Tutankhamun Centenary 2022 : What Was It That Led to Lord Carnarvon Taking Up Digging in Egypt?

 

Lord Carnarvon

The Catalyst That Led To Lord Carnarvon 

First Digging for Tombs in Egypt

With the motor car accident in Germany re-dated  1909, that event could not have been the trigger that led to Lord Carnarvon taking up exploring in tombs in Egypt. By 1909 Carnarvon and Howard Carter were already digging at Thebes.

The truth of what started the Earl's interest in Egyptology  can be found after a holiday taken by him to the USA in 1903.

Extract below from the book  "Lies, Damned Lies and the Carnarvons" (2022) by William Cross, FSA Scot.

Jeremiah Lynch of San Francisco 

 The Man who Inspired Lord Carnarvon 

During a trip to the USA  in 1903  Lord Carnarvon and his wife  Almina were invited to a dinner  hosted by a maverick Irish-American ex-senator named Jeremiah ‘Jere’ Lynch[i] at his Bohemian Club in San Francisco where a gathering of local people joined the Earl’s party.[ii]

Lynch enjoyed a busy life as a former senator and gold prospector in the rush to the Klondike of 1898. He also travelled in Egypt, lived for a long spell in Cairo and had written a book, “Egyptian Sketches” [iii], all about these experiences. 

Egyptian Sketches by Jeremiah Lynch

Lynch  even owned a female mummy, a figure wrapped in a shroud that stood at the foot of the Club’s inner staircase.

Lord Carnarvon was excited listening to Lynch’s convoluted tales about Ancient Egypt.

Lynch was a long-standing lover of Egypt and its tombs. This ancient world much  intrigued Carnarvon. The  tantalising tales of Egyptian tombs and mummies in the rocks at Deir-el-Bahari were especially attractive to hear when Lynch proclaimed that comparatively few notable Egyptian mummies of the wealthier kind had ever been recovered. 

It was Jeremiah Lynch who stirred dramatically Lord Carnarvon’s interest towards focusing on Egypt as a haven for antiquities; a quest-cum-passion that would lead to triumph but also to his demise before he could reap any benefit from the many years of high expense, (met by Almina[iv]) and of sweat, toil and falls-outs with Howard Carter.

Interestingly, Lynch went on to remove additional mummies from Egypt following the loss of his Bohemian Grove mummy in a fire,[v] and enlisted Carnarvon’s help in getting permission to do so from Lord Kitchener.[vi]

Always a close friend of Almina and Lord Carnarvon, Lynch died in 1917; he has since been forgotten and is still overlooked in the Carnarvon-Tutankhamun tale. Professor Brian Fagan renewed Lynch’s candidacy for mention in the Tutankhamun Timeline in his book “Lord and Pharaoh: Carnarvon and the Search for Tutankhamun.” [vii]

Fagan is clear that this meeting " triggered a much more serious interest in Egyptology for Carnarvon".

Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson goes a little further in his “A World Beneath the Sands:Adventurers and Archaeologists in the Golden Age of Egyptology” (2020):

 “In January 1903, in San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, Carnarvon met a former US senator by the name of Jeremiah Lynch ..…Inspired by Lynch’s account, Carnarvon decided to make Egypt his winter home…”

EXTRACTED FROM 

" LIES, DAMNED LIES AND THE CARNARVONS" BY WILLIAM CROSS

[i] Jeremiah Lynch (1849-1917) of Irish-American parentage. Traveller and adventurer in Egypt (1889). San Francisco stockbroker (Callaghan and Lynch) and later New York business man. Author of Egyptian Sketches (1890) and The Lady Isis in Bohemia (1914). In 1907 (only four years after meeting Lynch) Lord Carnarvon sponsored the excavation of the tombs in Deir el-Bahari (Thebes).

