Video: '16th February 1923: Howard Carter unseals Tutankhamun's burial chamber'

(Friday, February 16, 1923; during the Discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun) — After 32 centuries, the inner chamber of the Tomb of Tutankhamun was opened today in Egypt near Luxor, as British archaeologist Howard Carter and his team broke the seal and went inside to find the sarcophagus of the boy pharaoh of Egypt.

Present were 20 invited witnesses, including the expedition sponsor, George Herbert. Inside the tomb were 5,398 separate items, most prominently Tutankhamun’s solid gold coffin.

Carter and his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, opened the first chamber of the tomb on Nov. 26, 1922. They cataloged and removed more than 2,000 artifacts from the antechamber and its annex, during which time they found a doorway with its rope seal still intact.

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Having opened the door, Carter found the chamber filled with an enormous gilded shrine which, it later emerged, was the outer layer of four nested shrines inside which lay the king’s sarcophagus.

It took Carter and his team 12 months to disassemble the shrines within the tight confines of the tomb and prepare to lift the lid of the sarcophagus, by which time Lord Carnarvon had died. His death in April 1923 contributed to the legend of the “Curse of Tutankhamun,” but was more likely due to complications associated with accidentally infecting a mosquito bite while shaving.

Tutankhamun’s mummy itself wasn’t finally reached until October 1925, while work to remove the remaining artifacts from the tomb continued until Nov. 10, 1930, eight years after the discovery of the tomb.

The artifacts are now housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, while Tutankhamun’s mummy is displayed inside a climate-controlled glass box inside the tomb.