After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Curse of King Tutankhamun's Tomb

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Untimely deaths followed the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb by Howard Carter. Coincidence or ancient curse? When the tomb of King Tutankhamun was sealed more than 3000 years ago, it was rumoured to be protected by a curse, which would ruin the life of anyone who disturbed the pharaoh's final resting place. A mere two weeks after the tomb was discovered in 1922, one of the explorers died from a fatal mosquito bite. This wasn't the end of the bad luck, there was more to come... Anthony and Maddy are joined by Egyptologist Campbell Price to unpick fact from fiction, and get to the bottom of one of the most notorious curses in the world.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe Acast powers the world's best podcasts here's a show that we recommend So you enjoy a good podcast and you also like comedy? Look no further than the Pantelis podcast. I'm Pantelist and this is my podcast.

Every week I'm coming at you with a different reason to be angry, whether it's current events or arguing with my comedian friends that also pop into the show. The Pantelist Podcast drops new episodes weekly powered by Acast. ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com. The sun beats down on the beginning of the season in the Valley of the Kings. Only in the winter does the temperature dip enough to allow for tourism and, more importantly, excavation. But at 2pm on November 26, 1922, it's still very hot.

All around, the sounds of tools against hard earth have ceased. Anyone who isn't assembled around the ancient stairway cut into the ground is watching silently from afar. At the bottom of the steps, through a sealed outer door and down a passageway cleared of debris over the last few weeks, British Egyptologist Howard Carter, a man in his late forties, is focused on the task at hand. Trembling, he makes a tiny hole

in the top left-hand corner of the door, and with an iron testing rod, tests its depth. It passes straight through. There is a space there, one that isn't packed with rubble. A chamber, perhaps. As he tests the air for foul gases and widens the hole to glimpse inside the chamber, the candle flickers as a rush of air escapes. Now exact numbers vary, but within a decade of Howard Carter's discovery, several of

those present will have died from mysterious illnesses and strange accidents. Others gifted with loot from the tomb will be blighted with fire and flood. As this air, which escapes from its centuries-long burial beneath the bedrock of Egypt, is finally Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie and I'm Anthony and today we are joined by Dr Campbell Price. Now Campbell is curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, which is part of the University of Manchester. And it holds one of the UK's most significant Egyptology collections. Is that right Campbell? It does, of course I'm biased. I would say that, but outside the British Museum's collection and the Petrie

Museum at UCL, I'd say it's the biggest and most significant in Britain. So today we're going to be talking about the excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamen. And I think most people, certainly I did this at school, I think I know something of the story. We're going to get into it a bit more, but let's just start with the basics. Who is doing the searching? We heard in this opening scene that the tomb is being excavated, they're breaking into it. who's doing that? So first of all, this is the kind of quintessential dictionary definition, archeological find,

it's Tutankhamun's tomb. Howard Carter, it's important to emphasize, as you said, English archeologist, Egyptologist, antiquities dealer as well, artist, very accomplished artist. He goes to Egypt as a teenager. He's of very modest means. He's sent by the Egypt Exploration Fund, now Society, which I'm very pleased to be the current chair of trustees of the Egypt Exploration Society. And another great Egyptologist, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie says, this boy Carter, he's a good artist,

but we'll never train him up as an excavator. He becomes the most famous archeologist ever to have lived. He has worked in the Valley of the Kings, this massive cemetery, desert cemetery for decades. People imagine Carter just wandering along and then just finds the tomb of Tutankhamen. He doesn't, he's been looking for it for years. He knows and has found several other tombs which have included and contained other bits which he goes on to find in

complete well-preserved form in the tomb of Tutankhamun. And so he is in some ways the best place person to find the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 when the fateful first step is revealed. It's interesting to me that you say he's already gone on to find other tombs because I know what you mean about he's sort of the quintessential blueprint archaeologist. He's the person that we think of in it. He's the answer to every pop quiz question ever. And the fact that I suppose in this narrative, this mythologised version of the story, he just happens upon the tomb and he breaks into it and all this stuff is preserved perfectly. It's all incredible. But actually, he's part of a whole

system of archaeological practice in the Valley of the Kings anyway. And he's been there for a long time doing that. That's absolutely fascinating. So what does he expect to find? He's been searching for the tomb for a while. Why this particular tomb? What's he hoping to find there? Will Barron So there's a list of kings that ruled at the time the Valley of the Kings was used as a cemetery. So you can tick them off. And most of them have been found. And there's a gap under the name Tutankhamun. Now, Tutankhamun, in ancient times, he rules for nine years. He comes to the throne probably when he's only nine or 10. So he's a teenager when he dies. Of course, this is only revealed when his body is found and it's possible to say how old

he was when he died. He lived at a very interesting time. 14th century BC, his dad, probably his dad, his father, was by any measure a bit of a weirdo when it comes to Egyptian kings. He revolutionized the way the king presented himself. He shut down all the worship of Egypt's many gods and then decided right, there's only one god, the sun god, the Aton, and I am his sole prophet. So Tutankhamun kind of resets the official position in Egypt, mid 14th century BC. And he's buried after a reign of nine years, but because he's associated with this so-called heretic, he's left off the official list of great kings of Egypt. So 200 years later, in the time of Ramses the second, Ramses the great, Tutankhamun doesn't appear on the official list. So if you were trying