[ii] The San Francisco Call of 31 March 1903 lists the attendees as Miss Charlotte Russell, Miss Alice Hager, Miss Ethel Hager, Miss Linda Cadwalader, Miss King, Miss Helen Wagner, James D Phelan, Enrique Grau, Clement Tobin, Donald de V Graham, Dr Johnston and Richard McCreary

[iii] Lynch, Jeremiah  Egyptian Sketches  London:  Edward Arnold (1890).

[iv] Almina’s access to the millionaire Baron Alfred de Rothschild’s wealth base through her mother’s association with Alfred funded the years of digging in Egypt.

[v] Great San Francisco Earthquake and subsequent fires took place on 18 April 1906.

[vi] Lord Kitchener (1850-1916) was Consul General in Egypt, 1911-1914.

[vii]  Brian Fagan. “Lord and Pharaoh: Carnarvon and the Search for Tutankhamun”. Left Coast Press INC International Concepts. (2015).

Tutankhamun Centenary: Lord Carnarvon’s Famous Car Accident At Langenschwalbach, Germany

 Tutankhamun Centenary 2022

Lord Carnarvon’s Famous Car Accident at Langenschwalbach, Germany

When it happened and its implications

Or How Will Cross Came, Saw And Conquered!

Motor Carnarvon

“Even today the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb offers potential for the creation of legends.

For years one legend has been trotted out, that of the car accident at the notorious “Heimbach bump (in the road)” near Langenschwalbach (1) as the starting point for the discovery of the tomb.

The claim has been passed down that it was not until after this accident that Lord Carnarvon was advised by his doctors to regularly visit Egypt on health grounds. There is hardly a publication on Tutankhamun that does not draw a connection between these events.

Generations of Egyptologists (2) have relied on various (pieces of) evidence which led to the assumption that the accident actually took place in 1901. (3)

(This was) a mistake as the British historian William Cross recognised years ago based on British press reports. (4)

These reports name 1909 as a much later time for the accident. Certainly, it is true that the spelling, by some sources, of the place where the accident took place as “Fehwel(l)bach “ and (the fact that) at least one report misplaces (the accident) in the vicinity of Stuttgart (5) has led people to mistakenly want to think of a second accident rather than the date being wrong for over a hundred years.

At the same time there have always been inconsistencies for thinking of the year 1901 which could have led to doubts. Thus there was no evidence of the Countess Lady Almina ( Carnarvon's wife) spending time at the spa in Langenschwalbach at the time which has previously been so long put forward, (i.e) late summer/early autumn of the year 1901, which would have been expected in the usual spa lists.

No German newspaper reported the accident and besides Lady Almina gave birth to her daughter Evelyn in England on the 15th of August, 1901. Evelyn’s baptism followed in the presence of her parents on the 21st of September 1901 in Burghclere church.

Although the window of opportunity for a possible stay of Lady Carnarvon’s in Langenschwalbach thus becomes rather small, the year 1901 was and continues to stubbornly be regarded as the year when the Earl who wanted to meet her there, had his car accident. (6)

On the basis of the dates compiled by William Cross, the author has now examined the relevant local newspaper archive for an accident report in August/September 1909. And, yes indeed, in the Monday edition of the Wiesbaden General-Anzeiger from 30.08.1909, page 4, under the heading “The district of Nassau, Kemel” we find the very same report that is missing from the year 1901 and which is reproduced here in full:

“A bad automobile accident took place on Thursday evening close to our town. An English lord who had driven in his motor car from Reims encountered two carts on the road about seven o’clock in the evening. An incline in the road made it difficult to see and thus the lord, who was himself driving, could not bring his car to a stop quickly enough. He steered the car towards the ditch running alongside the road. The car turned over and the chauffeur flew in a five to six metre arc into the wood but was not injured. The lord, however, suffered severe injuries to his head and, apparently, to his chest. It was fortunate that workmen were standing near the place where the accident occurred and immediately ran to help and fetched medical aid. The injured party was taken to Kemel where, during the night, a doctor from Langenschwalbach and a professor from Wiesbaden arrived. The condition of the injured party is said to be somewhat better. Towards evening his wife brought him to a hospital"

