Bittersweet Infamy - #50 - The Pharaoh's Curse

Episode Date: August 7, 2022

50th episode spectacular! Taylor tells Josie about the life, death, and afterlife of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, and the truth behind an infamous curse. Plus: the Meltie Awards, where fans pick the highlights of 50 episodes of infamy!

This episode is in memory of Linda Basso, Crampoo Survivor. Welcome to the Meltees! The first ever celebration of 50 episodes of Vita, Sweden. The Meltees are brought to you by 9th's Crazy Coloured Ketchup. They're fucking purple for some reason. And corn. It's everywhere.

Watch out behind you. Here are your hosts for this evening. Josie Mitchell and Taylor Basso. Josie! Taylor! That is a beautiful sparkling evening gown you're wearing. And that's a smashing dinner jacket with white gloves? Thank you. I saved them from my mass wedding at Madison Square Garden.

And look at all of these adoring fans. Peter, you made it! Welcome, Bitter Sweethearts, to the Meltees! Our celebration of 50 episodes of Bitter Sweet Infamy. We've taken it to you. The audience to determine which stories are as sweet as Candyman and which should be cast back to the mirror realm. Which stories are rollin' with the homies and which ones are way harsh, Ty?

Which stories shine like a DeLorean and which ones blow like Vesuvius? You voted on your favorite stories in categories like Best Memphis, Best Fictional Josie, and The Coveted Bitter Sweetest Episode. As we reveal the winners, we'll tell you a little bit about ourselves in the podcast in the style of a kitschy, badly scripted awards show. But you love that, Swill, don't you, you fucking animals? You'll still get your usual dose of infamy after the Meltees, but for right now, think of this as a little extra piece of candy in your Halloween bag.

It might have come into contact with nuts, so be careful. Speaking of a couple of nuts, do you remember how we first met? The year was 2008. The scene, Kephe de Soleil poetry slam on a rainy night in Vancouver. Your intrepid co-hosts met through a mutual connection. Mohammed, Josie thought Taylor and him were brothers, but alas, they were dating. But he don't look alike. A year later, we were both admitted to the creative writing program at UBC

where we had all of our classes together. And all of our breaks? Josie and I honed our rapport and our skills in Brian Wade's radio and stage play classes. A wonderful teacher and writer B-Wade, he recently passed away and we owe a lot to him. As fellow writers and collaborators on various storytelling projects, we've pulled a lot from our training as fiction writers, a.k.a. we've made a lot of shit up. A lot of shit.

It's really amazing that we landed on a non-fiction format, isn't it? Our best display of grade A bullshitting has to be the fictional Josie. Taylor, can you explain a little bit about this award category? A fictional Josie is a fictionalized version of one of the hosts, that's us, told in a second person perspective, usually at the beginning of the story to set the scene. Fictional Josie typically displays catastrophically poor judgment and gets into all kinds of shenanigans, including violence, mayhem, mishaps and tragedy. Though the category is named Best Fictional Josie, fictional Taylors are also eligible.

The nominees for Best Fictional Josie are... And the Melty Award for Best Fictional Josie goes to... Very good, very well deserved. Oh, okay, alright. You're a Melty Award winner, Josie. How does it feel for the original? That was a by Josie, Josie, by Josie for Josie, Josie experience. It was the original fictional Josie.

Yeah, maybe there was something there when that it just had a longer run time as the original, you know. Congratulations, Josie, and sex cult Josie. Sex cult Josie couldn't be here to accept this award. She was selling product marketing. Exactly. Did she leave you any remarks to say in her name? Come big, come often. Wow, okay.

That might be a little crass. But good advice, but good advice. Boy, fictional Josie and Taylor sure have eventful lives. I'm a little jealous. Not me. I'm all about that slow paced life. You do always say that your favorite episodes of Buttersweet Infamy are the ones where nothing happens. Exactly.

Life isn't all climaxes and plot twists. Sometimes you just want a story with no stakes, no urgency, no consequences at all. The nominees for best story where nothing happens are... Krampus and his kin. Number 34, Ketzel Kowaddle is coming to town. Number 40, the Voynich manuscript. And number 43, the mystery of Al Capone's vaults. And the winner for best story where nothing happens.

Number 43, the mystery of Al Capone's vaults. Whoop, whoop, whoo! Absolutely! How exciting! It was just a bottle! It was just a bottle. Yeah. And yet that led to this, this beautiful golden award that I am in real life holding in my hand right this second. It's heavier than I thought, right?

