ABSTRACT
During the summer of 1916 Carter took his one wartime home leave in England, in the course of which he had several meetings with Alan Gardiner to discuss various co-operative tasks which the latter had in mind. The first, but not the principal enterprise, was the study of the Turin papyrus bearing the plan of a royal tomb. In this Carter was required to carry out on the ground in Egypt a careful survey of the tomb of Ramesses IV, which he completed by the spring of 1917. The article, including Carter's 'perfectly deliciously drawn plan and section', was published later in the same year.! They further discussed arrangements for the publication of the Opet scenes at Luxor. Gardiner was prepared to pay Carter for this drawing and looked forward to a volume in which expense would not be spared. Carter relished the challenge, looking forward to a task which he could pursue intermittently during periods of leave from war-work in Cairo. Gardiner was especially enthusiastic: 'I have got the very best artist to help me ... I should like the book to be an artistic one'; 'I want this once to do your admirable drawings real justice ... I want our publication to be just perfect.'2 By May 1917 Carter had completed drawings for fifteen plates, about half the estimated total. Then nothing further happened, for reasons that are not wholly clear; the end of the war, the resumption of Carter's work for the Earl of Carnarvon, and finally the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun successfully ruined the possibility of completion. The finished drawings are now among the Gardiner papers in the Griffith Institute.3 So terminated a collaboration planned to end in a very fine publication, which would, in Gardiner's words, 'show the Americans that they have not the monopoly of making editions de luxe'. By a strange irony - but fortunate purpose - the Opet scenes are now well on their way to pUblication in the excellent series of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Gardiner
would, I am sure, have applauded this late fulfilment of one of his cherished tasks but at the same time lamented the loss of a volume demonstrating the special artistic and epigraphic skills of Howard Carter. An examination of Carter's drawings in Oxford shows what has been lost, particularly in consideration of the deterioration of the Luxor monument in the intervening seventy years.4
