| Honorific Prefix: | The Right Honourable |
| The Earl of Carnarvon | |
| Birth Name: | George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert |
| Birth Date: | 26 June 1866 |
| Birth Place: | 66 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, London, England |
| Death Place: | Cairo, Kingdom of Egypt |
| Resting Place: | Beacon Hill, Burghclere, Hampshire |
| 5th Earl of Carnarvon | |
| Tenure: | 29 June 1890 – 5 April 1923 |
| Other Titles: | Lord Porchester (until 1890) |
| Residence: | Highclere Castle |
| Nationality: | British |
| Known For: | Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb |
| Predecessor: | Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon |
| Successor: | Henry Herbert, 6th Earl of Carnarvon |
George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, (26 June 1866 - 5 April 1923), styled Lord Porchester until 1890, was an English peer and aristocrat best known as the financial backer of the search for and excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
Styled Lord Porchester from birth, he was born at 66 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, London, the only son of Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon, a distinguished Tory statesman, by his first wife Lady Evelyn Stanhope, daughter of Anne and George Stanhope, 6th Earl of Chesterfield. Aubrey Herbert was his half-brother. He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He inherited the Bretby Hall estate in Derbyshire from his maternal grandmother, Anne Elizabeth, Dowager Countess of Chesterfield in 1885, and succeeded his father in the earldom in 1890.[1]
He was High Steward of Newbury.[2]
Lord Carnarvon married Almina Victoria Maria Alexandra Wombwell,[3] alleged to be the illegitimate daughter of millionaire banker Alfred de Rothschild,[4] of the Rothschild family, at St Margaret's Church, Westminster, on 26 June 1895. Rothschild provided a marriage settlement of £500,000 (equivalent to £ in), and paid off all Lord Carnarvon's existing debts.[5] The Carnarvons had two children:[6]
Exceedingly wealthy due to his marriage settlement,[5] Carnarvon was at first best known as an owner of racehorses, and in 1902 he established Highclere Stud to breed thoroughbred racehorses.[8] He joined the Jockey Club and in 1905 was appointed one of the stewards at the new Newbury Racecourse and acted as a steward at other racecourses.[9] His family has maintained the connection ever since. His grandson, the 7th Earl, was racing manager to Queen Elizabeth II from 1969 until his death in 2001.[10]
Lord Carnarvon was a keen motor-car driver. In 1903 he suffered a serious motoring accident near Bad Schwalbach in Germany, after which he never fully recovered his health.[11] After a lengthy convalescence his doctors advised that he winter out of England and from then on he and Lady Carnarvon often spent their winters in Egypt.[12] Here he became an enthusiastic amateur Egyptologist and also bought Egyptian antiquities for their collection in England.[13] In 1907 Lord Carnarvon undertook to sponsor the excavation of nobles' tombs in Deir el-Bahri, near Thebes. He employed Howard Carter to undertake the work[12] on the recommendation of Gaston Maspero, director of the Egyptian Antiquities Department.[14] In 1912 Carnarvon published Five Years' Exploration at Thebes, cowritten with Carter, describing their excavations.[15]
In 1914 Lord Carnarvon received the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings, replacing Theodore Davis, who had resigned. Carter again led the work, undertaking a systematic search of the Valley for any tombs missed by previous expeditions, in particular that of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Excavations were interrupted during the First World War but resumed in late 1917.[13] By 1922 little of significance had been found and Lord Carnarvon decided this would be the final year he would fund the work.[16] However on 4 November 1922 Carter was able to send a telegram to Lord Carnarvon in England, saying: "At last we have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival; congratulations."[13]
Lord Carnarvon, accompanied by his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, returned to Egypt, arriving at Luxor on 23 November 1922.[17] Both were present the next day when the full extent of the stairway to the tomb was cleared and a seal containing Tutankhamun's cartouche found on the outer doorway. This door was removed and the rubble-filled corridor behind cleared, revealing the door of the tomb itself. Carnarvon was also present when on 26 November Carter made a tiny breach in the top left-hand corner of this doorway, enabling him to peer in by the light of a candle. When Carnarvon asked, "Can you see anything?" Carter replied "Yes, wonderful things!" The tomb was then secured, to be entered in the presence of an official of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities the next day.[18] However that night Carter, his assistant Arthur Callender, Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn apparently made an unauthorised visit, becoming the first people in modern times to enter the tomb.[19] [20] [21] Some sources suggest that the group also entered the inner burial chamber.[22] In this account a small hole was found in the chamber's sealed doorway and Carter, Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn crawled through.[21]
The next morning, 27 November, saw an inspection of the tomb in the presence of an Egyptian official. Callender rigged up electric lighting, illuminating a vast haul of items, including gilded couches, chests, thrones and shrines. They also saw evidence of two further chambers, including the sealed doorway to the inner burial chamber, guarded by two life-size statues of Tutankhamun.[23] [24] In spite of evidence of break-ins in ancient times, the tomb was virtually intact and would ultimately be found to contain more than 5,000 items.
