Lord Carnarvon
The Catalyst That Led To Lord Carnarvon
First Digging for Tombs in
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
Lynch enjoyed a busy life as a former senator and gold prospector
in the rush to the
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.
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
EXTRACTED FROM
" LIES, DAMNED LIES AND THE CARNARVONS" BY WILLIAM CROSS
[i] Jeremiah Lynch (1849-1917) of Irish-American parentage.
Traveller and adventurer in
[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
[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
[v] Great
[vi] Lord Kitchener (1850-1916) was Consul General in
[vii] Brian
Fagan. “Lord and Pharaoh: Carnarvon and the Search for Tutankhamun”. Left Coast Press INC International
Concepts. (2015).
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