I'm on a voyage along the River Nile...
..tracking a 100-year-old tale of adventure...
..and mystery.
Over there, the greatest archaeological discovery
of all time took place -
the tomb of Tutankhamun.
And the most glittering treasure hoard on Earth.
All this can tell us the story of the Golden Boy.
A century later,
meeting the Boy King is a dream come true.
I didn't think I'd get emotional!
I can't believe I'm stood here by this.
The name of the man who found him was Howard Carter.
His discovery is the stuff of fantasy.
Everywhere, the glint of gold.
But this tale of two very different men
is not what it seems.
Can you see over here? Yeah. There's a little bit of a cracking here.
It's full of myths and mysteries...
There aren't complete innocents and there aren't complete villains.
..big egos...
He hasn't studied at Oxford, hasn't studied at Cambridge.
..and missing treasures.
He made the wrong choice.
So hunting through cities,
tombs,
and castles,
my plan is to uncover the truth behind the legend of Howard Carter
and the legend of Tutankhamun.
Before I start on this quest, there's something I want to know.
What does Tutankhamun mean here, in Egypt?
Noura Khedr is an Egyptologist and tour guide.
What's all this? So, basically, the graffiti of Tutankhamun,
back in 2011, he was everywhere,
with the headdress in the modern way.
On this? On these walls? Everywhere! All over the streets.
Tutankhamun ruled Egypt
3,500 years ago,
but in 2011, as young Egyptians protested against corruption,
Tut became their Che Guevara,
their Guy Fawkes.
A 21st-century people's pharaoh.
He was everywhere. I think of Tutankhamun,
I always say that he's the best marketeer
for the Ancient Egyptian civilisation
and Egypt in the modern time. And look at that! Oh, my God!
Even the car, the little van, with the face,
the very iconic, imposing face of Tutankhamun.
He's everywhere. You cannot help it.
People love him so much. HORNS BEEP
But what about the man who found Tut?
He was born 3,500 kilometres away
to an ordinary family in London.
Before I left the UK, I tracked down the start of his story.
He was far from the typical aristocratic explorer.
These are Howard Carter's handwritten memoirs.
I love the title - An Account Of Myself.
This makes for a pretty miserable read.
His father was an artist who didn't make an awful lot of money
and it seems that the family lived in a sort of genteel poverty.
Howard was born in 1874.
Three older siblings had already died,
so as a sickly child he was sent, alone,
to live with his aunts in Norfolk.
"As I was not strong,
"I was debarred from public school life and games.
"As the youngest in an artist's family,
"there was a necessity to start earning my living
"from the age of 15."
To escape his lonely existence,
Howard taught himself to draw the Norfolk wildlife.
Wow.
It's so realistic.
You can see each individual feather.
Even the wrinkles around the eye,
it's just amazing.
And I love his use of colour.
I love the care of his brush strokes.
Marketing this talent was Howard's ticket out.
In Victorian England, a poor boy needed a rich benefactor,
and Carter got one.
The local lord and lady of the manor in Norfolk
were so impressed by Howard's artistic skills
that they set about finding him a position.
They were extremely well connected,
and some of their friends had begun to finance
the fashionable pursuit of archaeology.
To his complete astonishment,
soon Howard Carter found himself on his way to Egypt.
Dawn on the first day of my Nile adventure.
This river is the lifeblood of Egypt.
Either side, these lush, green, fertile strips,
before sudden sandy barrenness.
This is its West Bank.
Three-and-a-half millennia ago, it was the land of the dead,
where the pharaohs built vast tombs and temples.
At just 17, Howard was an excavation artist.
One of his first jobs was here.
Back then, Tutankhamun's name was hardly known,
but this temple was built by Tut's great-great-great-great grandfather's half-sister,
Hatshepsut.
Yeah, you see so many fragments... Even today, archaeologists like Dr Stephen Harvey
employ artists to capture every detail.
So with this strong sun of Egypt, the sun god Ra hitting the stone,
there's a play of shadow.
And the shadows make this readable. That was the whole point.
