Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun: was the tomb really cursed?

The next day the doorway was unblocked and an electric light installed. Carter and Carnarvon found themselves standing in the antechamber, an untidy room packed with everything that an Egyptian king could possibly need for an enjoyable afterlife. But Carter’s attention was fixed on the northern wall. Here, blocked, plastered, sealed and guarded by two large statues of Tutankhamun, was the doorway to the burial chamber. Once again, the sealed doorway had been breached by a robber’s hole.

Carter and Carnarvon knew that the anteroom must be emptied before the wall could be dismantled, but that would take many weeks of hard work. Desperate to know if the tomb was intact they returned that night and crawled through the robber’s hole. To their delight they found that the burial chamber was almost completely filled by a golden shrine, its seals still intact. Swearing each other to secrecy they crawled back and sealed the hole.

The burial chamber would be officially opened on 17 February 1923 in the presence of an invited audience of Egyptologists and government officials.

The public was fascinated by the activities in the Valley of the Kings. Those who could travel to Egypt did, though there was little for them to see. Those who could not visit in person relied upon the newspapers that carried almost daily reports from the Valley. Soon the small, sleepy town of Luxor was swamped with visitors and the expedition found itself living in near siege conditions. As a means of recovering some of the money that he had spent looking for Tutankhamun, Carnarvon decided to sign an exclusive deal with The Times. This incensed the reporters from the other newspapers, and did nothing to stop their demands for information. Denied official access to the tomb, they now printed sensational gossip in place of facts.

In late February 1923 the excavation was closed to allow the exhausted excavators a brief holiday. While Carter stayed in Luxor, Carnarvon and his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, sailed south to spend a few days at Aswan. During this trip Carnarvon was bitten on the cheek by a mosquito. Then, soon after his return to Luxor, he accidentally sliced the scab off the bite while shaving. He soon started to feel unwell. With his condition worsening he travelled to Cairo for expert medical attention. But it was too late. Blood poisoning set in and pneumonia followed. A younger, fitter man may have been able to throw off the infection, but the 57-year-old Carnarvon was still suffering the effects of a severe motor accident in 1901 that had left him weak and vulnerable to chest infections. He died on 5 April 1923.

Here was a dramatic Tutankhamun story that everyone could report. News of the death travelled fast, stimulating intense debate. For the first time the general public, made sensitive to the plight of the defenceless dead by the First World War and the major flu epidemic that followed it, started to question the archaeologists’ easy assumption that the dead were a legitimate target. Would Carter be happy if someone attempted to dig up the recently deceased Queen Victoria, asked one indignant Times correspondent?

For some observers this was far more than a question of ethics. They believed that the excavation had put the lives of the archaeologists at risk. Anyone with a taste for popular fiction understood just how dangerous the ancient Egyptians could be. Victorian literature was filled with accounts of vengeful mummies who strangled, poisoned and possessed their victims, with one of the most sensational works, Lost in a Pyramid, or, The Mummy’s Curse, being penned by Louisa May Alcott, more famous today as the author of Little Women. Already, before Carnarvon’s death, novelist Marie Corelli had warned against tampering with the unknown: “I cannot but think that some risks are run by breaking into the last rest of a king of Egypt whose tomb is specifically and solemnly guarded, and robbing him of his possessions”.

Britain, in 1923, was a land looking for comfort. The old religious certainties, already weakened by the scientific advances of the Victorian age, had been further eroded by the horrors of the First World War. Now the country was experiencing a wave of interest in all aspects of the occult as seances and ouija boards offered a glimmer of hope that the bereaved could contact those who had “passed over”. Theosophy, an occult attempt to reach spiritual enlightenment partially inspired by the spiritual forces or “elementals” of the ancient Egyptians, was all the rage

False reports started to emerge from the tomb. Many people believed that an engraved plaque – “Death comes on swift wings to he who disturbs the tomb of the pharaoh” – had been discovered and suppressed by Carter. It hadn’t; the plaque quite simply did not exist. Carter himself had little patience with the curse theorists. He made his feelings plain in an interview with the New York Times: “It is rather too much to ask me to believe that some spook is keeping watch and ward over the dead Pharaoh, ready to wreak vengeance on anyone who goes too near”. Inevitably, his vehement denial sparked rumours that Carter was collaborating with “the authorities” to hide the evidence of a dangerous curse.

Testing the curse theory

How could the long-dead Tutankhamun have killed anyone? The idea that his burial might have been booby trapped with poison was a popular one. It is theoretically possible that the sealed chamber could have housed a cocktail of microscopic spores and, indeed, a black fungus was found growing inside the tomb. However the Egyptian scientists simply did not have the knowledge necessary to set such a sophisticated trap. Could Carnarvon have been killed accidentally? Maybe he had been infected by poisonous bat-droppings? Or had been poisoned by a mosquito which had drunk embalming fluids?

It was left to the more practically minded to point out that the sealed tomb could not have housed a bat colony, while the lack of water in the Valley of the Kings meant that there were no mosquitoes. This injection of common sense did little to halt speculation. Many “experts”, most notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of two popular tales of ancient Egypt, preferred the idea of an intangible curse implemented by “elementals”.

In 1934 Egyptologist Herbert Winlock attempted to disprove the curse theory by studying the statistics. He found that only six of the 26 people present at the opening of the tomb had died within a decade. Time was to prove that, of those who had first visited the burial chamber, only Carnarvon had died suddenly at the relatively young age of 57. Howard Carter died aged 64, some 16 years after Carnarvon, while Lady Evelyn, who had been present on the first, clandestine, visit to the burial chamber, did not die until 1980.

Professor Douglas Derry who, it might be argued, committed the gravest desecration by autopsying and dismembering the king’s body, reached the grand age of 87. In 2002 Mark Nelson of Monash University, Melbourne, confirmed Winlock’s results, finding that the 25 people most likely to have been exposed to the curse died at an average age of 70. To set these figures into context, life expectancy at birth for men born in 1900 was 47 years, while those who lived to the age of 65 might be expected to reach the age of 76.

Writer and broadcaster Dr Joyce Tyldesley is honorary research fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at Liverpool University, and teaches Egyptology at Manchester University

This article was first published in the November 2005 issue of BBC History Magazine