An ancient evil unleashed on an unsuspecting land?
Well, that's what the stories would have you believe. From weird coincidences to
creepy legends to a very unlucky canary, here's the truth about King Tut's curse.
When Howard Carter opened the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922, the world went a little nuts.
What could be more captivating than a bunch of rooms full of glittering treasure,
buried under the sands of the Valley of the Kings for more than 3,000 years?
A curse, that's what.
"AHHHH!"
Depending on who you ask, there were 11 so-called victims of King Tut's curse,
but most of the deaths really weren't that mysterious, with the exception
of Lord Carnarvon, the first and most famous.
Carnarvon was the wealthy financier of Howard Carter's expedition,
and the legend says that the curse first caught up with him in the form of a mosquito.
After that, Carnarvon cut himself while shaving over the raised mosquito bite.
That's really not something you would expect to kill someone,
so the fact that it did kill him is part of what really gave momentum to the idea of a curse.
The bite became infected, and Carnarvon died from blood poisoning. The timing was pretty ominous,
too — his death occurred just two months after King Tut's tomb was opened.
Carnarvon was already in poor health, though, and had been for more than 20 years. So
on a logical level it's really not surprising that he was so susceptible to developing an infection.
His death wasn't the only one linked to the tomb — 58 people were present for the sarcophagus'
opening, and eight of them passed away within 12 years. The other 50 people presumably lived long,
fulfilling lives. So if there was a curse, it wasn't a very efficient curse.
We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that there was some pretty creepy stuff that went down after the
tomb was opened. When the archaeologists broke through the first room they found two statues
of Tutankhamun. The statues were life-sized, and on each head was a crown decorated with cobras.
The workers were spooked by the images of the snakes, because cobras were symbolic of the
king's justice. Then, later that day Carter's pet canary was literally eaten by a cobra,
so that spooked the locals even more. Some of them
believed the spirit of the dead king was warning the archaeologists away.
It's worth noting, though, that Egyptian cobras aren't exactly uncommon in Egypt.
For every canary that died in Egypt the day King Tut's tomb was opened,
there were probably a few thousand other small animals that also got eaten by cobras,
and not because they had anything to do with the opening of a pharaoh's tomb.
Still, the only cobra prey that gained notoriety was that one little yellow canary,
who happened to be unfortunate enough to get eaten at precisely the right moment in history.
"Whew, I should be safe in here."
If the story about the canary is even true, there isn't any proof that it is. According to Skeptoid,
the media was responsible for most of the stories about a curse on King Tut's tomb,
and the media in the 1920s wasn't exactly known for its commitment
to the truth if the truth might get in the way of a sensational story.
Evidently, the canary story was just one of a bunch of "curse" stories told by the papers — the
papers also said all the lights in Cairo went out at the exact moment of Lord Carnarvon's death, and
that his dog, which he'd left behind in England, howled and then died for no apparent reason,
also at the exact moment of his death. But then Skeptoid points out that these stories
only ever appeared in the papers and not in any of the writings of people who mattered,
like Howard Carter or any of those who worked with him. Sensational stories sell papers,
so publishers would have every reason to keep milking the so-called curse as long as possible.
Another popular legend is that Howard Carter and his team encountered a written curse in
the antechamber. The curse was inscribed into a clay tablet and it went like this:
"Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh."
Pretty grim, but Carter failed to make any written note of this tablet's existence,
and then evidently also lost it, since it has never been seen by anyone. People who believe
in the curse say that the absence of the clay tablet in historical records is simple:
Carter just scrubbed all mentions of it so as to not upset the locals.
But that doesn't seem like something an archaeologist would be inclined to do.
Also there's the part where none of the deaths that have been loosely associated
with King Tut's tomb had anything to do with wings. Well, except for that canary.