And that's the sort of thing, I guess, that Carter's picking out in his drawings.
He's trying to show those elements that might be flattened out otherwise. Yeah.
It takes an artist to really convey the line here.
And, you know, there is no such thing as a photograph
that captures the way that this looks at all times of the day,
but a drawing can.
When Howard arrived in 1891,
the world's eyes were on Egypt.
Relics of the pharaohs were emerging from the sand.
But the country was under British control.
There was plenty of opportunity for Howard.
His talent for drawing wildlife made him a natural for Egyptian art,
a vital tool in unlocking the secrets of the pharaohs.
He hasn't studied at Oxford, hasn't studied at Cambridge,
and they want probably a dogsbody too,
someone to really sort of do the lower level work,
and I bet that quickly they realised how skilled he was
and probably wanted to keep him on.
I really think you can't get inside the mind of an artist,
until you have a go yourself.
This part in particular is really special to me.
There are so many birds in this area.
That's something I myself am really interested in.
Howard Carter, of course, would have been up on a scaffolding,
getting really close, taking in every single detail.
And in that process of reproducing,
he was training himself up as an Egyptologist.
The sickly boy was a self-made success.
And he was already plotting his next move.
This is the most famous of the grand hotels
that Howard would have seen springing up
on the opposite side of the Nile.
Egypt had become the winter playground of the rich and famous.
The Winter Palace hosted Agatha Christie,
author of Death On The Nile,
silent movie stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford,
and the Tsar of Russia.
Howard hung out at the hotels,
selling paintings to tourists for extra cash...
..and impressing the rich men who ran Egyptian archaeology
with his artistic skills.
What I find so incredible
is not only the sheer skill of his draughtsmanship,
but also the scale of art he was having to produce.
There was so much there.
His work ethic paid off.
Soon, he was excavating.
And by 25, in 1899,
he was appointed Chief Inspector in charge of archaeology.
His beat was Luxor...
..the West Bank of the Nile,
with its tombs and great temples,
and the East Bank, with the bustling, modern city.
Howard's job was to protect the country's heritage
and supervise excavations.
But in a British protectorate, this wasn't straightforward.
I'm meeting archaeologist Dr Monica Hanna to find out more.
Objects would cross the Nile to the East Bank where you had
these French, American, British antiquities dealers
who would buy the loot
and, of course, you have these foreigners
coming here to shop for objects.
And I guess this Nile river is the motorway
out of here with the goods. Exactly.
This is the highway to Europe
where they don't want their suitcases checked at Alexandria
because they were just full of objects.
Tourists travelled from Alexandria to Cairo.
Then up the Nile to Luxor
and the Valley of the Kings.
Carter installed steel gates and guards,
but it seemed impossible to stop the tomb raiders.
Some of the most visited tombs were those of the 18th Dynasty,
whose powerful pharaohs ruled Egypt 3,500 years ago.
The name Tutankhamun was still barely known,
but this was his family.
I'm heading into the tomb of Amenhotep II.
That's Tutankhamun's great-great-grandfather.
In 1901, Howard Carter had left the West Bank
and was travelling across Egypt,
but one night someone broke in here.
Inside the tomb was a sacred boat known as a barque.
The tomb robbers stole it, damaging a mummy in the process.
As soon as he heard the news, Carter rushed back.
This was his chance to play the great detective.
The gates he'd installed hadn't been up to the job.
Clue number one.
The padlock had been broken,
forced open using a metal bar,
but then it had been glued back together
to give the impression that the tomb was unopened.
Now Carter had seen this somewhere else before.
It was the MO of a notorious local tomb raider.
Howard Carter had a suspect.
The suspect had pulled off a string of robberies.
This time, Howard wanted him behind bars.
Clue number two.
A bare footprint next to the sarcophagus.
Inspector Carter measured it,
and was convinced he could match it up to his suspect.
Now he knew he had his man.
But the suspect had friends in high places
who bought his stolen treasures.
He walked away Scot-free.
Howard was furious.
There was a reason that Carter was so concerned about this break-in.
