Howard Carter

Howard Carter was the patient excavator who opened a doorway sealed for more than three thousand years. Born in Kensington in 1874, the youngest of eleven children of an artist father who nurtured his gift for drawing, he grew up largely in the Norfolk town of Swaffham, a sickly boy schooled little but skilled with a pencil. A neighbouring collection of Egyptian antiquities lit the fire, and at just seventeen he was sent to copy tomb decoration at Beni Hasan, learning his craft under Flinders Petrie and Naville before rising to Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt. After years of steady searching in the Valley of the Kings, he found in November 1922 the intact tomb of Tutankhamun, the best preserved pharaonic burial ever unearthed.

His Taurus Sun is the bull's own patience and unshakeable will, the earthy connoisseur who builds a foundation and holds it against every discouragement; he spent seasons digging where others had given up, and would not be moved. His Aquarius Moon gave the psyche of the fringe genius, the out-of-the-box mind fused to a larger mission and content to be the difficult outsider. Stubborn earth and visionary air together: the exact temperament to wait out a buried king.