The curse of the pharaohs is a long-held belief that archaeologists and others who come into contact with Egyptian artifacts will be stricken with misfortune caused by the spirits of pharaohs. The curse of the pharaohs originated after the death of Lord Caernarvon, who helped open the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922. While you can debate whether they actually had any magical effect, the fact is that Egyptians did use curses, especially as security measures on their tombs. These curses were more likely to be present in the tombs of private citizens rather than royalty, possibly because royal tombs had better security. But royal curses are far from unheard of. Most of these curses took the form of threats toward anyone who might rob or otherwise desecrate the tomb. An abridged example includes As for anyone who will do something evil against this my grave, seize a stone from this my tomb, remove any stone or any brick from this my tomb, enter this tomb in a purity, he will be judged regarding it by the great God. I will wring his neck like a goose and cause those who live upon earth to fear the spirits who are in the west. I will exterminate his survivors. Yikes! Curses are part of a larger body of magical texts known as execration rituals, which were meant to curse a person or object when found unpalatable or to ward off harmful spirits. While we can't say for sure whether any ancient grave robbers suffered ill effects from the cursed tombs of Egypt, the earliest known report of a mummy's curse from the modern era is pretty unambiguous. As recorded by author Leo Rookby, the first horrific account of a mummy's magical attack comes from a 1699 account of a Polish traveler who had taken two mummies from Alexandria. The traveler was subsequently haunted by visions of twin specters who plagued his dreams. and was terrified by the increasingly stormy seas on his voyage back home. Apparently, the waves grew worse and worse until the man threw the mummies overboard, at which point the storm abated. Whether or not this story is true, such tales definitely increased popular intrigue around the idea of mummies presenting a supernatural threat. Oh, I hate mummies. Interest around mummies and their tombs only increased in the Victorian era, during which period a kind of Egyptomania swept the empire. In the 19th century, a macabre new fad emerged among the British leisure class, mummy unwrapping parties. While nominally done for science, these spectacles more likely appealed to the more prurient interests of the repressed upper classes as salacious entertainment. At least this was maybe incrementally more acceptable than the centuries-old practice of eating mummies for their supposed medical benefits. The most famous example of a mummy's curse, and the one that drove the idea into the mainstream, is associated with the most famous mummy ever discovered. On February 16, 1923, an expedition led by British archaeologist Howard Carter and financed by Lord George Herbert of Carnarvon opened the sealed burial chamber of the teenaged pharaoh of the 18th century, King Tutankhamen, also known as King Tut. Tutankhamun had previously been a little-known and unimportant ruler as far as pharaohs go. But the discovery of his basically intact and unspoiled tomb launched him to a level of celebrity that has hardly diminished in the following century. Carter's discovery, likewise, kicked off a whole new wave of interest in Egyptology. It was in November 1922 that Carter and company first entered into the interior chambers of Tut's tomb. There they found treasures that had not been seen by human eyes in over 3,000 years, a rarity as the majority of pharaonic tombs had been looted in previous centuries. In the final chamber, opened in February, Carter found the now iconic sarcophagus of King Tut, as well as numerous jewels, statues, chariots, and articles of clothing, all of which were carefully catalogued. According to popular legend, however, one other thing was uncovered when the final chamber was unlocked. A deadly curse. Despite the fact that King Tut's final resting place was not an example of a tomb bearing an inscribed curse on the wall or on any item of its interior, the curse of King Tut is the most famous Pharaoh's curse of them all. This was due to the mysterious deaths that befell members of that famous expedition. The first and perhaps most shocking was the dig's financier, Lord Caernarvon. Hu died mere months after the tomb was first opened when he accidentally cut open a mosquito pipe that became infected. A friend of Howard Carter's, to whom he gave a mummified hand as a paperweight gift, had his house burned down and then flood when he tried to rebuild. American Railroad Executive George J. Gould died of pneumonia after visiting the tomb. Lord Caernarvon's half-brother never even visited the tomb, but his blindness, rotten teeth, and death by sepsis are sometimes attributed to being related to an accursed brother. Others supposedly died of murder by smothering, death by burning, suicide at despair over the curse, among others. Howard Carter himself lived for over a decade after the expedition, but some still attribute his death from lymphoma to the curse. There are a number of people who might be credited with helping to spread the story of the curse of King Tut. One culprit was Arthur Weigel, a writer for the Daily Mail who was upset that Lord Caernarvon had sold exclusive story rights to rival newspaper The Times. Weigel began to fill columns with whatever Tut facts he could, including the story that Caernarvon's pet canary had been killed by a cobra the day the tomb was opened, which he interpreted as an ill omen. Weigel's writing played up the curse angle, which he correctly anticipated the public would eat up, and he later claimed to have predicted Lord Caernarvon's death, saying, If Caernarvon goes down into the tomb in that spirit, I give him six weeks to live. Oh yeah, this just keeps getting better and better. Another person to whom the spread of the cursed story can be credited is Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had a credulous fascination with the supernatural despite being best friends with professional psychic buster Harry Houdini. Doyle specifically told a New York newspaper that Carnarvon's death was due to an evil elemental conjured up by Egyptian priests to protect Tut's tomb. Doyle backed up his conviction with anecdotes about personal friends he believed had been cursed by another mummy. The existence of this mummy could not, alas, be confirmed. While it is certainly striking to look at a list of those who died or otherwise suffered as a result of the alleged curse of King Tut, it may pay to look at the circumstances with a more skeptical eye. A study carried out in 2002 by the British Medical Journal looked closely at the survival rates of 44 Westerners who, according to Howard Carter, were in Egypt at the time the tomb was opened. Only Westerners were considered, as according to legend, native Egyptians were not affected by the curse. The deaths of the 25 men who were part of Carter's team were compared with those