“Unearthing the Truth: Did the Pharaoh’s Curse Really Guard Ancient Tombs?”

It is a classic supernatural horror trope: a team of archaeologists dig through the desert sands to reveal the entrance of an ancient Egyptian tomb, sealed and forgotten for millennia. Carved over the door in hieroglyphics they find an ominous inscription, warning that anyone who dares disturb the tomb will suffer a terrible curse. Undeterred, our intrepid team ventures inside, where they discover the mummified remains of an ancient pharaoh and a hoard of golden treasures meant to accompany him to the afterlife. It is the discovery of a lifetime – one that will bring the archaeologists a lifetime of fame and fortune. Unfortunately for them, however, “lifetime” is a very relative term. One by one, the members of the team are struck down by mysterious illnesses and accidents, until not one is left alive.

The trope of the “pharaoh’s curse” is so engrained in our popular image of ancient Egypt that every new archaeological discovery is inevitably met with countless tongue-in-cheek calls to “put that back where you found it”. While the idea of ancient supernatural curses may seem laughable to us today, myths and legends always come from somewhere. So, is there even a tiny kernel of truth to the pharaoh’s curse? Did the Ancient Egyptians actually place curses on tombs to protect them, and have any archaeologists actually died in a manner that defies logical explanation? The answer may surprise you.

Despite a seemingly infinite amount of pop-cultural claims to the contrary, protective ‘curses’ of the type we usually think of are exceedingly rare in Ancient Egyptian tombs. The vast majority of the inscriptions found in these tombs are ritual in nature, containing instructions to help guide the occupant safely to the afterlife. One of the rare exceptions is found in the 6th Dynasty mud-brick tomb or mastaba of Khentika Ikhekhi:

“As for all men who shall enter this my tomb… impure… there will be judgment… an end shall be made for him… I shall seize his neck like a bird… I shall cast the fear of myself into him.”

The 9th Dynasty tomb of Akhifiti, governor of Hierakonopolis, contains a similar warning:

“Any ruler who… shall do evil or wickedness to this coffin… may Hemen not accept any goods he offers, and may his heir not inherit.”

While the tomb of 18th dynasty architect Amenhotep, son of Hapu, bears the following metal-as-f***k inscription:

“As for anyone who will come after me and who will find the foundation of the funerary tomb in destruction…

Their bodies will decay because they will starve and will not have sustenance and their bones will perish.”

The vast majority of such curses date from the Old Kingdom period of 2700-2200 B.C.E, and are found almost exclusively in the tombs of private individuals or low-ranking politicians, not pharaohs or other nobility. One famous exception, discovered in the Bahariya Oasis and dating to the Greco-Roman period, reads:

“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.”

While certainly fitting our popular image of a “pharaoh’s curse”, such inscriptions were likely intended as a reminder for priests to maintain the ritual purity of the tomb, rather than a warning to would-be grave robbers. As for the rarity of these curses, Egyptologists believe that at the time the act of robbing a grave would have been seen as unthinkable and dangerous to write down. Furthermore, while pharaohs and other nobles had armies of priests to maintain and guard their final resting places, private individuals had no such resources, and would thus have taken every possible precaution – including written curses – to protect their own tombs.

But while such curses did technically exist, accounts of supernatural events tied to Egyptian antiquities do not appear until very recently. One of the earliest such accounts appears in Louis Penicher’s 1699 book A Treatise on Embalming, and tells of a Polish traveller who purchased two mummies in Alexandria for use in making medicine – and yes, once upon a time people did eat mummies as well as grind them into paint as fertilizer, but that is a story for another time. According to Penicher, on the journey home the traveller’s ship was beset by rough seas while he was haunted by ghostly visions – neither of which abated until he finally threw the mummies overboard.

The definitive origin of the pharaoh’s curse legend, however, is usually traced to the early 19th century. In 1821, English surgeon and antiquary Thomas Pettigrew held a bizarre spectacle at the Egyptian Hall, in Picadilly, London: the public unwrapping of an Egyptian mummy. The event caused a sensation, inspiring a trend for similar “unwrapping parties” that lasted decades. The spectacle also inspired writer Jane Loudon Webb to write a fantasy novel titled The Mummy: or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, among the first stories to feature a mummy returning to life and taking revenge on those who dared disturb its tomb. This was followed in 1828 by the children’s book The Fruits of Enterprise, featuring similarly animated and vengeful mummies. In 1869 Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, even took a stab at the genre – penning a short story titled Lost in a Pyramid or: The Mummy’s Curse – as did Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his 1892 story Lot 249. Interestingly, many of these early pieces of mummy fiction were written by women and feature female mummies taking revenge on male desecrators, leading some experts like cultural anthropologist Jasmine Day to interpret the texts as thinly-veiled rape-revenge fantasies.

