The curse of the pharaohs is a long-held belief that archaeologists and
others who come into contact with Egyptian artifacts will be stricken with misfortune,
caused by the spirits of pharaohs. The curse of the pharaohs originated after
the death of Lord Carnarvon, who helped open the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922.
While you can debate whether they actually had any magical effect, the fact is that Egyptians
did use curses, especially as security measures on their tombs. These curses were more likely to
be present in the tombs of private citizens rather than royalty, possibly because royal
tombs had better security. But royal curses are far from unheard of. Most of these curses
took the form of threats toward anyone who might rob or otherwise desecrate the tomb.
An abridged example includes... "As for anyone who will: do something
evil against this my grave, seize a stone from this my tomb, remove any stone or any brick from
this my tomb, enter this tomb in impurity [...] he will be judged regarding it by the great god.
I will wring his neck like a goose and cause those who live upon earth to fear the spirits who are in
the West. I will exterminate his survivors." Yikes.
Curses are part of a larger body of magical texts known as execration rituals,
which were meant to curse a person or object one found unpalatable, or to ward off harmful spirits.
While we can't say for sure whether any ancient graverobbers suffered ill effects from
the cursed tombs of Egypt, the earliest known report of a mummy's curse from the modern era
is pretty unambiguous. As recorded by author Leo Ruickbie, the first horrific account of a mummy's
magical attack comes from a 1699 account of a Polish traveler who had taken two mummies from
Alexandria. The traveler was subsequently haunted by visions of twin specters who plagued his dreams
and was terrified by the increasingly stormy seas on his voyage back home. Apparently,
the waves grew worse and worse until the man threw the mummies overboard,
at which point the storm abated. Whether or not this story is true, such tales
definitely increased popular intrigue around the idea of mummies presenting a supernatural threat.
"Oh I hate mummies..." Interest around mummies and their tombs
only increased in the Victorian era, during which period a kind of "Egyptomania" swept the empire.
In the 19th century, a macabre new fad emerged among the British leisure class:
Mummy unwrapping parties. While nominally done for science,
these spectacles more likely appealed to the more prurient interests of the repressed upper classes
as salacious entertainment. At least this was maybe incrementally more acceptable
than the centuries-old practice of eating mummies for their supposed medical benefits.
The most famous example of a mummy's curse, and the one that drove the idea into the mainstream,
is associated with the most famous mummy ever discovered. On February 16, 1923,
an expedition led by British archaeologist Howard Carter and financed by Lord George Herbert of
Carnarvon opened the sealed burial chamber of the teenaged pharaoh of the 18th dynasty,
King Tutankhamun, also known as King Tut. Tutankhamun had previously been a little-known and
unimportant ruler as far as pharaohs go, but the discovery of his basically intact and unspoiled
tomb launched him to a level of celebrity that has hardly diminished in the following century.
Carter's discovery likewise kicked off a whole new wave of interest in Egyptology.
It was in November 1922 that Carter and company first entered the interior chambers of Tut's tomb.
There they found treasures that had not been seen by human eyes in over 3,000 years,
a rarity as the majority of pharaonic tombs had been looted in previous centuries.
In the final chamber, opened in February, Carter found the now-iconic sarcophagus of King Tut,
as well as numerous jewels, statues, chariots, and articles of clothing,
all of which were carefully catalogued. According to popular legend, however,
one other thing was uncovered when the final chamber was unlocked: A deadly curse.
Despite the fact that King Tut's final resting place was not an example of a tomb
bearing an inscribed curse on the wall or on any item of its interior,
the curse of King Tut is the most famous pharaoh's curse of them all. This was due
to the mysterious deaths that befell members of that famous expedition.
