Richard William Howard Vyse

Major General Richard William Howard Vyse KCMG (25 July 1784 – 8 June 1853) was a British soldier, anthropologist and Egyptologist. He was also Member of Parliament (MP) for Beverley (from 1807 to 1812) and Honiton (from 1812 to 1818).

Richard William Howard Vyse, born on 25 July 1784 at Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, was the only son of General Richard Vyse and his wife, Anne, the only surviving daughter and heiress of Field-marshal Sir George Howard. Richard William Vyse assumed the additional name of Howard by royal sign manual, dated 14 September 1812, on inheriting the estates of Boughton and Pitsford in Northamptonshire through his maternal grandmother, Lucy, daughter of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (1672–1739).

Vyse died at Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, on 8 June 1853. He married, 13 Nov 1810 Frances, second daughter of Henry Hesketh of Newton, Cheshire. By her he had eight sons and two daughters; among his children was Lt Frederick Howard Vyse RN. His will was proved on 13 August 1853 at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury.

Howard Vyse was commissioned as cornet into the 1st Dragoons in 1800. He transferred to the 15th Light Dragoons as a Lieutenant in 1801 and was promoted Captain in 1802 and Major in 1813. In 1815 he transferred to the 87th Foot and in 1816 to the 2nd Life Guards, and then also to the 1st West India in 1819. He was promoted brevet Lieutenant-Colonel in 1825, later nominated to rank put onto half-pay in 1825, Colonel in 1837, and Major-General in 1846.

In 1809 he acted as aide-de-camp to his father on the staff of the Yorkshire district, and on 5 July 1810 received the honorary degree of D.C.L. from Oxford University. On 2 October 1840, Vyse undertook an official duty as the Colonel of the Life Guards in the mourning party for HRH Princess Sophia-Augusta.

Vyse was returned to parliament for Beverley on 8 May 1807. In October 1812 he exchanged this seat for Honiton in Devonshire, which he retained till the dissolution of 1818. He served as High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire in 1830.

Pyramids of Giza

At Giza he and John Shae Perring worked with gunpowder forcing their way into several monuments, including the burial chamber of the pyramid of Menkaure.

Vyse's gunpowder archaeology made one highly notable discovery in the Great Pyramid of Giza. Giovanni Battista Caviglia had blasted on the south side of the stress-relieving chamber (Davison's chamber) on top of the King's chamber, a chamber discovered by Nathaniel Davison in 1765, hoping to find a link to the southern air channel. But while Caviglia gave up, Vyse suspected that there was another chamber on top of Davison's chamber, since he could insert a reed "for about two feet" upwards through a crack into a cavity. He therefore blasted straight up on the northern side, over three and a half months, finding four additional chambers.

Vyse named these chambers after important friends and colleagues; Wellington's chamber (Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington), Nelson's chamber (Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson), Lady Arbuthnot's chamber (Anne Fitzgerald, wife of Sir Robert Keith Arbuthnot, 2nd Baronet) and Campbell's chamber (Patrick Campbell, the British agent and Consul General in Egypt).

Just as amazing as the chambers were Vyse's discovery of numerous graffiti in the chambers, in red paint, dating from the time the pyramids were built. Along with lines, markers and directional notations were work gangs names, including cartouches of several Pharaohs, concentrated in Lady Arbuthnot's and Nelson's chamber, but all four chambers contained graffiti (or more correctly "quarry-marks" as Vyse called them). The previously discovered Davison's chamber contained no graffiti.

The now famous single instance of Pharaoh Khufu's name (identifying him as the builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza) is found on the south ceiling towards the west end of Campbell's chamber. The Khufu cartouche is part of a short inscription that reads "the followers, gang, of Khufu", i.e. the workmen that constructed the chamber. Today this chamber also contains a fair amount of 19th and 20th century graffiti. The other similar famous "Khnum-Khuf", also part of work gang graffiti, is found in Lady Arbuthnot's chamber. Several other compound cartouches can be found in this chamber.

Controversy

Vyse has been accused by some people of having forged the Khufu cartouche, most notably by Zecharia Sitchin. In his book The Stairway to Heaven, Sitchin accuses Vyse (and his assistants Mr. Hill and Mr. Perring) of perpetrating the forgery because of Vyse's "determination to obtain a major find as time and money were running out". However, the forgery claim is given no credence by historians and Egyptologists such as Selim Hassan, Zahi Hawass, Jaromir Malek, Professor Rosalie David or Bill Manley, or major museums such as the British Museum and the Egyptian Museum, all of whom accept that Khufu was the builder of the pyramid and by implication that Vyse's cartouche is authentic.

It should be noted that Vyse's claim about the cartouche also relies on the expert opinion of Samuel Birch of the British Museum, who is quoted at some length in Vyse's book. Thus, if the forgery claim were to be true, it would have involved an improbable conspiracy between no less than four persons.

• Operations carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837, volume 1, published London, 1840. Full text at archive.org.
• Operations carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837, volume 2, published London, 1840. Full text at archive.org.
• Appendix to Operations carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837, published London, 1842. Volume three of Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837. Devoted to Perring's researches. Full text at archive.org