BOOK FEATURE: The man who really found Tutankhamen (British Corporal Spy)

CAIRO, Egypt -- For the past 36 years journalist and author Desmond Zwar has shared a great secret: that it was not archaeologist Howard Carter who was responsible for the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb, but a humble British corporal whose very presence on the site had to be kept confidential; who in the last days of the dig took a photograph that changed history.

Richard Adamson was a 23-year-old spy. He had infiltrated the Wafdist Party -- dedicated to overthrowing British rule in Egypt -- and as a result 28 Egyptians were arrested in Cairo, four of them sentenced to death. Consequently Adamson himself was in great danger of assassination and was bundled off to the Valley of the Kings to work incognito with archaeologist Howard Carter, his identity carefully hidden.

Desmond Zwar, who has written 17 nonfiction books, including a collaboration with Nazi deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess, has now published his memoirs of 50 years' international reporting and reveals here how he met the mild-mannered, humble Richard Adamson who at last told him the true story of the Tutankhamen discovery... [Editor's note]

It was at the end of a day in Room 8, at the Daily Mail, just before Christmas, and we were wrapping up the pages for the first edition. If anything happened during the night to cause sub-editors to change an article that was somebody else's problem.

I was about to leave when there was a call on the secretary's phone; she had gone home, so I took it. The security man downstairs had a Mr. Adamson wishing to see somebody who might be able to help him. It was about some photographs. I have no idea why I did it, but I asked security to send him up. He arrived from the lift, a small, 70-ish man in a threadbare black suit meekly clutching his hat. He didn't want to be a bother, but he had just come from being with Prince Charles and ... he'd said the magic word! I ushered in Richard Adamson to a chair beside mine in the paper-strewn features room and he said he didn't want to take up a lot of time, but he had been in Luxor, Egypt, in 1922 with British Egyptologist Howard Carter. Carter had been picking over the last area he was to dig in Egypt's Valley of the Kings; searching for Tutankhamen's tomb. Adamson, then a 23-year-old, had been a policeman in Cairo, he said, well ... more than a policeman really; he was a spy. He had been involved in 'security work' in Cairo, infiltrating the Wafdist Party, which at the time was attempting to overthrow British rule in Egypt. (The story was getting more and more intriguing!)

"I had passed on certain information which led to the arrest of 28 Egyptians -- four sentenced to death and the rest jailed," he said matter-of factly. "I was a marked man, and it was deemed advisable to send me away from Cairo." He had been sent to join Howard Carter and his wealthy patron, Lord Carnarvon, in the Valley; and Carter, knowing of Adamson's 'trouble', had insisted that his identity and background be kept secret, employing the young policeman to type up his work notes on the daily dig, making sure that he (Adamson) wasn't mentioned.

My colleague, putting on his coat behind Adamson's back, on his way home, mouthed the word: 'Nutter.'

I ignored him as Adamson told me he had just come from a private audience with Prince Charles who had been so fascinated by what he told him of Egyptology that he had extended a scheduled one hour's chat to four hours, keeping a royal detective cooling his heels outside the Prince's rooms. And now, as one of the few witnesses left, he had been invited to take part in a film by the Egyptian Tourist Department to reenact the discovery in the Valley of the Kings. This was why, in some desperation, he was seeking the paper's help. "I would like to get my photographs back from Cairo." There were some hundreds of his photographs the Egyptians were still keeping in the Cairo Museum; a collection officials were reluctant to acknowledge even existed.

"One picture is historic: it is a box-camera snap I took and showed to Carter the day before he uncovered the passageway to Tutankhamen's tomb. Just after I took the photo the Egyptian workers covered over again what was later shown to be a step I had photographed."