It's heavy, it's very heavy and it is somehow actually melting, which is a nice touch. Dude, science. Science these days. We got to leave a nice Yelp review for that trophy place, they really turned it out for us. Yeah. Yeah, no. How exciting? Very good, I suppose. Very good. On to the next. Speaking of stories where nothing happens, that reminds me of how we got this podcast started. I mean, something did happen, we started a podcast.

But it was the nothing happening that inspired it. It was late 2020, in the thick of the COVID pandemic, and besides the utter breakdown of in-person society and the constant ever-present existential threat to the very core of our beings, there wasn't really anything happening in the day-to-day. So we needed a way to connect and create. Taylor dropped me a message asking if I'd be down to collaborate on a podcast project with him. Rosie took the bait like the ruby she is and we started hashing out the details. One of the most important details was finding a name. The title Infamous was already taken by a podcast about Takashi69, so that was out. I remember you also brainstormed the titles The Infamous Ones and Shitty People.

There's no judgment in a brainstorming, Sash. Could you tell me, Taylor, was it going to be a podcast about Shitty People or were we meant to be the Shitty People? I was riffing. It was actually Mitchell, guest host and Batman stepdad turned real dad, who came up with the idea for the title Bitter Sweet Infamy. Neither Josie nor I had any experience with podcasting, but we had research experience. And we both know how to tell a story. Even if the story is about an NFL Christmas album or a scary statue of Lucille Ball. We talk a lot about quote-unquote bad art on the show.

But if the value of art is determined by how much joy it brings, then our next nominees may be the greatest artworks of all time. Fuck you, Da Vinci. The nominees for best bad art are... The winner is... The musical adaptation of Stephen King's Carey from number 44, Bloodbath on Broadway. The winner is... Scary Lucie, the controversial Lucille Ball statue number 40, The Vornish Manuscript. Yay! Oh, I love that episode, by the way. Robbed for best story where nothing happens.

Oh, how exciting. Scary Lucie, a face that could melt ice cream, ended up melting hearts instead. It's beautiful. That's really lovely. I'm so happy about that. I am here to accept the award on behalf of Scary Lucie. She couldn't be here today, but she wanted me to tell you all... So... that's her speech. And then she said, oh, and then she took a giant loaf of bread out of an oven. It was fantastic. I really am so thrilled and thankful that you took me up on my offer to do this podcast, Josie. Together, follow you into the fiery pits of hell. You know that.

Josie, what a perfect introduction for our next category, Scariest Hole. It's almost like we scripted it. The nominees for Scariest Hole are... The Well to Hell, the deepest man-made hole on Earth. Number 12, The Well to Hell. The Puebla Sinkhole. Number 21, The Galapagos Affair. Hates to Hell. Turkmenistan's ever-burning fire pit. Number 37, Gosetta Waxman.

The Endless Excavation of Al Capone's Empty Vault. Number 43, The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults. And the winner of Scariest Hole, The Well to Hell. Oh my gosh. Deep down the well. One person voted for none, but great work. No holes. None of these holes scared me. None of these holes were even scary, bro. Why did you make us vote for these? Who is this person?

I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Josie, The Well to Hell couldn't be here tonight. But you're here to accept that award. Of all of our of all of our invitees, only Peter the Dolphin arrived. It is an empty pensioners' hall in one dolphin. Would you have any remarks? Thank you, Well to Hell, for the work that you put in being so terrifying. So scary.

I hope that nobody ever loses their sunglasses down you. The scariest thing that could happen. The scariest thing ever that could happen. Congratulations and we miss you. Wish you were here. Yeah, take the lid off. Take the unseal. Come back. Oh man, just melts your heart.

Josie, where did you go? I can't see you. I'm frightened. Boo! You startled me. I'm sorry. I was just hiding over here behind the scenes. That's right. I forgot we're doing that behind the scene segment for our audience. You're a mess. What? So what does a typical episode of bittersweet infamy look like behind the scenes?

You just call me a mess. Shake it off. We're live, pal. First, we hop on a zoom call and hit record on Audacity, a free recording and editing software. If you're curious about our mics, we both use Blue Snowball USB mics, which are decent quality and sell for about 40 to 50 dollars US. Neither of ours are blue. What doesn't make it into the final episode? A lot of mic bumps, P breaks, throats cleared, beers cracked. Joint slit, mispronunciation. Yes, even more than you already hear. So's burps and half-baked takes, plus other nips and tucks to help the pacing.

