Professor Jin Shoufu’s Journey through Ancient Egypt · Essay Four This adaptation is published with the authorization of Professor Jin Shoufu. Original source: Jin Shoufu’s Ancient Egyptian Civilization. Contemporary editorial adaptation and English rendering by Clio Walker (史途), with AI assistance. This is neither a newly written eyewitness travelogue by Professor Jin nor a chapter-by-chapter reproduction of his book.

On 4 November 1922, a step appeared beneath the rubble in the Valley of the Kings. Howard Carter’s archaeological journal records the day tersely: while ancient workmen’s huts were being cleared, the excavators uncovered the top of a staircase descending into the rock. The steps led to a blocked doorway. Impressions bearing Tutankhamun’s name eventually emerged from its seals.

This was an excavation directed by Carter and financed by the fifth Earl of Carnarvon. It also depended on Egyptian workers and foremen, officials of the Antiquities Service, and specialists from several institutions. The news soon compressed that long chain of labour into a familiar sentence: a British archaeologist had discovered a pharaoh’s treasure. Who stood before the verb, and who receded into the background, formed part of the story from the beginning.

On 26 November, Carter looked through a hole in the doorway. The subsequently published excavation account turned candlelight, glinting objects, and Carnarvon’s question about whether Carter could see anything into one of archaeology’s best-known scenes. That recollection shaped public memory, but it was a retrospective narrative, not a verbatim recording made at the door. More important, the chamber held far more than a single dazzling view. Thousands of objects pressed against one another; wood, cloth, leather, and pigment could not survive hurried removal. Discovery was only the beginning of the work.

Carter understood that problem. He brought in photographer Harry Burton, conservator Alfred Lucas, archaeologist Arthur Mace, and other specialists. The Metropolitan Museum of Art lent members of its Theban expedition. Objects were numbered, photographed, strengthened, and moved one at a time. Researchers can still follow journals, object cards, and photographs in Oxford’s Tutankhamun Spatial Archive because the team did not treat the tomb merely as a chest of removable gold.

Scientific recording, however, did not automatically settle control. In January 1923, Carnarvon granted The Times the worldwide right to sell news and photographs from the excavation. The agreement brought income to expensive work, but it also required other newspapers—including Egyptian papers—to obtain the most coveted news from an English newspaper. Before the tomb had fully opened, a door controlling who could tell its story first had closed.

Egypt itself stood at a political turning point. In February 1922, Britain had unilaterally ended the protectorate and recognized Egypt as independent while reserving questions including defence, imperial communications, foreign interests, and Sudan. In January 1924, a government led by Saad Zaghlul took office. The king in the tomb had been dead for more than three millennia, but people outside it were contesting sovereignty in the present. For Egyptian readers, Tutankhamun was not an antiquity sealed off from contemporary life. Who issued excavation permits, admitted journalists, and kept excavated objects tested what independence actually meant.

The conflict accumulated during the second season. Carter wanted to retain the leading role in news and visitor arrangements; the Antiquities Service insisted on corresponding authority for government officials and the Egyptian press. The Oxford journals show discussions about releasing news simultaneously to The Times and Egyptian newspapers, followed by repeated disputes over visitor lists. The quarrel did not spring from a single discourtesy. It grew at the intersection of the newspaper contract, the excavation concession, the ownership of the contents, and the authority of a new government.

In February 1924, the confrontation finally broke over a visiting list. Members of the excavation team wanted their wives admitted on a day reserved for the press; the government refused. Carter and his colleagues treated this as the culmination of repeated interference. They stopped work, locked the tomb, and sent a protest notice to Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel. The Egyptian government maintained that a permit holder had no authority to close a national antiquities site on his own. An argument about visitors became a contest over who could give orders.

On 22 February, the Antiquities Service took possession of the tomb with police and soldiers and forced Carter’s locks. American diplomats soon reported the litigation between Carter and the Egyptian government to Washington. They also worried that the controversy would damage the ability of American museums to excavate and receive a share of finds. Their cables make the wider stakes unusually plain: the issue concerned not only Carter’s standing but whether foreign museums could continue carrying Egyptian objects into their own galleries.

Under the partage system then in use, the Antiquities Service decided at the end of a season which objects remained in Egypt and which could be assigned to the excavator. Carter’s side argued that ancient intruders had entered the tomb, so it was not wholly undisturbed and the excavators should receive at least duplicate objects. The Egyptian government maintained that the royal burial still counted as an intact discovery in law and that all its contents must remain in Egypt. Classifying a tomb as “intact” could therefore decide the destination of thousands of objects.

The crisis did not end with one side leaving forever. After negotiations, Carnarvon’s estate relinquished its claims to the objects, and Carter was allowed to continue clearing the tomb. Work resumed on 25 January 1925. The principle that the collection would remain in Egypt did not prevent documentation from continuing. Conversely, the systematic archive produced by Carter’s team did not grant any foreign institution title to the finds. Scholarly cooperation and cultural sovereignty did not have to be mutually exclusive.

Placed beside what Jin Shoufu calls the “two dimensions of Orientalism,” the dispute becomes clearer. The first dimension separates pharaonic Egypt from the Egypt that followed. Ancient Egypt is praised as magnificent and mysterious, while modern Egyptians are cast as people who merely happen to live beside its ruins—as though their political rights had nothing to do with the monuments. Foreign excavators can then appear as “discoverers,” while a local government’s demands about news, permits, and finds can be described chiefly as obstacles to scholarship.