Was he in fact, claiming that it was his own alertness and shrewdness that led to the actual discovery? Well, he said, that step was the first leading down to the tomb, and had he not shown Carter that photograph, the deadline for the expiration of the dig license would have passed and Carter would have departed Egypt empty-handed. Had such a claim been made public before? I asked him. "Oh no, Mr. Zwar. I would not seek to make claims that would detract from anybody else's efforts. Mr. Carter was a good man ..."

He had taken the snap on 3rd November 1922, almost the eleventh hour of the end of Carter's exclusive digging rights in Egypt. Armed with an old John Bull box camera, he was pottering about taking snapshots of the excavations, having his film developed each night by the manager of the Winter Palace Hotel in nearby Luxor. He had lent the Egyptian Museum this photograph and many others, and had not been given them back. I confirmed their existence on a visit to Cairo in 1992 and was told they were soon to be used in a "major expo of the Tutankhamen memorabilia."

I was now so fascinated with what Adamson was telling me that I invited him back to our flat for a drink and he went on with his story. He sipped sherry with Delphine and I and both of us felt a shiver of excitement as he went on with his account of what happened half a century ago.

When he was pottering about with his camera, he said, he noticed three Egyptian diggers uncover what looked like a large boulder near some workmen's huts. "I then saw them quickly cover up the boulder with rubbish they had taken from another spot, and start digging in a different direction." But before they hid what they had uncovered the alert Adamson photographed it.

"The next morning Carter arrived on the site at the usual time and said: 'Everything all right?' I said: 'Yes, the work's going along now.' There was only a short time of the concession left.

"Lord Carnarvon, Carter's wealthy mentor, had already returned to England. 'Well, there's not far to go now,' Mr. Carter said, and went on with what he was doing." (For seven backbreaking years, his health failing, Carter had tried, and he believed failed, to discover the last link in the Pharaohs -- the tomb of the boy King Tutankhamen (1333 BC - 1323 BC), which he firmly believed was somewhere in the arid Valley.)

Carter, said Adamson, had then crouched down in the sand and had drawn a line with his finger showing how far they were going to excavate. He said to Adamson: "Then we'll level all this up."

"There, with all that rubbish that has been put on top of it. They are about 50 yards away -- I can pinpoint them. Here, I've got photos of them." And he took the fresh prints from his pocket.

"Carter studied the photographs. He then said: 'We'll have to uncover this lot again.' He called the Arab workers over and ordered them to do it. There was a bit of an argument. The ghaffir (foreman) didn't want to do it. That, in itself, ought to have given rise to a bit of suspicion, but it didn't dawn on us then. But Carter insisted and they uncovered the stones. Carter took his coat off, and I took off mine, and we got right down to it to examine them. It was a step I had found! There was one underneath it and one underneath that. Carter stood up. 'These are no boulders. We'll need some help.' I said: 'You'll get no more help tonight, Sir.'

"'Right,' said Carter. 'We'll carry on ourselves until it gets dark.'" Together Adamson and Carter scraped sand and rubbish away from six steps. The next morning, starting at dawn, they uncovered another 10. Facing them now was a door. "Carter was obviously excited. He said to me: 'I think we've reached what we are looking for'."

Carter wrote later in his own account of the discovery: 'It was clear by now, beyond any question, that we actually had before us the entrance to a tomb ...' And he gave the only clue to another person being responsible for the momentous discovery: 'Hardly had I arrived next morning (November 4th) than the unusual silence, due to the stoppage of work, made me realize that something out of the ordinary had happened. I was greeted by the announcement that a step cut in the rock had been discovered underneath the very first hut to be attacked.'

This was the first and only reference -- oblique as it was -- ever made by Carter that another person was responsible for perhaps the world's most important archaeological find.

"We found a passageway," Adamson went on, as Delphine, my wife, came back into the room with drinks. "Then we came to a door. We uncovered it and found another passage, leading right. The passage was covered with plaster but some of it was of a different texture. Somebody had been there before us. We removed this and it took about half an hour. Then we came to rubble, all boulders and wood.