A typical episode is about two and a half hours before it gets edited down, although our current record is four and a half hours. Because my dumb ass brought Josie and Ramone a chaotic and unerable tangent about the children's video game. Shelly Duvall's It's a Bird's Life and my attempt to register a world record speedrun a bit. Shelly and her birds are safe and sound in a folder on our Google Drive called Cutting Room 4, where they live alongside other artifacts like our never aired sponsor segment Bitter Sweet Infamy Sells Out, in which we reviewed the movie The Lost Leonardo about the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. Ultimately, cuts happen at the discretion of whoever told that episode's main story, as they also edit that week's episode. So for example, I'm editing this one, although Josie and I are working on the melties together. And what's an award show? Without a few stars. Taylor, everybody loves a celebrity. Remember that video of all those celebrities singing Imagine during the pandemic?

Everyone loved that. And since we're always looking to bump up those listens, we're not above using a little celebrity cameo to goose the ratings. But here's Mr. Sean Connery to present the award for Best Celebrity Cameo. Here are the nominees for Best Celebrity Cameo. That was better than usual, I feel. I need you to look. Barbara Streisand from both number one, Barbara Streisand's Clone Dogs and number 17, Dolphin House. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins as J.T. LaRoy's co-conspirator in number seven, J.T. LaRoy. James Cameron on PCP from number 16 and When the Sky Was Open. T-Street composer Brian Steele contributing the Mimphemous, number 20, One Taste.

And Michael McConaughey, number 45, the nicest killer around. And the winner is... The suspense. Barbara Streisand. Barbara, congratulations. Wow, the girl who brought us to the dance gets her flowers at last. Oh, this is so beautiful. Where do you think this award ranks among the awards that Barbara Streisand has received over the course of her storied career? You know, Oscars, Tonys, Grammys, whatever she's got, kicking around.

Yeah, cause she's, what do they call it when you get all three? You get like a Tony and a Grammys. There's four. There's Emmy, Grammy, Oscar Tony, and that's an Egot. Yep. Well, now she can add... Yeah, megot. Megot, bitch. She megot it. Oh, shit. One of the... Is she our only... Look it up. Is she our only megot? This is a huge moment. She's the world's first megot.

Holy shit. Wow, congratulations to Barbara for megotting tonight in this very podcast. Wow. Holy cow. We love to see it. Worst is in champagne for everyone! Josie, did you know that the interstitial music that plays after every Minfamous was composed by Mitchell Collins? Yeah, I love with him. Well, did you know that the original inspiration was Tokyo Subway Jingles and that I found a whole rare album of them on the internet to use as a jumping off point?

Yeah, man. I was there. Are you okay? No. If you've listened to Bittersweet Infamy since our first five episodes, you know all about the Minfamous, a smaller, mini-infamous story that we tell at the beginning of each episode. Originally, the Minfamous was the story of a current event that we would both read an article about before the show, but it didn't quite pop. Around episode 13, we started to treat the Minfamous less like a hot take on a topical news story. Hot takes melt your ice cream. And more like a smaller version of the main story, where we don't know what the other is bringing to the table. The Minfamous is also a great place for those pesky stories that are really interesting, but don't have quite enough available information to tease out a full hour.

Sometimes the Minfamous and the main story go together like Peanut Butter and Jelly, as in our All Under Water episode number 22, our All Floating episode number 38, or the movie Magic of episode 16. Other times, they go together like a small town, Texas Martyr, and a Greenlandic apartment building. The randomness of the Minfamous keeps us humble, but that's not its only function. It sets the tone, usually a light one, it warms us up, and it warms you up. Like a soup. Yes, and it's a way for both of us to bring something creative to every episode. Like bringing soup to a potluck. Are you okay? I'm hungry.

The nominees for Best Minfamous are The creation of Mother's Day, number 15, Run Bambi Run The Titanic Chowder PCP incident, number 16, and when the sky was opened. Bar 9-11, the 9-11 themed bar, number 26, Fake. Holiday halftime, the NFL series of flock Christmas outposts, number 33, Krampus and his kin. Chindagu, the Japanese art of inventing useless things, number 35, Bindi Jo Hall. True crime in Antarctica, number 36, the Jerusalem Syndrome. The history of spring break, number 39, Caster Semenya.

Scary Lucy, the controversial Lucille Ball stack shoe, number 40, the Voynich manuscript. Chris Crowe and his bird life partner, number 41, The Runaway Bride. The Cernettes and the first photo on the World Wide Web, number 44, Bloodbath on Broadway. And the winner of the Best Minfamous, Chindagu, the Japanese art of inventing useless things, number 35, Bindi Jo Hall, wow. Josie, congratulations, Best Minfamous. It's you, babe. Wow. You've perfected the art of the Minfamous, the people have spoken.

That is so strange to me. That I am liked by anybody. This one was interesting because I started researching it. We were recording around Christmas, like for the January, and I needed a gift for my brother, Tig. And I was like, what is something like useless that I could give him? And it was a book about Chindagu. And I was like, dope, this will be the best. I love that.