of the Westerners who were not involved in opening the tomb. The study concluded that there was no significant correlation between exposure to the tomb and the average age of death. No one who entered the tomb was more likely to die within 10 years than someone who hadn't. While a popular theory is that the tomb may have contained mold, spores, or other toxins that infected various members of the team, Experts generally don't buy that idea, though mummies and tombs definitely can contain deadly bacteria and mold. The fact is, many of those who died had already been in. The rest were just people looking for tenuous connections where they don't really exist. Aside from the supposedly cursed tomb of Tutankhamun, one of the most famous stories of a mummy-based curse is associated with maybe the most famous disaster of the 20th century, the sinking of the Titanic. The story of the unlucky mummy, as it is known, says that four young Englishmen visiting Luxor bought a mummy case containing the remains of an Egyptian princess. One by one, these four men were stricken with disaster, disappearing in the desert, getting shot, losing a fortune. and succumb to illness. Eventually, the mummy ended up in the hands of the British Museum. When placed in the Egyptian room, the mummy began frightening night watchmen with weeping and pounding, throwing other exhibits off shelves, and cursing a child with measles. If only the museum had a powerful incantation to ward off evil. You nasty thing from beyond the dead, no matter what you think or do. The museum sold the mummy to a private collector, who found himself equally haunted. This collector eventually agreed to ship the mummy to an American archaeologist in New York in April of 1912 on the HMS Titanic. Is this story true? Almost certainly not. The Titanic's manifests have been closely studied. There is not a single mummy listed among its various contents. In fact, you can trace back the story of this cursed mummy to the writers William Stead and Douglas Murray, who were inspired by a real coffin lid at the British Museum. The legend got tied to the Titanic after Stead actually died in the tragedy. The book The Curse of the Pharaoh's Tombs by Paul Harrison tells the story of British Egyptologist Walter Brian Emery following the uncovering of a hidden tomb in Saqqara. During this excavation, one of Emery's workers found a statue of the Egyptian god of the dead, Osiris, about eight inches tall. The worker gave the statue to Emery, who took it back to his quarters. Not long after, one of his assistants discovered Emery, paralyzed, in his shower. He dragged his boss to a couch and immediately called an ambulance. Emery was rushed to the British hospital in Cairo, where doctors confirmed that Emery was indeed paralyzed on his right side, unable to move or speak. Emery passed away the next day, March 11, 1971. Cairo newspapers blamed his death on the curse of the pharaohs. Is this another example of a curse bringing misfortune to an archaeologist? Well, Emery was a real British Egyptologist who did excavate a tomb in Saqqara. And he did uncover a small statue of Osiris. He did also collapse suddenly after a stroke and die in a Cairo hospital in March 1971. However, the details of the story are most likely exaggerated to draw a connection between the statue and his death. Zahi Hawass is an Egyptian archaeologist and Egyptologist who was Egypt's first Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs. His 2006 book, The Golden King, The World of Tutankhamun, discusses his experiences with mummy curses. According to Hawass, when he was young, he was involved in an excavation in the Nile Delta. His job was transporting the excavated artifacts, most of which were from the Greco-Roman era, to Cairo's Egyptian Museum. The very same day that he moved these objects, his aunt died. The next year, on the day he moved more artifacts, his uncle died. Then again the following year, during another move, his favorite cousin died. Despite the annual loss of beloved family whenever he transported ancient objects, Hawass does not believe in the curse of the pharaohs, rightly acknowledging that most of the deaths associated with King Tut were foreigners who had nothing to do with the actual excavation. Bet at the party. Nevertheless, in his earlier book, The Valley of the Golden Mummies, he relates the story of how after excavating the mummies of two children at the Baharia Oasis, he found himself haunted by the children in his dreams. After months of sleepless nights and a particularly frightening nightmare in which the young girl mummy reached out to strangle him, Hawass concluded that the children needed to be displayed with their father, also a mummy. After the family was reunited, The nightmare stopped. The legend of the curse of King Tutankhamun, it seems, will never die. Even decades after the death of Howard Carter, people have continued to believe that the curse of King Tut lives on. Zahi Hawass tells in his book The Golden King of a story spread by a German journalist about the curse of the pharaohs from the 1970s. According to this tip, the journalist met with the Director General of the Egyptian Antiquities Department, Dr. Gamal Merez, and asked if he believed in the curse. Merez replied that though he had excavated many tombs and mummies, nothing had ever happened to him. According to the journalist, Merez was dead the next day. Popular legend associates Merez's death with the movement of some of the treasures of King Tut to an exhibition in England. Hawas points out, however, that Merez had long suffered from chronic illness. He furthermore reveals that Merez actually specialized in Islamic archaeology and had, in fact, never excavated anything from Faroni times. Not everyone who gets stricken with a mummy's curse is an archaeologist. In some cases, the accursed in question isn't looking to put artifacts in a museum, but rather their goal is money or a trinket in their pocket. Such was the case in 2004, when a German tourist visited an Egyptian tomb and decided to stroll out with a pharaonic carving he definitely had not walked in with. Once the man returned home to Germany with his illicitly obtained souvenir, He began experiencing a number of horrific conditions. These ailments included paralysis, nausea, fevers, chills, and even cancer, to which he eventually succumbed by 2007. At that point, the man's stepson decided the only way to rid his family of this curse was to return the object to its place of origin. As such, he sent the carving to the Egyptian embassy in Berlin, who sent the object back to the Supreme Council for Antiquities for authentication. The artifact was sent along with a note from the stepson apologizing for the theft and his account of his stepfather's death, which he attributed to the curse of the pharaohs. According to the note, the stepson hoped that returning the carving would atone for his stepfather's crime and allow his soul to rest in peace. That presumably is up to Osiris. Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Grunge videos about history are coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.