to do an itemized list, he's not there. So Carter knows this, Carter knows of his existence and realizes his tomb hasn't definitely been found. And incidentally, Carter himself is not trowling or pickaxing. It's a whole team of skilled Egyptian workers who- Whose names are lost to the myth. Who are basically lost. I didn't even really- I knew that, but I assumed that he was at least down with them and going through that process with them. Because I've seen the picture, which we'll talk about some of the pictures later in the episode, but I've seen that picture where he has tool in hand and he's down there

and he is surrounded by other people. So he's doing this at a distance slightly. Yes, in common with other European, Western archaeologists of the time he's directing. He is very good at strategizing, as you said, he plans out a grid system and so he works through the grid. And so there's this apocryphal tale that his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, who we'll come on to talk about, funds so many seasons, they don't find anything spectacular and Carnarvon wants something or nothing and Carter offers to fund with his own money from Antique Stealing one final season. And eventually, Canarvon agrees to that. It's a film plot. It's like a movie. The

one last chance. We've got a big faceless money backer in the background. Faceless money backer. That's the name of this episode. Can I just check something with this? Is he there for, you say he knows that Tutankhamen's tomb is there somewhere in that last ditch attempt, is he looking to find Tutankhamen specifically or will any big old find do? I think any big old find would do, but I think he has Tutankhamen in mind. So two questions about the sort of technicalities of how he finds the tomb. First of all, I want to just ask, you said that he uses the grid system. Is that the kind of the same grid system that archaeologists

use today in terms of plotting trenches or is this on a much bigger scale, like thinking about the whole landscape? How is that working? A good question. I think it's on a bigger scale. It's not just in terms of trenches. It's not just bits of string with a wooden frame. This is not Mortimer Wheeler and you might imagine British archaeology with lots of mud. There's lots of sand. It is extremely hilly there because what you're working through is not just the natural landscape, this is the fun bit, it's the spoil heaps of archaeologists before you who've dug out other tombs. So what you're seeing is like a lunar landscape beneath all the rubble. The Valley of the Kings being a valley, being a wadi as it's called in Arabic is subject

to occasional flash flooding. And it seems not long after Tutankhamen's tomb was sealed, one of these flash floods comes along and picks up the dust, which when wet goes like cement and seals the tomb at the bottom of the Valley of the Kings. So you've got a historical circumstance, Tutankhamun's not on the official list. You've got this kind of geological chance, it's at the bottom of the Valley of the Kings, and you've had this weather event that's sealed it. Edith And you've got these two different competing stories in the landscape. You've got the ancient Egyptian history and then you have the history of the archaeologists who have changed that environment and you have to, as an archaeologist, be able to read that as well and literally

and in terms of the archive, dig through it and understand it in order to find what you're looking for. So how do they find the tomb in the end? They basically systematically move one pile of rubble over and then start on another. You sometimes read about clearance down to Bedrock. They clear down to a point where the set mud of one of these floods has been reached. And it is, according to the story, an Egyptian water boy, a regular person member of the team, the big Egyptian team that sets down supposedly the water jar for the day and finds the edge of a step that's not natural. And that rest is history.

First of all, that landscape that you're describing sounds like a history heaven slightly. Like you're literally stumbling over debris from these incredible discoveries. But you mentioned somebody else that's in the mix there, and it's the fifth Earl of Carnarvon. And he's playing a part in this as well. Again, not necessarily out digging or discovering or brushing. So what's he doing? What role is he playing? Well, he's the sponsor, because to do archaeology in Egypt at that time, and really at any time you need to employ lots of people to move the rubble and that's expensive. So at that time in the

1920s you needed a moneyed backer and so Canarvon meets Carter. Carter of fairly modest means, no formal education, no university degree. He subsequently gets honorary degrees, but he's never studied at a university. He's an artist, as I said, a dealer and a kind of in-between guy. And so he makes the acquaintance of Canarvon, who's a bit older, is a major British aristocrat at the time, very closely linked to the big money families, to the royal family. Now it's worth saying for what I think we're going to go on to discuss, Lord Carnarvon was never in the best of health with his friends. Spoilers.

Spoiler alert. With his friends when he's very young, late teens, early twenties, where they might be going off doing some military training. He's a bit judged to be too weak. So he makes friends with this very interesting guy called Prince Victor Duleep Singh, who is related to the Maharaja of Lahore and has incredible connections of his own. And these two have a close friendship, get up to no good instead of going to war.

Lord Carnarvon contracts syphilis. They do things that are not going into the army, but there is the impression. There's plenty of that in the army as well. Indeed. But there's this impression of George Herbert, ultimately the Earl of Carnarvon, not being in the peak of health at any point in his life. So he is an early adopter of the motor car. So he likes motor car racing.

And he gets into an accident, is quite badly injured, and is told you need to rest and you need a good climate. And the British climate is not ideal in the winter. So it often goes for aristocrats who've got TB and respiratory conditions, the dry air is meant to be good. So Canarvon goes to Egypt and then as a hobbyist takes up archaeology, an interest in archaeology. But he would, as you rightly say, he's not the one digging. He is put in touch with someone like Carter who can contract a team to do the digging. There's so many interesting layers there, aren't there, of the sort of performance of masculinity

in the period, but also the performance of class, the performance of colonialism in Egypt itself. And it's sort of fascinating all these layers of the story that come together in this one moment. So we have the stage set, we've explored the landscape, we've got the money in place. Carter and his team of Egyptians who are disappeared from the records, or certainly in terms of the story that's as it's sort of typically told, they're all working really hard, the water boy, supposedly, finds the first step, traces the line of the step, and soon they are looking at the entrance to a tomb. Yes. So they're looking at a staircase and staircases tend to lead somewhere.

