ARCE Public Lecture: The Road to Tutankhamun: Records of Exploration and Excavation in 19th and early 20th Century Personal Archives

Lecture Information: 

In 1912, American lawyer-turned-archaeologist Theodore M. Davis famously said “I fear that the Valley of the Tombs is now exhausted”, but the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 was to prove him quite wrong. Davis had an impressive record of excavation, working with several Egyptologists and archaeologists, including Howard Carter, in the years before Carter’s partnership with Lord Carnarvon. This talk will discuss excavation in the Valley of the Kings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using personal archives such as diaries and letters to build a picture of archaeological life in Egypt. The archivists include Emma B. Andrews, Theodore Davis, Helen Winlock, Joseph Lindon Smith, and Howard Carter himself. 

About Sarah Ketchley: 

Dr. Ketchley is an Egyptologist with a specialty in art history in the first millennium BCE. Based at the University of Washington in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, she teaches introductory and graduate-level classes in digital humanities and directs a long running undergraduate internship program. Inspired by intrepid women travelers of the 19th century, Sarah works with students to digitize and publish a range of primary source material from the period, including the Nile travel diaries of Mrs. Emma B. Andrews. Working computationally to analyze the content of Emma’s writings, Sarah and her students have created an extensive digital biographical database, interactive maps, and an archive of encoded primary source material from the “Golden Age” of Egyptian archaeology.