A Note to Carter Manuscripts and the Discovery of Ahhotep’s Coffin (Cairo CG 28501)

Among Howard Carter’s “autobiographical sketches” in the Griffith Institute and the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York, an interesting digression narrates “the first modern discovery connected with the royal mummies”, that of the coffin of queen Ahhotep at Dra Abu el-Naga (Cairo CG 28501). While the discovery is traditionally credited to Auguste Mariette, according to his own descriptions and those of his friends and collaborators, here Carter gave a radically different account of the find, attributing it to an Egyptian fellâh acting alone, the father of his servant Abd el-Arl. The presence of some quite precise details, absent in the much vaguer ‒ and sometimes contradictory ‒ versions of Mariette and his collaborators, makes it remarkable and seriously raises the question of the reliability of Mariette’s accounts of the discovery. The paper provides a transcription from Carter’s manuscripts and comments the most significant points.