seen much amid the rubble and the flickering light of a bad kerosene lamp. But he knew he'd found it. As T.H.G. James wrote in his fine book on Howard Carter, this brief conciliabule, and especially the excavator's response, contribute. "more than to the story of the discovery, indeed, to the myth of the discovery". And that's how a little-known wren of history became the emblem of a discipline. It was still in autumn, a century before the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb and a month, almost to the day, before the day that brings us together today, Sunday 22 September 1822, that the famous Lettre à Monsieur Dacier, Secrétaire perpétuel de l'Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, relative à l'alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques, was lithographed. On September 14 around noon, in the beautiful light of Horace Vemet's former studio, which served as his office, Jean-François Champollion had received confirmation of the key to reading hieroglyphs... "
Nicolas Grimal
