Pierre Lacau

[1] In 1912 he was appointed director of the French Institute of Eastern Archaeology, succeeding Émile Chassinat, whose work he continued by excavating new structures within Abu Rawash, the funerary complex of Djedefre to the east of the pyramids of Giza.

[3] Lacau oversaw the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 by the English archaeologists Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in the Valley of the Kings.

[4] In 1924 Lacau, acting under the orders of the new Minister of Public Works, forbade the wives of Howard Carter's team to enter the tomb.

Carter closed the tomb in protest, locked it, refused to hand over the keys, and posted an explanatory notice in the Old Winter Palace Hotel, Luxor, thus breaking the terms of his license and relinquishing full control to Lacau.

[5] In 1938 Lacau was appointed professor at the Collège de France in Paris, where he held the chair in Egyptology until 1947; he was elected to the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres in 1939.