I refuse to believe that this isn't a film. I know. It's really filmic. This is just a script. So they're then faced with a plastered sealed door. So the door has the impression of a seal from ancient times with the seal of the necropolis, which is a jackal over nine bound enemies. Campbell, I'm not gonna lie, I would see that and I would turn around. I feel like I have no business. You wouldn't. You'd go too far. You were not going to be like, we found it. I'll leave it there now. Off I go. You get digging. Go. No, I would have got off the plane in Egypt and been like, this is too hot for me.

I'm going back immediately. Okay, sorry. So we've come across this pretty terrifying imagery immediately. I should add all of this is happening in kind of slow time because there wasn't much in the way of plane travel in the 20s. So Lord Carnarvon is not even there. He's in England at Highclere Castle, which has since become very famous for Downton Abbey as the location for that. So Carter immediately sends this famous telegram saying, found a staircase, found a door with seals intact. Doesn't matter

that you can't really read what the seals say. The Valley of the Kings is not just for anybody, for any Tom, Dick or Harry to be buried in. It is for kings and queens of a 500 year period known as the New Kingdom. If you find a sealed door, the chances are you're looking at an intact royal tomb. So Carter, remember, has been doing this for years and years. So he sends off the telegram, you know, congratulations. It's ready for your arrival. So of course, can Arvin get straight on the boat? Is that not a little bit premature? I mean, he's really, you say there's a good chance there's a royal tomb behind, but that's quite a move from Carter. He's quite sure of himself

to say, get over here, this is happening. He is. And I think he is confident and a bit cocky in a sense at that point. Later on, he will experimentally have a look to make sure that something is going to do. Just a quick check. If he's going to, because he's had an experience, at least one experience where he's invited great dignitaries. And then the thing that he's found has not been as spectacular to him, at least as expected. So Canarvon shows up, they take down the first sealed doorway, they find a corridor filled with rubble, but there's a hole through the corridor.

So someone has got in before them. So there's a sense of excitement, but of potential disappointment. The outer wall, the outer doorway is sealed or resealed as it turns out, not from the original burial party. So this is an animal intervention. This isn't something burying down as often happens on like Neolithic burial mounds in Britain, you know, you get that kind of disturbance. This is human. This is human activity. So that I mentioned that the seal of the necropolis and this comes back later on. And to us, maybe it is an ominous image of a jackal over nine bound captives. Because ancient Egyptian iconography and ideology, state level ideology is pretty belligerent,

like a lot of state level ideology. The king is a sphinx, he's a lion, he's a hybrid creature who's gonna maul the enemies of the state. So there's this idea that the jackal represents secrecy, not threat, but things that are only for the initiated to know. And this is a secret because the secret is the king's tomb. So eventually they get to a second doorway, which is completely sealed. They've cleared the corridor of rubble the Egyptian team has.

And that is the fateful moment with the metal bar and the candle going in. And in Carter's diary, it's a slightly different wording than the famous, what can you see? Wonderful things. Well, speaking of seeing wonderful things, I have a picture in front of me. And usually Maddie and I take it upon ourselves to describe this picture. And I know we're getting you to work extra hard by passing this over to you, but I think you're probably better placed to tell us exactly what's happening here because I feel like this is the moment you're describing or close to it anyway.

This is a couple of months after that first moment. So what you're seeing is Carter and Carnarvon together. They were rarely pictured together, given they become such a famous duo in archaeology. So what you're seeing is the literally very staged opening of another interior door to the burial chamber. So upon the famous seeing the wonderful things, Carter says it's like the props room of some forgotten opera because there are strange animals, there are statues, there is furniture and everything pretty much is covered in gold. Well, let's pause on that for a second because that must have felt so dissonant and it feels so dissonant to me looking at the photos and we're going to go to talk about the photograph of the interior of the tomb, but they look like they were made yesterday.

They are in such fantastic condition. And when we think about especially romantic archaeology, archaeology in the early 20th century and this age of sort of golden glamour and colonialism and all of this, that we think of these, especially talking about cinema as well, these fragmented forms, these broken dusty objects, things that can be pieced back together and the brokenness and the wear and tear is the charm of them. And I just wonder what it would have felt like. I mean, it's interesting that he says it's like going into an opera house. It's like something not real. It's like a performed other world.

