Swaffham has fared better than some market towns in Nor-folk today, where rural poverty rubs up against second homes and country houses still in private hands. Tucked away in its Georgian and Victorian buildings are a boutique hotel, a good bookshop, and several options for afternoon tea. Above the wide marketplace the name Rasputin blazes over a Russian restaurant – a sign of Eastern European immigration to the region, which is always in need of agricultural and healthcare workers. But many storefronts wear the pinch of penny-counting, and in 2016, the Breckland district voted by 64.2 per cent to leave the European Union. A benefactor with a pot or two of gold would not go amiss.

Perhaps a similar divide between well off and poor, old-timer and newcomer, marked the town when Howard Carter lived there as a boy. Both sides of his family had deep Swaffham roots, and Carters live there still. A second cousin once or twice removed runs a tapas restaurant called Tutankhamun’s, right on the marketplace. On the walls hang paintings based on photographs, with a portrait of Carter himself in pride of place behind the bar. Ask about the family connection and the owners will unfold a complicated family tree. Swaffham should do more to honour him, they say. A statue, a display of replicas from the tomb, something, anything, to bring Tutankhamun tourists here.

Two doors down, the town museum does its best to remember the Carter family and their famous son, on its shoestring budget as an independent charity. Swaffham Museum was one of the first places I visited after moving to Norfolk, and one of the last when the time came to move away, a decade later; little had changed in between. The Carter Connection Gallery on the ground floor is the museum’s most heavily used space. It tells the story of Howard Carter’s early life and Swaffham ties, alongside activities and displays designed for children ‘doing ancient Egypt’ at school, as I once did.

Gilt-framed oil portraits introduce us to the Carter family; they are by Howard’s older brother William, who followed their father Samuel into a painting career. Beyond them is the star attraction: a scaled-down recreation of the moment, in February 1923, when Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon broke through the dividing wall between the Antechamber and the Burial Chamber. You climb a set of wooden steps and peer into a recreation of the tomb, built in what might have been a broom cupboard. Press a button and the lights go up on the scene, as an actor voicing Howard intones the inevitable words. Yes, wonderful things.

Unlike the Swaffham pedlar, Howard had not found his fortune there but in the Middle East, where the old English folk tale seems to find its origin, or at least its twin. The thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi, a Sufi scholar, told of a man in Baghdad who dreamed of finding wealth and renown in Cairo, and a Cairo man who did the opposite. Dorothy and the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz said more or less the same: dream of being elsewhere, and you may miss where treasure lies.

Born in Earl’s Court, London, in May 1874, Carter was sent as a baby to live in his grandfather’s household on the edge of town, where the woodland began. Country air was better than the famous London fog, and Carter’s mother had her hands full with several other children. Howard was the youngest of eleven, ten sons and one daughter; three of his older brothers had died before his birth. In Swaffham, Grandfather Carter was gamekeeper for the estate of the Hamond family and lived in a tied house on their estate. Still known by the name Keeper’s Cottage, the house is built of brick and the gnarled flint nodules that fill the Norfolk fields, like the stone bones of long-dead creatures.

Young Howard was looked after by two unmarried aunts. Other family members joined him when they could: his brothers Verney and William, the portrait painter; his sister Amy, to whom Carter remained close throughout his life; and their parents, Martha and Samuel. Samuel Carter was an artist of some success, known for his skill at painting animals. In London, his work had been shown in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibitions, and he was the animal illustrator for the Illustrated London News, a weekly newspaper that would play a significant role in Howard’s life. By the time Howard was in his early teens, his parents divided their time between London and Swaffham, where Samuel continued to paint commissions for country clients. Favourite horses, pampered pets, and hunting themes offered steady and respectable work.