"Carter then decided to cover up our entry and cable Lord Carnarvon to return to Egypt. He did, and on November 23 our party of six once more uncovered the passageway.

"First Mr. Carter made a small hole at the top of the door and inserted a lighted candle to test the purity of the air for any foul gas. Lord Carnarvon, myself, Mr. A. R. Callender, Mr. Rex Englebach, the chief inspector of antiquities, and Lady Evelyn Herbert, Lord Carnarvon's daughter, watched during a tense silence as Howard Carter picked up a torch and looked inside -- it was a moment I can never forget.

"He stepped down and handed the torch to Lord Carnarvon who peered into the hole for almost a minute. Eventually the torch was handed to me. I looked inside. I don't know what I expected to see, but most certainly the sight took my breath away. As I moved the torch around details came into view.

"There was a room, about 25 feet by 30 feet and as I shone my torch inside, everything seemed yellow. I thought at first that the lens must have been dusty to give off this yellowish look. Then I realized what I was looking at was gold.

"Suddenly my beam picked out some objects, the like of which I've never seen before and which I'm sure I'll never see again.

"There were three large couches in the form of animals. It was uncanny. All around, in a state of haphazard confusion, were chests, vases, shrines, chariots and thrones ... everywhere the glint of gold. Gleaming eyes were picked up by the torch and they glowed frighteningly in reflection.

"The center couch, a hippo God, had eyes that glared right back at you, about three feet from the torch. It was just as if the thing was alive, and I drew back. I think I looked for perhaps half a minute before I handed the torch back.

"One had the feeling as if we were in the presence of someone who, although dead, was alive and watching. You seemed to inherit the belief of those long-dead Egyptians; that they do not die, but live on in the spirit of their Gods and ancestors."

The sight the party was taking in had not been seen by man since 1,350 years before the birth of Christ save for a frustrated break-in by thieves, established scientifically to have taken place some 12 to 15 years after the funeral. Then it was time to break through to the inner chamber. It was protected by two life-size sentinels in black, overlaid with gold; upon their heads the Royal emblems of the sacred cobra and vulture. Carter took a few minutes to remove stones and make a gap large enough to squeeze through. He was confronted with two massive doors of an outer shrine, closed by bolts but otherwise unsealed. The workers prised open the ebony bolts and the double-doors fell open. Inside was the Burial Chamber ...

Adamson said he first saw a chair, studded with gold. It had a servant figure carved on it, offering the king the conventional wish of devotion: a million years of life. "A sad touch in a tomb of a king who had died at the age of 18 and there, jewelled and golden, was his throne, and on it a scene showing him seated on a chair while his young queen anointed his body with oil from a jar. There was a collection of household implements; the king's shields and spears, his great fan of ostrich feathers, scepters, walking-sticks and trumpets made of silver."

Above the intruders' heads, a dozen boats waited as if ready to sail down the Nile as a flotilla.

It was almost a year later that in the burial chamber itself, the excavators broke through and uncovered the greatest treasure of all: four gold shrines containing a sarcophagus and a nest of three coffins, the last fashioned from solid gold.

"Because consecration liquid had been poured over the mummy, it was stuck fast in the coffin," Adamson told me.

"Heat from primus lamps filled with paraffin had to be used before the mummy could be removed. Over the head and shoulders was a golden mask. The mummy was lying at an angle in the coffin, evidently it had been tilted when lowered and the consecration liquid had set and kept it in that position.

"When the wrappings on King Tutankhamen were finally removed, one could only stand and gaze, bereft of thought, action or words."

Richardson Adamson was silent for awhile. "That scene has rarely been out of my mind over the years. To look upon the features of one who had lived so many centuries ago, to see him as a civilization, long since departed had seen him, and to know you are looking on the face of an actual Pharaoh of Egypt who had ruled so vast an empire long, long ago, was incredible. Around his neck and across his breast, his wife and mourners had placed a collarets made of cornflowers, lilies and lotus. They were dead and withered, but after 3,000 years still had a trace of color. The face appeared to be looking back at you, mockingly, eyes partly open. There was a scar on his left cheek.