A lot of people assume the mummy's curse is part of ancient Egyptian mythology,
meant to deter grave robbers from stealing the king's treasures. And while it is true
that ancient tombs were designed to confuse potential thieves, in King Tutankhamun's time
there was no concept of a written "curse," per se. That might have something to do with
the fact that only about one percent of the Egyptian population could read hieroglyphics,
notes Ancient Origins, and it's pretty unlikely that anyone that educated would be robbing tombs.
So writing down a curse to scare away robbers would be pointless.
According to National Geographic, the late Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat
concluded there was "no ancient Egyptian origin of the mummy's curse concept."
Instead, Montserrat said a 19th-century London stage performance, which featured the on-stage
unwrapping of real Egyptian mummies, was the inspiration for the original stories.
Dig back deep enough into Egyptian history, though, and there does seem to be a tomb or
two that promised divine retribution for grave robbers. Early mastaba-type tombs, which predate
King Tut by some 15 dynasties, sometimes included curse-like threats of death by wild animals,
so perhaps these inscriptions persisted in the verbal mythology of ancient Egypt.
Still, it really didn't seem to work very well as a deterrent, since tombs were
usually completely picked over and looted by the time modern people discovered them.
Seventeen years after he opened the tomb of King Tutankhamun, Howard Carter finally
succumbed to the mummy's curse. After achieving archaeological fame and touring the world as a
lecturer and expert on Egyptian archaeology, Tut smote Carter by giving him lymphoma.
So if there was a curse, Carter didn't seem to get much of it. But according to Skeptoid,
believers like to say Carter was indeed cursed: Cursed to live a long life wherein
he would have to watch all his friends and colleagues as one by one they were taken down
by a 3,000-year-old Egyptian corpse. Of course, with a couple exceptions,
most of the curse's victims were only casual acquaintances of Carter's, not close friends.
It makes you wonder: Shouldn't the prime target of the curse be the
dude who accidentally decapitated the boy king while trying to remove his golden death mask?
That's right: in their eagerness to reveal the face of the boy king, Howard Carter and
his workers tore the whole head off along with the mask they were trying to remove.
"I did it! Ha ha!"
There's also the tomb-toxin theory, which goes like this: Pharaoh gets sealed in tomb,
bacteria and other pathogens take hold and multiply, tomb is opened thousands
of years later releasing said toxins into the lungs of unsuspecting archaeologists.
It's a nice, tidy way to explain away mysterious deaths without acknowledging supernatural forces,
but it's not a very solid theory.
According to National Geographic, labs have indeed discovered potentially dangerous molds growing on
Egyptian mummies and tomb walls, including one that can cause bleeding in the lungs and
another that can cause lung infections. That could explain one of the deaths — George Jay Gould died
from pneumonia shortly after entering the tomb, writes Roger Luckhurst in "The Mummy's Curse."
But it seems odd that a deadly pneumonia-causing bacteria would only infect a single person when
there were plenty of other people who spent a lot more time in the tomb than Gould did.
Skeptoid also notes that if tomb toxins were the real cause, there would probably be some
sort of record of lots of people falling ill in other parts of Egypt, but there isn't.
You might still be clinging to the notion that if there weren't a curse,
surely there wouldn't have been so many deaths that were directly linked to the opening of the
tomb. So let's just break it all down. According to Live Science, noted skeptic James Randi wrote
in his book "An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural"
that the people who were involved in the opening of King Tutankhamun's tomb lived an average of 23
years afterwards. And those were mostly old guys, so that figure doesn't even represent a shortened
lifespan. They made it to 73 years old, on average – at a time when the average lifespan was 72,
according to Randi. So if a curse did exist, it seems to have given everyone an extra 12
months or so over what they'd normally get if they weren't cursed. Not bad.
But what about all those people who died within the first few years? Well, that
can be explained by random chance. Pretty much any significant event involving a large number
of people is going to have an occasional death associated with it. Finally, in 2002, a study
found no statistically significant difference between the death rates of the tomb-enterers
and the death rates of tourists in Egypt at the time, so case closed. No mummy's curse.
"Your soul-suckin' days are over, amigo."