In the 1890's, as Egypt totters on the brink of revolution, a poor, young uneducated boy of seventeen--Howard Carter--arrives in Cairo to take up a job he has been offered on account of his natural artistic talents: He will be working in the tombs and temples, copying the freizes and hieroglyphs for the Egyptian Exploration Fund, a learned society trying to record the great monuments of Egypt's past.

Self taught, tough, a loner, over the next thirty years Carter will live in two worlds simultaneously: modern Egypt, with its desperados, its archaeologists backed by wealthy aristocrats, its local grave robbers, scholars, its political turmoil, ruins, its great works of ancient art and its clever forgers. And he will live in the world of the ancient pharoahs, especially those of the 18th dynasty.

At the very beginning of his career, fate or chance throws Carter together with the brilliant and fanatic Flinders Petrie, where he works on Petrie's excavation of Amarna, the ancient capital (14th century BC). Tut's youth was spent in this place where a unique spiritual and artistic revolution was taking place. Akhenaton breaks with traditions -he closes temples throughout Egypt, turns away from the great cities and builds a new capital in the remote desert in middle Egypt where he allows Egypt's great empire to crumble as he devotes himself to meditation on his great discovery: that there is only one God.

Meyerson draws on state archives, letters written thousands of years before to explore this revolutionary time and court where Tutankhamun spent his youth before, being taken away to be crowned as a boy pharaoh by priests and generals who want to restore Egypt--to what it was.

Tut married to his half sister, reverts to Egypt's polytheistic pantheon and rules until he is a youth of 18 when he suddenly dies: Perhaps, due to Tut's youth, there was insufficient time to complete digging one of the vast underground royal sepulchers favored by the pharaohs of the 18th dynasy. For whatever reason he is burried in a hurriedly decorated small non royal tomb whose existence is forgotten. Eventually, tomb workers build their shacks over its entrance.

Davies, an American millionaire claims he has discovered Tut's tomb: it is a simple shaft tomb with artifacts bearing Tut's cartouches. Most scholars agree: the young pharaoh would not have possessed a great royal tomb. Only the uneducated and truculant Carter disagrees. And he manages to get the wealthy Earl of Carnavon to back him in his search. Over a period of seven years, hundreds of thousands of pounds are spent, the piles of rubble mount, and Carter and Carnarvon become the standing joke of the valley.

Finally Carnarvon himself is willing to give up. But in a last all or nothing roll of the dice, Carter offers every penny he has saved toward one final season. The pay off is not only undreamed of amounts of silver and gold and jewels (the inner coffin, solid gold, weighs more than two hundred pounds), but some of the most moving and beautiful masterpieces of ancient art ever to be uncovered, including the famous Tut death mask, an almost universal icon of antiquity. Is there a curse on the tomb? people asked when Carnarvon dies right after the tomb's opening. Perhaps.

But in Meyerson's opinion, the real curse of Tut's tomb is that Carter did NOT die immediately after discovering it. For the great excavator lived to work on for ten more years in the tomb, becoming bitter, embattled, filled with hatred humanity. Before he dies Carter will claim to know where the much sought-for tomb of Alexander the Great is to be found. But he will not reveal his secret. The world does not deserve to know.