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
Bernard Bruyère Carter a deadline to find something of value on the expedition they had just begun. Bruyère, who followed the excavations of the English with interest, suggested that they explore a spot they had not yet prospected: the foot of the entrance to Ramesses VI's tomb. There, they discovered the Tomb of Tutankhamun. During the excavation campaign of 1927, Bernard Bruyère excavated tomb TT299, the second tomb of Inerkhau, which he had already found in 1922–23 according to the reports of Karl Richard Lepsius. He then faced major technical problems, including the falling of a twenty-ton rock that threatened to destroy