Death will come on swift wings to whomsoever opens this chest.
“It’s the curse! It’s the curse! Beware of the curse!” Beni.
“Stupid, superstitious bastard.” Daniels.
The Mummy, 1999
“CARNARVON’S DEATH SPREADS THEORIES ABOUT VENGEANCE; In Egypt, England, France and Here, Occultists Advance Stories of Angered Gods.
LONDON, April 5.—Genuine regret is expressed here on all sides at the death of Lord Carnarvon. The loss to Egyptological research is felt to be severe, and many tributes are paid to the perseverance that brought him to success, the final fruits of which, however, he was not destined to enjoy. His death has given strength to the belief held by a number of superstitious people that the hand of Nemesis pursues the disturbers of ancient Egyptian tombs…”
Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES. April 6, 1923
“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.” Egyptian tomb curse.
In 1869, Thomas Cook & Sons began offering tours to that most exotic and mysterious of destinations: Egypt. Napoleon’s 1798 campaign to Egypt had brought some of ancient Egypt culture back to Europe, and public fascination reached a fever pitch known as “Egyptomania”. Architecture, fashion, jewellery, mummy-unwrapping parties.
Yes, wealthy hosts would unroll mummies for entertainment after dinner, with much showmanship. These evenings would often include ‘lectures’, and afterward guests could even take home scraps of the wrappings as party favors.
The mummies, sadly, weren’t difficult to obtain. The common people of ancient Egypt were interred in niches in mass graves, and enterprising Egyptians 3,000 years later were happy to dig them up and sell them – or, if desired, tourists could climb down and choose their own, like a lobster in a tank.
Thomas Cook’s new organized tours took all of the work out of visiting exotic destinations. Tourists could climb the Great Pyramid, in full Victorian outfits, and have a picnic at the top. They could then cruise up the famous Nile river on special boats called dahabiyahs, sailing in luxury as they watched the great sands of Egypt pass by.
And so, in 1860, five young graduates of Oxford University, having embarked on the requisite Grand Tour to complete their education, found themselves in possession of a special souvenir. They’d bought it in the mummy pits of Deir el-Bahri, but it wasn’t a mummy – it was the coffin lid of a priestess of Amen-Ra. High-end stuff. The priestly castes of ancient Egypt weren’t to be trifled with.
One of the men went to Cairo, where he accidentally shot himself in the arm while quail hunting and had to have it amputated. A stupid accident, you may think.
However, misfortune plagued all of them. Two of the men died on the way back to England. Another member, Arthur Wheeler, managed to make it back to England, but lost his entire fortune gambling. He then moved to America, where he proceeded to lose his new fortune to both a flood and a fire.
After that, the coffin lid was placed under the care of Wheeler’s sister. When she decided to have it photographed in 1887, the photographer died, as did the porter who’d transported it. A man asked to translate the hieroglyphs on the lid committed suicide.
The lid was then sold to the British Museum. In 1904, after word of the cursed object got out a young and ambitious journalist named Bertram Fletcher Robinson published a front-page article about the artifact in the Daily Express, called “A Priestess of Death”. “It is certain that the Egyptians had powers which we in the 20th century may laugh at, yet can never understand.”
Three years later, he died suddenly of a fever. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by then doing spirituality tours, then said that he himself had warned Robinson that he’d be tempting fate if he got too involved with the ‘mummy’. “He persisted, and his death occurred.” … “The immediate cause of death was typhoid fever, but that is the way in which the ‘elementals’ guarding the mummy might act.”
I’ve heard various versions of this ‘mummy curse’ for years. None of them have been verified, but the mysteries of ancient Egypt were running so deep at the time that the idea of some terrible retribution for disturbing their dead just wouldn’t go away.
It wasn’t helped by the death of Lord Carnarvon, financier and patron of Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, which occurred not longer after the opening of the tomb. While Carter’s find, with all of the marvelous contents of an unlooted tomb, made all the news, the ‘pharaoh’s curse’ almost stole the show.
(Photo credit: Harry Burton, The Griffith Institute, Oxford. Colorized by Dynamichrome for the exhibition “The Discovery of King Tut” in New York).
George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, was born in 1866. He was an enthusiastic amateur Egyptologist, and in 1907 sponsored excavations among the tombs of nobles in Deir el-Bahri, near Thebes. Director of the Egyptian Antiquities Department Gaston Maspero recommended Howard Carter to do the work.
In 1914, Carnarvon received the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings, again led by Carter, who proceeded to search systematically for any tombs missed by previous expeditions. He specifically wanted to find the tomb Pharaoh Tutankhamun, the son of the infamous heretic pharaoh, Akhenaten. Akhenaten had tried to revolutionize Egyptian religion with the idea of a single deity, sun disk god Aten, instead of the large pantheon the ancient Egyptians had been worshipping for centuries. It didn’t go over well.
After the First World War put the excavations on pause, Carter resumed in late 1917, but five years later not much had been found. Lord Carnarvon was deciding to end the digging when, on November 4th, he received a telegram from Carter reading: “At last we have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival; congratulations.”
Carnarvon, with his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, hustled back to Egypt, and arrived in time to see the clearing of the stairs into the tomb was cleared. A seal containing Tutankhamun’s cartouche, an oval shape inside which the pharaoh’s name was inscribed in hieroglyphs, on the outer doorway confirmed the identity of the inhabitant. Four days later, the door that sealed the tomb was removed, then sealed by an official of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities. That night Carter, Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn, and Carter’s assistant Arthur Callender made an unauthorized visit, becoming the first people in thousands of years to enter the tomb.
