Later that month, Carter and Lord Carnarvon did exactly that, clearing the way to the door, which they found to bear the symbols of King Tut as well as evidence of a breach by possible grave robbers. Nevertheless, days of digging later, Carter’s candle illuminated through a hole in the door an antechamber full of archeological treasures…and actual treasure, since much of it was gold. Most exciting, they saw another door behind it, this one with the seals intact.
Next came the slow, steady work of cataloguing the artifacts on their way to the sealed door and its promise of a dead boy king. It took about seven weeks. Meanwhile, headlines around the world touted the find and tourists crowded the site, watching as these treasures were carted to a nearby empty tomb for documentation. Then, just as the antechamber was cleared, the tomb was closed for the season. The world would have to wait a little longer to see if the tomb still held its royal mummy.
Lord Carnarvon would never find out. During the break, while in Aswan in southern Egypt, he was bit by a mosquito, and then he nicked the bite while shaving. He contracted blood poisoning and died shortly thereafter. His death gave the curse story life. It took off partly because there was already a template in place thanks to previously discovered cursed Egyptian funeral objects (namely, the Unlucky Mummy — see this page), but also because Carnarvon had sold exclusive press rights to the dig to the Times of London, leaving all other media outside the ropes with the tourists. But with Carnarvon dead, they didn’t need access anymore. They had a whole new angle on the King Tut story: the curse of the pharaohs.
The story was further helped along by people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who posited that nature spirits called elementals (my dear Watson) that guarded the tomb must have taken vengeance upon Carnarvon for disturbing it. Another author, Marie Corelli, attested that she owned a rare Egyptian book that explained that royal tombs contain secret poisons for defilers. People added apocryphal events to the timeline, for instance, that a cobra — a symbol of the pharaohs — ate Carnarvon’s canary on the day he opened the tomb. That his dog howled and died on the same day that he did. That a clay tablet with a curse was found in the tomb and then destroyed by Carter and Carnarvon so that the workers wouldn’t see it and be scared away. That when Tut was unwrapped, he bore a matching facial wound to Carnarvon’s lethal shaving one.
His suicide note stated, “I can’t stand any more horrors.”
Meanwhile, Carter kept digging. He reached the burial chamber in early 1923, where he found King Tut’s body and more than 5,000 other items, including a gold coffin and Tut’s iconic gold mask. But overshadowing this discovery that reinvigorated Egyptian archeology were all the people connected to the dig who died after Carnarvon. The lists reads like the lyrics to Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died.”
After Carnarvon, there was railroad magnate George Jay Gould, who visited the freshly opened tomb and died of pneumonia shortly thereafter. Egyptian aristocrat Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey, another early tomb visitor, was shot by his wife that same year. Still in 1923, Carnarvon’s half-brother Aubrey Herbert died from what some say was blood poisoning. In 1924, Archibald Douglas Reid, a radiologist who x-rayed King Tut’s sarcophagus, died from a mysterious illness, and Sir Lee Stack, Governor-General of Sudan and one of the first people to visit the tomb, was assassinated in Cairo. In 1926, French Egyptologist Georges Bénédite perished after taking a fall outside the tomb. Arthur Mace, a member of Carter’s team, suffered ill health after twenty years in the field and had to retire from Egypt. He died in 1928, some say from arsenic poisoning.
Jumping to 1929, another of Carnarvon’s half-brothers, Mervyn Herbert, succumbed to pneumonia. That same year Captain Richard Bethell, who worked for both Carnarvon and Carter in various roles, died in bed under suspicious circumstances. Months later, his father threw himself out the window of his seventh-floor apartment. His suicide note stated, “I can’t stand any more horrors.”
All these people were somehow connected to the discovery of King Tut, and they all died within seven years. But the carnage didn’t stop there. The list of people claimed to be cursed by King Tut grew exponentially over the decades. Anybody who visited the tomb, wrote about it, transferred artifacts from it, or was related to someone who did those things was rewarded with the word curse in their obituary.
But what of Howard Carter? The guy without whom King Tut might still be twice buried? He lived for almost two decades after opening the tomb, dying at age sixty-four of Hodgkin’s disease in London. His grave bears an inscription taken from the Wishing Cup of King Tut, a chalice found in the tomb: “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.”
In the end, the curse of King Tut’s tomb has thrived because it makes sense as a story. What do you expect to happen when you defile the ancient dead and dump out the afterlife-bound treasures of a death-and-eternity-obsessed culture? If anything is cursed in the history of the world, the Egyptian tomb of a royal must be.
Historically, Tut has been on display in his tomb for anyone to see, while many of the treasures of his afterlife have been exhibited at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, as well as at museums around the world in traveling shows that spread the curse across the planet.
However, as of the writing of this book and after almost a decade of stop-and-start-construction, Egypt is putting the finishing touches on its new Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It’s touted as one of the largest museums in the world. The museum will reunite all 5,000-plus artifacts from King Tut’s tomb in one massive exhibit, including the body of the boy king himself.
If anything’s worth risking a curse, it might be a visit to this museum.
In addition to the Hope Diamond, other cursed gemstones include the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the Black Prince’s Ruby, the Regent Diamond, the Sancy yellow diamond, the Delhi Purple Sapphire, the Star of India sapphire, and the Black Orlov diamond. Though the stones are different, their stories are similar.
They usually originate in the gem-fertile earth of India, where they were placed in and plucked from the eye sockets of holy idols. European imperialism or mercantilism brought them to the Western world, where they adorned the spiky hats of royalty. Some eventually immigrated to America, bought by the kings and queens of capitalism. Some shrank over the centuries as gem cutters carved them down to satisfy personal tastes or as gem-cutting technology advanced. Eventually, many ended up in museums, trapped under glass like they were once trapped under the Earth’s mantle.
You can see the Koh-i-Noor and the Black Prince’s Ruby in the Tower of London with the rest of the British crown jewels. The Regent and the Sancy diamonds are at the Louvre. Marie Antoinette wore both before she lost a place to hang a necklace. The Delhi Purple Sapphire, which is technically an amethyst, is at London’s Natural History Museum. The Star of India is at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was stolen in 1964 but was found and returned three months later. The Black Orlov is currently in a private collection.