"The bandages were extremely fragile and crumbled at a touch. All fingers and toes had been bandaged separately and gold sheaths placed over each one. Gold sandals were on the feet. Some resinous material had been used to plug the nostrils, partly open the eyes and pushed between the lips. The skin was a grayish color."

Adamson was ordered, he said, to remain at the scene "for a few weeks" to guard the treasures as they were catalogued and removed from the tomb. He was to stay there in fact, for seven years.

Some time later Delphine and I flew to Cairo and after seeing the Tutankhamen treasures in the Egyptian Museum and going to the Valley of the Kings at Luxor, I gave Egyptian authorities the record of my weeks of interviews with Richard Adamson and his claimed role in the discovery: a role never mentioned in the guide books, and unknown to Egyptologists who had devoted their lives to researching every detail of the rich heritage they were showing me.

Egypt's most famous Egyptologist, Mr. Zahi Hawass, director-general of the Giza Plateau area for the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, confirmed that Adamson's photos had been held by the Egyptian Museum, but said they were 'now in an archive in Britain.'

He agreed that the Egyptian Museum had once held the significant photograph of the steps Mr. Adamson had shown Howard Carter. It had been kept with dozens of Adamson photographs and there was no reason to disbelieve what Adamson had told me. Mr. Hawass, an Egyptologist for the last 25 years, was now seeking to have the Adamson archive returned once more to Cairo for an international symposium he was organizing to mark the 75th anniversary of the discovery of the tomb.

"All of us have known that the Egyptian workers found the steps. But we have always believed that they [the workers] went to Howard Carter and asked him to come and have a look at the steps. Mr. Carter had always believed Tutankhamen's tomb was somewhere there. It was just a matter of time needed to discover it."

From what he had been told of the Adamson Archive he believed that the photograph would prove what Adamson had claimed. Had the workers deliberately tried to conceal the discovery from Carter?

Richard Adamson, in less guarded moments, had told me he had been conveniently 'forgotten' by Howard Carter, even though he had spent years helping Carter collate and index the treasures in the tomb.

Each evening, he said, when the day's digging was over and Carter and his team had gone back across the Nile to Luxor, the 27 shillings-a-week corporal would get out his folding camp bed, his sheets and two blankets, and settle down for the night.

"There really wasn't a need to take the army bed down into the tomb," he smiled. "There were already 12 or 15 similar beds down below. They might have been 3,000 years old but they were in excellent condition. Their design was no more crude than the bed I was using."

Adamson would settle down in the eerie tomb, reading by a light from a generator and playing his gramophone. Accompanying the hum of the generator at ground level, the strains of "Aida" echoed through chambers dug almost 40 centuries before. "A single red lamp lit the burial chamber. It was kept on all night but shaded so I could sleep.

"I was never scared. I had a direct field telephone link with Carter and I could get through to him immediately in an emergency. But it was odd; I was a single British soldier guarding the most valuable and incredible treasure the world had ever seen.

"There was also a series of trip-alarms, bells and wires, which would have awakened the whole of Luxor if there had been an attempt by thieves. They probably believed the tomb was guarded by a whole regiment!"

Once an alarm bell did shrill loudly in the night. Adamson immediately awakened and grabbed his revolver. "Who is it?" he called out, his voice reverberating through the chamber.

"It was Carter, he couldn't sleep and had come over for a chat. Earlier that day he'd asked me if I wanted someone with me, because the mummy had just been opened. I think he came to see if I was alright."