In one of his unpublished autobiographies – An Account of Myself, he had titled it – Carter claimed to have been ‘debarred from public school life and games’ due to physical weakness, as if these proving grounds for the military and civil service had ever been an option in his family circumstances. Although two of his older brothers briefly attended Hamond’s grammar school in Swaffham, which was sponsored by the same family for whom their grandfather worked as gamekeeper, there is no record of Howard having gone there. Perhaps he received his schooling at home with his aunts, or by informal arrangements elsewhere. Whatever the reason, in later life, Carter must have been aware that a lack of formal education set him apart from many of the gentlemen archaeologists, wealthy art collectors, and aristocratic patrons with whom he worked and socialized. Soon after I moved to England, I heard British Egyptologists offer a single criticism of Carter: that he had copied the Earl of Carnarvon’s manners of speech and dress. After several years of living and working in Britain, I came to understand how barbed the observation was, by English standards. To ape one’s social betters is to flout a system in which everyone is meant to know their place and stay there.

The teenaged Howard Carter had plenty of contact with his social betters when he helped his father Samuel with painting commissions. Like his brothers and sister before him, Howard had studied drawing and painting with Samuel, with a focus on closely observed birds and animals; the family kept a menagerie at their Swaffham home. His skills with pencils and watercolour brushes would serve Carter well in later life, not least in the recording of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Helping out his father also brought him into the ambit of the landed gentry – and his first encounter with ancient Egypt, courtesy of a country house.

Since the 1850s, Samuel Carter had done regular commissions for the Amherst family at their estate some eight miles west of Swaffham.² William Amherst (or Tyssen-Amherst, to give one spelling of the family name) was just twenty years old when he inherited from his parents, who died less than two years apart. They are buried in a sturdy church of Norfolk flint that can now be reached by footpath across a field, its square tower hunkered down near the ruins of what was once Didlington Hall. Part of the estate’s wealth came from the timber forests planted in the sandy-soiled Brecks, which helped build industrializing Britain. Amherst spent his income in lavish style. He turned the brick-built Georgian hall into an Italianate mansion said to have boasted a chimneypiece from St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Outside were landscaped gardens, boating lakes, and a well-stocked deer park that attracted royal visits. Inside, Amherst’s library was a book collector’s dream. His rarities included sixteen volumes printed by William Caxton, who set up the first press in England in the 1470s.

But it was Amherst’s passion for Egyptian antiquities that changed Howard Carter’s life. In 1865, Amherst purchased the entire 600-strong collection of Egyptian antiquities formed by Dr John Lee, a noted astronomer who had spent time in Egypt during the Napoleonic Wars.³ The most striking objects in Lee’s collection were seven statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet (‘the powerful one’), carved in a hard, dark stone and standing nearly 7 feet tall. They had been in England for several decades by then. Lee acquired them after they failed to sell at Sotheby’s auction house in 1833, rescuing them from the damp, dark arches beneath Waterloo Bridge, near the quayside where they had been unloaded after the long journey out from Luxor, Egypt. With a woman’s body, a lion’s mane, and the disc of her father, the sun god Re, upon her head, each Sekhmet sits in calm stillness on a simple throne, but like a purring cat, she could flip into aggression. War and disease were her weapons, punishments for those who disobeyed the cosmic order known as maat. Chaos has a kinder side in ancient Egyptian thought, at least, and after the devastation Sekhmet wrought came the healers and physicians who worked in her name.

Amherst placed his seven Sekhmets in the open air outside Didlington Hall, where their dark stone bodies could warm up in the weak English sun while they kept watch over the neat lawns and Norfolk fields beyond. He liked to say that there was one statue for each of the seven daughters that he and his wife Margaret had welcomed at one- or two-year intervals since their marriage. They had no sons, and at his elevation to the peerage in 1892, as the 1st Baron Amherst of Hackney, Amherst ensured that the title would pass through the female line. Sekhmet – strong-willed daughter of the sun god Re – proved a more apt symbol of his able daughters than the new Lord Amherst might have anticipated.

