An Afternoon with Margaret Beaumont

Margaret is an independent scholar.

Her talks will be on:

It Wasn’t Just Carter in KV62:

The team that made the clearance and conservation possible

The name of Howard Carter will forever be linked with the wonderful discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, but he did not work alone. From the waterboy who is said to have found the first entrance step which revealed the tomb’s location to the Government chemist who made it possible to remove the fragile contents and the experts loaned by the Metropolitan Museum, the clearance, conservation and publication of the tomb and its contents were very much more of a team effort than has been remembered. 

This talk will examine the work of the experts who took part in this great work, their individual contributions, triumphs and setbacks, which included the many difficulties of working with Egyptian politics and Carter himself.  

An American Businessman in the Valley of the Kings

Theodore Davis and the Golden Age of Egyptology

In 1887 a wealthy American lawyer who had profited from the liquidation of bankrupt banks during America’s ‘gilded age’ visited Egypt for the first time. Bitten by the Archaeology bug and with the instincts of a treasure hunter he would winter in Egypt for many years, obtaining the concession for excavating in the Valley of the Kings, his goal to discover a royal tomb. 

Employing professional archaeologists, whose views on proper excavation techniques he mainly ignored, and a large Egyptian workforce, he made several important discoveries, and published lavish, volumes recording his finds. A short tempered and dogmatic taskmaster, he missed finding the greatest prize of all, the tomb of Tutankhamun, by mere yards.

This talk will consider his discoveries and relationships with some of the best known figures in what has been called the Golden Age of Egyptology.