While French philologist Jean-François Champollion announced his decoding of hieroglyphics from the famous Rosetta Stone in 1822, it was many decades before egyptologists were able to translate ancient Egyptian texts with any confidence. Thus, the idea of the pharaoh’s curse was well established long before any actual written curses were discovered or translated, the trope originating not from actual Egyptian history or mythology but from western Orientalist ideas of the ancient Egyptians as a mysterious, darkly spiritual people. But one event above all others popularized the myth and planted it firmly in the public imagination: the discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun.

The tomb of the boy king, who ruled from around 1341-1323 B.C.E. until his untimely death at age 18, was uncovered on November 4th, 1922 by a team led by British archaeologist Howard Carter and his wealthy patron, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon. Though tiny compared to other royal tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, Tutankhamun’s was the first to be found almost entirely intact, and contained hundreds of intricately crafted grave goods, many crafted from solid gold. The discovery caused a media sensation, sparking a worldwide craze for all things ancient Egyptian.

On November 29, 1922, Carter finished excavating the staircase leading down to the tomb and cut through the door into the tomb itself. According to Egyptologist Henry Breasted, shortly thereafter Carter dispatched an Egyptian worker to run an errand at his nearby house. On approaching the entrance the worker heard a “faint, almost human cry”, whereupon he rushed in to find Carter’s pet canary dead in the jaws of an Egyptian cobra. Since in ancient Egyptian mythology the rearing cobra or uraeus was a symbol of divine royalty, the incident sparked local rumours of a curse. These rumours would only intensify when, four months after the opening of the tomb, Lord Carnarvon suddenly fell ill and died. Eerily, just six weeks earlier egyptologist Arthur Weigall had observed Carnarvon joking and laughing as he entered the tomb. Turning to a nearby reporter, Weigall quipped: “I give him six weeks to live.” Furthermore, just two weeks prior to Carnarvon’s death, the New York World magazine published a letter by English novelist Marie Corelli claiming that a “dire punishment” would befall anyone who opened a sealed tomb. This chain of coincidences sparked another media frenzy, launching the pharaoh’s curse into the public consciousness. Adding to the legend were reports that at the moment of Carnarvon’s death, the power grid in Cairo blacked out and his dog back at the family estate in Highclere, England, let out an anguished cry and suddenly died.

Carnarvon’s demise would soon be followed by a string of mysterious incidents and deaths. On May 16, 1923, American financier George Jay Gould I died of a fever shortly after visiting Tutankhamun’s tomb, while in 1924 Sir Archibald Douglas-Reid, the first person to x-ray the pharaoh’s mummy, died of complications from abdominal surgery. That same year, archaeologist Hugh Evelyn White hanged himself, while in 1925, Howard Carter presented his friend Sir Bruce Ingram with a paperweight composed of a mummified hand adorned with a bracelet inscribed with the words “Cursed be he who moves my body. To him shall come fire, water, and pestilence.” Shortly after receiving the gift, Ingram’s house in England burned to the ground. And when the house was finally rebuilt, it was destroyed once again by a flood. Other alleged victims of the curse were Egyptian Prince Ali Kamel Fahby Bey, shot dead by his French wife in 1923; Sir Lee Stack, governor-general of the Sudan, who was assassinated in Cairo in 1924; Aaron Ember, a close friend of Lord Carnarvon’s who died in a 1926 house fire; Arthur Mace, a member of Carter’s excavation team who died of pneumonia in 1928; and Captain the Honourable Richard Bethell, Carter’s secretary, who was smothered to death in a Mayfair club in 1929.

These deaths were more than enough to convince the chronically superstitious of the reality of the curse.

Many nervous collectors began sending their Egyptian relics to museums to avoid becoming the next victims, while avowed spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publicly speculated that the deaths of Lord Carnarvon and others were caused by “elementals” summoned by Tutankhamun’s priests to guard the royal tomb.

