Be Careful!

Before the entrance between the two statues in the Antechamber could be opened, the items in the Antechamber needed to be removed or risk damage to them from flying debris, dust, and movement. Documentation and preservation of each item was a monumental task. Carter realized that this project was larger than he could handle alone, thus he asked for, and received, help from a large number of specialists.

To begin the clearing process, each item was photographed in situ, both with an assigned number and without. Then, a sketch and description of each item was made on correspondingly number record cards. Next, the item was noted on a ground plan of the tomb (only for the Antechamber).

Carter and his team had to be extremely careful when attempting to remove any of the objects. Since many of the items were in extremely delicate states (such as beaded sandals in which the threading had disintegrated, leaving only beads held together by 3,000 years of habit), many items needed immediate treatment, such as a celluloid spray, to keep the items intact for removal. Moving the items also proved a challenge.

Clearing the objects from the Antechamber was like playing a gigantic game of spillikins. So crowded were they that it was a matter of extreme difficulty to move one without running serious risk of damaging others, and in some cases they were so inextricably tangled that an elaborate system of props and supports had to be devised to hold one object or group of objects in place while another was being removed. At such times life was a nightmare.⁸

When an item was successfully removed, it was placed upon a stretcher and gauze and other bandages were wrapped around the item to protect it for removal. Once a number of stretchers were filled, a team of people would carefully pick them up and move them out of the tomb.

As soon as they exited the tomb with the stretchers, they were greeted by hundreds of tourists and reporters who waited for them at the top. Since word had spread quickly around the world about the tomb, the popularity of the site was excessive. Every time someone came out of the tomb, cameras would go off. Owing to remembered images of the recent war, more than one witness thought the items brought bandaged and upon stretchers from the tomb looked like the wounded from World War I.⁹ The image must have been especially acute when the life-size statues were removed upon stretchers.

The trail of stretchers were taken to the conservation laboratory, located at some distance away in the tomb of Seti II. Carter had appropriated this tomb to serve as a conservation laboratory, photographic studio, carpenter's shop (to make the boxes needed to ship the objects), and a storeroom. Carter allotted tomb No. 55 as a darkroom.

The items, after conservation and documentation, were very carefully packed into crates and sent by rail to Cairo.

It took Carter and his team seven weeks to clear the Antechamber. On February 17, 1923, they began dismantling the sealed door between the statues.

Burial Chamber

. . . when, after about ten minutes' work, I had made a hole large enough to enable me to do so, I inserted an electric torch. An astonishing sight its light revealed, for there, within a yard of the doorway, stretching as far as one could see and blocking the entrance to the chamber, stood what to all appearances was a solid wall of gold. . . . It was, beyond any question, the sepulchral chamber in which we stood, for there, towering above us, was one of the great gilt shrines beneath which kings were laid. So enormous was this structure . . . that it filled within a little the entire area of the chamber, a space of some two feet only separating it from the walls on all four sides, while its roof, with cornice top and torus moulding, reached almost to the ceiling. . . . ¹⁰

The inside of the Burial Chamber was almost completely filled with a large shrine over 16 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 9 feet tall. The walls of the shrine were made of gilded wood inlaid with a brilliant blue porcelain.

Unlike the rest of the tomb whose walls had been left as rough-cut rock (unsmoothed and unplastered), the walls of the Burial Chamber (excluding the ceiling) were covered with a gypsum plaster and painted yellow. Upon the yellow walls were painted funerary scenes.

On the ground around the shrine were a number of items, including portions of two broken necklaces that looked as if they had been dropped by robbers and magic oars "to ferry the king's barque [boat] across the waters of the Nether World."¹¹

To take apart and examine the shrine, Carter had to first demolish the partition wall between the Antechamber and the Burial Chamber. Still, there was not much room between the three remaining walls and the shrine.