By noon on November 27,
1922, the sealed door at the end of the
entrance passage had been recorded and then
demolished.
Carnarvon's party entered,
having to step over the white lotus chalice
which stood on the threshold. The initial
inspection resolved
Carter's doubts about
the exact nature of the discovery: this room
was most certainly the antechamber to a
royal tomb. Moreover, the haphazard
placement of it's furnishings indicated that
the antechamber had been ransacked by
robbers and hastily rearranged by guards.
Carter assigned each
object a number for maintaining records and
comments; in Burton's photographs, these
inventory numbers appear on small cards.
Measuring twenty-six by
twelve feet, the antechamber was the biggest
room in the tomb. It held a bewildering
array of both secular and religious objects.
Three large, animal-shaped couches lined it's
western wall. Stacked over and under them
were several royal thrones as well as
ordinary wicker stools.
Alabaster vases for
precious unguents stood beside common oval
containers of cooked duck. Plain chests for
bows and arrows alternated with ornate
coffers for jewelry and scepters.
Pieces of four
chariots
were piled up in the southeast corner. The
burial party had dismantled these chariots
to get them down the narrow entrance
passage. Behind the couch in the southwest
corner was a plunderer's hole into another
small room.
Carter decided to delay clearing
that room, which he called the annex, until
the rest of the tomb was emptied.
The real fascination lay
with the north wall of the antechamber.
There, two life-size statues of the king
stood facing each other, guarding a sealed
doorway. As
Carter said, "Visions of chamber
after chamber, each crowded with objects
like the one we had seen, passed through our
minds and left us gasping for breath". The
contents of the antechamber were incredibly
jumbled. After the ancient robberies,
necropolis officials had quickly attempted
to restore a semblance of order, stuffing
items into the nearest containers at hand.
Indeed, the officials' carelessness caused
almost as much damage as the robbers'
vandalism.
Time had taken it's toll.
Carter described the leather harness of the
chariots as having turned to glue, dripping
over their wheels, axles and frames. Cloth
had become sheets of dust, and beads had
fallen in meaningless heaps after their
threading string rotted.
The smaller objects were
removed first, making space for the
dismantling of the large couches and the
untangling of the dismembered chariots. It
took seven weeks just to record and clear
the objects. Years of treatment and study in
the field laboratory would be required
before many of the pieces could leave the
Valley of the Kings. |