The first, and perhaps most shocking, was the dig's financier, Lord Carnarvon, who died mere
months after the tomb was first opened when he accidentally cut open a mosquito bite that became
infected. A friend of Howard Carter's, to whom he gave a mummified hand as a paperweight gift, had
his house burn down and then flood when he tried to rebuild. American railroad executive George Jay
Gould died of pneumonia after visiting the tomb. Lord Carnarvon's half-brother never even visited
the tomb, but his blindness, rotten teeth, and death by sepsis are sometimes attributed to being
related to an accursed brother. Others supposedly died of murder by smothering, death by burning,
and suicide at despair over the curse, among others. Howard Carter himself lived for over
a decade after the expedition, but some still attribute his death from lymphoma to the curse.
There are a number of people who might be credited with helping to spread the story of the curse of
King Tut. One culprit was Arthur Weigall, a writer for the Daily Mail who was upset that
Lord Carnarvon had sold exclusive story rights to rival newspaper The Times. Weigall began to
fill columns with whatever Tut "facts" he could, including the story that Carnarvon's pet canary
had been killed by a cobra the day the tomb was opened, which he interpreted as an ill omen.
Weigall's writing played up the curse angle, which he correctly anticipated the public
would eat up. And he later claimed to have predicted Lord Carnarvon's death, saying,
"If [Carnarvon] goes down [into the tomb] in that spirit, I give him six weeks to live."
"Oh yeah, this just keeps getting better and better."
Another person to whom the spread of the curse story can be credited
is Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had a credulous fascination with
the supernatural despite being best friends with professional psychic-buster Harry Houdini.
Doyle specifically told a New York newspaper that Carnarvon's death was due to an
"evil elemental" conjured up by Egyptian priests to protect Tut's tomb. Doyle backed
up his conviction with anecdotes about personal friends he believed had been
cursed by another mummy. The existence of this mummy could not, alas, be confirmed.
While it is certainly striking to look at a list of those who died or otherwise suffered
as a result of the alleged curse of King Tut, it may pay to look at the circumstances with a
more skeptical eye. A study carried out in 2002 by the British Medical Journal
looked closely at the survival rates of 44 Westerners who, according to Howard Carter,
were in Egypt at the time the tomb was opened. Only Westerners were considered,
as according to legend native Egyptians were not affected by the curse. The deaths of the 25 men
who were part of Carter's team were compared with those of the Westerners who were not involved in
opening the tomb. The study concluded that there was no significant correlation between exposure
to the tomb and the average age of death. No one who entered the tomb was more likely to
die within 10 years than someone who hadn't. While a popular theory is that the tomb may
have contained mold, spores, or other toxins that infected various members of the team,
experts generally don't buy that idea. Though mummies and tombs definitely can
contain deadly bacteria and mold. The fact is, many of those who died had already been ill.
The rest were just people looking for tenuous connections where they don't really exist.
Aside from the supposedly cursed tomb of Tutankhamun, one of the most famous stories
of a mummy-based curse is associated with maybe the most famous disaster of the 20th century:
The sinking of the Titanic. The story of the Unlucky Mummy, as it is known, says that four
young Englishmen visiting Luxor bought a mummy case containing the remains of an Egyptian
princess. One by one, these four men were stricken with disaster: Disappearing in the desert, getting
shot, losing a fortune, and succumbing to illness. Eventually, the mummy ended up in the hands of
the British Museum. When placed in the Egyptian Room, the mummy began
frightening night watchmen with weeping and pounding, throwing other exhibits off shelves, and
cursing a child with measles. If only the museum had a powerful incantation to ward off evil...
"You nasty thing from beyond the dead; no matter what you think or do,
good things will never come to you!" The museum sold the mummy to a private
collector, who found himself equally haunted. This collector eventually agreed to ship the
mummy to an American archaeologist in New York; in April of 1912, on the HMS Titanic.
Is this story true? Almost certainly not. The Titanic's manifests have been
closely studied, and there is not a single mummy listed among its various contents.
In fact, you can trace back the story of this cursed mummy to the writers
William Stead and Douglas Murray, who were inspired by a real coffin lid at the British
Museum. The legend got tied to the Titanic after Stead actually died in the tragedy.
