Of the over 5,000 artifacts found in his tomb, Tutankhamun’s funerary mask and iron meteorite dagge r are two of the most famous and most mysterious.Ĭarter and his team spent the next 10 years cataloguing and photographing the contents of the tomb (both at the burial site and at a studio) before turning the artifacts over to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, as Egyptian laws expected at the time. Though the pharaoh and his tomb fascinate the world today, Tutankhamun was willfully forgotten in antiquity thanks to his successors, who erased him from official histories.

Thus began the daunting task of excavating and recording the over 5,000 objects held inside. When they opened the tomb, they uncovered thousands of “ wonderful things ,” as the British archaeologist described at the moment of the breakthrough. Within 20 days, they had already cleared the totality of the stairway of its dust and sand. 4, 1922, Howard Carter and his team found the steps to the tomb of the ancient pharaoh Tutankhamun.

Gold mask of egyptian mummy tuc