In 1871, the Amhersts took their eldest daughter Mary (known as May) with them on the first of many trips they made to Egypt, travelling by rail and river in style. They took in the sites that were by then part of a tourist trail, and the family inevitably brought home more artefacts, whose sale and export was licensed by the Antiquities Service of the Egyptian government. Back in Norfolk, Amherst added a single-storey extension to Didlington Hall to house what had become one of the largest collections of Egyptian artefacts in private hands. Known as the Museum, its elongated windows cast natural daylight on the open shelves and glazed cabinets filled with the family’s ancient treasures. In addition to the Sekhmet statues, the collection boasted amulets, scarabs, pottery, sculptures, and stelae carved with offering prayers for the dead. Amherst owned several papyrus sheets and scrolls as well, including one that proved to have historical importance. Joined to its other half, which had been purchased by Leopold II of Belgium, it recounts a series of tomb robberies in the Valley of the Kings, 300 years after Tutankhamun’s burial. By then concealed from view underneath later structures, his tomb escaped the worst incursions that the scrolls described for other royal burials.

Hidden tombs were far from Howard Carter’s mind when he began to accompany his father to work at Didlington Hall in the late 1880s. By then, the Carters and the Amhersts had struck up a social friendship of sorts – enough for the owners of Didlington to take an interest in the future of the Carters’ youngest child. They supported a charitable organization called the Egypt Exploration Fund, founded in 1882 by their sometime guest at the Hall, the novelist Amelia Edwards. When the Fund announced that it was looking for a young artist to train for work in Egypt, the Amhersts thought Howard Carter would be perfect for the job. He was seventeen years old with no other serious prospects, and his modest background meant that the £50 salary for a year’s work – about average in the UK at the time, for a skilled labourer or junior clerk – would be welcome. Mrs Amherst assured Mrs Carter that it was a sound opportunity, or as she wrote to the young scholar, Percy Newberry, with whom Carter would be working: ‘I told his mother that he ought to try and improve himself by study as much as possible during his leisure time.’⁴

Howard Carter went to London in the summer of 1891 to train for his new job. This involved studying drawings in the manuscripts department of the British Museum, made by travellers like Robert Hay on their own Egyptian journeys some seventy years earlier. Egyptology was young as an academic discipline, but it gave itself a genealogy stretching back to the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and the French general’s subsequent defeat by a British and Ottoman alliance. Hand-copying the scenes and inscriptions that covered the surfaces of ancient Egyptian monuments was somewhere between a pastime and an obsession for many European visitors anxious to take their visual impressions of the country home with them. The Nile and its riverbanks, the pyramids and half-buried temples, all thronged this visual repertoire as well, an ancient Egypt filtered through Romanticism and the picturesque. Carter tried his hand at inking drawings and made his own copies from British Museum objects, which satisfied the Egypt Exploration Fund that they had found their man.

Carter left England for Egypt in October 1891. His father Samuel saw him off at Victoria Station, handing over newspapers and a tin of tobacco for the journey down to Southampton and across the Mediterranean. The young man, green as a bowling lawn, still knew little about ancient Egypt or its myths, and perhaps it was just as well. Had he consulted the seven Sekhmets at Didlington Hall, they might have warned him: death is never far from life, and destruction paves the way, painfully, for rebirth.

At Beni Hasan and a nearby site called Deir el-Bersha, Newberry and Carter lived and worked in the bluffs above the Nile, where rows of tombs built around 2200 bc look out over a floodplain lush with crops in the winter months. Carter was there to help Newberry copy the painted decoration inside the tombs.⁵ There were charming representations of ancient Egyptian life, with wrestlers and dancers alongside workmen, traders, and farmers. Drawing everything by hand was the gold standard for recording hieroglyphic inscriptions and tomb scenes, and Newberry wasn’t very good at it. His method was to hang tracing paper over the walls and pencil the outlines; these were then taken back to England and inked in as solid forms. As an artist, Carter knew that only copying by eye could capture both the spirit and the specifics of the original paintings, with their carefully applied colour, fine outlines, and delicate details. But as the junior person in a four-man team, most of Carter’s work had to follow Newberry’s system. The copies he made in his own way, using the skills he’d learned fro...