The second dimension ranks interpreters. European scholars possessed language training, archaeological methods, and powerful publishing institutions, so their accounts acquired authority. The labour of Egyptian excavators, questions from Egyptian reporters, and choices made by Egyptian officials often shrank into footnotes. Tutankhamun’s tomb magnified the hierarchy. The Times agreement did more than sell news: it made the power to interpret overlap with the power to speak first.

Yet rewriting the story as a simple struggle between Egypt and “the West” would produce another distortion. Carter’s recording methods preserved irreplaceable evidence. British, American, Egyptian, and other specialists contributed skilled labour to fragile objects. Egypt’s Antiquities Service itself had long been cosmopolitan, and officials did not always agree among themselves. Carter’s team clashed with the government while continuing to rely on government staff, Egyptian technicians, and local workers. Historical alignments moved. Professional contributions and unequal structures could exist at the same time.

Modern Egypt’s relationship with ancient Egypt is not an unbroken line either. The Egyptian language changed over a very long history, and Coptic is its latest stage; Arabic later became the everyday language of most Egyptians. Egyptian and Arabic belong to the Afroasiatic family, but they are not the same language. Religion, institutions, and writing traditions underwent real transformations. Acknowledging rupture does not declare that people living in Egypt have no relationship to the earlier history of their land.

Continuity also consists of more than etymology or ancestry. Cities and villages did not empty when pharaonic dynasties ended. The Nile’s agricultural environment, the reuse of ancient places, and local memories continued to change. Christian, Muslim, and other Egyptians can understand the pharaonic past in different ways. They need not first become adherents of ancient religion before they may ask that objects remain in Egypt, participate in research, or correct someone else’s image of their country.

Tutankhamun became one of the world’s most familiar signs of ancient Egypt. The golden mask travelled through exhibitions, advertisements, and textbooks, while Carter’s glimpse through the doorway was told again and again. Less often told is how a discovery in a newly independent country became an argument about press access, law, and ownership; why Egyptian newspapers objected to buying news about Luxor from London; or why foreign museums watched a seemingly minor work stoppage so closely.

Those questions do not dim the objects in the tomb. They allow light to fall on the people outside its door. Tutankhamun’s burial equipment embodied an ancient arrangement of royal power. People in the 1920s built another order around the same objects. What we now call “the discovery” is the story formed when those two arrangements collided.

There was therefore a second door to open. The first led into a tomb and was opened by archaeological work. The second leads toward the making of authority, the assignment of ownership, and the ways people recognize the past of the place where they live. It has no single key. Opening it requires us to see Carter’s technical achievement, Egyptian labour, the government’s legal claims, journalists’ right to information, and the institutional boundaries of a discipline formed in an imperial age.

Sources and editorial note Original basis: Jin Shoufu, Ancient Egyptian Civilization, Lecture 1, section 1.4, “Two Dimensions of Orientalism,” read with sections 1.1–1.3. The corresponding portion of the user-supplied, authorized manuscript was consulted directly; the reference is by section, without invented page numbers. This essay recasts Jin’s two hierarchies—pharaonic versus modern Egypt, and Western interpreter versus interpreted East—through the documented dispute over Tutankhamun’s tomb from 1922 to 1925. Published with Professor Jin Shoufu’s authorization. Clio Walker (史途) prepared the contemporary adaptation with AI assistance; this does not imply Professor Jin’s review of each added source or interpretation.

Primary and institutional sources: Griffith Institute, University of Oxford, Tutankhamun Spatial Archive, records for the first, second, and third seasons, https://tutankhamun.griffith.ox.ac.uk/seasons/1st-season-1922-1923 , https://tutankhamun.griffith.ox.ac.uk/seasons/2nd-season-1923-1924 , and https://tutankhamun.griffith.ox.ac.uk/seasons/3rd-season-1925 ; U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1924, correspondence on foreign archaeological interests and the Carter controversy, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1924v01/comp14 ; UK Parliament, statement on Egypt, 28 February 1922, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1922-02-28/debates/031cf09f-7db3-44a3-99f4-c3b5a692279e/STATEMENTBYTHEPRIMEMINISTER ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Egyptian Expedition, 1906–1936,” https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-egyptian-expedition-1906-1936 .

Research checks: Salima Ikram and Amr Omar, “Egypt,” in A History of World Egyptology (2021), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107477360.004 , used to check the varied national, ethnic, institutional, and political actors who shaped Egyptology in Egypt; University of Chicago, Ancient Egyptian Language Program, https://mes.uchicago.edu/languages/ancient-egyptian-language-program , on Coptic as the final stage of Egyptian; James P. Allen, Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction, chapter 1 open extract, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611865.002 , used to limit the linguistic claim to Egyptian and Arabic being distinct members of the Afroasiatic family.

Evidence and reconstruction boundaries: Carter’s famous exchange at the breached doorway comes from the excavation account he and Mace prepared afterward and is treated here as retrospective narration, not a live transcript. Carter’s journal supports the discovery of the stair; no name, dialogue, or action is invented for a worker whom that entry does not identify. The 1924 rupture involved news distribution, visitor access, the excavation concession, and ownership; the refusal to admit team members’ wives is not presented as its sole cause. Positions on partage and the tomb’s legal status are attributed to the parties at the time rather than judged by later ownership norms. Map data uses only a Valley of the Kings regional point and a Cairo city reference point, linked respectively to excavation events and central-government or diplomatic action. The place of the London news contract and later publication locations are not treated as story-event locations.