And of course it was a sort of stage set for the Egyptians themselves, right? But going into that as a 20th century person must have felt completely surreal. Yeah. Yes, exactly. I think for Carter, he says, you know, 33 centuries had passed. He has a very, in the write-up, he has a very romantic turn of phrase with the help of other people like Arthur Mace who made his writing more literary. But to be that person, to imagine that moment of putting the candle in and thinking bloody hell. And they know this is important because just to come back to these pictures that we have here. So for the listeners, we have some black and white photos. And in the first one that Campbell was describing, we have two men standing in the center of the photo and around them. And I hadn't imagined

this for myself. There is kind of wood paneling leading into one of the rooms. And this wood paneling to me seems like it's supporting everything, keeping everything in place, keeping things as it should be. So it's safe, I guess, or relatively safe. I am wrong by the look on your face. Well, tell me what it is. Tell me what it is. I'm so glad you've asked about this particular image because it often gets skipped past in the narrative to get something else. So what you're seeing is the so-called antechamber, which is the first room full of stuff, funerary furniture that they encounter. They clear

all of that out. Carter, as I say, has worked in other royal tombs, which were all robbed, completely robbed, but he has found fragments of the thrones, the chariots, the beds, all of the stuff. He knows what to expect. He's had a tiny taste of what's to come. Yeah, which is, as I say, would have given him a particular insight. But what you cannot see in this photo, because they are very strangely from a modern conservation point of view,

hidden by paneling, are these two statues of the king that are described as eerie sentinels. Now, these are two pieces from the tomb that absolutely fascinate me. So they are known again from other tombs. They represent the king or a sense of the king, maybe his spirit, an aspect of his spirit. So they show him with a staff in one hand and a mace in the other, with one foot advanced as is standard in Egyptian art.

They're covered in black resin and all the details of the costuming and the jewellery picked out in gold. These were meant to be, in a sense, ways for the king to experience rituals. They may have been used for rituals during the lifetime even of the king. Then they're buried with him. But in the colonial atmosphere of 1920s Egyptology, yes, this is very glamorous, but undoubtedly from the very moment the tomb is found, there is a sense of threat. And these are pictured as,

and are still referred to as the guardian statues. There is no ancient function that says that they're guarding anything, but their placement, their colouring, a racist interpretation of the black skin of the figures, and their general situation is interpreted as threatening. So it is very odd, as someone who works in a museum, that these incredibly precious pieces are still in position and they are covered in paneling. The reason this is done is because Carter and Carnarvon in this image are literally on a stage.

The stage is covering a hole that they made, which they secretly used to check if the tomb was in fact intact. So not only is the whole photographic business here staged and performative, the opening of that door in front of dignitaries in the antechamber when this was going on, that is quite literally staged. Wow. What's happening in real time then is the discovery is still going on. They're still opening up the tomb, or maybe not two months on, but they're certainly presumably cataloguing

things, exploring what's in there, thinking about the space, learning it. And they're trying to work out the story that Tutankhamun was trying to tell with this space or that his subjects were trying to tell of his life. Yeah. And that narrative. But then there's another narrative that's being added onto that. There's the narrative of Carter as the discoverer and Knaven as sort of accomplice to that, as the architect of this material is already taking on, as you say, colonial flavor, a superstitious or a slightly sinister flavor thinking about those guardian statues and that they are threatening in some way or they're interpreted as that anyway. And that's so interesting to me that you have, you know, we talked earlier about the sort of layers of the

landscape and all those different histories. And these are just more and more layers and their layers being told physically in that space in terms of what's being preserved, what's maybe being put at risk. And then those decisions obviously have longer term impacts, but also told in terms of modern technology. You've got the photographs, obviously, you've got Carter's writings that as you say, are sort of hammed up and made more literary and palatable for a reading public back home in Britain. You have all these technologies and these art forms that are just constantly shape-shifting as this is unfolding on the ground and it's still such a new discovery. It's such a sort of hybrid and exciting thing that

you can look at from all these different angles. It's fascinating. Exactly. It's a crucible of experimentation in archaeology because as you say, it's a new technology even to photograph things. We're 1922, 23. And so Carter employs this chap called Harry Burton, who's actually based in New York. And he produces these really iconic images using hidden light sources, which even, you know, I remember being a little boy and a great aunt giving me a reprint, a 1970s reprint of Carter's book, The Tomb of Tutankhamen. And in that-

You had no chance, Campbell. Oh, I just had to be an Egyptologist. And in the book, and still today if you see those images, there is something quite cold and clinical about them. If they were in colour, maybe they might have been more glamorous and glitzy. It's cold. It's in many ways self-consciously scientific. And this is always a tale of not just two stories, but several narratives. One is Carter himself is aware of the importance of recording

this find, and he records it in such detail. He trusts and employs a close team of Egyptian colleagues who he is personally very close to. They may not make it to the final full, grand, singular narrative of heroic white archaeologist, but Karcher is clearly very well embedded with his Egyptian colleagues. But then he makes a, well, Knaarvin I should say, makes a spectacular miscalculation in selling the exclusive rights to the story basically in photographs taken by Burton to the times of London. So the people of Egypt have to hear the news of this find in their own country secondhand

from a British newspaper. All the other British newspapers are understandably ticked off. And that might be the origin of the curse narrative in this case, where it is the rival newspapers who are starved of the oxygen of actual news, who are thinking, oh, well, we'd better come up with some other thing to sell newspapers. And that, especially in the case of a guy called Arthur Weigel, who's a British archaeologist who worked in the Valley of the Kings and may actually have found Tutankhamun had he stayed there a bit longer, who knows. He works, I think, for the Daily Mail. He's the Egypt correspondent. He witnesses the opening of that inner burial chamber wall and he speculates about Lord Carnarvon as being so offhand about this,

something terrible is going to happen to him. And sure enough, in whatever it is, six weeks, he's dead. I would say there's a general colonial angst about going somewhere you're not invited. There's a Freudian metaphor there, but then the guardian statues play into that. But then for Tutankhamun in particular, and especially around the death of Canarvon, it is rival newspaper people who want to make a story because they resent not having the access to the official find. Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed.