The discovery of the accident report in the Wiesbaden General-Anzeiger refutes the thesis that the car accident was the motive behind Lord Carnarvon’s stays in Egypt and, that he, whilst searching for a meaningful activity, had discovered archaeology. In fact it was quite different: when the accident happened in 1909 the Carnarvon/Carter co-operation had already been in existence for two years and the Earl had already visited Egypt frequently. (9) With the now verified date of the accident, the 26th August 1909, the mention of Lady Almina as “Countess of Carnarvon m. Bed., England” in the Spa list for “Bad Langen-Schwalbach” of the 15th August 1909 fits perfectly. There her stay is referred to as being at the Hotel Alleesaal. So we can be certain of one part of the original story: Lord Carnarvon was, in fact, on the way to his wife, who was at the spa in Langenschwalbach, when he was involved in the bad accident on the Bäderstraße (Bäder road). But, of course, as could be shown here —thanks to the intensive spade work of William Cross — eight years later than presumed.

FOOTNOTES:

1. The spelling of Langenschwalbach the spa in the west Taunus not far from Wiesbaden varies: Bad Langenschwalbach, Bad Langen-Schwalbach and Langenschwalbach refer to one and the same place: the predecessor of the chief town of the Rhine-Taunus- area in Hesse known as Bad Schwalbach which once belonged to Nassau..

2. C. Vogel, “You either find grand things, or nothing at all.” The Man behind Howard Carter: Life and Work of the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, in Antike Welt 31/1, 2000, 95-98.

3. A considerable part in the dating of the car accident for 1901 probably belongs to a sister of Lord Carnarvon, Lady Winifred Burghclere. In L. Burghclere, Introduction: Biographical Sketch of the late Lord Carnarvon, in H. Carter & A. Mace, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, Cambridge, 1923, 1-40 she names the accident (without giving a date) as the trigger for Carnarvon‘s travels to Egypt from 1903 onwards. There is no space here to go into the errors and confusions of her original placing of the accident in the year 1901, that will take place elsewhere.

4. William Cross, "Carnarvon, Carter and Tutankhamun Revisited": The hidden truths and doomed relationships, Newport, Gwent, 2016/2019, pages111-113.

5. We find “Fehwellbach” for example as the site of the accident in The Sportsman, August 28th, 1909.

6. Even today the successors of the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon have touted 1901 as being the time of the accident. So, for example, the present Countess of Carnarvon gives the date as late September, 1901: The Countess of Carnarvon, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey, London/New York 2011, 90ff.

7. Even if the report of the Wiesbaden General-Anzeiger does not name the Lord meeting with an accident, his identification with Lord Carnarvon — taken in conjunction with the contemporary reports in the British newspapers—is indisputable.

8. Wiesbaden General-Anzeiger, 30th August, 1909, P4 under “The Nassau Area”, Kemel section, 30th August.

9. William Cross was able to prove that Lord Carnarvon had already visited Egypt for the first time in 1889. W. Cross op.cit., 22.The Earl had already visited Egypt several times before September 1901 with Lady Almina whom he had married in 1895. Thus we have to maintain that the moment in August/September 1901, as the trigger for Carnarvon’s stays in Egypt, does not lend itself to building a legend, even without the efforts made here to depict the events of the accident.

SOURCE : GÖTTINGEN MISCELLANY ( slightly amended)

Dr Carola Vogel

Contributions to the discussion of Egyptology

Number 266 (2022) Pages 39-40

With special thanks to Alan Roderick for the translation of the article from German into English.

A number of publications issued for the Centenary have cited the year 1909.

If the motor accident in Germany was not the spark that led to Lord Carnarvon taking up digging in Egypt, What Was?

TO BE CONTINUED

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