That's a great gift because they're actually really interesting and very creative and amusing. Much in the way that I love Shy Guy from Mario, like deep bone level love would get a tattoo of Shy Guy from Mario. Because he exists on the exact boundary between frightening and cute. Tomaton, very the same. He's got these big dead eyes, but it works somehow. And he's feeding you something horrible that you don't want while you're in the middle of exercise. He's very cute about it. Very cute, it's true.

Your cartooning of him too is just... I captured him, right? Really did. Big fucking stupid dead eyes, big tomato head. Yeah, you nailed it. And just the excitement in his limbs, everything is there, it's beautiful. Yes, he wants to, he wants to, I put him in a little outfit too, which I may be very happy. Yeah, well it's the belties to go to dress up.

It's been a learning process to determine which stories will be the best fit for the feature story of an episode. One thing that had a steep learning curve for us was determining which stories had the right balance of infamy and levity. Turns out it's really draining to tell stories that only feature murder, homophobia, racism, assault. Taylor, are you okay? Tomaton, quick, feed Taylor tomate. Wow, first of all, a Melty Award winner, Tomaton. Who's name we've been pronouncing, Tomaton, for the record, the entire time on the show. Anyway, thank you, I needed that.

Gotta watch out, my dude. You need to keep that perfect bittersweet balance. And on that note, here are the nominees for our biggest and final award, the bittersweetest episode. Number 11, Joan Wabare. Until one day later. Sorry, what was that? Tragedy strikes. What makes you think a tragedy strikes me?

Why would tragedy strike? Number 13, Flowers and Hell. They wait for him to leave his pack of cigarettes unattended and they leave a love note for him on every single cigarette in the pack. Has anybody ever done that for you, Taylor? No, the plugs that I've been hanging out with couldn't sniff that level of romance. Sad. Number 17, Dolphin House. And like, she's like this young 20 year old and she's like, I have no scientific training, but I think I get this.

But I have a guess. This is good. But I have a guess. But I read a book when I was five. Number 19, Night Trap. What started as a dimly-dry, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark. What started as a dimly-lit thriller has now become a brightly lit, campy B movie starring shambling vampires and trash bags that cannot bite you, but can extract your blood by a comically phallic pneumatic tube. Number 22, Elena Mukina.

There are four metal events. There's the vault, which is the thing that you vault over, right? Yeah, that's the vault. Yeah, if you got it. Again, my knowledge of gymnastics is very low because I actively did the splits as a child. Number 24, Girl Interrupted. The therapist did her thing, did her Reiki, and she opened up some portal thingy. And Brittany believed that bad spirits entered the house that way.

Why is she opening up a portal? I don't know. I don't know. Number 27, The Throne. The thing that Vanessa Williams ends up choosing to get crowned in is this, like, lavender evening gown that looks great, but then someone has, like, glued what looks like a dyed lavender bathpuff to the shoulder. Yeah, oh yes, yes, yes, yes. And it's just like, damn, this was 1983. Number 37, Go Set a Watchman. If you are listening to this podcast to complete your 10th grade English homework.

Hello, welcome. Glad to have you. Oh my God, welcome! Is it 3 a.m. before the assignment? Yes! So I am straight up taking us back to 10th grade today. Sparkdude. Yeah. Sparkdude.

Number 45, The Nicest Killer Arrant. There's a story of a local vet who explained that a procedure for her dog would cost 45 dollars and she haggled him down. Good for her, though. That's how you stay rich, kids. Yeah. Number 47, Okunoshima, Rabbit Island. And none of the actual chemicals, of course, but, like, receptacles for the chemicals. It displays photographs.

I hate you for doing this to me. I thought this was going to be a funny island story. So in order to determine who gets to break the fun news here, we've brought back a very deep cut from our very first episode about me got award winner Barbra Streisand and her clone dogs. I'm surprised you still have that around, your coin. My Big Cat Life of the Party coin manufactured for and distributed by B&G novelties Tucker Georgia 3085. It is a coin that was gifted to me from a strip club bathroom. And on one side, it says, Big Cats are dangerous and it has a picture of a tiger and on the other side it says, but a little pussy never hurt anyone. It's got a picture of a little kitten. Here's this, the very first time we gathered to create content for use to determine which of us would get the first episode and which of us would get the second.

Look at this, another little behind the scenes moment. What was also in front of the scenes, I think we explained it on the original episode as well. So it was just a scene. Just a scene. But, just a scene in the drama that is our lives. Josie, at the time, you took little pussy. Do you want to, do you stick with that? You know, the world is a different place. Wow.

