In ancient Egypt, Pharaoh’s curses were common and were associated with symbols of authority like pharaohs whether alive or dead. The curses were sometimes faced on the tomb entrance to protect the dead and the monuments from being disturbed or looted. The people of Egypt considered the pharaoh to be a half-man, half-god.
The most famous curse of Tutankhamun was brought to
the attention of the people due to the mysterious deaths of some of Howard
Carter’s team and the people who visited Tutankhamun’s tomb afterward.
The curse of Pharaohs was allegedly cast upon people who disturbed the mummy of an ancient Egyptian, especially the Pharaohs.
TUTANKHAMUN’s tomb is said to hold a curse that was
broken by archaeologists when they entered to search its contents and affected
more than 20 of them in a matter of years.
It is said: “When Carter poked a hole into the tomb, Lord
Carnarvon asked if he could see anything and Carter famously replied ‘yes
wonderful things’.
“It is
alleged he found a curse written in hieroglyphics upon a clay tablet reading:
‘Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the pharaoh’s peace.’
Five months after
entering the tomb, Lord Carnarvon, aged 56, was dead. And at the time of his
death, all of the lights went out in Cairo. "However, the strange activity
did not stop there.
Who was Tutankhamun? Nearly lost to history
Tutankhamun was only the age of nine when he became king
of Egypt during the 18th dynasty of the New Kingdom (c. 1332–1323 B.C.E.). His
story would have been lost to history if it were not for the discovery of his
tomb in 1922 by the archaeologist Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings.
His nearly intact
tomb held a wealth of objects that give us unique insights into this period of
ancient Egyptian history. Tutankhamun married his half-sister, Ankhesenamun, but
they did not produce an heir. This left the line of succession unclear.
Tutankhamun died at the young age of eighteen, leading many scholars to speculate on the manner of his death—chariot accident, murder by blow to the head, and even a hippopotamus attack! The answer is still unclear.
Howard Carter: Who Opened Tutankhamun
On 26 November 1922
Howard Carter, a British Egyptologist, stood before a sealed door blocking a
dark corridor. Behind him stood his patron Lord Carnarvon. Both men knew that
they were standing in the tomb of the 18th-Dynasty boy king Tutankhamun – the
sealing on the now dismantled outer door had made that clear.
Carter came upon the
first of twelve steps of the entrance that led to the tomb of Tutankhamun. He
quickly recovered the steps and sent a telegram to Carnarvon in England so they
could open the tomb together. Carnarvon departed for Egypt immediately and on
November 26, 1922, they made a hole in the entrance of the antechamber in order
to look in.
But the outer door
had also shown the unmistakable signs of more than one forced entry. Was
Tutankhamun still lying undisturbed in his tomb? Or had the ancient robbers
once again thwarted the modern archaeologists? Nervously, his hands trembling,
Carter forced a small hole in the left hand corner of the doorway, lit a
candle, and peered inside.
“Presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light,
details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals,
statues and gold – everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment – an eternity
it must have seemed to the others standing by – I was struck dumb with
amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer,
inquired anxiously, ‘Can you see anything?’ it was all I could do to get out
the words ‘Yes, wonderful things’.”
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.
Tutankhamun’s innermost coffin
Tutankhamun’s coffin
(a box-like stone container) held not one but three coffins in which to hold
the body of the king. The outer two coffins were crafted in wood and covered in
gold along with many semiprecious stones, such as lapis lazuli and turquoise.
The inner coffin,
however, was made of solid gold. When Howard Carter first came upon this
coffin, it was not the shiny golden image we see in the Egyptian museum today.
In his excavation
notes, Carter states, it was “covered with a thick black pitch-like layer which
extended from the hands down to the ankles.
This was obviously an
smoothing liquid which had been poured over the coffin during the burial
ceremony and in great quantity.”
The image of the
pharaoh is that of a god. The gods were thought to have skin of gold, bones of
silver, and hair of lapis lazuli—so the king is shown here in his divine form
in the afterlife. He holds the crook and flail, symbols of the king’s right to
rule.
The death mask of Tutankhamun
The death mask is
considered one of the masterpieces of Egyptian art. It originally rested
directly on the shoulders of the mummy inside the innermost gold coffin. It is
constructed of two sheets of gold that were hammered together and weighs 22.5
pounds (10.23 kg).
Tutankhamen is
depicted wearing the striped names headdress (the striped head-cloth typically
worn by pharaohs in ancient Egypt) with the goddesses Nekhbet and Wadjet
depicted again protecting his brow. He also wears a false beard that further
connects him to the image of a god as with the inner coffin.
He wears a broad
collar, which ends in terminals shaped as falcon heads. The back of the mask is
covered with Spell 151b from the Book of the Dead, which the Egyptians used as
a road map for the afterlife. This
particular spell protects the various limbs of Tutankhamun as he moves into the
underworld.