In our new series Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast brought to you by Ubisoft and HistoryHit is a must listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast. So we're going to come on to talk about the curse and what happens to Lord Carnarvon, or what doesn't happen based on the curse. Let's just talk a little bit about the loot first because you mentioned there, Campbell, this colonial anxiety. I mean, it doesn't stop them going into the tomb, but it is present in the narrative and in terms of their behaviour

on the ground. And they're going into a space that has been, as far as the ancient Egyptians who created it and who sealed it up. And obviously there's maybe question marks around people having been in some of that space in the century since, but for all intents and purposes, it is a funerary space. It's a space of a sacred ritual and it's a space to be left alone and to remain empty of living human beings. And they're going into that and they're coming across incredible items. And they are coming into contact with them, but maybe also taking them as well. So before we talk about that, I'm going to make Antony describe a photograph of I think it's a pretty famous one. I certainly recognize this photo. This is the antechamber again, isn't it, with some items in. So, Anthony, tell us what we're looking at. Well, I have never seen this photo before, but funnily enough, it looks to me like it's my granny's

shed. It is full of stuff. Now, the disadvantage, I think, Campbell, you were talking about this earlier, the disadvantage of this, I think, is that it looks, is because it's in black and white. To me, and my bad eyesight, it looks like a jumble of stuff. It looks like there's some old stuff in a room and people have not been taking care of it. However, look a little bit more closely and you see chests. You can see part of a carriage, I think, a chariot potentially. Yeah. I see some wheels. can see part of a carriage, I think, a chariot potentially. Yeah.

I see some wheels. I see stools. I see what looks like maybe some form of big animal, big dogs, big cats, big lions, maybe I'm guessing, and yeah, it's like a jumble sale gone wrong. You are going to tell me if you came across this stuff in a jumble sale by absolutely everything that you can get your hands on, I understand that. But to the eye, it looks like stuff in a jumble sale, buy absolutely everything that you can get your hands on. I understand that. But to the eye, it looks like stuff in a room.

But I think you're getting back to Carter's observation that it's a jumble from a prop store of an opera or a theatrical production, which as we've said is true to an extent. This is a secret. It was not, as Maddie said, meant to be seen by profane eyes. It was buried with the king, the dead king, who was being transformed into a god. So the religious purpose of it was not, it's not everything but the kitchen sink

to use in the afterlife. I think people often assume that. It's objects that had been used by the king during his lifetime, his sandals, his clothing, his underwear, over a hundred pairs of underwear that he'd used, not because he needed them in the afterlife, because in the afterlife he's going to be a god and gods don't need underwear. But because the king of Egypt was thought to be at least semi-divine, anything that touched the divine person was sacred and could not be thrown away. They're literally imbued with the magic of that person. I think that was true. So Carter knew when he found

it that this was the sort of thing he would expect because as I said, he'd found fragments of these pieces. But they are all objects which help transform the king into full godly status or help him in the journey to the afterlife. It's not simply things for him to use. There were tools, there was a fire lighting set, there are musical instruments, there are games, there are beds, there are other bits of furniture, there's clothing. There's a whole wardrobe that even though in artistic depictions, which are generally not to be trusted in ancient Egypt, you would imagine the king always wore like bright white linen garments. There are full on Hollywood

style costumes, feathered capes. Where are they now? They're very badly degraded, but they're now in Cairo. So the other point to make in encountering this tomb of four chambers that's stuffed full of things, it is not as the burial party originally left it because there have been at least two robes. Yes, so I was going to ask this, I mean, just in terms of looking at that space, you can see the

chariot is, it looks like it's been a bit of an accident. Is that just the effect of time and these things sort of eroding in that space without human intervention plus some robberies as well? Like what's actually, it looks like a bit of a car crash. It looks like in Friends, Monica's secret cupboard that she puts everything in and she tells you- You're looking at me like I know what you're talking about. I have no idea what you're talking about. I figure Anthony's not watching any TV or film despite being an actor on TV and film. Look, it's like the cupboard when you tell your husband that the house is tidy and you've tidied it up and it's like, oh no, don't open that door. And then you open it and everything.

I see, I see, I see. Presumably it wasn't left like that by the ancient Egyptians. and it's like, oh no, don't open that door. And then you open it and everything. I see, I see, I see. Presumably it wasn't left like that by the ancient Egyptians. It doesn't seem so. And so Carter actually records that there are the boxes, the chests, the caskets that you can see in that photo have little dockets, little labels that say, this contains four gold rings, six.

Yeah, all the itemized things that it was meant to have taken, that were meant to have gone in from the palace when things were being packed up. So clearly someone has been in, they have stolen linen, they have stolen unguents, one of my favorite words, perfumed oils and kind of substances. And I think that's the kind of stuff that would decay quite quickly. So the robbery seems to have happened. There was even the finger marks in one of the nice vases where someone had scooped out the king's face cream or whatever. And I think what we see now in that photograph and what Carter and the team found was both a well-set out group of objects, which had simply

partly fallen apart through three and a half thousand years. Partly it was the mess of the tomb robbers going in and having a rummage, a good old rummage. And partly it was how the original burial party left it really. So it does seem quite jumbled. The thing about the jumble is Tutankhamun, being the only king whose tomb really survives intact from ancient Egypt, had one of the smallest tombs. So they're trying to pack in stuff which would normally be distributed throughout several sizeable halls into small rooms. You can see things organized quite neatly, but it's not very aesthetic. There's no interior design going on here.