Around the archaeologist and the soldier stood golden chariots, funerary furnishings, beds, chairs and household ornaments, their jewels burning in the light like flames. "One bed was hinged and folded like a camp cot; others were massive gilded affairs, decorated with animal gods to protect the sleeper. There were handsome chests and caskets made of oak and inlaid with gold, gemmed with fine stones and filled with the Pharaoh's clothing, his household linen and personal treasures. There were chairs with lion feet and with curved backs; folding stools with legs shaped like the necks and heads of geese.

"There were daggers with sheaths that were works of art, headrests and writing material. A small pair of linen gloves was found that could be worn today; each finger was outlined in tiny golden stitches."

Adamson remembered that Carter and his team had become so familiar with the objects and their owner that 3,000 years melted away and they found themselves speaking in the present.

'"Be careful with that bowl he's been using," he'd tell his workers. "Put it over there where he's got his chairs.'"

Mr. Adamson said he thought nothing of tucking into 3,000-year-old bread with Egyptian cheese for supper at night. "They'd had it restored in the testing laboratory and it tasted just like normal, unleavened bread."

One day he sneaked a taste of a reconstituted sediment found in a gold and alabaster drinking cup, discovering it was wine.

I asked Richard Adamson if it didn't seem ungrateful that he was never mentioned other than being referred to as 'a European in the party'?

"Oh no. I was a nobody there," he said. "The Egyptians were suspicious about me and I was worried they'd know who I was. There were still a few days left of the concession and Carter might well have found the steps himself. He was at the time very downhearted and very depressed. "I lay no claim to discovering the tomb. There were other people in the team who did far more than I did, and Carter did not allude to them in any way.

"Because the Egyptian team were the same diggers that had been used by other expeditions for this work, they knew this was something different. As they were going toward the exit of the tomb they were deliberately covering it all up. There were only two more days to go and Carter could never have gone back; but the Egyptians would have come back.

"I asked Mr. Carter, 'Do you think they knew what that stone was, Sir?' And he said, 'Yes. Those diggers are no fools. They knew what they'd found.'"

When he was 80, and having lost his legs to diabetes, Richard Adamson returned to Egypt -- wheelchair bound -- to revisit the tomb.

This article has been excerpted from the book, "The Queen, Rupert & Me," by Australian author and journalist Desmond Zwar.

Thanks Nick! Spectacular! I'm speechless.

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I find the titles to these kinds of articles amusing. Adamson no more "found" the tomb than Carter or even the diggers themselves. The tomb was found by the group after an exhaustive and methodical search of an area meticulously researched.

The diggers wouldn't have discovered the tomb unless Carter put them in the right area, Adamson wouldn't have "discovered" the tomb unless he accidentally spied them covering it up, Carter wouldn't have discovered the tomb unless Carnarvon financed him and Carnarvon wouldn't have discoverd the tomb without the approval of Egyptian authorities and the work of those who had come before them.

In fact, of all the characters involved, Adamson seems to have done the least.

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KV 62 (Tutankhamen), Theban Mapping Project
http://www.thebanmappingproject.com/sites/browse_tomb_876.html

Theban Mapping Project (Valley of the Kings etc)
Theban Mapping Project | 1980s to present | Kent Weeks et al
Posted on 01/13/2005 11:03:55 PM EST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1320504/posts

You are exactly right. It’s an interesting story though. And accounts differ. My aunt and uncle were there too and they have their story. My They were Americans. My uncle was reported to have taken the first photographs of the discovery because the official photographer had already left. We have negatives of these pictures. My uncle was a friend of Carters... An acquaintance really. But he was there and so was his wife my aunt who was the first American woman to enter the tomb. In any case, after Canarvan returned and the tomb was opened, only those with credentials were allowed to stay. So my uncle, not having any, wrote some 1000 words to a paper in the states and asked if they wanted more. They agreed and he had his credentials to stay. He was, according to his experience, the only American working for an American paper. The other reporters were mostly European. He also could read
Heiroglyphs so which was more than the average man could do. As the items came out of the tomb, he was able to advise the rest if the reporters what the items use was and what it said.

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