[justify][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]THE CURSE OF TUTANKHAMEN[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]By the autumn of 1922, archeologists had already spent 16 years searching for the tomb of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings, near Thebes in Egypt. The patron of the current expedition, Lord Carnarvon, had decided that further work was pointless; the whole team would pack up and go home. However, as they prepared to leave, a group of Egyptian workmen were prodding around some boulders near the tomb of Rameses VI, which had already been opened. Here they found a flight of steps, covered by sand. After a week of digging down through the 60 feet of desert, the expedition's chief excavator, Howard Carter, discovered at the bottom the prize they had been seeking for so long: the tomb of the 14th Century BC boy-pharoah, marked by the inscription: "Lo, I am here".[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]For three years they worked through the antechamber and then the 5,000 breathtaking and priceless treasures in the burial chamber itself. These were finer than anything which had been discovered in any other Egyptian tomb. Finally, in October of 1925, they opened the coffin and found a death mask of beaten gold. This was the face of Tutankhamen, an image which gripped the world immediately and which still holds an immensely powerful resonance for millions of people.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]What the archeologists and their servants could not know was that a terrible curse would now settle upon all those who had defiled the tomb, a curse so vengeful that it not only killed many people on the original expedition, often in bizarre and unexpected circumstances, but persisted to the end of the century - even causing havoc among the makers of a TV film about the discovery, nearly sixty years later.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]The first example of the curse's awesome power came just five months after the tomb was entered, when Lord Carnarvon died in Cairo. The moment he breathed his last, all the lights in the city went out. Simultaneously, at his home in England, his favourite fox terrier threw back its head, howled, and dropped dead.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]Since then there have been many other deaths and weird goings-on associated with the tomb and the pharaoh. Howard Carter's assistant, Richard Bethell, died suddenly of a circulatory illness six years after the opening. Grief stricken by his son's death, his father, Lord Westbury, committed suicide by jumping from a block of flats. George Jay Gould, the son of the wealthy financier Jay Gould, died in 1923 within days of being one of the early visitors to the tomb.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]But the curse can affect anyone who comes in contact even indirectly with the desecrators. In 1980 a British TV company made a film based on the story. On actor, Raymond Burr, collapsed on the set and another, Ian McShane, broke his leg in a car crash. In 1992, Christopher Frayling made a series called 'The Face of Tutankhamen' for the BBC. During the filming, the crew shot a sequence in the Cairo museum, but found the tape blank when they played it back. While they were working in the tomb, the TV lights went out for twenty minutes, at the very moment Frayling mentioned the curse. Soon afterwards he suddenly stopped breathing and believes only prompt action by his wife saved his life. And a hotel lift he was travelling in fell 21 floors when the cable snapped.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]In spite of all these mysteries and terrors, those involved remained sceptical about the curse. The actress Angharad Rees, who played Carnarvon's daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, in the 1980 film, said afterwards: "It's all nonsense. Film sets can be dangerous and full of problems - this location was no worse than others I've worked at.' Nor was Christopher Frayling a believer: "I am sure there are rational explanations," he said afterwards.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]And he is perfectly right. This is a good example of a paranormal event, or series of events, in which we don't need to surmise that there's a perfectly rational explanation - we are virtually certain there is.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]But first, the curse. It does seem to have been a remarkably selective one. Though Lord Carnarvon died shortly afterwards, his daughter, who was also present at the opening, went on to live to the age of 79, dying fifty-seven years after the event. Indeed, the average survival rate for the 22 main participants was 20.9 years, and at least three lived for more than 40 years after the event. As the accompanying table shows, out of the people it's been possible to track down, only two had the misfortune to die when they were younger than 65. These include Carnarvon himself, who was in Egypt partly because he was ill already and his doctor had recommended the climate. He went to hospital after a mosquito bite he received in the Valley of the Kings turned septic.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]The story about the lights of Cairo going out at the moment of his death is dramatic, but hardly improbable. The power supply frequently failed in Cairo in the early part of the century; it was an event scarcely more surprising than rain in England. As for the faithful dog which died at the same instant as its master, first hand information about the timing is hard to come by, but one believer in the curse quotes Carnavon's son as saying it was 4 am British time. His father died at 1.55 am in Egypt. Since these time zones are two hours apart, the dog must have died within 5 minutes of the doomed desecrator.