Things aren't nicely placed. You know, there's a chest that's sort of on top of what looks like a table or something. It looks like we run out of room on the floor, right? But yeah, it's a sort of game of Tetris really, which is, it seems a little bit unritualistic to a certain extent. One thing though, the thieves would have been really easy to catch because their skin would have been immaculate. Grabbing that thing and then they just that's how you catch them.

So I'm sure they ended up on a spike. So is it really a curse if you've got great skin? I don't know. Jury's out. Well, let's talk a little bit more about this curse then. Because what that suggests to me if there were robbers in ancient Egyptian times that there is a variation in terms of belief in the afterlife and in the spirit of the dead person in that space. But this does continue into the Egypt of the 1920s or is this something that Westerners,

that Europeans are reading about in terms of ancient Egyptian beliefs and taking it as their own superstition in relation to this case? Or when they open the tomb, are all the Egyptians who've been working so hard excavating it, do they all step back and say, I'm not going in there? We don't want to touch things. Is this made up by the times? I don't think this is entirely made up by the times. Short answer. Tomb robbery has been endemic since the tombs I don't think this is entirely made up by the times, short answer.

Tomb robbery has been endemic since the tombs were being built. That is human nature. It is true of the human condition. Naturally, and let's be absolutely explicit about this, it was advantageous for the British colonial rulers of Egypt to say, oh, the natives can't be trusted with these treasures. We, the scientific archaeologists, will come in and save this. And that is the other important point to make at this stage. In talking about this, when Carton Canarvon were removing the objects from the antechamber, they were sometimes taking them to another tomb, the so-called

laboratory tomb, which was much bigger, standard royal tomb, empty, and it was where they did a lot of conservation work. Then that material was then put on a boat and then taken up to Cairo to the National Museum. At that time, it was assumed perhaps, in common with previous excavations, that the explorer, the archaeologist, the Brett, would take 50% of the finds and they would come to London or maybe to New York. The individual?

Yes. Wow. So the archaeologist, as standard, between the mid 1880s, up until even the 1970s was entitled to a share of finds. And of course, in the 18th century, they absolutely felt they were entitled to it, even if it wasn't official and very much to take those things. Indeed. This is a law which is often referred to as the Partage system. So it's called Fiennes

division or Partage, English or French term for a system thought up by, you guessed it, the English and the French. And in that system, notionally, the best things stayed in Cairo Museum, the National Museum in the capital in Cairo, the best things stayed in Cairo Museum, the National Museum, in the capital in Cairo, and then things which were thought to be surplus to requirements were given to the archaeologist. Now, in the case of Tutankhamun's tomb, it was so chock full of incredible things. Even the surplus, the duplicates were incredible. And there is no question Carter pocketed stuff for himself,

for Knarvin, it's very clear. So Carter, like so many of these, or any historical character is complex. He was close with his Egyptian workmen, even though he may have denied their existence in official publications. He was very methodical and careful and meticulous, but also he sold the rights to a British newspaper

to represent it to the world. And he expected and was disappointed by the decision by the newly formed nationalist Egyptian government in the wake of a partial liberation from British rule in 1922, months before the tomb was found. It was ruled that because this was in fact an intact royal tomb, even though there had been a couple of robberies, it was judged as intact. And so the whole contents were property of the state, of the

Egyptian state. So Howard Carter really wants to, I agree that he's a complex figure. I think his motivation seems to be predominantly to write himself into the narrative. From whatever intention, he does want to be part of that story and he does sort of insert himself into that. So we've heard about Carter and where he figures in the arc of the story, but let's hear a little bit more now about Lord Carnarvon and what happens to him. The streets of Cairo were heaving despite the early hour. Horse-drawn carriages and automobiles vie for space on the roads.

Car horns honk, men shout at one another, and salesmen hawk their wares to those out late or very, very early. Rising above this cacophony is the imposing façade of the continental Savoy Hotel. Tall columns frame the entrance ornately carved, and empty balconies await the day. All is still except for the fine curtains fluttering out of the doors open to the breeze. Only a couple of rooms are lit at this very early hour, and one of these is that of George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon. The Earl has a high fever. He shivers and sweats, his breath quick and shallow. An infected mosquito bites throbs in his face as he labours for breath through the pain,

his breath's increasingly shallow. A final breath leaves his body then, and as his eyes go dark, so too does his room. In fact, at that moment, all of Cairo is engulfed in darkness as a power failure sweeps the city. In England, at Highclere Castle, a dog howls. Just a month and a half after witnessing the opening of Tutankhamun's burial chamber, Lord Carnarvon is dead. Now could he be the victim of the Pharaoh's curse? Yes, I buy it completely. The end. I love that his dog howls back in high, Claire.

