From The Writer's Almanac

Because if today's an unpleasant day, you can always find neat in the annals of history.

Poor Emerson. He was so disappointed. Peabody had a time of it keeping his spirits up. (Ahem.)

It was on this day in 1922 that a British man named Howard Carter made one of the greatest archeological discoveries of all time by discovering the tomb of King Tutankhamen. It was the first fully intact pharaoh's tomb ever found by an archaeologist.

King Tut's tomb was located in the Valley of the Kings. Egyptians had hoped that by hiding the tombs in among the rocky hills of the valley, they would prevent robbers from stealing the valuable contents of the burial chambers. The robbers were persistent, though, and by the time Howard Carter first joined the archaeological survey of Egypt, as a seventeen year old in 1893, most of the tombs had been emptied of anything of value.

Carter was an amateur artist, and he got a job copying ancient Egyptian paintings and inscriptions so that they could be studied by scholars around the world. He worked his way up to supervising excavations. Most archaeologists at the time believed that there wasn't much left to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings, but Carter had found references to a little known pharaoh whose tomb had never been found. He got the wealthy investor Lord Carnarvon to fund a series of exploratory excavations, but he turned up almost nothing. Carnarvon finally told him that he couldn't spend any more money on the search, but Carter persuaded him to fund one more excavation.

The dig began on the first of November. Three days later, on this day in 1922, one of the site workers needed to set down his water jar, so he kicked some rocks off a flat spot on the ground and noticed that it looked like part of a staircase. By the end of the day, Carter had uncovered a series of steps that led to a sealed door. Carter sent a telegram to Lord Carnarvon, and a few weeks later they entered the tomb together.

A long corridor led to wall of stones that blocked the entrance to the antechamber. Carter carefully removed enough stones to make a hole in the door, and then extended his candle through the hole. Carnarvon asked if he could see anything, and Carter replied, "Yes...Wonderful things!"

Carter later said, "At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold...everywhere the glint of gold."

Egyptians believed that they should be buried with all the objects they would need in the afterlife, and Carter found more than five thousand such objects in the tomb, including boomerangs, shields, eye makeup, and 116 baskets of food. It took him ten years to extract and catalogue everything.

It turned out to be the tomb of a pharaoh who had come to the throne as a young boy and died when he was only a teenager. The tomb probably wasn't ever found by robbers because it was a smaller than average chamber. And Carter was surprised to find how hastily the tomb had been decorated. The objects were all jumbled together, and the wall paintings were sloppy, with splashes of paint in the corners that no one had cleaned up.

Many people have speculated that King Tut's hasty burial is evidence that he was murdered. In 1968, a researcher from Liverpool X-rayed the mummy and discovered that there was evidence King Tut had died from a blow to the head.

There has long been speculation about King Tut's curse. Lord Carnarvon died of an unknown illness a few months after exploring King Tut's tomb. That same day, the electricity went out in the city of Cairo, and back in England, Carnarvon's dog, Susie, suddenly howled and died. Some scientists believe that Carnarvon might have inhaled an ancient fungus or microbe that overwhelmed his immune system. As for the electricity, it was pretty unreliable in Cairo at the time. Nobody has any theories about the dog.