I'm going to do Big Cats. Big Cats are always dangerous. I'm living dangerously. So the Big Cat looks a little cross-eyed. He looks like an Ed Hardy tattoo cat. I'll post a picture of this coin on Instagram. You should. And then the little pussy is a real smart alec. Okay, I feel a little cross-eyed. So that works. Okay, let's go.

So the person, let's see, this cornflip determines which of us gets to read out the winner. Okay. You should have stuck with your original little pussy wins. I get to read it out. Beautiful. The winner and the bittersweetest episode that we've ever done. Number 19, Night Trap. Night Trap.

The people have spoken and it is Night Trap, bitch. The only award this game ever won. Congratulations. Wow. People love a comeback, baby. Wow. I am here on behalf. The augurs could not be here tonight. No.

They asked me to deliver a speech on their behalf and it was more blood, please. And then Scary Lucy rolled up behind them and was like, ah. So it was really good. It was a good interaction wholesome. I feel like there was a lot of good exchange happening and now we've won together. So thank you. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Wow.

How are you feeling, Taylor? Like, are you tingly all over? What are you going to do now? Oh, man, I'm not going to play Night Trap. That's for damn sure. So fun fact. We posted a picture of this on our Instagram speaking of behind the scenes Night Trap content before we recorded our first in-person episode.

Me, Josie, and Mitchell, that was number 41, the Runaway Bride. I showed Mitchell and Josie Night Trap and they attempted, Mitchell primarily attempted to play it and it was not fun. Yeah, easy, entertaining, none of it. Yeah, yeah, it's not about entertainment. It's about confusion. It's about trapping people if you can in the night. In the night.

A Night Trap of sorts. Thank you for tuning in for the first, but hopefully not the last, Melty's. Unless you didn't like it, in which case it's gone forever. But wait, Taylor, there's one last award here not yet claimed. Let me read that. It's the award for Best Audience. Thank you, everyone, for supporting the show for 50 episodes. And for those who want to know how you can support us in making the podcast,

we've set up a coffee link. Coffee, which is spelled K-O-F-I, is an online platform that allows you to kick creators a couple of bucks about the price of a coffee if you like their content. We don't make money on the show in between web hosting, video conferencing and paying our guests whom we'd like to pay more. We do incur some regular costs. On average, between research, writing, recording and editing, we each put about 20 to 30 hours of work into an episode.

We could sell ads, but we'd love to keep the show independent and ad-free, at least for as long as it's possible to do so, just because we all get too many fucking ads every day. Ads suck. Except for this ad, right now, telling you that if you want to financially support Bittersweet Infamy and it's within your means to do so, feel free to visit coffee.com slash bittersweetinfamy. That's K-O-F-I dot com slash bittersweetinfamy. And throw a couple of bucks our way.

We'd love to eventually expand into offering additional content for patronage, but for now, this is our way of testing the waters. And if money's tight for you, no sweat. Bittersweet Infamy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, following us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy, or best of all, just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it. And with that, our giant decorative ice cream cone has melted to the ground.

And you know what that means. The Pensioner's hull is going to give us our deposit back. That and the first ever melties are out of clothes. Thank you all so much for attending. You can pick up your gift baskets on the way out. Please do leave in the next 10 minutes or we will be charged for the additional hour. Stay sweet! We're back. We're back from the melties.

How do you feel? We've taken off our award show finery. I feel much more relaxed. I got to take the shapewear off. That's for the Spanx? You unspanked the Spanx? Unspanked, yeah. Which is a literal and metaphorical for the script.

The script felt a lot like a Spanx, yeah. I'm about to go into a whole bunch of scripted literature here, so you're free, but I'm not. But it is different. The back and forth scripting is, that's an animal. It's very different. That is an animal in a different environment. The acting is gone.

It's gone out of me. It's long gone. You were acting? I was trying to take down some of what I was saying. I was being completely sincere. I can't believe you would deceive the fan base in that way. Yeah. Yeah, dude.

Josie, our semi-centennial. That's 50. It's a little vocab word for you there. Our semi-centennial story begins on a desert night in Cairo in April 1923. Oh, all right. George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, has in the past weeks fallen ill. And while at first he was starting to look better, he's taken a downturn and he's not going to make it through to the morning.

Upon the Earl's death at 2 a.m., according to witnesses, Cairo is hit with a mysterious blackout. Okay. And at the exact same time, back at his family home in Hampshire, England, his loyal dog Susie lets out a blood-curdling howl and perishes herself. Ah, dude. Do we know what kind of dog Susie was? A hooned of some kind, I believe. Okay, okay.

