Arthur Phillips search for meaning in life. The novel was well received commercially and critically, winning Phillips the 2003 Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for Best First Fiction, as well as other honors. "The Egyptologist" is structured as journals, letters, telegrams, and drawings, from several different points of view. The main story is set in 1922 and follows a hopeful explorer who, working near Howard Carter (the man who discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun), risks more and more of his life and savings on an apparently quixotic effort to find the tomb of an apocryphal Egyptian king. The book was an
Embalming cache about a dozen large sealed storage jars. Within them were contained pottery, dishes, bags of natron, animal bones, floral collars and linen containing text dated to the final years of the then little-known 18th dynasty Pharaoh Tutankhamun. It was later determined that that material not only contained material used in the embalming process (such as bags of natron and linen), but the remains of food used in the funerary banquet held at the conclusion of the pharaoh's interment. When Tutankhamun's tomb was discovered in 1922, many small items similar to those found in the KV54 cache were found in the