The discovery exploded onto world news. All of those treasures, many either crusted in gold or made of the solid metal – a wonderful window into the world of the people who’d created such a fascinating culture millennia before the birth of Christ.
Then, on March 19th in 1923, Lord Carnarvon suffered a severe mosquito bite, which he then cut during shaving. It became infected, and blood poisoning soon set in in an era when antibiotics weren’t yet available (penicillin and sulfa drugs weren’t discovered until the late 1920s to mid 1930s). On April 5th, Carnarvon died in Cairo at the Continental-Savoy Hotel.
At the exact moment, apparently the lights went out across Cairo. Back in England at Highclere Castle, Carnarvon’s pet terrier dropped dead back. Then it came out that Howard Carter’s canary had been swallowed on the night the tomb was first breached by a cobra – a symbol of Egyptian royalty!
Claims that an engraved plaque had been found in the burial chamber, reading “Death comes on swift wings to he who disturbs the tomb of the pharaoh” had already spread, and the tabloid press in both the UK and US made the most of it. The intruders had been affected by an ancient curse, they said, and the Earl’s death only proved it.
When American railroad executive George Jay Gould caught a cold and died shortly after visiting the tomb, it seemed to provide more corroboration of a curse. The Daily Express newspaper in Britain reported that all over the country people had begun donating their Egyptian antiquities to museums in fear. The ‘curse’ took on a life of its own.
The idea of curses in mummies’ tombs took hold after Napoleon’s army looted treasures in the Valley of the Kings. Mummies were objects of fascination to the Europeans – so strangely preserved. There was an early Victorian stage act about unwrapping mummies who then came back to life, and then many Gothic writers, began writing stories of vengeful mummies. Louisa May Alcott even wrote one in 1867, called “Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy’s Curse”, followed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1892 about a reanimated mummy. How could a writer resist?
Every death with any association with the Tutankhamun tomb became a headline. The man who X-rayed the mummy, Sir Archibald Douglas Reid, died the following year of an unexplained illness. Fellow Egyptologist Professor Hugh Evelyn White committed suicide and left a note saying there was a curse on him, while American Egyptologist Aaron Ember died in a house fire. Howard Carter’s secretary was smothered with a pillow in an elite gentleman’s club.
Lord Carnarvon’s daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, believed the curse story so much that she wanted to break off her engagement so that her fiancé wouldn’t fall victim through marrying her. (Hegallantly refused.)
The concept of curses goes back to ancient times themselves. Cain was cursed by God to a life of eternal wandering after murdering his brother Abel. (And if you read my trilogy, you’ll find out what happened to him!) There are curses to be found in the Bible and the Koran. In tombs throughout the ancient world , archeologists have found curse tablets and dolls, promising all manner of dire repercussions.
To this day, the idea of curses persist. The Grimaldis of Monaco apparently carry a curse that they’ll never find happiness in marriage, placed upon them by a witch in the 14th century after Prince Rainier I, the first Grimaldi ruler of Monaco, ordered her to be burned at the stake. The Kennedy family seems to have had more than their share of misfortune, after someone Joe Kennedy crossed in business during the 1920s wreaked supernatural revenge.
According to a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, our human brain likes to recognize coincidences and infer some connection behind them.
Subject(s): Maps, Cartography, Cairo, Egypt, Topographic map, Political map, Nile River, Citadel, Saladin, Landmarks
Collection(s): Unstacked Topic(s): African History Find in: Library Catalog
We also tend to feel that objects hold memories of those who used them. We bury personal objects with our dead, save locks of hair, collect good luck charms and the like. We likely won’t touch something with a sinister reputation. (The writer in me makes note to self for my novel.) And we love stories – ghost stories in particular.
If you believe, then perhaps artifact 22542 in the British Museum, a piece of wood once covered an ancient Egyptian priestess, may have carried mysterious powers through time.
The British Museum’s archival notes for the ‘Unlucky Mummy’, as the coffin lid is known, list the following Curator’s comments:
“This object perhaps best known for the strange folkloric history attributed to it: it has acquired the popular nickname of the ‘Unlucky Mummy’, with a reputation for bringing misfortune. None of these stories has any basis in fact, but from time to time the strength of the rumours has led to a flood of enquiries.
The mummy-board is said to have been bought by one of four young English travellers in Egypt during the 1860s or 1870s. Two died or were seriously injured in shooting incidents, and the other two died in poverty within a short time. The mummy-board was passed to the sister of one of the travellers, but as soon as it had entered her house the occupants suffered a series of misfortunes. The celebrated clairvoyant Madame Helena Blavatsky is alleged to have detected an evil influence, ultimately traced to the mummy-board. She urged the owner to dispose of it and in consequence it was presented to the British Museum. The most remarkable story is that the mummy-board was on board the SS Titanic on its maiden voyage in 1912, and that its presence caused the ship to collide with an iceberg and sink!
Needless to say, there is no truth in any of this; the object had never left the Museum until it went to a temporary exhibition in 1990. This mummy-board is both a remarkable ancient object and an example of how Egyptian objects can develop their own modern existence.” www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA22542
When my hubby and I embarked on our own adventure to Egypt many years ago, Indiana Jones-style hats in tow, we didn’t see any mummies, as the Egyptian Museum was according them some respect and no longer displaying any. However, there were still a lot of mysteries about one of the most amazing cultures in history. At the time it was speculated that thousands of statues were still to be unearthed just under the Luxor temple. At the museum, the painting of the Meidum Geese, over 3,000 years old, looked as fresh as a daisy and had pigments yet to be identified.
Perhaps the idea of curses isn’t so far-fetched.
