THE EARL AND THE PHARAOH

A fawning biography of the British aristocrat who, with Howard Carter, unearthed King Tutankhamun’s tomb.

The author is the wife of the eighth Earl of Carnarvon as well as the caretaker of the vast family castle, Highclere, now famous as the locus of the TV show Downton Abbey. The fifth Earl of Carnarvon, George Herbert (1866-1923), was the most notorious of the bunch, as the financial backer of Carter’s King Tut excavation in 1922 and a dilettantish archaeologist who perished shortly after the momentous discovery from blood poisoning. The countess delineates with painstaking detail the privileged fabric of the scion’s life. He was known as Porchey as a child, the only son of a well-regarded Tory statesman. Porchey was sickly growing up and stricken by the early death of his mother in 1875, when he was 8. He was raised to love hunting and horse racing, and he was more interested in socializing and gambling than academics while a student at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1895, he married Almina Wombwell, the illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild, and he spent untold amounts of money on racehorses and cutting-edge automobiles before discovering his love of Egyptology. He and Almina spent much of each winter season in Egypt, and in 1908, he employed Carter as his “learned man” to extend excavation work into the Valley of Deir el-Bahri. With the war intervening and political upheaval in Egypt, the two got back to the Valley of the Kings by 1920. Due to his health, however, the earl could not savor the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, but his widow persevered with Carter, ensuring his tireless work would not be in vain. The narrative may interest amateur Egyptologists, but the text is another addition to a long line of the author’s celebrations of her wealthy, influential descendants—e.g., The Women of the Real Downton Abbey, At Home at Highclere, etc.

Written by a family member, the book lacks objectivity and suffers from an excess of detail about family lineage.