Release the hooned. It's Susie. Gotcha. Anyway, she dead. There are routine explanations for the Earl's death, an infection from a mosquito bite, but known among the locals and whispered among the faithful is the real reason for Carnarvon's death. This is some Agatha Christie shit, dude. He was among the first to break the seal etched into that fateful plaster wall.

Death shall come on swift wings to whoever toucheth the tomb of the pharaoh. And of course, he was only the first. One by one they fell, each who entered the sacred place. One cannot simply disturb the eternal rest of the great king Tutankhamun and expect to leave unrepaid. Josie, welcome to Bitter Sweet Infamy, episode 50, The Pharaoh's Curse. It's like the Nancy Drew game all over again. Yeah, that Tomb of the Lost Queen, you know that one. So Josie, what do you know about King Tutankhamun and or the Curse thereof?

In the 80s, there was a show, a traveling exhibition of Tutankhamun's tomb in Los Angeles. My parents went, got a poster, and it hung in our attic. Do you have any thoughts about that? Was it haunted to you? Did it seem exciting to you? Did you look at that and think, I too am going to look at these stolen relics? What was your vibe? My vibe was not so haunted because it had this very 80s glitz and glam vibe to it. The aesthetic trappings of the 80s could not be defeated even in the context of someone who lived like 3,000 years before.

Oh, no, no, no. I think they were exemplified. That's what was happening. It was just like wavelengths from across history were just like boom, boom, boom in sync. And yeah, I don't know. I just when I hear the name Tutankhamun, I think of that poster and I see what's on the poster, I should say, is the death mask of his tomb. The golden one. The golden one that has like this dark, beautiful blue inlay with gold kind of popping out, which as I'm saying, it's stunning. It's 80s to the max. So I got that and then hints, murmurings, just a slight, slight seasoning of the mummies

during Brendan Fraser. The best film. Yes, truly. Like the objective best film that has ever existed, in my opinion. But then it also has some vibes of colonialism's revenge. Big time. Oh God. Not even the revenge, the initial venge. The initial venge. Yes, exactly. The ongoing venge.

Why are you fucking... The venge continues to this day. With our shit. Yes, it's just ringing all the time. Yeah. I would observe that in your description right there, there was very little about Tutankhamun himself, the man, his personality, he is a historical figure that existed. What do you know about him in that context? That's true. What I described was all just vibe.

Yeah, you were like, yeah, hieroglyphics, they're doing the thing with their arms. Anubis is in their mummies. Lot like an Egyptian. But what about Tutankhamun? Yes. I don't know much. He was a boy king and then he grew up to be a man king. Almost. He was getting there.

He died at about 19 is what we think. But in my head he was younger. In my head, he came to power when he was about eight or nine and we'll chat a bit about that. But in my head, I think of him as a young king as well. Okay. And he was, I'm just shooting the dark now, but he was responsible for building a really gnarly pyramid to himself and decking it out for his afterlife with some very shwanky shwank. Question mark?

It wasn't a pyramid. It's, we're actually a few, I think we're at least a thousand years post pyramids because the pyramids in all of their majesty are very tempting targets for grave robbers. Like, where's the pyramid? Oh, it's over there. Let's go in and steal some shit, right? It's in the middle of the desert and nobody lives out there. Okay, no one will see us. Yeah.

Whereas Tutankhamun is buried in what's called the Valley of the Kings and this was meant to be a more, I don't know, it was for your pharaoh who wanted a slightly more discreet presentation in order to discourage grave robbers, etc. It didn't work, as we'll find out. Okay. But perhaps the reason that you think of him as having this very opulent, succulent tomb, juicy, delicious tomb is because... Slathered in mayo? Yes, yum, yum, yum, delicious tomb is because it was relatively the anonymity aspect of the valley did actually work in his favor. And so other than a couple of very early disruptions by like grave robbers who were contemporary to the time that the tomb was built kind of thing,

it was very quickly forgotten to time, buried over by the backfill of other construction projects subject to the desert elements as they are. And so it did go dormant for a long time. And so when it was found, it hadn't been disrupted. And so it had all of these various treasures and things still to find because they hadn't been sniped. Right. The positive outcome of Al Capone's vaults. I get it. Okay.

Yes. Yes. Sometimes it's important to forget the entrance to the vault and we would all be better off if we did not to spoil the end of this story. But so to be clear, this retelling and when I what I am going to be going into here is I'm going to tell you a little bit about Tutankham and the guy himself and I'm, you know, I'm really happy that you said that I candidly know nothing about the guy because nobody tests. So you're fine. Oh, you're good. You're good.

We don't know shit about Tutankham and I'll give you what we do now and then I'll give you the discovery of his tomb and the story about how this idea of there being a curse exists. Is it true? How has it evolved, etc. So that's what we're doing here for episode 50. All right, babe. That sounds very 50. This is mature.