Do they say that that happened? Right. Let's get into this. So the stage is set for really something dramatic to happen. So we've had lots of dramatic things. And I think that story I told you about Arthur Wagle, the Egyptologist rival journalist who's present at the opening of the burial chamber. He says, you know, Canarvon's jocularity will get him into trouble. Something will befall him. And sure enough, you know, Canarvan is not an Egyptologist. He's a hobbyist. So he maybe looks at things in a slightly different way. And he's maybe not welcoming that community in the same way that a more professional person might be. Indeed. He's, you know, sold the story quite literally to the times to recoup the cost

that he's outlaid for digging all this stuff up. The story goes, he gets a mosquito bite. Remember, he's not a man in the best of health anyway. He gets the mosquito bite when he's in the very south of Egypt. Again, accounts vary. He's at another fancy hotel in Aswan down in the south. He gets sufficiently unwell from having nicked this bite while shaving that he goes to Cairo to the Savoy Hotel and it's there. He eventually dies of septicemia. When he dies, so the story goes, it is said that his dog howls and drops down dead. The dog dies too.

Dog dies apparently, at Highclere Castle in England. This is sometimes attributed by the Herbert family to a Scottish maid. And you know, the Celts are particularly credulous. So, you know, if someone's Irish, Welsh or Scottish, they must be superstitious. Anyway, the thing about the lights going out in Cairo, this happened all the time. Various other permutations or extrapolations come from this. One is that Howard Carter's pet canary gets killed. There's always a pet canary.

There's a lot of animal death in this episode, more than expected. So the story is that pet canary gets killed by a cobra and the cobra is quintessentially the symbol of pharaonic power. It spits fire and poison at Pharaoh's enemies. One of my favorites that can be debunked, I think from an Egyptological point of view, is the story of a clay tablet with the words, death shall come on swift wings to whoever will disturb the tomb of a pharaoh. Actual curses, explicit curses are extremely rare in Egyptian tombs. I could name a handful from much earlier times, a thousand years before Tutankhamun came to the throne. And one occurs on a tomb of one of the pyramid builders at Giza. And it was excavated by an Egyptian archaeologist, very famous Egyptian archaeologist called Professor Zahi Hawass. He is now in his 80s.

It's been 20 years since he found that tomb. He's fine. But did he sell the story to the times and take all the treasure? No. And this is something I've been thinking about recently. There are a couple of instances of curses in tombs around the time of Tutankhamun and they threaten anyone who comes into the tomb and does something to damage, deliberately attack the name or the memory of the deceased. And the curse is basically that you will not be remembered. You will not be remembered. You will not be famous. Now, Howard Carter is the lead person. He is the most famous archaeologist ever to have left. He is the

pub quiz question answer. I remember him from primary school. If that was the intent of the curse, then it singularly failed. And then there's these other, I have a list here in front of me of other people who were potentially dead. We won't concentrate too much on everybody because there's actually too many of them. But we have- That's compelling evidence in and of itself there, right? We have Archibald Douglas Reed, who is a radiologist at St. Thomas's. Go on, yay or nay? Nay because he was an early experimenter in x-rays and x-rays. You have a clue there. Nay, because he was an early experimenter in X-rays and X-rays. And he'd been ill with cancer,

sadly, before the tomb was found. We have Prince Ali Kamel Fahime Bey, shot by his wife. Very tangential to the whole Tutankhamen story. Okay, great. Sir Lee Stack. Oh, the governor of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan is killed in 1924. It is? Yes. No, no, I think he's totally unconnected with the tomb. Okay. And then we've talked about Arthur Mace already. So what about Arthur Mace? He was part of Carter's team during the excavation and potentially murdered. He is an established Egyptologist long before the Tutankhamun's tomb is discovered, Mace, I think, dies in 1928. And he's the closest, probably apart from Carnarvon, to the finding and promulgation of the story of the tomb. But even so, that's six years after.

If you were a vengeful pharaoh, I think you could be more direct. There's a non-death, it says in my notes, of Sir Bruce Ingram, who is someone who is a recipient of a paperweight from Carter that is said to be made from a mummified hand and has a scarab bracelet on it. So he's supposedly got items from the tomb, presumably sat on his desk if it's a paperweight, and he doesn't die. So I think it's worth emphasizing that even for to come and to miss found there is there's a great currency and Egyptian curse stories. So you've got Edgar Allan Poe's writing about reanimated mummies. You've got the MR James story that was done on BBC recently. Yeah, I can't

think what it's called. But that was well before Howard Carter. I mean, MR James late 19th early 20th century, right? Yeah. That late Victorian Gothic horror, even Arthur Conan Doyle, who himself was a big imperialist and had opinions about the Egyptians, modern Egyptians. He had opinions on a lot of things. He supposedly gets off a ship in New York in 1923, years of Canarvon's death and is quoted as saying, oh, but of course, this was the work of elementals from the tombs, supernatural entities that Canarvon shouldn't have been messing with. So I think the core of the curse myth undoubtedly revolves around Canarvon's rather untimely death. He's only in his fifties, but he's not a well man. Add to that a general air

of interest at the time amongst Egyptologists in spiritualism. That was definitely happening in the twenties. And then you've got the rival put out journalists who want something to write about. And yeah, it makes for quite a heady cocktail that has clearly persisted in the literature since. So I think by 1932, so 10 years after the tomb was found, it finds its biggest expression on the silver screen with the Universal Mummy movie with Boris Karloff. And that is a classic. That is a classic. Before you go, Campbell, I want to ask you, in the context of 1920s imperialism, the curse helps to underpin British imperialist ideas about superstitions in this part of the world,

about the Egyptians themselves maybe not being trustworthy, and it sort of bolsters that worldview. Do you think there's a use that a story like this has, and I don't mean to take it at face value, I mean for us to reassess the story, thinking about where the objects from Tutankhamen's tomb and other items from ancient Egypt have, or indeed the ancient world more generally, have ended up in museum collections. Do you think that's something we can take from this story about the curse in terms of thinking about the distribution of these items, who has custodianship over them and what they mean in a modern global context today? Do you think there is a role for the curse within that?

