100-year-old folklore and pop culture have perpetuated the myth that opening a mummy's tomb leads to certain death.
Movie mummies are known for two things: fabulous riches and a nasty curse that brings treasure hunters to a bad end. But Hollywood didn't invent the curse concept.
The "mummy's curse" first enjoyed worldwide acclaim after the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt.
When Howard Carter opened a small hole to peer inside the tomb at treasures hidden for 3,000 years, he also unleashed a global passion for ancient Egypt.
Tut's glittering treasures made great headlines—especially following the opening of the burial chamber on February 16, 1923—and so did sensationalistic accounts of the subsequent death of expedition sponsor Lord Carnarvon.
In reality, Carnarvon died of blood poisoning, and only six of the 26 people present when the tomb was opened died within a decade. Carter, surely any curse's prime target, lived until 1939, almost 20 years after the tomb's opening.
But while the pharaoh's curse may lack bite, it hasn't lost the ability to fascinate audiences—which may be how it originated in the first place.
Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon at the door of the burial chamber. Photo by Harry Burton (1879-1940)
Birth of the Curse
The late Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat conducted a comprehensive search and concluded that the concept began with a strange "striptease" in 19th-century London.
"My work shows quite clearly that the mummy's curse concept predates Carnarvon's Tutankhamen discovery and his death by a hundred years," Montserrat told the Independent (U.K.) in an interview some years before his own death.
Montserrat believed that a lively stage show in which real Egyptian mummies were unwrapped inspired first one writer, and subsequently several others, to pen tales of mummy revenge.
The thread was even picked up by Little Women author Louisa May Alcott in her nearly unknown volume Lost in a Pyramid; or, The Mummy's Curse.
"My research has not only confirmed that there is, of course, no ancient Egyptian origin of the mummy's curse concept, but, more importantly, it also reveals that it didn't originate in the 1923 press publicity about the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb either," Montserrat stressed to the Independent.
But Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo and a National Geographic Society grantee, believes the curse concept did exist in ancient Egypt as part of a primitive security system.
She notes that some mastaba (early non-pyramid tomb) walls in Giza and Saqqara were actually inscribed with "curses" meant to terrify those who would desecrate or rob the royal resting place.
"They tend to threaten desecrators with divine retribution by the council of the gods," Ikram said. "Or a death by crocodiles, or lions, or scorpions, or snakes."
Tomb Toxin Threat?
In recent years, some have suggested that the pharaoh's curse was biological in nature.
Could sealed tombs house pathogens that can be dangerous or even deadly to those who open them after thousands of years—especially people like Lord Carnarvon with weakened immune systems?
The mausoleums house not only the dead bodies of humans and animals but foods to provision them for the afterlife.
Lab studies have shown some ancient mummies carried mold, including Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus flavus, which can cause congestion or bleeding in the lungs. Lung-assaulting bacteria such as Pseudomonas and Staphylococcus may also grow on tomb walls.
These substances may make tombs sound dangerous, but scientists seem to agree that they are not.
F. DeWolfe Miller, professor of epidemiology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, concurs with Howard Carter's original opinion: Given the local conditions, Lord Carnarvon was probably safer inside Tut's tomb than outside.
"Upper Egypt in the 1920s was hardly what you'd call sanitary," Miller said. "The idea that an underground tomb, after 3,000 years, would have some kind of bizarre microorganism in it that's going to kill somebody six weeks later and make it look exactly like [blood poisoning] is very hard to believe."
In fact, Miller said, he knows of no archaeologist—or a single tourist, for that matter—who has experienced any afflictions caused by tomb toxins.
But like the movie mummies who invoke the malediction, the legend of the mummy's curse seems destined never to die.
BY BRIAN HANDWERK, National Geographic
