IT IS RARE INDEED for a journalist to understate his own story. But that is what Arthur Merton, Cairo correspondent of The Times, managed to do on November 30, 1922, when he revealed to the world the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

“This afternoon Lord Carnarvon and Mr Howard Carter revealed... what promises to be the most sensational Egyptological discovery of the century,” he reported. With hindsight, the discovery was arguably the most sensational archaeological discovery of any sort, in any country, in any century. It was also one of the greatest scoops in the history of The Times.

Just over three weeks before, Merton dispatched a runner to Luxor with the news that Howard Carter, the English archaeologist, had uncovered a single stone step near the entrance to the tomb of Rameses VI.

Carter had been digging in the Valley of the Kings for 15 years, slogging away with the financial backing of Lord Carnarvon but little success. As Merton reported, “at times they almost despaired of finding anything”.

The single step led to 16 more, then to a sealed door bearing the name of Tutankhamun. Carter wired Carnarvon, summoning him to the site.

On November 26, the searchers reached a second door. Carter made a small breach in the top left-hand corner and then, with Carnarvon at his shoulder, lifted up a candle to cast a thin ray of light inside. “As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, gold.”

Carnarvon, unable to bear the suspense, demanded: “Can you see anything?” “Yes,” Carter replied. “Wonderful things.”

A week later, those wonderful things were revealed to a wider world, or more exactly to Carter’s friend, Merton, thus ensuring a world exclusive for this newspaper.

The news duly appeared on Page 13, “An Egyptian Treasure — Great Find at Thebes”, accompanied by a leader. Today that seems like understatement, but in an age long before the concept of front-page news, it was the equivalent of a screaming banner headline.

Merton’s report is a masterpiece of compressed excitement. “With difficulty an entrance was effected, and when at last the excavators managed to squeeze their way in, an extraordinary sight met their eyes which they could scarcely credit.” He described the gilt couches, the elaborate carvings inlaid with gilt, ebony and ivory, the “exquisite workmanship”, the royal robes and the flower arrangements, still green and intact after 3,000 years, although they disintegrated to the touch. He almost salivated over the “enormous quantities of provisions for the dead, comprising trussed duck, haunches of venison, &c all packed in boxes”.

In return for his scoop, Merton paid glowing tribute to Carter and Carnarvon for their “patience, perseverance and perspicacity”, noting the archaeologist’s “thoroughness and above all his flair”. (The italics were another sign that Merton’s excitement had been transmitted to the sub-editors, who would normally have removed any such emphasis.)

The full extent of the treasures had yet to be revealed. Carter himself was uncertain whether he had discovered “a tomb or merely a cache”. Not until the following February, after three months of careful excavation, would he open the inner chamber and gaze on the great sarcophagus of Tutankhamun for the first time. (The Times would scoop that story too, this time by means of a controversial financial deal with the excavators that set off a remarkable Fleet Street battle.)

It fell to the leader-writing team, back in London, to put the discovery from the distant past into modern context. “The earth holds in her recesses the rich memories of our race,” the paper declared, “and sometimes... a discovery comes that lights up the obscurity of the distant past.”

With the First World War over for just four years, ideological ferment everywhere and power shifting in Europe, the paper inevitably heard echoes of the contemporary world in Tutankhamun’s ancient treasure-house. It approvingly noted the carvings depicting Egypt’s imperial power over Syria and Ethiopia, and evidence of religious upheaval. Here was a king contending with changing times, the weight of power and clashing beliefs.

“The ancient king who thus suddenly steps out from oblivion has a permanent significance,” the editorial noted. “Through the ages the winds are blowing that disturb the spirit of man continually with the dream of power and comfort it with the hope of God.”

At the same time, the gulf between the Ancient Egyptians and the Britons of 1922 seemed immeasurable, in a “Europe wrestling with problems that would have been stranger to them than all their weird panoply is to us”.

On the same page that it reported, with patriotic pride, the great archaeological trove, The Times and its correspondents wondered whether to preserve the past, and how to build for the future. Another editorial lamented that the Elizabeth hospital in Croydon, “the sole surviving piece of dignified architecture in the place”, might be torn down. A letter called for the building of a new bridge across the Thames at Charing Cross, arguing that “a magnificent bridge at this point would be a glorious memorial to the Great War”.

As Britain debated what to build and what to pull down, in distant Egypt a tomb built for all eternity surrendered its secrets, because the grave-robbers had forgotten where it was, the sand had covered it and an English archaeologist had come across it, just as he was about to give up hope.