The year is 1922, and famed egyptologist Howard Carter is frustrated.
Months ago he had sent a telegraph to his financier, Lord Carnarvon, informing him of
another disappointing season of digging in the harsh Egyptian desert with no luck.
Lord Carnarvon's reply back had been simple: you have one more season of funding to make
a significant find.
Carter thus returned to a spot he had previously scouted but not dug at in the Valley of Kings,
a line of ancient huts mostly covered over with sand.
Yet whatever secrets lay hidden under the Egyptian sands remained that way, and now
time- and money- was running out.
If he didn't make a major discovery in the next week or two, his funding and career both
would be over.
In the work site a young Egyptian water boy is hurrying along bringing drinking water
to the thirsty workers when suddenly, he trips on a stone and dislodges it slightly.
Curious, he pries the stone loose and his eyes widen when he spies a set of stairs cut
into the bedrock.
Rushing to Carter's tent, cries of alarm ring throughout the camp.
Carter hurries to the accidental discovery, prying away more stone to reveal a full flight
of stairs leading deep into the earth.
Crews labor to remove the blocking debris until a man-sized opening is made, into which
Carter steps through.
Torch in hand, Carter descends the stairs and arrives at a mud-plastered doorway, upon
which are the stamps of several royal cartouches.
His eyes go wide- whatever lies behind this doorway is something big, something directly
linked to the ancient kings of Egypt.
He orders the hallway be refilled in order to discourage tomb robbers and immediately
departs for Cairo, where he sends a telegram to Carnarvon informing him of the discovery.
Carnarvon wires more funding to Carter, but insists on being there for the tomb opening-
and two and a half weeks later both men are in the ancient staircase, standing before
the mud-sealed doorway.
With a chisel his grandmother had gifted him for his 17th birthday, Carter makes a small
hole in the top left hand corner of the doorway, and raising a small candle to the hole, peers
inside.
At first he sees nothing, but then as the dust settles the dim light of the candle reflects
off golden and jeweled surfaces that litter the chamber behind.
Carnarvon impatiently asks Carter if he can see anything, to which Carter famously replies,
“Yes!
Wonderful things!”
Lost for three thousand years, Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun is widely considered
one of the greatest archaeological achievements in history, and yet the discovery was strangely
plagued by a great deal of deaths which many have attributed to the ancient curse of the
Pharaohs.
Others still point to more practical reasons for these strange deaths, but the unsettling
warnings of curses within the tombs themselves can be rather harrowing.
Take for instance this curse discovered in an Old Kingdom era tomb: “Cursed be those
who disturb the rest of a Pharaoh.
They that shall break the seal of this tomb shall meet death by a disease that no doctor
can diagnose.”
Eerily, many people involved with the excavation of ancient tombs in Egypt have succumbed to
strange diseases, or had previously diagnosed diseases flare up and claim their lives.
Yet many say that these were nothing more than practical warnings that preyed on the
superstition of ancient people, and if you are burying a dead guy in a room full of gold
and wealth it kind of makes sense to try and scare away any would-be tomb robbers.
Carter himself was said to propagate the myth of an ancient curse in order to keep tomb
robbers away after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, and yet none can deny that the penetration
of these sacred resting places and the pilfering of their riches has indeed led to some very
strange incidents.
But what about actual death caused by ancient curses, or at least serious illness?
For answers to those questions we can turn to nine of the most famous alleged victims
of the curse of the Pharaohs.
George Herbert, or Lord Carnarvon, was the financier behind Howard Carter's expeditions
to the Valley of Kings, and one of the first men to enter the tomb of Tutankhamun after
his three thousand year rest.
Months after the opening of the tomb mysterious accidents had already plagued some of the
workers involved with the original excavation, and already newspapers were running rampant
with tales of ancient curses being linked to the ancient boy-king's tomb.
A few months after his entrance into Tutankhamun's resting place, Lord Carnarvon was shaving
when he accidentally tore open a mosquito bite which led to a blood infection.
Days later he was dead, doctors attributing the death to pneumonia and a severe infection
of the skin and underlying soft tissues.
Immediately the press jumped on the story, claiming that Tutankhamun had claimed revenge
on the man responsible for his disturbance- yet more level-headed individuals were quick
to point out that Lord Carnarvon had always been prone to infections.
A semi-invalid after a nearly fatal car accident in 1903, Lord Carnarvon was prone to frequent
and severe lung infections, and it was generally believed that one severe bout of pneumonia
could lead to his death at any time.
Thus critics of the ancient curse theory point out that the Lord's death was unfortunate,
but completely ground in reality.
Yet consider that many ancient Egyptian curses warn of death by disease, and while Hollywood
would have us believe in ancient mummies coming to seek their revenge, what if the curse of
the Pharaohs merely seals your doom by completely natural means?
What if the ancient curse was nothing more than the slight nudging of Lord Carnarvon's
razor blade, causing it to cut into the mosquito bite which would become infected.
Or perhaps, the curse was the prompting of the mosquito in the first place, directed
to bite Lord Carnarvon in the one place his razor blade would slice....