This tomb didn't just contain the remains of Amenhotep II,
but also a collection of mummies,
members of Tutankhamun's family that were brought here in antiquity
to keep them safe from robbers.
The pharaohs were buried with great treasures.
Now almost all that was left was their bodies.
There was Tutankhamun's great-great-grandfather,
his grandfather,
his grandmother and, perhaps, his mother.
Now they were vulnerable to a new generation of tomb raiders.
There was only one solution.
Carter carefully packaged them up,
catalogued them and then sent them for safety to Cairo.
Howard gave the pharaohs pride of place in Cairo's new museum,
where you can still see their statues today.
This is, essentially, the family photo album
of Ancient Egypt's 18th Dynasty.
And here is its grand matriarch, Hatshepsut.
She was half-sister to Tutankhamun's great-great-great-great-grandfather.
The family album continues in here.
Some experts think that this is Tutankhamun's dad,
Akhenaten.
And over here, his first wife.
This is Nefertiti. Her name means beauty.
And, of course, look how beautiful she is in that sculpture.
This is interesting. It's the royal family.
There's Akhenaten again. And his other wife, known as the younger lady.
Now that is probably Tutankhamun's mum.
Last, but not least, Amenhotep III,
also known as Amenhotep The Magnificent,
the pharaoh responsible for taking Egypt to its absolute zenith of power.
And right next to him is his wife, Queen Tiye.
Here she's shown ever so slightly higher than her husband.
And that shows that she was a powerful and important ruler in her own right.
And there you have it, Tutankhamun's grandparents.
But one member of the family was still missing,
known only by the hieroglyphs spelling out his name,
including the symbol of the scarab beetle.
At still just 27 years old,
Howard Carter may have seen this as a chance to make a name for himself
by finding the 11th pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty -
King Tutankhamun.
Logically, Tutankhamun's tomb had to be in the Valley of the Kings.
Howard didn't have the money to fund an excavation.
What he could do was keep his ear to the ground.
Carter loved to hang out in cafes.
He would listen, chat to the locals,
but this was viewed with suspicion by his British colleagues.
It was not the done thing.
Howard was hard-working and very ambitious,
but he didn't always follow establishment rules.
One night, drunk Western tourists picked a fight with some excavation guards.
Angrily, he took the side of the Egyptian staff.
"I have a hot temper
"and that amount of tenacity of purpose
"which unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy
"and which nowadays, due to such idiosyncrasies,
"it pleases my enemies to term me
"as having 'un mauvaise caractere'.
"Well, that I can't help."
Not only was Howard fired as Archaeological Inspector,
he was now unemployable.
He turned to dealing artefacts.
Here is Luxor Temple. Directly opposite
is the Luxor Hotel.
Howard Carter would stay here when he was excavating on the West Bank.
Alongside is this street.
It was peppered with the shops of dealers in antiquities.
So this whole set-up was very convenient for Howard Carter's enterprises.
As Inspector, Howard had fought hard to protect Egypt's heritage,
but on the side, like his contemporaries,
he'd sold some finds to collectors and museums.
Objects were still taken without proper excavations,
and the whole idea of taking these objects for the museums
was the thing that was fuelling such plunder in the 19th century.
Egypt was under British control.
The rules said that half of the finds could be removed from Egypt, half had to stay.
We hear about these tomb robbers. Who are the tomb robbers?
Well, they're always the Egyptians, you know.
And you see this usually - a very greedy person.
While actually it's the Westerners who want to buy these objects. OK.
Howard Carter - cop? Robber? Or both?
I think there aren't complete innocents and there aren't complete villains.
I think he was a mix of both.
He probably at some times tried to do his best to protect the sites
and at other times he did what was best for his own interests.
Even in his wilderness years, Howard dreamed of discovery.
But with no wealthy patron, he had no hope of funding a dig.
He needed a stroke of luck
and, boy, did he get it!
For 350 years, this Hampshire estate has been home
to one of England's most prominent families,
but you probably know it as Downton Abbey.
Howard became a regular visitor.
Just cram-packed full of beautiful art.
Wow.