But if any of this is starting to convince you that the pharaoh’s curse is actually real, I am sorry to inform you that the legend simply doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny, and that all the deaths commonly attributed to the curse are at best only circumstantially connected and at worse complete coincidences. Take, for example, the death that started it all: that of Lord Carnarvon. According to his autopsy, Carnarvon died of septicaemia or blood poisoning, contracted when he accidentally sliced open a mosquito bite on his cheek while shaving. It was an accident that could have happened anytime and anywhere, and was completely unrelated to Tutankhamun’s tomb. The swiftness of Carnarvon’s death was also unsurprising, for the Earl had been in poor health since being injured in a 1903 automobile accident and was prone to frequent bouts of pneumonia and other illness. Nonetheless, true believers pointed to his unusual manner of death as proof of the curse when, during the first detailed autopsy of Tutankhamun’s mummy, a lesion was found in a similar spot on the pharaoh’s cheek.

The other deaths commonly attributed to the curse are even more dubious, with many of the victims having only a tangential connection to the opening of the tomb – or, in many cases, none at all. But perhaps the greatest strike against the legend is that Howard Carter himself – logically the number one target of a curse – lived for another 16 years, dying in 1939 of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Equally long-lived were Achaeologist J.O. Kinnaman, who died in 1961; Lord Carnarvon’s daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, who died in 1980; and Sergeant Richard Adamson, who guarded the tomb round-the-clock for seven years and died in 1982. Indeed, of the 58 people present when the tomb was opened, only eight died within the next 12 years. More amusingly still, according to magician and debunker James Randi:

“This group died at an average age of seventy-three plus years, beating the actuarial tables for persons of that period and social class by about a year. The Curse of the Pharaoh is a beneficial curse, it seems.”

Though Carter himself dismissed the curse as “Tommy-rot”, he was ironically partially responsible for its spread. As James Randi explains:

“When Tut’s tomb was discovered and opened in 1922, it was a major archaeological event. In order to keep the press at bay and yet allow them a sensational aspect with which to deal, the head of the excavation team, Howard Carter, put out a story that a curse had been placed upon anyone who violated the rest of the boy-king.”

Carter also attempted to ward off reporters by selling the exclusive rights to the story of Tut’s tomb to the Times of London. This arrangement, which caused every other news outlet to be at least a day behind The Times in reporting on the excavation, encouraged reporters to concoct sensational stories to capture the public’s attention. Such wholesale speculation and fabrication led to newspapers reporting that the tomb contained written curses when none, in fact, existed. The only vaguely curse-like inscription in the entire tomb was found on a shrine containing a statue of Anubis, the Ancient Egyptian god of embalming. This inscription merely states “It is I who hinder the sand from choking the secret chamber. I am for the protection of the deceased”, but by the time the translation reached the press it had acquired an additional passage: “…and I will kill all those who cross this threshold into the sacred precincts of the Royal King who lives forever.” Soon, this had metamorphosed further into the far more menacing: “They who enter this sacred tomb shall swift be visited by wings of death.”

Yet while 100 years have passed since the opening of Tutankhamun’s Tomb, the legend of the pharaoh’s curse is still alive and well. In 1972, when Dr. Gamal Mehrez of the British Museum died after supervising the transfer of Tutankhamun’s treasures to an exhibit in London, his death was widely blamed on the curse. More recently in 2021, the transfer of 22 mummies from the old Egyptian Museum to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization was blamed for a string of strange incidents across Egypt, including a train crash, a building collapse, and the container ship Ever Given becoming stuck in the Suez Canal. Former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass dismissed the claims as ridiculous, but Hawass himself is not immune to the superstition. In 1996, while moving the mummies of two children from Bahariya Oasis to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Hawass reported being haunted by apparitions of the children in his dreams. The dreams did not stop until the mummies were reunited with that of their father, after which Hawass decided not to put the bodies on display.

In recent years, microbiologists have put forward a scientific explanation for the so-called pharaoh’s curse: mold spores and other microorganisms. Indeed, many different species of mould and bacteria have been found inside ancient Egyptian tombs including Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus flavus, Pseudomonas, and Staphylococcus – all of which can cause serious health effects if inhaled. However, there is no evidence that any of these organisms were responsible for the deaths of any archaeologists, meaning that the ultimate source of the pharaoh’s curse is the same as it always was: our own fanciful imaginations.

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