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]A good story, except that Britain is not ahead of, but two hours [u]behind[/u] Egypt, so even if the timing is accurate, the dog died four hours later. Nevertheless, it is an interesting coincidence that the two deaths occurred in the same night - except that for true believers any domestic mishap, from a death in the family to a grandfather clock stopping, would have served the purpose of making the event look spookier.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]The real explanation of this non-existent curse is probably much simpler. In 1980, the Daily Mail printed an interview with Richard Adamson, a former soldier, who had mysteriously avoided the effects of the curse in spite of having slept in the tomb to protect its contents for seven years. His head was a few inches away from the mummy in its solid gold coffin, and his feet were recklessly pointed at the two Ka statues, which had guarded the remains for 3,300 years.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]He told the newspaper that his main defence against grave robbers had been a wind-up gramophone and three records. He would play them - one was the triumphal march from Aida - so that the sound wafted eerily through the Valley, enough to deter anyone remotely superstitious.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]He had been sent to Egypt in 1921 as a military policeman during the British military occupation. The following year he was detailed to help Lord Carnarvon pack up the expedition, which at that stage had appeared to end in failure.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]When the discovery was first made in 1922, crowds of people descended on the site. They had begun to hamper the digging work, and there seemed a real danger that thieves would break in and ransack the burial chamber before the archeologists could get there. Mr Adamson told the Mail: "We realised we need something to keep the armies of curious people away. Many items down there were so fragile, they would have crumbled in the hands of people trying to carry them off.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]"Quite suddenly we thought about a curse. Inscriptions laying curses on intruders had been found on the walls of tombs nearer Cairo, and it so happened that a reporter had been hanging around asking about curses there. We saw no such inscriptions laying curses in Tut's tomb, but, let's say, we didn't discourage him from thinking there was. With a wink and nod from us he was quite happy to make up the tale of a curse over King Tut's tomb."[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]The story grew in fertile ground. The Victorian novelist Maria Corelli had already written: "No good will come of disturbing Pharoah's bones." One Egyptologist from the British Museum, Carol Andrews, says that in fact curses were not found in tombs, and archeologists wouldn't expect to find them - though they might find curses inveighing against anyone who disturbed the funery offerings of food and drink which were commonly left in chapels for the spirits to consume. Speaking more than 55 years after the event, Mr Adamson might easily have got some details wrong, but there seems no reason to doubt his statement that the curse was an ad hoc invention to serve a pressing purpose.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]An air of dark mystery already hung over Egyptian tombs. For instance, in the early part of the century there were popular stories, among the "urban legends" of their day, about a coffin lid which had belonged to a Princess from Thebes and had wound up in the British Museum. The lid, which carried the face of an unhappy woman, was said to represent a soul in torment. This lid was supposed to have created numerous mishaps, so it was sold secretly to an American, who took it home on the Titanic... None of this elaborate story was true, and the lid is still safely in the British Museum.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]But the Curse of Tut is a classic example of a paranormal myth. (Even Prince Charles asked Mr Adamson if the fact that both his legs were amputated was the result of the curse. Mr Adamson pointed out that this was the late result of injuries he'd suffered in the First World War, more than a decade earlier.) As with so many similar yarns, the story has gathered "facts", which are passed from one account to another without ever being checked. For example, Sir Lee Stack, the governor-general of the Sudan from 1917, is often quoted as a victim of the curse. He was assassinated in Cairo in November 1924 - but there is no apparent evidence that he ever visited the tomb.[/color][/font][/justify]
[justify][font:cc12=Comic Sans Ms][color:cc12=indigo]But the curse is a beguiling story. It implies, excitingly, that the dead live on and can still influence those still on earth. It has mystery and history, romance and colour. Any event which seems to bear out the story can be drafted in its support. Anything which doesn't, such as the long healthy life passed by Lord Carnavon's daughter, is simply ignored. A glance at the the real facts shows how nonsensical the curse is; but it's also nice to have Mr Adamson's testimony to show how the story probably started.[/color][/font][/justify]
Home 
Calendar