Look at this staircase!
SHE GASPS Ah, beautiful.
That is quite a haul.
Must have made such an impression on him.
And it's incredible to think that it's still used as the family home of the Carnarvons.
At 34, Howard had the luckiest encounter of his life,
with George, Earl of Carnarvon.
The current Lord C is his great-grandson.
He was probably one of the last great sort of Edwardian adventurers, really.
Firstly, quite a gambling mentality. Oh! You know.
He was mad about the horses.
He was an owner, breeder and racehorse owner.
He helped found Newbury racecourse.
George Carnarvon spent his money on fast horses and fast cars,
but after a nasty accident, he needed a safer hobby.
He had this idea of a quest for something hard to touch,
something amazing. So he was sort of drawn to history,
drawn to archaeology even as a young boy? Absolutely.
Without that, he would never have been someone who would have gone to Egypt
and embarked on what might appear to be a crazy idea
of digging up the earth to find something amazing from past civilisations.
They often met here,
where archaeological deals got done.
They have these glorious gardens, you can stroll around,
you can be by the river in the cool of the evening.
The decor inside where you had your gin and tonic of the time,
they could have made a plan, cooked up together,
of how they were going to work together.
Howard got a taste for the high life.
There's a sense, isn't there, that Howard Carter was aspiring to be like your great-grandfather?
He, I think, wanted to emulate
the general style of my great-grandfather,
which of course may well mean going to the same tailor, having the same sort of clothes.
He also wanted to be the English gentleman abroad.
Finally, Howard Carter, the loner,
had found a kindred spirit.
Together, they planned what seemed impossible -
to find an untouched pharaoh's tomb.
Howard was back on the West Bank, with a new house,
paid for by George Carnarvon.
Oh, this is nice.
It's bigger than I was expecting.
I think for a single guy, he's got a lot of space here.
Before every excavation, Carter put together a shopping list
of the little luxuries that an Englishman might want abroad.
There's some pate de foie gras,
And quite a lot of alcohol. Then there's practical things.
Yardley's soap. But, interestingly, he's gone for the Bromo toilet paper.
That's the rough, scratchy stuff, not the soft, luxurious one.
In comparison to the other houses on the West Bank,
this was big, comfortable and luxurious.
Soon, everyone was calling it Castle Carter.
Only so many digs were allowed in the Valley of the Kings.
So while they waited, they started to dig just outside the Valley.
This footage was shot by George Carnarvon himself.
He could afford to pay hundreds of local workers,
but they were more than labourers.
They brought Howard vital intelligence.
In his memoirs, he said that a man called Gad Hassan came to visit him here,
in the gardens of Castle Carter.
Hassan wanted to sell him some information
about the location of a tomb that had just been revealed after heavy flooding.
Now Carter thought this could be the tomb of the pharaoh Amenhotep I.
And I think, I might be wrong, that this is Tutankhamun's
great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather.
The tomb had been robbed, but it was still a big find.
Howard and George were now major players.
So was this mysterious man, Gad Hassan,
who had basically told Carter the location of a pharaoh's tomb?
Well, he came from one of the nearby villages, just over there.
Gourna is now abandoned.
but it once housed hundreds of Howard Carter's workers.
When I read the records of Carter,
they're referred to as natives, native workers,
or just not referred to at all.
Well, I'm looking for them
at the National Egyptian Archive of Egypt.
I'm looking into peopling the past of Egyptian Egyptology.
We know the expressions of Carter and we know the expressions of Lord Carnarvon,
but we never see what did the Egyptians say.
They're not given a voice. You see that in the photos, too.
They're almost like props and supports... Exactly. ..to Carnarvon and Carter. Exactly.
They do not come out as individuals.
They come out not so different from the objects that were being discovered.
But their knowledge was essential.
So these people have been living in this landscape and they have been not just living,
but they have been using it in multi purposes. And so such use of landscape
lets you know where the water would go when there's a flash flood,
they'd let you know where the inundation arrives.
They were his right and left hands, basically.
I think this is how he built his glory, on top of their shoulders.