On 29 November the tomb was officially opened in the presence of a number of invited dignitaries and Egyptian officials.
Lord Carnarvon travelled to England in December 1922, returning in January 1923 to be present at the official opening of the inner burial chamber on 16 February.[25] Before the opening Carnarvon had sold the exclusive newspaper rights to report the excavation to The Times. Whilst this helped finance the work it created resentment both from other newspapers and from the Egyptian authorities, whose own press was also excluded.
Towards the end of February a rift with Carter, probably caused by a disagreement on how to manage the supervising Egyptian authorities, temporarily closed excavation. Work recommenced in early March after Carnarvon had apologised.[26] This was to be Lord Carnarvon's last significant involvement in the excavation project since he fell seriously ill shortly afterwards.
On 19 March 1923 Carnarvon suffered a severe mosquito bite, which became infected after a razor cut. On the 5th of April he died in the Continental-Savoy Hotel in Cairo from, according to contemporary reports, blood poisoning progressing to pneumonia.[27] On 14 April Lady Almina Carnarvon moved Lord Carnarvon's remains to England.[28] His tomb appropriately reflects his archaeological interest, being situated within an ancient hill fort on Beacon Hill overlooking his Highclere family seat.[29]
After Lord Carnarvon's death Carter continued the excavation. However the Egyptian government took ownership of the contents of the tomb and in April 1930 provided a grant of £35,000 to his heirs (equivalent to £ in).[30]
Encouraged by newspaper speculation,[26] [31] the ‘Curse of Tutankhamun’, or the ‘Mummy's Curse’ entered into popular culture and was fuelled further by the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's suggestion that Carnarvon's death had been caused by ‘elementals’ created by Tutankhamun's priests to guard the royal tomb.[32] On 3rd April 1923, just six weeks after Howard Carter had unsealed the burial chamber in the tomb of Tutankhamun, Conan Doyle arrived in New York to begin a four-month lecture tour on Spiritualism.[33] Two days later he was asked by a reporter whether he connected the breaking news of Carnarvon’s death with the curse of the pharaohs. Conan Doyle responded to this question by drawing parallels between the death of Carnarvon and his late friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson,[34] and his comments were reported in an article, which appeared in the Daily Express newspaper on 7th April 1923, as follows: [35] [36]
In 1998 it was argued in the Canadian Medical Association Journal that Conan Doyle may well have been right, owing to research (published in Proceedings of the Royal Society) by Sylvain Gandon,[37] then of the Laboratoire d’Écologie in Paris, on the longevity and potency of toxic spores, as well as comments by archaeologist Nicholas Reeves on "reports of a black fungus inside the tomb".[38] Howard Carter dismissed such speculation as 'tommy-rot', commenting that "the sentiment of the Egyptologist [...] is not one of fear, but of respect and awe [...] entirely opposed to foolish superstitions".[39] Carter also asked a scientist he knew to test for possible pathogens on one of Tutankhamun's bandages, and the test reportedly found nothing. But modern testing of Egyptian mummies has found the presence of the toxic fungus Aspergillus flavus, whose spores also reportedly killed scientists after the opening of a 15th century royal tomb in Poland in 1973, and Carnarvon (and other alleged victims such as George Jay Gould and Arthur Mace) showed symptoms that were at least arguably consistent with poisoning by its spores.
Some of the stories were clearly fabricated, including that a curse had been found inscribed on the wall of the tomb,[26] [40] while a study showed that those involved in the tomb's discovery and clearance did not have a lower than average life expectancy.[41] In 2003 a study of documents and scholarly sources led The Lancet to conclude as unlikely that Carnarvon's death had anything to do with Tutankhamun's tomb, refuting another theory that exposure to toxic spores,[38] such as those of the toxic fungus (mycotoxin) Aspergillus flavus, had contributed to his demise. Although he was one of those to enter the tomb on several occasions, none of the other 25 from Europe was affected in the months after their entries. The cause of Carnarvon's death was reported as ‘pneumonia supervening on [facial] erysipelas' (a streptococcal infection of the skin and underlying soft tissue). Pneumonia was thought to be only one of various complications arising from the progressively invasive infection that eventually resulted in multiorgan failure." The Earl had been "prone to frequent and severe lung infections" according to The Lancet and there had been a "general belief ... that one acute attack of bronchitis could have killed him. In such a debilitated state, the Earl's immune system was easily overwhelmed by erysipelas.”[42] The above-mentioned Aspergillus flavus speculation was revived in a 2022 documentary by Channel 4 that argued that its spores were a possible cause of Carnarvon's death (and possibly also of the deaths of Gould and Mace).[43]