Victims of King Tutankhamen's
Curse
1. George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon
The man who financed
the excavation of King Tut's tomb was the first to succumb to the supposed
curse. Legend has it that when Lord Carnarvon died, all of the lights in his
house mysteriously went out.
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.
2. Sir Bruce Ingham
Howard Carter, the archaeologist
who discovered the tomb, gave a paperweight to his friend Ingham as a gift. The
paperweight appropriately (or perhaps quite inappropriately) consisted of a
mummified hand wearing a bracelet that was supposedly inscribed with the
phrase, "cursed be he who moves my body." Ingham's house burned to
the ground not long after receiving the gift, and when he tried to rebuild, it
was hit with a flood.
3. George jay Gould
Gould was a wealthy
American financier and railroad executive who visited the tomb of Tutankhamen
in 1923 and fell sick almost immediately afterward. He never really recovered
and died of pneumonia a few months later.
4. Aubrey Herbert
It's said that Lord
Carnarvon's half-brother suffered from King Tut's curse merely by being related
to him. Aubrey Herbert was born with a degenerative eye condition and became
totally blind late in life.
A doctor suggested
that his rotten, infected teeth were somehow interfering with his vision, and
Herbert had every single tooth pulled from his head in an effort to regain his
sight. It didn't work. He did, however, die of sepsis as a result of the
surgery, just five months after the death of his supposedly cursed brother.
5. Hugh Evelyn-White
Evelyn-White, a
British archaeologist, visited Tut's tomb and may have helped excavate the
site. After seeing death sweep over about two dozen of his fellow excavators by
1924, Evelyn-White hung himself—but not before writing, allegedly in his own
blood, "I have succumbed to a curse which forces me to disappear."
6. Aaron Ember
American Egyptologist
Aaron Ember was friends with many of the people who were present when the tomb
was opened, including Lord Carnarvon. Ember died in 1926, when his house in
Baltimore burned down less than an hour after he and his wife hosted a dinner
party.
He could have exited
safely, but his wife encouraged him to save a manuscript he had been working on
while she fetched their son. Sadly, they and the family's maid died in the
catastrophe.
7. Richard Bethell
Bethell was Lord
Carnarvon's secretary and the first person behind Carter to enter the tomb. He
died in 1929 under suspicious circumstances: He was found smothered in his room
at an elite London gentlemen's club.
Soon after, the
Nottingham Post mused, "The suggestion that the Hon. Richard Bethell had
come under the ‘curse’ was raised last year, when there was a series of
mysterious fires at it home, where some of the priceless finds from
Tutankhamen’s tomb were stored." No evidence of a connection between
artifacts and Bethell's death was established, though.
8. Sir Archibald Douglas Reid
Proving that you
didn't have to be one of the excavators or expedition backers to fall victim to
the curse, Reid, a radiologist, merely x-rayed Tut before the mummy was given
to museum authorities. He got sick the next day and was dead three days later.
9. James Henry Breasted
Breasted, another
famous Egyptologist of the day was working with Carter when the tomb was
opened. Shortly thereafter, he allegedly returned home to find that his pet canary
had been eaten by a cobra—and the cobra was still occupying the cage.
Since the cobra is a
symbol of the Egyptian monarchy, and a motif that kings wore on their
headdresses to represent protection, this was a rather ominous sign. Breasted
himself didn't die until 1935, although his death did occur immediately after a
trip to Egypt.
10. Howard carter
Carter never had a
mysterious, inexplicable illness and his house never fell victim to any fiery
disasters. He died of lymphoma at the age of 64. His tombstone even says,
"May your spirit live, may you spend millions of years, you who love
Thebes, sitting with your face to the north wind, your eyes beholding
happiness." Perhaps the pharaohs saw fit to spare him from their curse.
11. Mohammad Ibrahim
Some 43 years later,
the curse struck down one Mohammad Ibrahim, who officially agreed to Tutankhamun’s
treasures being sent to Paris for an exhibition. His daughter was seriously
hurt in a car accident and Ibrahim dreamed he would meet the same fate and
tried to stop the export of the treasure. He failed and was hit by a car. He
died two days later.
Alleged victims of the curse included Prince Ali Kamel
Fahmy Bey of Egypt, shot dead by his wife in 1923; Sir Archibald Douglas Reid,
who supposedly X-rayed the mummy and died mysteriously in 1924; Sir Lee Stack,
the governor-general of the Sudan, who was assassinated in Cairo in 1924;
Arthur Mace of Carter’s excavation team, said to have died of arsenic poisoning
in 1928; Carter’s secretary Richard Bethell, who supposedly died smothered in
his bed in 1929; and his father, who committed suicide in 1930.
Did these bizarre deaths really happen due to the Pharaoh’s
curse? Or, all this happened by
coincidence? What’s your thought?
The End
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