The years that Howard had spent hanging out in cafes with the locals was paying off.
He knew exactly who to hire for tomb hunting.
The details are in his diary.
Routine payments to Gad Hassan,
and a second foreman, Ahmed Gerigar.
In 1917, they got permission to enter...
..the Valley of the Kings.
A rich American called Theodore Davis
had dug here for 11 years,
but he had declared the Valley empty and thrown in his trowel.
When Howard Carter finally got permission,
he found a valley full of rubble
and everyone thought that all the royal tombs that were going to be discovered
had been discovered, but Carter did have two things on his side.
The first clue was this channel in the cliffs.
Howard's team knew it had been cut on purpose by the tomb builders
to direct flood water away from the tombs.
This narrowed the search. There was no point digging in the outflow.
The second clue had been found by Theodore Davis.
But he'd missed its meaning.
It was a cup bearing the name Tutankhamun,
including the symbol of the scarab.
Even with this knowledge on his side, though,
it wasn't going to be that easy.
The work was more like engineering than excavation.
For five long years, the Carter crew spent more time shifting rubble than sifting treasure.
What little they found had nothing to do with Tutankhamun.
Then, in June, 1922,
Howard received a summons.
In the aftermath of WWI,
high taxation was putting stately homes at risk.
I think Great-grandfather was getting to the stage it was all becoming quite an expensive thing.
I think he probably said to Howard Carter,
"Look, my friend,
"we've had a great time out there, but maybe we should be drawing stumps
"because this is costing more and more and we haven't made any great breakthrough."
Howard argued passionately for just one more season.
Ultimately, what seems to come across is they were friends.
Yes, they were friends. He came here many, many times.
It was at one of these occasions...
..in June, 1922,
that they made the decision to continue for another year.
Egypt was still big news.
The world wanted a new discovery.
Carter had just one more season left to make that big find
that he was convinced was out there somewhere.
It's like a Hollywood movie. The tension is incredible.
He focused on one spot.
Over there, under that ridge of earth,
is the tomb of Ramesses VI.
He was pharaoh roughly two centuries after Tutankhamun.
At the very bottom was a pile of rubble that had never been properly excavated.
Carter worked his way through this, and discovered the huts
of the workers that had originally dug out Ramesses' tomb.
But what if he was to dig further back through the past
and go deeper? What would he find then?
On the 4th of November, Howard wrote,
"First steps of tomb found."
But who found them?
On the day of the discovery, when he arrived on-site,
he was met by the sound of silence.
What this meant was that the team had already discovered something important.
The site foreman was Ahmed Gerigar.
It was the Egyptian workers who had found
the first step down into the most important archaeological discovery of all time.
At the bottom was the sealed entrance to a tomb.
Howard stopped,
to wait for George.
He sent a famous telegram saying, "Appears have made amazing discovery of intact tomb.
"Await your arrival."
It took three weeks for George to arrive in Egypt.
On 26th of November, 1922,
the moment came.
As Howard peered through a hole in the wall,
George asked, "Can you see anything?"
Howard replied, "Yes.
"Wonderful things."
33 centuries had passed
since human feet last trod the floor on which we stood.
We were to witness a spectacle
such as no other man in our time had been privileged to see.
The most extensive pharaoh's treasure ever found.
Crammed full of objects.
To accompany Tutankhamun into the next life.
But when we came to a golden shrine,
the doors closed and sealed,
we realised
that we were in the presence of the dead king.
So beautiful.
Amazing to see this colour.
The scale of the figures over there!
Tutankhamun is shown
with his characteristic headdress.
And behind is his Ka, his soul,
clasping on to the ankh,
representing eternal life.
And he's embracing
the figure of Osiris.
So this is about
the eternal life of the pharaoh.
Tutankhamun is surrounded by symbols of divine protection.
This, for me, is the highlight.
It's these women on the corners,
one on each corner, their arms stretched around,
and their wings touching and overlapping.
It's only when you move around it
you get a sense this feels like a real body.
It feels like something three-dimensional.
You can see her breasts, her hips.
