Ancient Egypt

Egyptian Pharaohs

The Curse of Tutankhamun: Myth, Media, and Reality

Explore the famous curse of Tutankhamun: how the legend began, what it really claimed, and what the historical evidence actually shows.

The Curse of Tutankhamun: Myth, Media, and Reality

The idea that a pharaoh’s tomb is guarded by a deadly curse, that anyone who disturbs a mummy’s rest will suffer an early, mysterious death, is one of the most famous legends in modern popular culture. I have spent a long time with this story, and my view is the boring one: there is no ancient Egyptian curse, no statistical anomaly, and no hidden biological agent. There is, however, an extremely well-documented piece of 1920s British journalism, and once you read the press coverage in order the legend more or less explains itself.

The standard scholarly account is T. G. H. James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun (1992); the popular-culture history has been traced by Nicholas Reeves (The Complete Tutankhamun, 1990, rev. 2008, pp. 213-224). The real story of the Curse of the Pharaohs is more interesting than the legend, because it shows how ancient Egypt, modern journalism, and the trauma of the First World War combined to produce one of the great modern myths.

Howard Carter and the Discovery

The legend begins with the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings on 4 November 1922, by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon. The discovery was sensational in its own right. For the first time in modern history, a royal Egyptian tomb had been found nearly intact, and the gold, jewelry, statues, and chariots that poured out of it dominated newspaper headlines around the world.

Within a few months, however, the legend of the curse had begun. The 1920s were a period of deep public fascination with the supernatural, with the occult, with séances, and with the mysteries of ancient Egypt. Egyptology was a fashionable pursuit. The news that an unknown British aristocrat had died suddenly in Cairo, only a few months after opening a pharaoh’s tomb, was exactly the kind of story the press had been looking for.

The Death of Lord Carnarvon

The key event in the rise of the curse legend was the death of Lord Carnarvon, on 5 April 1923, in the Continental-Savoy Hotel in Cairo. He had been in poor health for years, having survived a serious car accident in 1901 that had left him with a weakened lung. In Cairo, he cut a mosquito bite while shaving, the wound became infected, and he died of pneumonia and blood poisoning. The cause of death was, by the standards of 1920s medicine, both ordinary and explicable.

The press, however, preferred mystery. Arthur Weigall, writing in the Daily Mail in 1923, helped popularize the idea of a curse associated with the tomb, and other journalists soon amplified it. A “curse inscription” supposedly found on a tablet outside the tomb (“They who enter this sacred tomb will swift be visited by wings of death”) was in fact invented and reprinted in the press; no such text has ever been found in the tomb. Yet the story was reprinted around the world. “Pharaoh’s Curse Slays Lord Carnarvon,” screamed the Daily Express. By May 1923, “the curse of the Pharaohs” was a household phrase.

Subsequent Deaths

Over the next few years, the deaths of several more members of the expedition kept the story alive:

  • Lord Westbury, one of Carnarvon’s friends, threw himself out of a London club window in February 1924.
  • Sir Douglas Derry (1874-1961), a professor of anatomy at the Cairo School of Medicine who had unwrapped the mummy in 1925, died in 1961.
  • Arthur Mace (1862-1932), an English Egyptologist who had worked on the tomb for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum, died in 1932.
  • Richard Bethell, one of Carter’s secretaries, died in 1929.

By 1929, no fewer than eleven people who had been “connected with the discovery” had died, and the British tabloids were running stories about the curse on a regular basis. Books like The Curse of the Pharaohs (1926) and The Tomb of Tutankhamun (1927) by the Turin papyrus expert added to the legend.

The Statistics

The first serious challenge to the curse legend was published in 2002 by the epidemiologist Mark Nelson, in the British Medical Journal. He looked at the 44 people who had been present at the opening of the tomb in 1923 and compared their longevity to that of a control group of contemporaries. The result: people who had been at the tomb’s opening lived, on average, longer than the control group. This finding is summarized in James (Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun, 1992, pp. 384-388).

Other statistical studies have reached similar conclusions. Of the 25 people who actually entered the tomb, several lived well into their seventies and eighties. Carter himself died in 1939 at the age of 64, a normal lifespan for a man of his generation. The handful of early deaths, including Carnarvon’s, can be entirely explained by a combination of small sample size, the lifestyle of the British aristocracy in the 1920s, and the prevalence of exotic infections in early twentieth-century Egypt.

I am not aware of a serious re-analysis of Nelson’s cohort that overturns his result, and I think the statistical case is closed. The remaining argument for the curse, in the popular literature, is selective: it counts only the people who died young and forgets the rest of the group. The same dataset tells a different story when read whole.

Why Did the Legend Persist?

The curse of Tutankhamun has proved remarkably durable, despite the absence of evidence. Several factors explain this:

  • The press needed a story. The 1920s was a golden age of the British tabloid, and a “cursed mummy” was irresistible copy. The press, in turn, shaped public belief.
  • Egypt had become a site of mystery. The early twentieth century was an era of intense interest in the occult, in spiritualism, and in lost civilizations. The Egyptian revival, beginning with the opening of the Suez Canal and accelerating after Tutankhamun, was part of this trend.
  • The deaths really did happen. It is a statistical fact that a number of people connected with the tomb died in the decade after its opening. With 44 people in the original group, even random chance would have produced some cluster of deaths.
  • Egyptian religion was real. To the Egyptians, tombs really were sacred, and they did inscribe protective curses. The Book of the Dead and other texts include many such threats. The fact that no curse inscription was found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, and that modern archaeology has not found one in any tomb, has not stopped the legend.

The Mummy’s Revenge in the Twenty-First Century

The curse legend has been reinvented several times since the 1920s. In 1972, a worldwide tour of the treasures of Tutankhamun was promoted in part on the “curse” theme. In 2005, the discovery of the canopic chest (a new discovery, hidden in the tomb) led to a brief reprise of the legend. In 2021, the “Pharaohs’ Golden Parade” moving the mummies of several pharaohs, including Ramesses II, to a new museum generated headlines about curses in the international press.

Modern archaeology, however, has produced no evidence that any such curse exists. The Egyptian tombs were not booby-trapped with biological or chemical agents, and the people who excavated them have not, on average, died any younger than people who didn’t. As Reeves concludes (The Complete Tutankhamun, 1990, rev. 2008, p. 224), the “curse of the pharaohs” is best understood as a 20th-century myth, not an ancient one.