Corpus

Corpus: stages of a research

Through the specialised bibliography about the Portuguese press and some websites, we managed to gather a total of 79 titles: 58 newspapers and 21 magazines. Then we began the process of checking these publications. For such, we resort to the on-site visit of the spoil of the Portuguese National Library and the General Library of the University of Coimbra. At the same time, we benefited from the publications available online in the Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa website, the Fundação Mário Soares website, and also the General Library of the University of Coimbra website. From this, we gathered 28 publications in which we identified news and articles related to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb and the subsequent related events: A CAPITAL, Diário Republicano da noite; A ÉPOCA; A IMPRENSA NOVA (Série I); A PATRIA; A TARDE; A TRIBUNA, Diário Republicano da manhã; A VANGUARDA; ABC: REVISTA PORTUGUESA; O COMÉRCIO DO PORTO; O COMÉRCIO DO PORTO, Edição da tarde; CORREIO DA MANHÃ, Órgão da Causa monárquica; DIÁRIO DA MANHÃ, Jornal de doutrina politica e de Grande informação; DIÁRIO DE LISBOA; DIÁRIO DE NOTICIAS; DIONYSOS, Revista mensal de philosophia, sciencia e arte; ILUSTRAÇÃO PORTUGUESA; JORNAL DE NOTÍCIAS; NOVIDADES; O DIA; O DOMINGO ILUSTRADO, Noticias & actualidades graficas, teatros, sports & aventuras, consultorios & utilidades; O MUNDO; O PRIMEIRO DE JANEIRO; O RADICAL, Jornal Republicano Independente; O REBATE, Diário Republicano da manhã; O SÉCULO; O SÉCULO, Edição da noite; REPUBLICA (Série I), and REPUBLICA (Série II).

 Corpus: the published news

 Concerning the published news (234), table 1 comprises the distribution of the number of news of each publication by year:

Table 1: Number of news by year and by publication (alphabetical order)

 Taking into account the number of published news in each year, we can see, in Graphic 1, that 1923 is the year with more news, a total of 117, followed by 1924 with 94 news. In these two years, we have, then, 211 of the 234 collected news, that is, 90% of the total.

 Graphic 1: number of news per year

This huge predominance is justified by the fact that these two years are those with the most number of known facts regarding the discovery: 1923 is the year of the official opening of the tomb and the year of the death of Lord Carnarvon; in 1924, the works on the tomb continued and the problems between Howard Cater and the Egyptian government about the continuance/running of the excavation works stand out; the year of 1939, the one that closes our chronology, appears in third place, albeit with only 10 news, all of them dedicated to either the death of Howard Carter or the new discoveries that occurred in Tanis, under the supervision of Pierre Montet.

The graphic curves are, in fact, very explicit: generally, though our chronology covers a period of 17 years, only in the years of 1923 and 1924 the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb was actually the subject of the Portuguese periodicals’ news. From 1925 onwards, the subject stopped being attractive and worthy of occupying the pages of the newspapers and magazines in Portugal.

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It is easy to conceive that allt the 234 published news did not have the same characteristics; they did not even deserve the same treatment from the journalists or the press service. Compiling and observing closely the textual characteristics of all that wealth of information, we established, with our own designations, 8 major categories or types of news: articles about curiosities, opinion article, signed original text/image, article of “scientific” nature, news copied from Portuguese newspapers, copied/adapted text/image from foreign publications, unsigned original (?) text, and agency news.

There is not only a significative variation between the different text categories that our classification tries to capture but also there is, naturally, substantial differences in the approach and development, according to the expertise of the 1920s and 1930s, between a simple factual news and an article of “scientific” nature, a copied/based story from foreign publications or an article about ancient Egypt curiosities.

 Corpus: the themes

 To each one of the 234 news that make up our corpus, regardless of their intrinsic characteristics, we attributed a theme, a subtheme, and when necessary, a topic so we can easily and immediately understand, in general terms, the content of what was published. In Graphic 2, we summarise the identified themes and the number of occurrences of each one.

Graphic 2: News’ themes

From the analysis of the news themes/subthemes, we highlight:

• The theme with the greatest number of occurrences – 54 – is “Opening/Closing of the tomb”, with 28 published news in 1923, 24 in 1924, and 2 in 1925, being present in 21 of the 28 publications. This theme comprises 6 subthemes, being the one regarding the opening of the tomb the one that is addressed the most, with 24 news; the second subtheme is the opening of the sarcophagus, with 15 news. In the topics of this theme (regardless of the subtheme), we stress the attention given to the riches and treasures found in the tomb.

• The second most frequent theme is “Problems between Howard Carter and the Egyptian government”, with 49 news, 48 published in 1924, and one published in 1925, in 16 of the 28 publications. This theme comprises six sub-themes. This news allows us to follow in some detail the problems and the misunderstandings between Howard Carter and the Egyptian government, in 1924, at the beginning of the second year of works. The Archaeologist and the institutions disagreed over the persecution of the works after the death of Lord Carnarvon, and Carter was even replaced by Pierre Lacau. Notwithstanding this situation, the problem was overcome, and it was Carter, the discoverer, who led the works to the end.

• The third theme most frequently addressed by the published news was “Death/translating of Lord Carnarvon’s dead body”, with 43 news (41 from 1923, and two in 1924), present in 20 of the 28 publications. This theme comprises only two subthemes: with curse (26 news) and without curse (17 news). In this case, we chose to identify the situations in which the news informs the death of Lord Carnarvon and subsequent situations referring to the curse that was supposedly the cause of his death, and the cases in which the news ignores this perspective.

The following clip presents a compilation of all the news gathered in our corpus:

© Projecto "Tutankhamon em Portugal. Relatos na imprensa portuguesa (1922-1939)" \ Project "Tutankhamun in Portugal. Reports in the Portuguese press (1922-1939)"