It's just beautiful.
The excavation of the tomb made Howard the most famous discoverer on Earth.
But he was also one of the most meticulous,
recording and wrapping each treasure.
Each one brought Ancient Egypt back to life.
There were over 5,000 objects in Tutankhamun's tomb,
but there's only one that everybody wants to see.
I get shivers every time I see this.
The golden mask of Tutankhamun.
Up at the top there, you see Wadjet, the cobra.
and Nekhbet, the vulture,
symbolic of Upper and Lower Egypt.
And Tutankhamun is king over it all.
Carved on the back here
were these incredibly precise hieroglyphs.
It's a protective spell.
It says, "Your forehead is of Anubis.
"The nape of your neck is of Horus.
"The strands of your hair are of Ptah-Sokar.
"You are in front of Osiris, Tutankhamun."
It truly is
THE icon of Egypt.
Dr Zahi Hawass is the country's most famous living archaeologist.
He's spent his life decoding these works of art.
Why do you think the Tutankhamun collection
is so important to the Egyptian people?
It's not to the Egyptian people.
It is to the whole world.
If you go in any city in the world and say, "Egypt,"
they will say, "King Tut!"
Because the Golden Boy captured the hearts of people everywhere.
You have the Anubis shrine, you have the canopic jars,
you have the throne. You know, the throne is also amazing.
The throne is inscribed with his birth name,
Tutankhaten.
Toys that he played with, drinking beer and wine.
All these kind of artefacts can tell us
the story of the daily life
and the religious beliefs of the Golden Boy.
Tutankhamun would have been a sensation in any age,
but, in 1922,
he set the world alight.
World War I was over.
# Wah wah! It was party time!
# Wah wah... #
Youth and dazzling wealth made Tut the perfect Jazz Age celebrity.
The New York Times,
February 18th, 1923.
"There is only one topic of conversation.
"One cannot escape the name of Tutankhamun anywhere.
"It is shouted in the streets, whispered in the hotels."
Egypt became a global craze.
And against all the odds, Howard Carter had made it.
But his work had only just begun.
Before he removed anything from the tomb,
he recorded each artefact with meticulous care.
I asked the curators for a closer view of my favourite object.
Wow.
Amazing.
It was designed to be worn by the pharaoh.
Up in that disc at the top,
you can see a tiny version of Tutankhamun.
The centrepiece - the scarab beetle.
The reason that scarab is so significant
isn't just for its symbolism. It's for what it's made of.
That beautiful yellow stone in the centre
is one of the rarest stones on the planet.
It is Libyan desert glass.
And it was created
when a meteorite hit the Earth, roughly 26 million years ago.
What was it doing in the tomb of Tutankhamun?
It's not found in any other Egyptian artworks.
We'll never know, but the Ancient Egyptians understood how rare it was.
And that's why they used it to offer this protection to their young pharaoh.
These treasures made him immortal.
George Carnarvon had spent a fortune.
To recoup, he did an exclusive deal with the London Times.
Nonetheless, the global press descended on Egypt.
The pressure on Howard was enormous.
His only protection was George.
Then, disaster struck.
It all happened here in the bathroom of the Royal Suite at the Winter Palace.
Lord Carnarvon had been bitten by a mosquito
and then later, when he was shaving,
he opened up the wound and it became infected.
Very soon, Lord Carnarvon was dead from blood poisoning.
Just four months after the tomb was opened,
Howard had lost his patron and friend.
My amazing great-grandmother has flown out in a de Havilland plane,
with a doctor. Gosh. She was the great nursing, medical expert.
To be with him. It wasn't enough to save him.
He even said a few hours beforehand, "I feel I'm, you know..."
He had this terrible thing of dying in the hour of his triumph.
Disaster number two.
The whole of the world's press were also gathered here at the Winter Palace,
and they were turning on Carter.
Lord Carnarvon's death provided them with the perfect opportunity.
The curse of Tutankhamun was born.
The rest of the media was furious at being excluded from the world's biggest story,
so the American press simply made one up.
