It all began with a phrase: “Death will strike with its wings the one who turns Pharaoh’s rest.” There was nothing really strange about them. That November 4, 1922, Howard Carter had just found a tomb, and the Egyptians were inclined to use this type of threat. However, a century after revealing one of the best kept mysteries, the final resting place of Tutankhamun, the urban legend still tells that a cruel curse persecuted all those who participated, in one way or another, in that event. The reality is that everything was due to a cocktail caused by a series of catastrophic misfortunes and part of microbiology.
Antonio Berlanga tells in ‘Incursion into the Unknown’ that the first victim of that expedition into the unknown was a canary that belonged to Carter himself. A cobra entered the archaeologist’s house and devoured the little animal. The peasants tied the dots and insisted that the reptile had been sent by Tutankhamun himself. It was only the beginning.
Next on the list was Lord Carnarvon. The count, who financed the discovery, traveled to Aswan on February 28, 1923, eleven days after the burial chamber was officially opened. In Thebes he was bitten by a mosquito. They quickly applied iodine, but his fever rose and he reached a temperature of 38.3 degrees. His daughter Evelyn decided to transfer him to Cairo on March 14. The ailment led to erysipel, the skin infection, continued into septicemia and culminated in devastating pneumonia. Legend has it that the morning he died, so did his terrier dog, after giving a start and howling.
And from here, the list grows. Aubrey Herbert, Carnavon’s brother, died inexplicably on September 26, 1923 after undergoing surgery. That same year, pneumonia killed George Jay Gould after entering the tomb. In 1926 it was the turn of George Bendi; the egyptologist fell down the stairs while he was visiting the tomb. Arthur Mace, the man who gave the last blow to the wall that protected the chamber, died in 1928 of pleurisy. Sir Douglas Reid he also ended up underground two months after taking a picture of the mummy. And Carter’s secretary, having a heart attack.
Richard Bethell (suicide), Lord Westbury (who threw himself out of his bedroom window)… Tradition tells us that, in 1929, 16 people related in one way or another to Tutankhamun’s tomb had died. It does not seem strange, therefore, that the press began to speak of a curse. To make matters worse, two weeks before Carnarvon’s disappearance, the gothic novelist Marie Corelli He sent a letter to ‘The New York Times’ in which he assured that he had an ancient text in Arabic that predicted that madness: «On the intruders in a sealed tomb falls the most horrible punishment. Death comes flying to whoever enters the tomb of a pharaoh.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the father of Sherlock Holmes, stirred and stoked the fire of the curse on the day Carnarvon died. He gave full credence to the haunting inscription on the tomb and said that it was not souls or spirits, but “elements created by Tutankhamen’s priests to guard the tomb” that were ultimately responsible for Carnarvon’s death. When the tomb was discovered, one of the ‘fellah’ (native workers) blurted out: “These men will find gold… and death!”
Up to 30 (other versions speak of 80) deaths of beings that had some relationship with the unearthing of Tutankhamun were counted. Nicholas Reeves, one of the world’s great specialists in Egyptology, analyzes in his splendid book ‘All Tutankhamun’ (Destiny) the misfortunes of the expedition on a human level, as well as a series of catastrophic misfortunes. One example: in 1939, Cairo Radio wanted to celebrate the Muslim New Year with the trumpets found in the tomb. The truck that was transporting them fell into a ravine and his driver died. Once at the station, the musician who was about to play the royal trumpet in front of the microphones died suddenly of a heart attack.
But a statistic from the North American Egyptologist Herbert E. Winlock, in 1934, he shattered the curse. The conclusion was that, of the 26 people who witnessed the opening of the tomb, six had died a decade later. Of the 22 who had witnessed the opening of the sarcophagus, only two had died. Of the ten who had been present at the discovery of the mummy, none had fallen victim to the curse (although some argue that Evelyn White, who helped discover the mummy, ended up hanging herself).
Cinema and television continued to fatten up the legend until in 1975 an Irish doctor assured that he had found the balm of wild beasts of the legend: Carnarvon, Mace and Benedite died of an infection caused by “bat droppings!”