A close friend of Howard Carter, Sir Bruce Ingham was allegedly gifted a paperweight
made from a mummified hand wearing a scarab bracelet- which is rather macabre.
Inscribed upon the bracelet were the words written in ancient Egyptian: “Cursed be
he who moves my body.
To him shall come fire, water, and pestilence.”
Soon after receiving the macabre gift, Ingham's house was lost in a freak fire which completely
gutted the home.
After rebuilding it, the home was then hit with a devastating flood.
There's no news if disease ever visited Ingham, but that may just be because he wisely thew
the very disturbing gift away- we definitely would have.
People not directly involved in the dig, and merely visiting the tomb were also susceptible
to the alleged curse though, with the most high profile of which was likely Prince Ali
Hemal Fahmy Bey who was murdered within a year of visiting the ancient tomb of Tutankhamen.
Sir Lee Stack, governor of Sudan, also met a violent death within a year of his visit
to the ancient tomb.
Another visitor to the tomb, British MP Aubrey Herbert would go blind shortly after and end
up dying of blood poisoning.
If this still seems like mere coincidence, Aubrey Herbert was Lord Carnarvon's half-brother,
and upon entering the burial chamber remarked aloud, “something dreadful is going to happen
to our family.”
One article in the Los Angeles Times however commented “No matter how little superstitious
a man may be, the act of breaking the rest so carefully guarded through the centuries
must cause an emotion which time can never efface.”
There's little doubt that there's truth to those words, and we can only imagine the feeling
of intrusion one must have when entering a three thousand year old tomb.
Yet if people were looking to explain away the ancient curse as coincidences, then 1924
would do little to allay their fears.
That year Sir Archibald Douglas-Reid, responsible for the initial x-rays of King Tutankhamun's
body, would go on to die of a mysterious illness- making the words of the curse warning of death
by a disease no doctor can diagnose ring eerily true.
After Sir Archibald was H.E.
Evelyn-white, a promising archaeologist who had been in the first team of explorers into
Tutankhamun's tomb.
He would go on to hang himself after writing “I have succumbed to a curse”- although
skeptics point out that Evelyn-White had just suffered the death of a close friend, and
may have been extremely depressed and meant his depression as his curse.
Dormant for a year, the curse reappeared in 1926 when George Benedite of the Louvre museum
died after visiting the ongoing excavations at the tomb.
Aaron Ember, another Egyptologist, also died that same year- this time of a freak accident
in his home.
After Howard Carter's main dig into the tomb archaeologist A.C. Mace took over and spent
from 1924 to 1928 on the site engaging in further excavations and making more discoveries.
However the longer he stayed on the site the weaker he seemed to become, until in 1928
he collapsed, dying days later of suspected arsenic poisoning in the same hospital as
Lord Carnarvon.
A year later skeptics would be rocked by two further deaths, the first of Howard Carter's
personal secretary Richard Bethell who had been present when the tomb was first opened.
He was found in November 1929, smothered to death in his bed.
A few months later, Bethel's father jumped to his death from a seventh floor apartment,
apparently in a fully delirious state.
His suicide note read “I really cannot stand any more horrors and hardly see what good
I am going to do here, so I am making my exit.”
His apartment was said to have been filled with artifacts directly from the dig site,
gifted to him by his son.
Lastly, that same year Lord Carnarvon's other half brother died from malarial pneumonia,
bringing an end at last to the curse of the Pharaohs.
Within just six years of the discovery of the tomb, Carnarvon, both of his half brothers,
Carter's chief archaeologist, his personal secretary and his secretary's father, the
excavation's radiologist, and a half dozen other prominent visitors to the tomb were
all dead.
Yet modern science points to a very possible explanation for most of the deaths.
After the death of an American egyptologist in 1995, American politicians ordered an investigation
into the hazards that mummies may pose, and a subsequent scientific study showed that
the mummies could carry several strains of deadly bacteria and mold- exactly the type
which could severely affect someone with a weakened immune system such as some of the
victims of the 1920's curse.
There's also the fact that the press had sensationalized the tales of a curse to such a degree, that
some of the more mentally unstable people involved in the excavation, such as Bethel
and his father, may have legitimately linked their mental troubles to the curse.
Lastly, and this one is one of the more interesting theories, is a recent publication by a historian
studying famed Satanist Alistair Crowley's notes who believes that the majority of the
deaths were at the hands of Crowley himself.
As a satanist who took inspiration for his worship from ancient Egyptian deities, Crowley
may have been deeply offended by the violation of Tutankhamen's tomb, and sought to reap
a revenge that could be attributed to the ancient curse the media was writing about
every day.
This historian links Crowley directly to several of the members who died as a result of the
alleged curse, and the fact that they all happened in Crowley's home of London, England,
lends great credence to the theory.
Ultimately we may never know if the curse of the Pharaohs was real, or just an imagined
explanation for the mysterious and tragic deaths of Carter's team.
It is easy to explain away superstitious talk of ancient curses, and it's likely that the
deaths were nothing more than natural causes or perhaps the murder spree of a satanist
fanatic- yet one can't help but note how very strange it was for so many people directly
linked with Tutankhamen's tomb to all die within years of each other.
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Swallowed You?
See you next time!