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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 reports of lights failing in Cairo, the cables that carried the news, and the novelist whose letter in a Saturday paper became 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 worked for George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon (1866-1923), since about 1907. By 1922 years of digging in the Valley of the Kings had found little, and Carnarvon had considered withdrawing his funding before agreeing to one more season. On 4 November 1922 Carter’s workmen (or, in a local legend, a boy bringing them water) found the first of what proved to be sixteen steps. On 26 November Carter made a small hole in the sealed door, held up a candle, and answered Carnarvon’s “Can you see anything?” with words his journal records as “Yes, it is wonderful,” remembered ever since as “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].
Less than five months later, on 5 April 1923, Carnarvon died at the Continental-Savoy Hotel in Cairo. He had nicked a mosquito bite while shaving. The wound became infected, blood poisoning set in, and 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 though power cuts in Cairo were far from unusual and, given the time difference, the dog, Susie, actually died about four hours after her master, 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 popular novelist Marie Corelli (1855-1924) issued a warning, carried in London by the Daily Express and in New York by the World. Citing “a rare book I possess entitled The Egyptian History of the Pyramids,” she wrote that “the most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into the sealed tomb” and asked, in the same piece, “was it a mosquito bite that has so seriously infected Lord Carnarvon?” [3]
Corelli was sixty-seven, a bestselling novelist, and given to public statements about the supernatural. She was not a scholar. The book she quoted said nothing about ancient Egyptian belief and much about the superstitions of later Arabic chroniclers. None of that mattered. Twelve days later Carnarvon was dead, and Corelli had become, retrospectively, a clairvoyant. The Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, quoted by the University of Manchester on the ninetieth anniversary of Carnarvon’s death, 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. Interviewed in New York on 5 April 1923, the day Carnarvon died, Conan Doyle suggested that “an evil elemental,” summoned by Egyptian priests to guard the tomb, may have caused the fatal illness. His fame gave the story a well-known signature, and his explanation that an elemental was “a built-up, artificial thing” without a soul gave occult readers a vocabulary they could use, as the Chicago Tribune reported the next day [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 visited the tomb in 1923 and developed a fever afterwards. Died of pneumonia on the French Riviera on 16 May 1923.
- Aubrey Herbert (1880-1923): Carnarvon’s half-brother and an MP, nearly blind for most of his life. Persuaded to have all his teeth extracted in the hope of restoring his sight, he died of blood poisoning in September 1923. Linked to the curse by association alone.
- Hugh Evelyn-White (1884-1924): English classical scholar and Egyptologist who died by suicide in 1924.
- Arthur Cruttenden Mace (1874-1928): Carter’s deputy on the Tutankhamun excavation. Suffered from pleurisy and pneumonia in his final years in Egypt, left the excavation in 1924, and died on 6 April 1928.
- Richard Bethell (1883-1929): Carter’s secretary, found dead in bed at a London club on 15 November 1929, a death later reported as a suspected smothering.
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 or more of four 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 P value for the difference was 0.87, far above the conventional 0.05 threshold for statistical significance, 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 found “no evidence to support the existence of a mummy’s curse.” Howard Carter himself, the man who lifted the seal, lived more than sixteen years past the discovery and died of Hodgkin’s 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, best known from the twentieth and nineteenth centuries BCE, in which the names of enemies were written on pottery bowls or figurines that were ritually smashed. The targets were most often enemies of the Egyptian state or troublesome foreign neighbors. Tomb-violators are not the standard target, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s entry on the genre [7].
A handful of Old Kingdom tombs at Giza and Saqqara do carry warning inscriptions, threatening intruders with judgment by the great god or with attack by crocodile, snake, hippopotamus, or scorpion. These are real, but they are exceptional. Tutankhamun’s tomb contained no inscribed curse against intruders. The curse was added by the press about four months after the door was breached.
Aspergillus and the Naturalist Theory
A third reading 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. The fungal link has been suggested for Carnarvon, George Jay Gould and Arthur Mace, but it has been disputed, at least in Carnarvon’s case, and remains unproven.
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 the stories of two Victorian gentlemen widely believed to have been cursed by artefacts they brought home from Egypt, and follows the myth through museums, exhibitions and the battlefields of Egypt and Sudan, per the publisher’s description at Oxford University Press. The mummy’s vengeance, in this reading, says as much about Victorian Britain and its colonial possessions as about the powers of dead pharaohs [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 and about the spoils of empire. 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.
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 dismissed the curse as “tommy rot,” insisting that the Egyptologist’s sentiment was “not one of fear, but of respect and awe.” 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 more than three thousand years, and what we tell about him says more about us than about him.
Sources
- Britannica Editors, Howard Carter, Encyclopaedia Britannica, last updated 5 September 2026. britannica.com; Howard Carter, Journal for 1922 (TAA i.2.1), Griffith Institute, University of Oxford. griffith.ox.ac.uk; Howard Carter, Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
- 90th anniversary of the curse of Tutankhamen: how a modern myth was born, University of Manchester, 4 April 2013. manchester.ac.uk; Dave Kindy, King Tut’s tomb was discovered 100 years ago, and unleashed a ‘curse’, Stars and Stripes, 5 November 2022. stripes.com; George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
- All About History Team, The Facts Behind the Curse of Tutankhamun: Fake News from Beyond the Grave, History Answers, 3 May 2017. historyanswers.co.uk
- 90th anniversary of the curse of Tutankhamen: how a modern myth was born, University of Manchester, 4 April 2013, quoting Joyce Tyldesley. manchester.ac.uk
- Tut May Have Sent Spirit to Kill His Finder, Doyle Says, Chicago Tribune, 6 April 1923, p. 3; transcribed by the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia. arthur-conan-doyle.com
- Mark R. Nelson, The mummy’s curse: historical cohort study, BMJ 325(7378): 1482-1484, 21 December 2002. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Britannica Editors, Execration Texts, Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com; Execration texts, Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
- Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy, Oxford University Press, 2012. global.oup.com