The truth about the curse of the pharaohs

George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, was bitten on the cheek by a mosquito some time in early March 1923. The bite became infected. By April he was running a high fever, had pneumonia in both lungs and his heart and respiratory systems were failing. He died in a Cairo hospital on 5 April.

His death came less than six months after Howard Carter, the Egyptologist whose excavations Carnarvon was funding, first discovered evidence that there was an undisturbed tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Thebes. That was on 4 November 1922 – 100 years ago this month. A few days later, Carter, Carnarvon and his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, had squeezed through a roughly-hewn hole in the wall of the burial chamber of Tutankhamun, uncovering its glittering treasures.

And now, just as his triumph was being celebrated globally, Carnarvon was dead, aged only 56. The curse of the pharaohs had struck again. 

I say ‘again’ because despite this being the moment it achieved international notoriety, the notion of a curse by the ancient Egyptians predated Carnarvon by some decades, becoming a staple of 19th century supernatural fiction. His death was simply its apogee. 

Louisa May Alcott, for instance, had written Lost in a Pyramid, or the Mummy’s Curse in 1868 while also working on the rather more enduring Little Women. It features adventurers who disturb the tomb of a long-dead sorceress outside Cairo – and things go rapidly downhill for them from there.   

I first became aware of the curse as a child reading Tintin. There was a lot of Tutankhamun around in the 1970s, but the output of Blue Peter and the like, which were my primary sources, concentrated on the discovery rather than any murderous magic that might have been attached. The Seven Crystal Balls, however, opens with our hero on a train reading a newspaper report about the discovery of pre-Conquistador Inca tombs in Peru. A stranger reading over his shoulder remarks: ‘This will lead to trouble… remember what happened with Tutankhamun. Think of all those Egyptologists dying in mysterious circumstances after they’d opened the tomb of the Pharaoh.’

Hergé was repeating what had become widely believed since Carnarvon’s death: that after the opening of the tomb in Thebes – modern-day Luxor – there had been a pattern of unusual and unexplained deaths among those involved. 

The most celebrated proponent of the curse theory was Arthur Conan Doyle, who had been convinced of the malevolent powers of antiquities from Egypt even before the King Tut discovery. When his friend and sometime collaborator, the Daily Express journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson, died suddenly from typhoid in 1907, Conan Doyle concluded the probable true cause was the long time Robinson had spent in the British Museum studying a female mummy and the maledictions that he had thus unwittingly unleashed – what he termed ‘elementals’.

So when news of Carnarvon’s premature death reached London, Conan Doyle was quick to attribute it to black magic spells made by Egyptian priests 3,000 years earlier to guard the tomb – a case of ‘Elementals, my dear Watson’. Conan Doyle’s endorsement gave the story wings. 

There was some great colour around the curse: stories of mysterious fires, suicides and shootings. I particularly like the suggestion that a messenger delivering news of the discovery to Carter’s home arrived to find his pet canary in the jaws of a cobra – the symbol of the Tut-era Egyptian monarchy – that had slithered into its cage.

Of course, the notion that the Carter-Carnarvon dig was cursed has been debunked so many times in the subsequent century that the debunking is as much a staple of the Tut story as the curse itself. There was no unusual pattern of deaths: Carter, who dismissed suggestions of any curse as ‘tommyrot’, died in 1939 at the ripe-ish age of 64, while Lady Evelyn clung on another 57 years until 1980. But fake news is hard to untell.  

And Conan Doyle’s tale of the curse was soon picked by that booming new medium, cinema, which would project it more widely still. A supernatural theme with a nebulous baddie wouldn’t work so well on screen, though, so United Artists had the fatal vengeance being delivered by the long-dead but well-preserved VIP himself. The Mummy was born ­– and with it a franchise that has run from 1932, with Boris Karloff, to a Tom Cruise version as recently as five years ago.

The myth permeates culture more widely, too. The idea of mysterious ancient powers and excavation underpins the Indiana Jones films, for instance, and lately too the curse has been revived by one of the biggest gaming franchises, Assassin’s Creed. There is of course something intrinsically ridiculous about being chased by a monster swathed in bandages, so it’s also become a comic standard, with multiple iterations via the likes of Abbott and Costello, Carry On Screaming! and Scooby Doo. 

But for believers there is nothing funny about the curse. Mussolini was said to be so spooked by it he ordered the removal of a resident mummy from his palazzo. 

The roots of the story may not be completely spurious, of course: it seems to me likely that there would have been curses made, spells cast. In How to Read a Graveyard, Peter Stanford explores burial rituals across multiple civilisations and times, and a recurring theme is how the burier wishes their dead ancestor to remain undisturbed and how warring enemies often desecrate their remains. Wouldn’t curses be a good way to try to ward off this outcome? 

When we say ‘rest in peace’, we are already halfway to wishing ill on future disturbers of our deceased loved ones. The annotation on Shakespeare’s grave, for instance, is quite specific in this regard: ‘Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.’

And curses have been found carved on some ancient world tombs – if not Tut’s. My memory of tourism in the Luxor tombs was that they were indeed strange and haunting. Tombs do tend to be. 

So the question perhaps is not so much ‘Was there a mummy’s curse?’ but ‘Did it work?’. The obvious answer is: no. But personally I’d still be wary about going on any digs in Egypt.