Today in History, November 4th
On November 4, 1922, Howard Carter's crew found the first step to King Tut's tomb. Plus the Iran hostage crisis and Obama's 2008 election.
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November 4 is best known for 1922, when Howard Carter’s workmen uncovered the first step down to King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt. The date also saw the start of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and Barack Obama’s election as the first Black U.S. president in 2008.
The big story: The First Step to King Tut’s Tomb (1922)
Most royal tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings had been plundered long before any archaeologist arrived. So when British Egyptologist Howard Carter’s crew struck a stone step cut into the valley floor on November 4, 1922, nobody could be sure what lay below. Carter had been searching the valley with backing from a wealthy collector, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, whom he had worked with since about 1907. The steps led down to a sealed doorway, and on November 26 Carter and Carnarvon peered into chambers that were largely intact. The tomb belonged to Tutankhamun, a young king who died at about 18. Its four rooms held several thousand objects. Inside a stone sarcophagus sat three nested coffins, the innermost of solid gold, with the king’s mummy within. Emptying the tomb took Carter about a decade, and most of its treasures went to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
More events on November 4
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1791 | A Native confederacy led by Little Turtle and Blue Jacket routed General Arthur St. Clair’s army near the Wabash River, killing at least 600 U.S. soldiers. It was the largest Native American victory ever won over U.S. forces. |
| 1842 | Abraham Lincoln, then a struggling Springfield lawyer, married Mary Todd at her sister’s home in Springfield, Illinois. |
| 1918 | British poet Wilfred Owen was killed near Ors, France, one week before the armistice. His mother got the telegram after the fighting had ended. |
| 1924 | Voters in Texas and Wyoming elected the first two female governors in U.S. history: Miriam “Ma” Ferguson and Nellie Tayloe Ross. |
| 1956 | Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution. Around 2,500 Hungarians died and some 200,000 fled the country. |
| 1960 | At Gombe in Tanzania, Jane Goodall watched a chimpanzee she called David Greybeard strip a stem and use it to fish termites from a mound, showing that humans were not the only toolmakers. |
| 1979 | Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took about 90 people hostage. Fifty-two Americans were held for 444 days. |
| 1995 | Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot after a peace rally in Tel Aviv by Yigal Amir, a law student with far-right ties who opposed his peace deals with the Palestinians. He died in surgery. |
| 2008 | Barack Obama defeated John McCain to become the first African American elected U.S. president, winning 365 electoral votes. |
| 2016 | The Paris Agreement on climate change took effect, committing nations to hold warming well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. |
Born on November 4
- 1879: Will Rogers, cowboy humorist, columnist and movie star born in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma.
- 1908: Joseph Rotblat, Polish-born British physicist and anti-nuclear campaigner who shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize.
- 1916: Walter Cronkite, longtime anchor of the CBS Evening News, often polled as the most trusted figure in America.
- 1969: Matthew McConaughey, actor who won the Best Actor Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club.
Sources
- Entrance to King Tut’s tomb discovered, History.com
- Howard Carter, Britannica
- This Day in History: November 4 (and its linked event articles), History.com
- Will Rogers, Biography.com
- Joseph Rotblat, Britannica
- Walter Cronkite, Biography.com
- Matthew McConaughey, Biography.com
