Everything You Need To Know About King Tut’s Iconic Curse And Where It Even Came From
Mummies have been a long-time favorite Halloween costume option– since toilet paper and gauze can do a bang-up job on a budget.
Plus, the iconic legend of King Tut’s Curse only adds to the fright factor, right?
Well, according to historians and a British Medical Journal study, the supposed curse of King Tut was nothing more than a media stunt meant to encapture the public’s attention for decades. And it clearly worked.
The Origin Of King Tut’s Curse
King Tut, whose full name was King Tutankhamun, ruled as an Egyptian pharaoh for ten years before passing away around 1324 B.C. at just nineteen years old.
But King Tut’s Curse does not originate nearly that long ago in history. Instead, the hysteria all began in 1922.
In November of that year, British archaeologist Howard Carter made perhaps one of the most remarkable contributions to archaeology ever. He discovered the entrance to the mostly intact tomb of King Tut.
So, Howard and his team devised a plan to enter the legendary tomb, and by February 1923, they were able to unseal the entrance.
However, amidst the unearthing of history’s past, Howard’s team began to dwindle one by one.
Miro – stock.adobe.com – pictured above is a replica of King Tut’s mask
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Deaths Spark Hysteria
First, Lord Carnarvon– who sponsored Howard’s expedition– passed away just two months later. On April 5, 1923, he died in his hotel room in Cairo after getting a mosquito bite that caused a fatal bacterial infection.
So, with a media frenzy already surrounding King Tut’s tomb, papers also included their speculation that Carnarvon had died due to a sinister spell known as King Tut’s Curse. According to the curse, anyone who dared to disturb the tomb would be doomed to death.
And, of course, as this story made its way through the grapevine, more and more media outlets began to add fantastical details about Carnarvon’s passing. For example, some claimed that when Carnarvon died, every light in the city of Cairo dimmed.
This should not have been that shocking, though, considering how power outages were nearly a daily occurrence in Cairo at the time. Nonetheless, the public ate it up.
So, as other members of Howard’s expedition passed away throughout the next decade, their deaths were also attributed to King Tut’s curse.
The statistical probability did not exactly support this myth from the start, though– since Howard’s team consisted of twenty-four people, and only six died by 1934. Regardless, the wonder and fear of the possibility had society members in a chokehold.
Plus, it did not help that many papers also claimed that Howard’s team had spotted an ancient inscription above King Tut’s tomb that they chose to ignore.
“Death shall come on swift wings to him that toucheth the tomb of a Pharaoh,” the warning supposedly read.
But that fact just simply was not true. There was a message above King Tut’s tomb– but it was actually a spell from The Book of the Dead that was ceremoniously inscribed to ensure eternal life.
So apparently, many newspapers mistranslated the true meaning. And whether that was truly a translational mistake or a creative way to heighten publicity remains to be seen.
Debunked: King Tut’s Curse
Regardless, though, a 2002 study published in the British Medical Journal finally debunked the long-held rumors of King Tut’s Curse.
There, researchers analyzed the ages of the twenty-five people who were supposedly exposed to the curse and ultimately found no significant difference between their survival rates as compared to people who never disturbed the Pharaoh’s tomb.
“There was no significant association between exposure to the mummy’s curse and survival, and thus no evidence to support the existence of a mummy’s curse,” the study concluded.
King Tut Lives On
Despite the scientific evidence pointing to no existence of a curse, though, Halloween folklore and fanatics have kept this legend alive. It survived in pop culture for nearly eighty years prior– giving way to countless television series, movies, and books that continue to thrive today.
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