It's a great story because the pharaohs always said
that anyone was cursed who breaks into a tomb.
And the cobra was everywhere, symbolically protecting.
The truth was more routine.
I'm afraid it's really the fact that he was not the strongest physical character
because of his general sort of shape
and it was just appallingly bad... bad luck, really.
George's own cine camera captured the last footage of him alive.
The curse was an invention,
but Howard was alone again,
left to manage personal grief on top of professional stress.
Political change was under way.
The Egyptian authorities were breaking free of British control
and insisting on oversight of Carter's work.
The pressures were reaching breaking point.
Finally, Howard lost it completely,
posting a public notice in the lobby of the Winter Palace Hotel.
"All my collaborators, in protest, have refused to work.
"After the press view of the tomb, between ten o'clock and noon,
"the tomb will be closed and no further work will be carried out.
"Signed, Howard Carter."
In other words, "I'm not playing any more.
"I'm taking my ball and going home."
Howard and George had expected to keep half the treasures.
Those days were gone.
Egypt insisted everything must stay.
But Howard could continue to run the excavation.
He was the right man for the next step -
revealing the body of Tutankhamun.
This is as close as I can get to his experience.
I can't believe this is happening!
As the last shroud was rolled back,
a gasp of wonderment escaped our lips,
so gorgeous was the sight that met our eyes.
The lid of a series of three coffins, nested one within the other,
enclosing the mortal remains
of the young King Tutankhamun.
I didn't think I'd get emotional.
I can't believe I'm stood here by this.
It feels such an honour. I just can't believe I'm...
..having this experience.
I used to dream about Ancient Egypt as a girl.
Among all that regal splendour,
everywhere the glint of gold.
Tutankhamun's innermost coffin
is 110kg
of solid gold.
There's this delicate feathering that runs all over it.
You've got the protective goddesses
covering the body with their wings.
Then the winged vulture and cobra,
covering his chest, protecting him.
And then, all the way up,
these delicately-carved feathers,
they curve right behind and embrace the body of the pharaoh.
There's so many incredible details that I can only see
now I'm so close to it.
It's unbelievably, beautifully worked.
The way the light just bounces off. It's breathtaking.
Howard Carter had gone through so much
and, ultimately, this was the very last obstacle
between him and Tutankhamun himself.
Or so he thought.
In fact, the body was covered in rock-hard resin.
Howard's emergency solution is pretty shocking.
In order to remove the mummy,
and the bracelets that were attached to it,
they ended up having to use hot knives and chisels
and take the body out, piece by piece, limb by limb.
Until, eventually,
all that was left
was the great gold mask and Tutankhamun's head.
They then...
..carefully reconstructed the body, bit by bit,
so it could be placed back in the tomb.
To satisfy 20th-century curiosity,
Tutankhamun was stripped of all his divine protection,
and autopsied.
He was 19.
He was just a couple of years older than my son.
I've set up a meeting here at the Winter Palace
to try and get to the bottom of one of the biggest Tut mysteries -
how did he die?
In 1968, a series of X-rays showed
shocking evidence of multiple injuries.
This unleashed decades of speculation on his violent death.
But is his fragile mummy a red herring?
Professor Salima Ikram is an expert on mummification.
OK. I'll see to the tea.
Yes, darling, if you do that... OK.
..I will open up this lovely portfolio.
Here you go.
So this is the leg. Uh-huh.
Can you see over here? Yeah. There's a little bit of a cracking here.
And people have been talking about he was thrown from a chariot
or something happened in battle. Right.
Let me remember that one. There's so many! Yeah.
The chest is quite extraordinary over here. Yeah.
But you can see that the ribs are all gone.
Yeah. There's a theory about, "Oh, a hippopotamus bit him,"
or a horse kicked him.
Now, that's not very likely with the horse
because, generally, the king would be not that stupid to walk behind a horse.
It seems Tut's famous injuries happened after he died.
During World War II, he was left unguarded in his tomb.
Raiders ripped a necklace from his chest
and shattered his ribs.
There's the famous head. Yeah.
Now what I love here is this bit of bone,
which for a long time was, "Tutankhamun was murdered!