Sounds ready to go. I wanted something that, you know, was worthy of our 50th episode celebration. So I decided why not something with millennia in it? I think I'm going back further than we've ever gone. Like I wanted the grand spectacle of, you know, the desert unfurling before us, the fertile Nile, statues of Anubis. Like I just really wanted to take us there. And so this retelling of the life and death and afterlife of King Tutankhamen is by no means comprehensive or even accurate. There is much conflicting information on Tutankhamen, most of it expressed by people who really seem to know what they're talking about,

all of whom virulently disagree with one another. So to what my sources, my first source was a book called The Murder of Tutankhamen and it was by a dude named Bob Briar. And it is generally agreed upon and it was my experience as well that it's like a very well researched, well written, fun to read version of the life and times of Tutankhamen. However, it really swings hard for, as you can tell by the name, it really swings hard for the Tutankhamen murder theory and in present day we know that didn't happen. So it's like a very good book that hung its whole thing on the, but what if, let me, let me be the one to name it. So if it actually happens, I killed it, no pun intended. Based on CT scan since we've discovered that the, what seemed to be bone fragments from a possible, like someone attacking you with like a blunt instrument, for example. Yeah, some assault.

Yeah, it was actually generated from like mishandling of the mummy. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whoops. The second source and you'll notice these are all books because I literally went to the library and just sat in the stacks and read their Tutankhamen shit and was like, can I take five of these? And I was like, daily, that's too many. So I settled with three. The second book is a really good book that I highly recommend called The Shadow King by Joe Marchant. Oh, I've heard of this one, I think.

Really? Yeah. It's really good. It's the story of King Tut's mummy specifically. It's less about the life and times of the man himself. I found the first book that I mentioned more instructive in that regard. But The Shadow King really, really tells the story of like what happens with his mummy, what happens with the Egyptian antiquity service, what happens with who are the various people who are most influential in the research of this mummy, etc. And it also does go into the cursed stuff quite a bit, which is really good.

So it's sort of about the afterlife. I mentioned the afterlife of this person and obviously there's a certain connotation to that in Egyptian mythology where they're seeking eternity in the way that they execute their burial rituals and so on. But there's also the fact that we're still, not only are we still talking about this person to this day, that's a sort of afterlife. But there's also the fact that this person's remains exist and are on public display and are like one of Egypt's national treasures and so on. That's an important afterlife as well. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. So this book goes into all of that.

And what I really like about it is it's a very humble book in that it doesn't claim to have the answer as to how this person died, which seems to be what a lot of books about Tutankhamen hang their hat on is like, no, I figured it out, bitch. I found the specific fracture in the femur that tells me this, that and the other. Joe Marchant, she's very humble. She's a good writer. She's got a good writing voice and she also, by the end, she's like, listen, I'll tell you the one I like, but take it with a grain of salt. Like I wasn't there. So yeah, yeah, that's cool. That is very cool.

Yeah. And then the last book that I read is called The Complete Tutankhamen by Nicholas Reeves. It's got a lot of really nice pictures like high res pictures of the masks and the various artifacts and implements found within the tomb. And so I consulted it often. I drew a couple of things in there. It was nice. It was a lot of fun. Oh, fun.

That's cool. So let me give you a quick update on 18th Dynasty Egypt, which is where we find ourselves at the beginning of this saga. I'm going to need a little help. Yeah, just a refresher. Did you ever in school study this sort of thing? Like, did you ever have to do like a book report or a class unit or something on it? We did in like 7th or 8th grade. We had a class called Early Civilization, Early Civ, if you were, you know, just moving fast in the hallways.

Had to get that out quick. Um, and so we... It's the West Wing. Walk and talk, walk and talk. I mean, middle school is a little West Wing-y. You got it, you know. We don't have middle school where I'm from. We only had elementary and high school.

Oh, wow. You were missing out on so many awkward. And the whole middle part. The whole middle part. Yeah, so I had a class called Early Civ and we learned about like ancient Egypt and ancient Greece and, you know, the early ones. Great Zimbabwe, you know, that kind of thing. Nice. Great. Zimbabwe. So to give you a little bit, we're about...

We are in the 1300s BCE. Okay, yeah. So wrap your head around that. We're way... we're... we're... Jesus. Jesus is not even a glint in his father's father's father's father's eye. Yeah, totes. That's so funny. And that, improbably, is what we base our dating system around.

