Lord Carnarvon

British excavator and collector. He was born in Highclere Castle, Hampshire, 26 June 1866, son of Henry Howard Molyneux H., 4th Earl, and his first wife Lady Evelyn Stanhope, and was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He succeeded to the title in 1890 and married Almina V. M. A. Wombwell in 1895.

After a serious motoring accident in 1901, he wintered in Egypt regularly from 1903, and from 1906 he excavated at Thebes where with the aid of Howard Carter (1874–1938) he made many important discoveries. These culminated in the finding of the tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922. His previous excavations were published in a sumptuous volume, Five Years' Explorations at Thebes, 1912. He formed a very choice and valuable collection of Egyptian antiquities which was subsequently purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1926.

He did not live to see the clearance of the tomb of Tutankhamun completed, the story of his death giving rise to the notion that a curse was the cause. He was in fact bitten by a mosquito while in the Valley of the Kings in March 1923. The bite became infected and he left for Cairo where erysipelas and blood-poisoning set in, followed by pneumonia. After several rallies he died there, 5 April 1923. His body was brought back to Highclere and buried on Beacon Hill on the estate.