Who Invented King Tut's Curse?

The curse of Tutankhamun was invented, and his tomb never had one. Fifty-three years before anyone found it, the author of Little Women put The Mummy's Curse in the title of a story. Five months after the tomb was found, the man who paid for the dig was dead in a Cairo hotel. Lord Carnarvon. The newspapers blamed the king in the tomb. Death on swift wings. What really killed

him started with something you've probably swatted off your own arm. Locked-out reporters, a novelist with a rare book and the creator of Sherlock Holmes all helped build the curse. So did someone much closer to the tomb. What actually killed Lord Carnarvon? And who invented the curse that took the credit? I'll admit I wanted the curse to be real. What I found was better: you can watch a legend being built,

week by week, while the man it would claim was still alive. The countdown starts on a single step. Howard Carter had first come to Egypt at seventeen, to draw, with no professional training. For years now, he had been searching the Valley of the Kings, on Lord Carnarvon's money. In early November, the first step down to Tutankhamun's tomb was found. From that step, Carnarvon has five months to live.

Late in November, Carter stood at a sealed doorway, with Carnarvon and his daughter, Lady Evelyn, beside him. He made a breach and held a candle to it. The flame flickered as the air escaped. Inside, a glint of gold. Carnarvon asked: Can you see anything? The famous answer is: Yes, wonderful things. That's the line Carter printed in his book the next year.

His journal that night is plainer. Yes, it is wonderful. Even the most famous sentence in this story was polished before it reached the public. Carter, Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn climbed in through the gap. Carnarvon has a little over four months left. Before the year was out, and before anyone had died, the first whisper of a curse reached the papers. A cobra, the royal snake of the pharaohs, was said to have killed Carter's pet

canary. By one report, the workmen took it as a warning from the dead king's spirit, against any further intrusion. It was a small story. But soon, most of the world's newspapers would be shut out of the tomb's story altogether. In January, The Times of London announced a deal. Carnarvon had given it the rights to everything from the tomb: the news, the interviews, the photographs. It was the nineteen twenty-three version of a streaming exclusive.

Reportedly, it paid him five thousand pounds up front. Plus a share of every report it sold on to other papers. Less than three months left. Every other paper was shut out. So the excluded reporters leaned on excluded Egyptologists, who described objects they had only seen in published photographs. One of the shut-out men was Arthur Weigall, covering the tomb for the rival Daily Mail.

By one account, he watched Carnarvon go down into the tomb, laughing and joking. If he goes down in that spirit, Weigall said, I give him six weeks to live. The rival papers needed a story The Times didn't own. It was about to start, on Carnarvon's own cheek. It began with a mosquito. It bit Carnarvon on the cheek. Shaving, he caught the bite with his razor and cut it open. The cut became infected, and the infection

turned to blood poisoning. His health had been weak for years, ever since a serious car crash in Germany. In the middle of March, already ill, he took the train from Luxor to Cairo. Three weeks left. By the last days of March, he had pneumonia on top of the blood poisoning. At the Hotel Continental, he drifted in and out of consciousness. And while he lay there, the bestselling novelist Marie Corelli published a warning.

According to a rare book I possess, she wrote, the most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb. The book, she claimed, listed secret poisons, enclosed in boxes. And she asked, in print: was it a mosquito bite that has so seriously infected Lord Carnarvon? Nobody knows why she sent that letter. She died the following year. Twelve days left. His son was coming from India. Two days left.

His son made it to Cairo. His wife heard him murmur: I have heard the call. I am preparing. In the early hours of the morning, Lord Carnarvon died. As his son went to his father's room, the hotel was suddenly plunged into darkness. In the legend, the lights went out across all of Cairo at the moment he died. And back home in England, his dog howled and dropped dead at the same instant. But the family's own account mentions only the hotel, in a city where power cuts

were far from unusual. The dog story came from his son, who was in Cairo, nowhere near the dog. And by one account, the dog died hours after its master, not at the same instant. That same day, in New York, Arthur Conan Doyle spoke to reporters. The creator of Sherlock Holmes was also a leading spiritualist. The Egyptians had powers that we know nothing of, he said. He suggested an elemental, a built-up, artificial spirit, may have guarded the tomb.

To the sceptics, he said you might as well argue that because bulldogs do not bite everybody, bulldogs do not exist. And the shut-out papers were free at last. As one Egyptologist puts it, the world's press finally had a story they could publish without deferring to The Times. One death made a story. A curse needed more. So the papers started counting.

