When the world went wild for King Tut

The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 sparked a frantic global obsession with ancient Egypt.

It must be the most celebrated exchange in the history of archaeology. "Can you see anything?" asked George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, standing in a gloomy passageway cut into the bedrock of the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile.

"Yes," replied Howard Carter, the British Egyptologist whose excavations Carnarvon had been bankrolling for the preceding six seasons. "Wonderful things."