Yes. I don't want to be one of these Egyptologists who rushes in and says, oh, we must dismiss it completely out of turn because other commentators, they tend not to be specialist Egyptologists but cultural historians in writing about Tutankhamun. I'm thinking particularly of Professor Roger Luckhurst, who's written a great book called The Mummy's Curse, which I was reading on the train down to the studio today. He makes the observation that curse narratives very readily incorporate their negations. So actually, if you go on and on about how much you don't believe the curse, that in fact becomes part of the narrative. I had a predecessor at Manchester Museum who was trying to make fun of the curse

narrative and said, well, some people think that a cursed mummy sunk the Titanic when in fact I heard that that same mummy was given to the Kaiser and it started the First World War. By making that suggestion, you've only expanded and amplified the narrative. And in answer to your question, Maddie, I think best placed, the cursed narrative challenges the ethics of the tomb robbering in the first place. If you're going to come and steal from me, there's got to be a quid pro quo. So you're going to steal from me, something bad is going to happen. And that is very ancient.

The ancient Egyptians must have had that concept. Clearly not enough to put those people off stealing the face cream and the jewelry, the portable jewelry from Tutankhamen. It persists throughout the Middle Ages. There are whole books written in Arabic about how best to assuage the gins in tombs in order to go hunting for gold. That's a big industry and it persists today. Sadly, dozens of people lose their lives in searching for things under their houses and in Egypt. And that undermines the structure of the house and they die. And often it's children because they're small enough to tunnel under the...

And in that sense, there is a true cost for searching for these things. There is a very, very serious true cost. And that I'm afraid to say is fueled by this absolute obsession we have still in ancient Egyptian art. We're so covetous of it. Tutankhamun is the kind of cover boy of this, but it's gone on for centuries. The West and books and documentaries.

Indiana Jones, Lara Croft. All of these things, museums do not simply reflect an interest in ancient Egypt. They actively create the interest in ancient Egypt. So we're all complicit in this fantasy, which people are literally dying for every year. So that's the real curse of the pharaohs, I think. Well, before we let you go, I'm going to ask a not very clever question, but I want to ask it anyway. We're talking about these curses.

We're talking about the potential of these curses and any kind of real world impact, you work with not necessarily the artifacts from Tootin Commons to necessarily on a daily basis, but you work with these artifacts a lot. I'm sure your team do as well. Over the course of your entire career, has there been anything strange, unusual, interesting that you would ascribe to some kind of otherworldly impact from any of these items that you've worked with? Gosh, that's a personal question.

It is. I didn't believe it was caused by supernatural forces, but there was a case just over 10 years ago when I went into our newly opened gallery of Egypt and Sudan and noticed that one of the pieces had moved on its shelf. And I went in the next day and it was in a different position. The next day it was in a different position again. Now that case is locked and alarmed and I have the only key, so I thought someone was playing a trick on me. And this spawned the story of the spinning statue

that we set up a stop motion camera that took a photo a minute for a week. And you could see that the piece was spinning. This little statuette was spinning around. And we put that footage on YouTube and it got a lot of attention. It even featured in an episode of The Simpsons. I mean, that's- That's cultural impact. Wow.

If only we'd monetized that YouTube clip in some way. And people were writing to me, people were coming in with lottery tickets, believing the statue was going to give them the knowledge about the lottery. People from all around the world came to visit and it increased a footfall. But it just confirmed to me not in existence of the supernatural because it was simply because the piece was on a glass shelf and it hadn't been adhered with conservation grade adhesive. It just confirmed to me that people will associate ancient Egyptian things in particular with

the unexplained, the supernatural, the threatening. And the power of power. The power of it. Had that peace been from Mesoamerica or from another part of the world from Europe, it would not have generated that. So as I say, the curse really is the inescapable association of pharaonic culture and the malign. And I've never found any evidence.

I've never felt personally threatened by ancient Egyptian forces myself. Campbell, if our listeners want to find you online, if they want to read your work, tell us where can they do that? Well, I'm online on social media at EgyptMCR. Do give me a follow and you can ask me some questions. I've got a wonderful co-authored book for kids with the wonderful Greg Jenner, Ancient Egypt Gets Unruly.

Brilliant. The part of a new series called Totally Chaotic History. And I've got a book coming out in September, Brief History's ancient Egypt, 10 things you always wanted to know. So these are the 10 questions that I get asked by people in pubs. People on podcasts.

People on podcasts. People in barbers. You are in the business of probably one of the most talked about parts of any, right? Like, I mean, it's the thing that people remember a lot about or think they remember a lot about. It's a real buzz chatty topic. And even, you know, if it's not a prescribed topic in the national curriculum, it gets

taught because teachers are always saying it's so vivid, it's so colourful, it's so interesting, it's so engaging a subject to talk about. So I hope that continues in schools. Absolutely. Thank you very much. So if you have enjoyed this episode of After Dark, and why wouldn't you have had, then you can find all our past catalog episodes wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this, leave us a five star view, no less.

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