By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 7, 2026
What the Curse of the Pharaohs Actually Was
The Curse of the Pharaohs is a folkloric tradition rather than an ancient Egyptian one. It names the cluster of stories, headlines, and warnings that gathered around the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb in November 1922 and the death of Lord Carnarvon in April 1923. The curse is real as a cultural phenomenon. The supernatural mortality it predicts is not.
A folklorist working a story like this does not begin with a verdict. She begins with the witnesses. The night clerk at the Continental-Savoy in Cairo who told a journalist the lights had blinked. The Reuters runner who carried the cable. The novelist in her London study who wrote a sentence in a Saturday paper that became, within ten days, the seed of a hundred-year legend. The job is to render the witness’s account in the witness’s cadence and to ask, soberly, where the story came from and why it survived. That is what these next pages try to do, set within the wider field of historical and archaeological mysteries.
The Discovery and the Death
Howard Carter (1874-1939), a self-taught British Egyptologist, had been searching the Valley of the Kings on the dime of George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon (1866-1923), since 1907. By the autumn of 1922 the dig had thinned. Carnarvon was ready to pull funding. On 4 November 1922 a water-boy uncovered the first of sixteen steps. On 26 November Carter widened a hole in the sealed door, raised a candle, and saw, in his own famous answer to Carnarvon’s question about what he could see, “wonderful things.” The tomb of Tutankhamun, the boy-king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, had been found nearly intact, according to the biographical record kept by Encyclopaedia Britannica [1].
Five months later, on 5 April 1923, Carnarvon was dead. He had cut a mosquito bite while shaving in his suite at the Continental-Savoy Hotel. The wound became infected. Erysipelas set in. Pneumonia followed. He was 56. The Cairo lights, by some accounts, blinked at the moment of his death. His dog, back in Hampshire, was reported to have howled and died the same night. These accounts were repeated until they hardened into common knowledge, even after later researchers showed that the Cairo blackouts were a routine feature of the city’s grid that month and that the dog’s death came hours apart from his owner’s, according to the University of Manchester’s anniversary review of the legend [2].
A folklorist notices what gets repeated. The mosquito bite, the dimming lights, the howling dog. Together they make a folktale shape: an omen, a warning, and a confirmation. Each detail is true at the level of report. The pattern is what carries the meaning.
How the Legend Was Born
The curse story did not come out of the tomb. It came out of the British press, and it can be dated almost to the hour. On 24 March 1923, while Carnarvon lay ill in Cairo, the Daily Express ran a piece in which the popular novelist Marie Corelli (1855-1924) issued a warning. Drawing on a now-discredited eighteenth-century book she called The Egyptian History of the Pyramids, she wrote that “the most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb” and asked, in the same piece, “was it a mosquito bite that has so seriously infected Lord Carnarvon?” [3]
Corelli was sixty-eight, a bestselling sentimental novelist, and given to public statements about spiritualism. She was not a scholar. The book she quoted was an Arabic-derived legendary collection compiled by an English antiquarian in 1727, of no archaeological standing. None of that mattered. Twelve days later Carnarvon was dead, and Corelli had become, retrospectively, a clairvoyant. The Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, writing for the University of Manchester on the ninetieth anniversary of the discovery, has argued that the legend took root precisely because The Times held an exclusive on the dig. Other papers, locked out of the actual story, hunted for any narrative they could print. Corelli supplied one [4].
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), the author of Sherlock Holmes and by 1923 a devoted spiritualist, supplied a second. Asked by reporters in New York, the day after Carnarvon’s death, whether the death was natural, Conan Doyle answered that “an evil elemental” placed by Egyptian priests to guard the tomb might well have caused the fatal infection. Conan Doyle’s authority gave the story a respectable signature, and his framing, that elementals were not souls but a third class of guardian beings, gave occult readers a vocabulary they could use, as documented in the History Today archive on Tutankhamun’s curse [5]. By summer the British, American, and continental press were tracking the next deaths against an expectation Corelli and Conan Doyle had together installed.
The Names on the Long List
Once the expectation was in place, the deaths came in. Within a decade the press had assembled a list. Each name on it had its own circumstance, and the folklorist’s instinct is to take each story on its own terms before reading the pattern. Six of the most-cited cases are summarized below.
- George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon (1866-1923): Mosquito bite, blood poisoning, pneumonia, dead 5 April 1923. The financier of the dig and the first death the press attached to the tomb.
- George Jay Gould I (1864-1923): American railway heir who toured the tomb in early 1923 and developed a fever en route to Europe. Died of pneumonia at the French Riviera on 16 May 1923.
- Aubrey Herbert (1880-1923): Carnarvon’s half-brother, MP, blind from a botched dental procedure intended to restore his sight. Died of sepsis in September 1923. Linked to the curse by association alone.
- Hugh Evelyn-White (1884-1924): Classicist who briefly worked at the Valley of the Kings; took his own life and reportedly left a note referring to a curse, although the note’s wording has been disputed.
- Arthur Cruttenden Mace (1874-1928): Carter’s deputy on the Tutankhamun excavation. Died of pleurisy and respiratory failure in April 1928 after years of declining health that pre-dated the dig.
- Richard Bethell (1883-1929): Carter’s personal secretary, found dead of suspected heart failure in a London club bed on 15 November 1929.
Compiled this way, the list reads as a curse. Set against the size of the population, the medical record, and the actuarial baseline of upper-class English life in the 1920s, it reads differently. That second reading is what the next section examines.
