The day of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun is a day that will never be forgotten by history. Events related to the discovery led to tales of a “curse” protecting the tomb.

Less than a year after the discovery, Lord Carnarvon, Howard Carter’s financier, died in in Cairo under mysterious circumstances.  Reports of his death varied greatly, some people claimed he was bitten by a cobra, while others say he died of blood poisoning related to a mosquito bite.  We do not know his exact cause of death, but afterward, many stories were circulated and rumors about curses, but if you examine the stories, you can find exaggerations and mistakes in each.

When KV 62, the tomb of Tutankamun, was found, an English reporter translated a piece of text from the front of the Anubis shrine incorrectly.  She claimed it said “I will kill anyone who enters this tomb.”  But if this text represented an actual, effective curse, everyone who entered the tomb should have died soon, including Howard Carter and all the workmen who cleared the tomb.  Howard Carter lived for almost 20 years after he opened the tomb, so clearly it was not a curse. Rather, texts of this nature were warning inscriptions that the ancient Egyptians intended to frighten people away from disturbing and robbing their tombs.

A possible explanation for disease associated with tomb openings is that the materials stored in tomb- mummies, wood, stone and organic materials, decay and collect germs over the centuries.  When Egyptology was a new discipline, and people began to enter these tombs as adventurers and explorers, they opened these tombs for the first time in thousands of years, and they encountered these germs, which sometimes proved fatal.  I have been excavating for 35 years, and have discovered many tombs full of mummies.  In order to clear the air, I open the tomb and leave it open for one day, for all the bad air to circulate out of the tomb.

An interesting story about the curse of King Tut is when I examined his mummy. I arrived in Luxor very early in the morning and stayed in the hotel until the Valley of the Kings was closed, so that I could avoid the tourists.  When I left my hotel, I had a streak of bad luck, which people may attribute to the “curse.” First we almost had a traffic accident. Then, as I was driving to the Valley, I received a phone call from my sister, telling me her husband had passed away.  When I arrived in the Valley, I was interviewed by a Japanese TV crew.  One minute after we finished, a big storm came into the valley, with strong winds and rain, which is very unusual.  The Japanese crew ran away, saying that it was the curse of Tutankhamun!  I was not worried about such things.  But it was very strange that when we put the mummy of King Tut into the CT scan machine, the brand new machine broke, and would not work at all.  I was sitting there, thinking that I had never believed in the curse, but the series of strange events seemed very odd, almost as though the curse were real. However, after one hour, we got the machine working again.