The book The Curse of the Pharaoh's Tombs by Paul Harrison tells the story of British Egyptologist
Walter Bryan Emery following the uncovering of a hidden tomb in Saqqara. During this excavation,
one of Emery's workers found a statue of the Egyptian god of the dead, Osiris, about eight
inches tall. The worker gave the statue to Emery, who took it back to his quarters. Not long after,
one of his assistants discovered Emery, paralyzed, in his shower. He dragged his boss
to a couch and immediately called an ambulance. Emery was rushed to the British hospital in Cairo,
where doctors confirmed that Emery was indeed paralyzed on his right side,
unable to move or speak. Emery passed away the next day, March 11, 1971. Cairo newspapers
blamed his death on the curse of the pharaohs. Is this another example of a curse bringing
misfortune to an archeologist? Well, Emery was a real British Egyptologist
who did excavate a tomb in Saqqara, and he did uncover a small statue of Osiris. He did
also collapse suddenly after a stroke and die in a Cairo hospital in March 1971. However, the details
of the story are most likely exaggerated to draw a connection between the statue and his death.
Zahi Hawass is an Egyptian archaeologist and Egyptologist who was Egypt's first
Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs. His 2006 book The Golden King: The World
of Tutankhamun discusses his experiences with mummy curses. According to Hawass,
when he was young, he was involved in an excavation in the Nile Delta.
His job was transporting the excavated artifacts, most of which were from the Greco-Roman era,
to Cairo's Egyptian Museum. The very same day that he moved these objects, his aunt died. The
next year on the day he moved more artifacts, his uncle died. Then again the following year,
during another move, his favorite cousin died. Despite the annual loss of beloved family
whenever he transported ancient objects, Hawass does not believe in the curse of the pharaohs,
rightly acknowledging that most of the deaths associated with King Tut were foreigners who had
nothing to do with the actual excavation.
Nevertheless, in his earlier book The Valley of the Golden Mummies,
he relates the story of how after excavating the mummies of two children at the Bahariya Oasis,
he found himself haunted by the children in his dreams. After months of sleepless nights and a
particularly frightening nightmare in which the young girl mummy reached out to strangle him,
Hawass concluded that the children needed to be displayed with their father,
also a mummy. After the family was reunited, the nightmares stopped.
The legend of the curse of King Tutankhamun, it seems, will never die. Even decades after the
death of Howard Carter, people have continued to believe that the curse of King Tut lives on.
Zahi Hawass tells in his book The Golden King of a story spread by a German journalist about the
curse of the pharaohs from the 1970s. According to this tale, the journalist met with the
Director General of the Egyptian Antiquities Department, Dr. Gamal Mehrez, and asked if
he believed in the curse. Mehrez replied that though he had excavated many tombs and mummies,
nothing had ever happened to him. According to the journalist, Mehrez was dead the next day.
Popular legend associates Mehrez's death with the movement of some of the treasures of King
Tut to an exhibition in England. Hawass points out, however, that Mehrez had long
suffered from chronic illness. He furthermore reveals that Mehrez actually specialized in
Islamic archaeology and had, in fact, never excavated anything from pharaonic times.
Not everyone who gets stricken with a mummy's curse is an archaeologist.
In some cases, the accursed in question isn't looking to put artifacts in a museum, but rather
their goal is money or a trinket in their pocket. Such was the case in 2004 when a German tourist
visited an Egyptian tomb and decided to stroll out with a pharaonic carving he definitely had
not walked in with. Once the man returned home to Germany with his illicitly obtained souvenir,
he began experiencing a number of horrific conditions. These ailments included paralysis,
nausea, fevers, chills, and even cancer, to which he eventually succumbed by 2007.
At that point, the man's stepson decided the only way to rid his family of this curse
was to return the object to its place of origin. As such, he sent the carving to the
Egyptian embassy in Berlin, who sent the object back to the Supreme Council for Antiquities
for authentication. The artifact was sent along with a note from the stepson apologizing for the
theft and his account of his stepfather's death, which he attributed to the curse of the pharaohs.
According to the note, the stepson hoped that returning the carving would atone for his
stepfather's crime and allow his soul to rest in peace. That, presumably, is up to Osiris.
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