What the Statistics Showed
In 2002 the medical researcher Mark R. Nelson published a historical cohort study in the BMJ on the survival of Westerners present at the Tutankhamun excavation between February 1923 and November 1926. He used Carter’s own writings to identify forty-four Westerners in Egypt during the relevant windows, of whom twenty-five had been potentially exposed at one of three tomb-opening events. The mean age at death of the exposed group was seventy years, with a standard deviation of twelve. The mean age at death of the unexposed group was seventy-five, standard deviation thirteen. The probability that this difference reflected anything other than chance was 0.87, the conventional threshold for “indistinguishable from noise” being 0.05, per the open-access version of the BMJ paper [6].
In short, the people the curse should have struck lived almost as long as the people the curse should have spared, and the small gap between the two means was statistically inseparable from coincidence. Nelson’s conclusion was that “no evidence was found for the existence of a mummy’s curse.” Howard Carter himself, the man who lifted the seal, lived seventeen years past the discovery and died of lymphoma in 1939, aged sixty-four.
A folklorist takes that null result seriously without treating it as the end of the story. Statistics tell us whether the deaths exceeded the actuarial baseline. They do not tell us why so many people, for a hundred years, have wanted them to.
What the Ancient Egyptians Actually Wrote
A second strand worth straightening is the popular notion that an authentic ancient Egyptian curse-genre threatens tomb violators with the wrath of the gods. The claim is partly true and largely overstated. The Egyptians did write curse-formulas. They are most prolific in the genre called the execration texts, dated to the Middle Kingdom, around 1840 BCE, and inscribed on pottery figurines or bowls that were ritually smashed. The targets were almost always foreign rulers, hostile tribes, or named human enemies of the state. Tomb-violators are not the standard target, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s entry on the genre [7].
A handful of Old Kingdom mastabas at Giza and Saqqara do carry warning inscriptions, threatening any robber with judgment in the next world or with attack by crocodile, lion, or scorpion. These are real, but they are exceptional. Most royal tombs, including Tutankhamun’s, contained no inscribed curse against intruders. The Carter team, on the day they breached the door, found no curse-text waiting for them. The curse was added by the press eight months later, an ocean and three thousand years away.
Aspergillus and the Naturalist Theory
A third reading, popular since the 1970s, is the so-called fungal-curse hypothesis: that the spores of Aspergillus flavus or A. niger, dormant in sealed tombs and inhaled at first opening, could plausibly account for some respiratory deaths. The idea is medically coherent in principle. In Carnarvon’s case, however, his pneumonia followed a documented blood infection, not a primary respiratory exposure. Modern medical opinion, including the analysis cited in The Lancet over the years, treats the fungal theory as unproven for the Tutankhamun cohort specifically, even where it remains an interesting hypothesis for tomb-air exposure in general.
Why the Legend Survived
If the statistics disconfirm a supernatural mortality and the Egyptian textual record disconfirms an ancient curse-tradition, the question becomes: why is the curse still with us? The cultural historian Roger Luckhurst, in The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy, published by Oxford University Press in 2012, argues that the legend long pre-dates Tutankhamun. Luckhurst traces it to two earlier circulating stories about cursed Egyptian artifacts in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and reads the whole tradition as a “displaced account” of British anxieties about colonial reverses in Egypt and Sudan, per the publisher’s description at Oxford University Press. The mummy’s vengeance, in this reading, is less about the powers of dead pharaohs and more about Britain’s nineteenth-century imperial unease [8].
Luckhurst’s framing is the most useful one a folklorist can borrow. The curse persists because it carries cargo. It lets a culture say something about contact with the dead, about the spoils of empire, about the visibility of the boy-king’s gold mask in newspaper photographs the very week Carnarvon’s blood went septic. Each generation has reused it for its own purposes. In the 1930s it sold film tickets for Universal Studios. In the 1970s it sold paperbacks about the unexplained. In the 2020s it animates podcast episodes and museum-marketing copy.
The witnesses are mostly gone now. Howard Carter died in 1939; Lady Evelyn Herbert, who entered the tomb at her father’s side, lived until 1980. The last living people who could speak to that November in 1922 went with the close of the twentieth century. What survives is the story they shaped together with Marie Corelli, with Conan Doyle, with the Reuters wire and the New York World, with each subsequent generation that needed the curse for something. The folklorist’s last task is to keep that record honest: the ninety-four-year-old’s present tense applied here to the legend itself, which speaks, even now, in the present tense, about a man who died in April 1923.
Reading the Curse as Folklore
Three frames hold this story together. The medical frame, in which Carnarvon died of an infected mosquito bite and Carter team mortality matched the period baseline. The textual frame, in which ancient Egyptian tomb-curses are rare and the Tutankhamun tomb in particular bore none. The cultural-historical frame, in which a tabloid sentence by a Victorian novelist and an endorsement by the creator of Sherlock Holmes seeded a legend that has run for a hundred and three years. Each frame is worth taking on its own terms, and each is worth taking together.
Carter himself, asked about the curse in lectures across America in the late 1920s, dismissed it consistently. He called it “tommy rot.” He noted that he had personally entered the tomb hundreds of times and had outlived most of the people the press kept attaching to its supposed power. The folklorist records his answer alongside Corelli’s and Conan Doyle’s. All three are part of the testimony. None of them speaks for the others. The curse, in the end, is a story humans tell about a king who has been dead for thirty-two centuries, and what we tell about him says more about us than about him.
