The British archaeologist Howard Carter was excavating in the Valley of the Kings in 1922 when he found a wall bearing the seal of Tutankhamen from the 14th century B.C. He made a small hole and peered through. From his journal:

"It was some time before one could see, the hot air causing the candle to flicker, but as soon as one's eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of the light the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one, with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another. And everywhere, the glint of gold."

In his 1992 book, "The Making of a Fly," the British geneticist Peter Lawrence describes how the thousands of genes in a fruit fly turn on and off, interacting to form an embryo, a larva, an adult fly. Although his book is about the genetics of animal design, Lawrence prefaces it with Carter's account of the discovery of the tomb of the boy king. It might seem ludicrous, even pretentious, to compare a 25-mm fly with the most spectacular archaeological find of all time, but work on that little fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has yielded a treasure trove of developments in biotechnology, medicine, evolutionary biology and genetics that make King Tut's baubles seem like so many grains of sand in the desert.