Howard Carter’s Portable Typewriter – Naturally, it’s a Royal

Howard Carter's Royal Model P portable typewriter on display at the Castle Carter house and museum outside Luxor in Egypt.

It will be 100 years this coming November 4 from the day Howard Carter's team literally stumbled across the intact tomb of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Tutankhamun in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Events associated with this centenary already offer clear evidence that Tutankhamun still holds enormous fascination for people of all ages, all around the world. In The New Yorker’s books section this week, Casey Cep has written about Christina Riggs’s work Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century, which came out on January 18. Cep starts out by saying, “Not long ago, in my sister’s elementary-school classroom, I met a second grader who seemed well on his way to a doctoral degree in Egyptology. After describing the mummification process in recondite detail - not only why the brain was removed through the nose but how exactly natron dried out the rest of the body - the child drew an elaborate cartouche with the hieroglyphs used to spell my name. He then proceeded to tell me more about the pharaoh Tutankhamun than most of the other students could tell me about their own grandfathers. It makes sense that a boy king would have an enduring hold over boys, but it is less clear why so many of the rest of us are still enthralled by Tutankhamun more than 3000 years after he ruled over the New Kingdom and 100 years after the excavation of his tomb … Tutankhamun represents an extremely narrow slice of Egyptian history; imagine if, in the year 4850, the world understood the United States largely through the Presidency of Millard Fillmore. Yet the anniversary of the excavation has occasioned everything from new histories and documentaries to travelling exhibitions and children’s books, each of which contains its own implicit argument about Tutankhamun’s appeal.”

Reading this, I could picture myself as the New Zealand approximate equivalent of an American second grader, in primary class four in 1957, when my constant stream of corrections led our teacher to ask me to take over her class talk on Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the Antarctic. Much easier, one might argue, for a child to be knowledgeable about someone who had only been dead 45 years than someone who had reigned between 1332 and 1323 BC. Still, there are statues one can stand before and touch and be inspired by, and then there are mummified corpses in tombs. I’m happy to say my interest in history, sparked by the tragedy of Scott, eventually led me to both. Like Scott, I was doomed to chase cold climates. Like Tutankhamun, I grew up in a place rich in nephrite and gold. But while such mineral wealth was beyond our reach, it still fostered an enthrallment with stories about people drawn to these valuables.

Eleanor Davis's illustration from the February 14-21, 2002, New Yorker.

I was in Egypt in late 1978 and spent time in both Luxor and Cairo, long before Thebes and Karnak became the tourist magnets they are now. Luxor was a shabby town in those days, and sadly Castle Carter, the museum dedicated to Carter in his former home on the hill of Elwat-el-Diban, was not open to the public. In fact, back then it was derelict. It had been left to rack and ruin for 36 years, since being abandoned by French Egyptologist Étienne Marie Felix Drioton, Director-General of Antiquities of Egypt at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and Alexandre Stoppelaëre, head of archaeological research at Luxor and in charge of the restoration of Theban necropolises.

I drove past Carter’s house on my way to the Valley of the Kings, but barely gave it a second glance. Carter had died of Hodgkin’s disease at his London flat almost 40 years earlier, leaving the house and the artefacts within it to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. When the MET’s expedition house in Egypt was closed in 1948, the pieces were sent to New York. By 1940, discussions about whether they should go to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo were left unresolved, but it was decided in November 2010 to return the more valuable items.

Egypt’s former Minister of Antiquities and director of the Cairo Museum, Zahi Hawass, came up with the plan to restore Carter’s house and after some years of work, under the direction of architect Hany El Miniawy, it was opened to the public on November 4, 2009, 87 years to the day after Carter’s discovery of the first step leading to Tutankhamun's tomb, and more than 70½ years after Carter had died. Egypt Today says, “The house is still in its original state and is home to maps, old books, writings by carter, as well as antique furniture and a replica of Tutankhamun's tomb.” The house, sometimes also called Carter House, stands on the west bank of Luxor, north of Assassif, at the crossroads of the road that leads to the Valley of the Kings.

One of the items now on display in Castle Carter is Carter’s portable typewriter. It is a Royal model P, introduced to the United States market in October 1926. However, the Royal factory at Hartford, Connecticut, which had just produced its one-millionth standard size typewriter, quickly fell behind with pre-Christmas orders for the portable, so it wasn’t until 1927 that these machines became more readily available in the US and overseas.

Carter, above, was born in Kensington, London, on May 9, 1874. At age 25 he was appointed inspector of monuments for Upper Egypt in the Egyptian Antiquities Service based at Luxor. He oversaw excavations and restorations at Thebes, while in the Valley of the Kings he supervised the systematic exploration of the valley by the American archaeologist Theodore Davis. In 1907 he began work for Herbert George Edward Stanhope Molyneux, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, who employed Carter to supervise the excavation of tombs in Deir el-Bahri, near Thebes. Carnarvon sponsored Carter’s work in Egypt for the next 16 years, until Carnarvon’s death on April 5, 1923. Carnarvon had gained the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings in 1914 and Carter led the work. Excavations were interrupted by the First World War, but Carter resumed his task towards the end of 1917.

                                       Carnarvon, reading on the verandah of Castle Carter.

After the clearance of Tutankhamun's tomb had been completed in 1932, Carter retired to his London flat at 49 Albert Court, next to the Royal Albert Hall.