At the start of November 1922, Howard Carter was a middle-aged failure, forced from his government job, and eking out a living as a “gentleman-dealer” in antiquities and Egyptologist-for-hire. By the end of the month he was an emergent media superstar.

The change was wrought by his sudden discovery, after years of fruitless searching and with his funds close to running out, of the tomb of Tutankhamun. The obscure young Pharaoh was catapulted on to the front pages and cinema screens of the world, and the 48-year-old Carter went with him.

It was an unlikely course of events, but then Carter’s whole life had been an unpredictable one. He grew up at Swaffham, Norfolk, and because of physical frailty was never sent to school. “Nature thrusts some of us into the world miserably incomplete,” he once remarked, and his notoriously bristly and stubborn manner may have been the unfortunate result.

His father, an artist for the Illustrated London News, taught Carter to draw well, however, and when he was 17 his skill in depicting nature was noticed by the Amhersts of nearby Didlington Hall, and earned him a trip to Egypt to trace tomb paintings. During the visit Carter spent four months excavating at El-Amarna under the tough but talented Flinders Petrie.

Enthusiasm undimmed by the notorious hardships of Petrie’s dig, Carter came back to work with the Egypt Exploration Society, recording the magnificent sculptures of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple on Luxor’s West Bank. When he was 26 Carter had a stroke of luck: Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, made him chief inspector of antiquities in Upper Egypt. Working with the eccentric American Theodore Davis, Carter found his first royal tomb – the looted sepulchre of Tuthmosis IV.

Promoted again and brought back to Cairo, in 1904, disaster struck Carter. A party of drunken French tourists assaulted the guards at Saqqara. Carter ejected them, the French complained. Told to offer a diplomatic apology, he refused, then resigned.

Carter lived in genteel penury as a guide to rich tourists, dealing in minor antiquities, and selling his water-colours of modern and ancient Egyptian scenes. Maspero helped to find him a post with the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who had been digging in a desultory way around Luxor while in Egypt for his health after a disastrous car crash.

Carter found Carnarvon several important private tombs in the Theban necropolis before the First World War intervened. Carnarvon was stuck in England and Carter was employed in intelligence in Cairo.

In 1917 the two men were finally able to begin their annual campaigns in the Valley of the Kings, where Carter – almost alone – was convinced that there were tombs remaining to be found. Carter removed thousands of tons of rubble, even building a light railway for the purpose, but finds were few and Carnarvon, bored, decided in the summer of 1922 to give up his concession. Carter was summoned to Highclere Castle.

Guessing what was coming, he offered to pay for one last effort himself. Carnarvon, a sporting man, agreed to fund one last season. He stayed in England, however, until Carter’s telegram on Guy Fawkes Day: “At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley: a magnificent tomb with seals intact; recovered same for your arrival. Congratulations”. Tutankhamun’s tomb was a secret no more.

Valley of the Kings still hides its secrets

“I fear that the Valley of the Tombs is now exhausted,” Theodore Davis said in 1912. A prosperous retired lawyer from Rhode Island, he had carried out a decade of excavations, employing Howard Carter among others as his field directors, and found several royal tombs – all looted – including the almost intact tombs of Yuya and Tjuyu, great-grandparents of Tutankhamun. But few who visit the open tombs around that of Tutankhamun realise that important finds are still being made within yards of their questing feet.

The tomb known as KV5 has been known since 1825, when the adventurer James Burton tunnelled in through the rubble that filled it: he found an unusual plan with at least seven rooms, but no decoration or finds, and KV5 was duly ignored. Then Professor Kent Weeks took another look, as part of a programme of mapping the entire valley, and found a name carved on the wall that suddenly made KV5 very interesting indeed.

The hieroglyphs spelt out the name and titles of Amenherkhepeshef, the firstborn son of Rameses II, who is reputed to have been the pharaoh whose unwillingness to let the Israelites leave brought down plagues on Egypt. A blocked doorway at the end of the first pillared hall revealed a passage lined with doorways that led to still more corridors and rooms: KV5 became the largest tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings. Weeks has continued to explore, and the current total is 128 rooms on several different levels.

“We now know that Rameses II buried at least six and perhaps as many as 22 of his numerous sons in this unique family mausoleum,” he says. Because Rameses lived to be nearly 90, he made several of them his co-rulers. They needed a grander burial place than most royal children received.

Another old find that has revealed new information is KV60, where two female mummies were found during Davis’s work in 1906. They had been reburied from elsewhere and had few grave goods, and remained unremarked until a few years ago.

Now it has been suggested that the women were in fact the notorious Queen Hatshepsut and her wet-nurse. Dr Zahi Hawass, who heads Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, says that DNA evidence shows that this was the long-lost burial of the Pharaoh Queen.

Hawass has also been involved in another exciting recent discovery, that of the first unlooted tomb to be found in the Valley of the Kings for decades. As part of the management programme to conserve the valley in the face of increasing tourism, he asked Otto Schaden, of the University of Memphis, to clear rubble from around KV10, a tomb a few yards south of Tutankhamun's tomb.

Last year Schaden found what Davis and Carter had missed: the filled-in shaft of a tomb now named KV63 (Tutankhamun’s, the previous new find, is KV62). Inside were seven coffins, some badly damaged by termites, and 28 large pottery jars.

Five of the coffins were for adults, two for children, but none had a mummy inside. Instead, they and the jars contained assorted materials and objects used in embalming and funerary rituals, including cloth collars decorated with flowers, a minature coffinette of gilded wood, and six down pillows decorated with hieroglyphs with mottos such as “life, health, stability”.

The objects are close in date to Tutankhamun's reign, but from whose funeral they are left over is not yet known. The tomb itself may have been cut, Hawass believes, for Kiya, a secondary wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten who may have been Tutankhamun's mother. “She disappears from this historical record at around the time he was born, and might even have died in childbirth,” he says.

The most recent find still lies deep underground: Dr Nicholas Reeves, of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project, reported last year the discovery, using ground-penetrating radar, of a buried chamber provisionally designated KV64. It, too, lies only yards from Tutankhamun's tomb and is, Reeves says “a feature that hasn’t seen the light of day for several millennia”. As Hawass says: “The Valley of the Kings still hides important secrets.”

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