Home sweet home

By Nevine El-Aref

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YESTERDAY was 4 November, the day on which, in 1922, Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. What more appropriate date could there be, asks Nevine El-Aref, for the English archaeologist's mudbrick house, from which he directed his excavations, to open as a museum?

Hundreds of journalists, foreign and Egyptian archaeologists, university professors and senior government officials gathered on Luxor' s west bank for the inauguration of the modest 20th rest house that was once Carter's residence.

The building now houses a display of the tools Carter used alongside some of the objects he discovered in the Valley of the Kings. Black and white photographs show Carter busy at work, removing Tutankhamun's funerary collection from the tomb and welcoming British, Egyptian and foreign dignitaries during the celebrations that marked its opening.

Pieces of English furniture illustrating a typical interior of the time are also on show. A visitors' centre attached to the house provides visitors with information about Carter, whose career as an Egyptologist began at Beni Hassan. By the age of 25 he had become the inspector-general of monuments in Upper Egypt, and in a series of excavations financed by the fifth Lord Carnarvon, succeeded in finding five tombs before hitting the jackpot, unearthing the treasures of a hitherto, virtually unknown minor Pharaoh, Tutankhamun.

Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), said the project, which cost LE1.1 million, had been competed in just four months in collaboration with a French team.