Is the curse of the pharaohs real? Tutankhamun's “death list”

What the legend says

The curse of the pharaohs legend holds that anyone who disturbs the tomb of an Egyptian king will pay with his life. Its famous version is the curse of Tutankhamun. Howard Carter's team, financed by Lord Carnarvon, entered the boy king's tomb in November 1922, and a few months later Carnarvon fell ill in a Cairo hotel and died. The story adds that the lights of Cairo went out at the moment of his death, that his dog in England howled and died at the same instant, and that a clay tablet over the entrance promised death on swift wings to whoever touched the pharaoh's tomb, a tablet Carter supposedly buried so as not to frighten his workmen.

Then comes the Tutankhamun “death list”: every later death that could be tied, however loosely, to the tomb, counted as the curse at work.

Where it started

The mummy's curse began in fiction, not in Egypt. The Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat traced its first appearance to The Mummy!, an 1827 novel by Jane Webb Loudon, and in 1869 Louisa May Alcott wrote a story called Lost in a Pyramid: the Mummy's Curse. Genuine tomb curses exist, but they are rare and do not match the legend. The few known warnings mostly date from the Old Kingdom, around the 24th and 25th centuries BC, more than a thousand years before Tutankhamun; they turn up in non-royal tombs as often as royal ones, and they usually promise retribution in the afterlife rather than on earth.

The Tutankhamun curse was a product of the press. An exclusive deal with The Times left other journalists outside the tomb with little to see. On 24 March 1923, while Carnarvon lay ill with an infected mosquito bite, the best-selling novelist Marie Corelli warned in the British press that, according to a rare book she owned, “the most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb.” Scholars regarded the book she cited as a collection of fairy tales. Carnarvon died in the early hours of 5 April. Corelli was hailed as a clairvoyant, and, as the Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley puts it, rival papers finally had a story they could run without deferring to The Times.

How it grew

The story gathered detail quickly. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, blamed Carnarvon's death on an elemental spirit released by the excavation. Several passengers cancelled their passage on the steamer carrying his body home, and the British Museum received parcels of mummified hands, feet, ears and heads from souvenir owners who feared they would be next.

The death list grew for decades. It came to include Prince Ali Kemal Fahmy Bey, who had visited the tomb and was killed in 1923; Georges Bénédite of the Louvre, who died in 1926 after seeing it; Carter's private secretary Richard Bethell, who died in 1929; and Albert Lythgoe of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who died in 1934, a decade after seeing the open sarcophagus. Deaths among the flight crew that brought the 1972 Tutankhamun exhibition to London were blamed on the curse too.

In the 1970s the explanations shifted from spirits to supposed physical booby traps. Philipp Vandenberg's 1975 book The Curse of the Pharaohs suggested uranium-lined floors, cyanide and chambers that magnified the Earth's magnetic field, and cited the deaths of Carter's colleagues Alfred Lucas and Douglas Derry as evidence, although they lived two and four decades after the mummy was unwrapped. Numbers of victims circulate with the list, but none of the sources checked for this file supports a total, so none is given here.

Which details hold up

Carnarvon's death is real, and ordinary. He developed erysipelas at the site of a mosquito bite, which led to septicaemia and pneumonia; the familiar version says he cut the bite while shaving. His health was already weak: he had been badly hurt in a car crash in Germany in 1901 and was prone to lung infections.

The omens shrink on inspection. Tyldesley notes that power cuts in Cairo were far from unusual, and that once the time difference is allowed for, Carnarvon's dog died four hours after him, not at the same moment. No curse inscription has ever been found in the tomb. According to Tyldesley, the wording grew out of a phrase of Corelli's that was soon said to be carved over the entrance or somewhere inside. And in a land where only about 5 per cent of people could read, Tyldesley adds, robbers could hardly have read a warning anyway.

The death list does not survive counting. Carter, who led the work in the tomb for years, died in his London flat on 2 March 1939, aged 64. Of those who first entered the burial chamber, only Carnarvon died prematurely. In 1934 Herbert Winlock of the Metropolitan Museum of Art answered the rumours with a count showing that only six of the people present at the openings had died; the BMJ study gives his figure as six of 24, while a 2013 essay describes a chart of 40 people.

The formal test came in 2002. The epidemiologist Mark Nelson took the 44 Westerners whom Carter recorded as being in Egypt at the time and compared the 25 present at key moments, from the breaking of the burial chamber's seals to the examination of the mummy, with the rest. The exposed group died at a mean age of 70, against 75, and survived an average of 20.8 years after exposure, against 28.9; neither difference was significant. Writing in the BMJ, Nelson found no evidence for a curse, while noting that his numbers were small.

The scientific-sounding theories fare no better. Tyldesley points out that the idea of a mosquito carrying the king's embalming fluids does not stand up, because there were no mosquitoes in the dry Valley of the Kings before the Aswan dam was built in the 1960s; that no bats had got into the sealed tomb to leave toxic droppings; that deliberately planted poisonous spores are unlikely, since Egyptian medicine did not understand what caused illness; and that radiation has no evidence behind it.

Verdict

The curse of the pharaohs is a true story about newspapers rather than about ancient Egypt: a 19th-century fiction, a novelist's warning, a press shut out by an exclusive deal and one death that seemed to fit. Is the curse of Tutankhamun real? The inscription was never there, the people at the openings lived on average another two decades, and a formal study found no effect. Real or Legend files it as debunked.