Pierre Lacau the excavator all the rest. Lacau oversaw the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 by the English archaeologists Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in the Valley of the Kings. Relations with Carter were rarely cordial and were exacerbated by both the monopoly of publication rights which Lord Carnarvon sold to "The Times", and pressure from the Egyptian government who resented the lack of Egyptian involvement in the Tutankhamen excavation. In 1924 Lacau, acting under the orders of the new Minister of Public Works, forbade the wives of Howard Carter's team to enter the tomb. Carter closed the tomb
Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun's tomb (subsequently designated KV62). The next several months were spent cataloguing the contents of the antechamber under the "often stressful" supervision of Pierre Lacau, director general of the Department of Antiquities of Egypt. On 16 February 1923, Carter opened the sealed doorway and found that it did indeed lead to a burial chamber, and he got his first glimpse of the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun. The tomb was considered the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings, and the discovery was eagerly covered by the world's press, but most of their