The tally started at once. More than a month later, a visitor to the tomb died. An Egyptian prince was shot dead by his own wife that summer. In September, Carnarvon's half-brother died. Every one of them went on the list. You didn't even have to go near the tomb. A radiologist, Archibald Reid, was counted because Carter had invited him to X-ray the king. Years of X-ray work had left his fingers damaged by radiation.

He died in Switzerland early the next year, after an operation. He never reached Egypt. Three years after Carnarvon died, a New York paper ran the headline: Vengeance of King Tut Is Seen as Death List Mounts. And the list had words to point to. A line ran in the papers, promising death on swift wings to whoever touched the tomb of a pharaoh. It came in several wordings, never quite the same twice. It was supposedly on a clay tablet that

Carter buried in the sand, so it wouldn't frighten his workmen. No one has ever produced that tablet. There was a real text behind it, though. On the clay base of a magical torch inside the tomb, Carter translated a spell of protection. It is I who hinder the sand from choking the secret chamber. In the press, it grew a new ending. I will kill all of those who cross this threshold. But the idea was older than the discovery.

Nearly a century before the first step was found, a novel called The Mummy brought one back to life. It threatened a young scholar. In eighteen sixty-nine, Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, published a story called Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy's Curse. And Arthur Conan Doyle, the man with the elemental, had written two mummy stories of his own, decades earlier. The curse didn't come out of the tomb.

It was carried in. Ancient Egyptians really did write curses. Mostly in private tombs of the Old Kingdom. One warns anyone who harms the tomb: I will wring his neck like a goose. But in a land where only about one person in twenty could read, a written curse was a strange kind of lock. Real curses, then. Just not in this tomb. So who put one there? The man who found the tomb thought he knew. Howard Carter called the curse tommy

rot. An Egyptologist's feeling, he wrote, is not one of fear, but of respect and awe. Nearly eleven years after Carnarvon, Weigall died too. The papers wrote that his death recalled the story of a curse on the violators of the tomb. Weeks later, writing by hand from near Luxor, Carter sent a private letter. He called Weigall's death a real blessing. And he named his culprit. The Tutankhamun Curse, he wrote, was his invention.

That's one man's accusation against a rival he disliked. It isn't proof. And there's one name Carter left out of that letter. His own. The year Carnarvon died, a magazine ran a story called The Tomb of the Bird. Its authors were Howard Carter and a novelist friend. In it, a cobra enters Carter's house. It passes down the passage. It coils up the leg of the table where the birdcage rests.

And it kills his pet, on the very day the tomb was first breached. One scholar, reading Carter's own pocket diary, argues that timing was embellished. The man who called the curse tommy rot had told its first omen himself, in print, with a novelist's help. So who invented the curse? Not one man. Shut-out papers that needed a story. A novelist with a rare book. A spiritualist with an elemental.

A century of mummy fiction. And the man who found the tomb. Whoever invented it, the curse made one promise: death to those who went in. That can be checked. Start with Carter. He died in London, of lymphoma, more than sixteen years after the candle. He never received a major British honour. A scholar from the Metropolitan Museum counted the forty people who had been there when

parts of the tomb were opened. Twelve years on, only six had died. Lady Evelyn, who climbed through that gap with her father, lived until nineteen eighty. The legend kept going anyway. Hollywood turned it into The Mummy, a film inspired by the discovery and the curse, and remade that film in nineteen ninety-nine. In nineteen seventy-five, a bestselling book blamed uranium in the tomb

floors and poison from peach pits. It even counted two of the team among the curse's dead, though both lived for decades after the mummy was unwrapped. Others blamed mould, and some mummies really do carry it. But one epidemiologist says Carnarvon would likely have been safer in the tomb than outside. The real test came from a medical journal. It started from Carter's own records of the Westerners in Egypt at the time of the key

openings. Twenty-five of them counted as exposed to the curse. On average, they died at seventy. Those who stayed out lived a little longer, by a gap too small to mean anything. The verdict: no evidence to support the existence of a mummy's curse. The curse never killed anyone. It only ever took the credit. I wanted the curse to be real. The true story is better: nobody had to be cursed for everybody to believe it. Death on swift wings.

His tomb never had those words. But there were wings in this story after all. They belonged to a mosquito. More legends are waiting behind sealed doors. Subscribe, and we'll hold a candle up to the next one.