"Someone hit him on the side of his head!" Etc, etc.
So this piece of bone that we can see here, that's disconnected, that's come away?
Yeah, this is, in fact, probably something that happened when they were handling the mummy
afterwards. It has nothing to do with his death.
Howard Carter may well be one of the culprits.
The truth is we'll never know how Tut died,
but since the Jazz Age, the idea of a delicate boy
living a life of luxury has captured our imaginations.
There's still something that...
that seems to stick, which is that Tutankhamun was this poor, fragile little boy.
I think we're projecting a great deal onto him from our modern times
because he was probably relatively robust.
And he wasn't a little boy. He was 19.
And we even know that he was, in fact, a strong, virile man.
So I don't think this poor, pathetic boy thing holds water.
But what about the idea that Tutankhamun was powerless?
Forgotten because he made no mark on Egypt?
These walls commemorate the festival of a great pharaoh.
You see this figure right here coming out of the temple
and going in an incredible procession
all the way to Luxor Temple to celebrate with the people.
We even have drinking songs inviting people to join in in the festival
and we see it in all of the art.
It's now believed this ruler is none other than Tutankhamun.
CHANTING
So, in 2021,
Egypt recreated his festival.
His magnificent reign brought back to life.
Here what we see is the pharaoh Tutankhamun on this sacred barque of one of the gods
in procession on the water.
21st-century Egypt has rediscovered Tut
as a symbol of national pride.
It now seems this god-like statue is the mighty Tutankhamun
complete with a rather splendid collar.
When Howard Carter first opened Tutankhamun's coffin,
an almost identical one was there on the pharaoh's body,
but, unlike the other treasures, it then went missing.
There's a final twist to this tale.
One of the most famous guests at the Winter Palace
was Agatha Christie,
author of Death On The Nile,
starring the great Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.
I'm meeting another detective,
who's been on the trail of the collar thief.
Marc, what's happened to this collar?
What is strange is that there is nothing of this collar,
not any part in Egypt now. So it was a big mystery until very recently.
Howard Carter had made detailed drawings
of every piece of the collar, which should be in Cairo.
So why did Marc spot this item on display in Kansas City, USA?
I was very surprised because it looked very well to the description of Carter.
And why, in 2015, did he see pieces up for auction in London?
You were putting it together in your mind like an Egyptian jigsaw puzzle!
Yes, yes. Yes, yes.
And for this you must have all the information in your brain
because it is the only device that works perfectly for these kind of things.
Marc could now account for much of the missing collar.
And the thief? None other than Howard Carter.
Very often in Howard Carter's life, when he had some choice to do,
he made the wrong choice.
It seems Howard took the parts back to London
hoping, perhaps, to reconstruct them.
Instead, he gave them away to acquaintances.
It was a different time, I suppose. It's very difficult.
100 years after the events, it's difficult to have a judgment.
We can only say, yeah, he should not have.
But it happened. It happened.
Howard gave away at least 24 small objects
that should have stayed in Egypt.
Despite his fame, he cut a lonely figure late in life,
haunting the scenes of his glory at the Winter Palace.
He had no close friends.
But he was always ready to tell strangers the tale of Tutankhamun.
He died in 1939.
It took him ten years to record and remove
all Tutankhamun's treasures from the tomb.
In his attention to detail,
Howard Carter was far ahead of his time.
The details are...mindblowing.
For all his many faults,
he left a great gift to the world.
Ah...!
The last word on Tutankhamun must come from Egypt.
I believe he means how powerful Egypt was at that time.
The sense of the belonging to this land,
being part of this heritage and huge, amazing history.
Like this is the heritage of the world, yes,
but also this is Egypt.
Now, more than ever, the story of these two men
goes far beyond a hunt for treasure.
The archaeology of Ancient Egypt is now in the hands of Egyptians.
And they are constantly adding new chapters to the narrative
that aren't just about pharaohs and treasures.
I won't be taking anything with me from Egypt,
apart from my memories and a sense that Carter's discovery
was only the start of the story.