History of the Archive

The Tutankhamun (TAA) Archive

At its heart are the records documenting the ten-year excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun by Howard Carter and his team, a rich and varied group of materials that includes maps, plans, object cards, drawings, journals, diaries, notes, correspondence, and the iconic photographs of Harry Burton. This core collection is complemented by secondary material accessioned later, along with related records preserved in other Griffith Institute Archive collections.

Following Howard Carter’s death in 1939, his niece, Phyllis Walker, inherited his estate, including his archaeological papers. Concerned for their safety as war approached, and recognising the importance of making them available for research and publication, Alan H. Gardiner and Percy E. Newberry facilitated their transfer from Carter’s London flat to the Griffith Institute in Oxford in August 1939, where they were placed for safekeeping under “protective deposit”. After further discussions, Walker formally donated the Tutankhamun records to the University of Oxford in 1945 as a permanent memorial to her uncle’s work. Between 1946 and 1959, additional material—including Harry Burton’s photographs, Carter’s maps and plans, and his lecture slides—was incorporated into the collection, joining the original documentation to form the comprehensive Tutankhamun Archive preserved today.

After its arrival, the documentation was organised and catalogued, with regular reassessment and continuous updates. A dedicated publication programme was also developed by the Griffith Institute, most notably the Tutʿankhamūn’s Tomb Series (1963–1990), together with a number of earlier and later independent complementary volumes. In the early 1990s, Jaromir Malek, then Keeper of the Archive, realised that at the existing rate of publication, it would take more than two centuries to publish fully the Tutankhamun excavation records, a situation he called “the real curse of Tutankhamun”.

Determined to make the material freely accessible worldwide, Malek sought a faster and more inclusive solution through digital technology. He initiated plans to digitise the entire photographic and documentary corpus under the working title Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation. By 1995, as the internet began to emerge, he and Jonathan Moffett, the Ashmolean Museum’s IT Manager, launched the Griffith Institute’s website, publishing Howard Carter’s 1st season journals and diaries. Over the following decade, the Griffith Institute team created searchable databases for the object cards and Harry Burton’s photographs, and added scanned documents alongside full transcriptions. By the time of Malek’s retirement in 2011, the online publication of the key components of the TAA Archive was complete, a pioneering effort that transformed access to one of archaeology’s most important collections. Between 2012 and 2015, the online presentation was reorganised, adopting a tile-based layout to enhance usability and modernise the interface, along with a revision of several existing transcriptions.