So, not everybody, just in a Western context, we do. What do you mean, dating? Oh, I thought you meant like going on dates with people. Yeah, because you got to keep the Holy Spirit between you. That's what I was talking about, you know? We're on the same page. Yeah, totally the same page. So, basically, at this point in Egyptian history, things are good

and have been good for thousands of years. We are in the cradle of civilization in what is basically history's most stable empire that just stayed. And again, this is like a very quick, quick and dirty summary. That's what I need, yeah. We have been and will be more or less the same for thousands of years, other than some various, you know, little spats here and there. Okay.

Nigel River, very, sorry, Nile River, very fertile. Nigel River, however, the British author from the 19th century British author. I tried to gloss right over it, but you had to make it a goddamn thing. Sorry, I'm here for comic relief, you know? Fertile Nile, we got every resource we want at our fingertips. Yeah. We live under a pharaoh. We have this pantheon of gods that we worship because why wouldn't you worship

them if worshiping them has brought you the umpteenth beautiful harvest, right? Exactly. Yeah. How do you explain the universe without a pantheon, you know? We're still figuring that out to this day, right? In the era that we're going to be discussing, the area that constitutes what we'll just call ancient Egypt, but you could also call it 18th Dynasty Egypt, like whatever you want to call it.

It spans an area from what is in modern terms, Syria to Sudan. Okay, yeah, that's big. It's quite large. Whoa, that's much bigger than modern day Egypt, yeah. And they have a really interesting approach to colonialism and tithing. Basically, they just like kind of roll up to people and they're like, hey, you owe us money now. It's like, okay.

And then they leave. It's not the raping. It's not the bellaging. It's just the army with all of its might rolls in and says, hey, pay us money now. And people seem to agree probably because it's a pretty imposing army. And then they fuck off and it's not like they occupied the space. They literally just come in and say, hey, you're renting now and that seems to be what's up. Okay, okay, huh, horrifying.

Gotcha. Yeah, none of it's amazing to be clear. I'm not advocating for this as a more ethical approach to colonialism. None of it's good, but I'm just letting you know what their tactics were. Tutankhamen's father was a pharaoh and he was a guy named Akhenaten who ruled from 1353 to 1336 BCE. Okay. Do you know anything about this name Akhenaten?

Is that familiar to you? Um, I, it's, no, I'm just going to go with a no. Cool. Yeah. We value 50 episodes and you can be honest. Yeah, I think it's time. I think it's time I tell you I have no clue. Let's just, let's just lay it out, we're friends.

Okay, so Akhenaten's interesting because and this is going to expose my ignorance of Egyptology and Egyptian history as well. But I didn't realize that Akhenaten was Tutankhamen's father. So I was going to do Akhenaten on his own because he's like a very, like I say, we have thousands of years of stability in Egypt and it's mostly accomplished by like, you know what, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Let's just keep to like, there's one Pharaoh, he's a God King. We pay tribute.

We get bundles of beautiful fiber and and fruit and bread and whatever from the Nile, it's fantastic. You know, let's not rock the boat. Yeah. But Akhenaten is one of the very few people who is like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We need to just, the industry needs a disrupter. And so, and so Akhenaten comes in and I didn't even realize he was Tutankhamen said, so I was going to do him on his own and then when I pulled up the Tutankhamen

story and it turns out, no, this motherfucker is Tutankhamen's dad. I was like, perfect. I get to do my Akhenaten episode anyway. So here's Akhenaten. Beautiful. He was originally known as Amenhotep the fourth after his father, also a Pharaoh. So this he's a person of royal lineage of royal blood. Okay.

But he would change his name in what was basically an act of heresy and the beginning of his own cult. So the Egyptians for thousands of years have worshiped this pantheon of God's Isis, Anubis, Amenra, first and foremost, hence Amenhotep. Like you see Amen in a lot of people's names because Amen, who is the Sun God is specifically the the patron God of the Pharaoh. Gotcha. Okay.

That makes sense. Yes. And to whom they pay tribute, make sacrifice, build effigy, you know, the whole thing, right? And one day, Amenhotep the fourth changes his name to Akhenaten and he says, no, no, no, no, we worship the Aten now. Oh, the Aten is the Sun disc, the literal circle, the disc of the Sun. And it is an aspect of the Sun God Ray as in Ra as in Amenra and an incredibly

minor player in the pantheon of Egyptian Gods. The way that I thought of to describe it to an American is like, if someone rolled up and said, no, no, no, like the president was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, the greatest president in American history is Franklin Pierce. And that's just back now. Or like Brotherford B. Hayes. Like somebody Benjamin Harrison, somebody nobody knows. Yeah, totally.

Did you just make that last one up? Like I'm not sure, you know? Wow. No, Benjamin Harrison for the record was between the two Grover Cleveland runs. That's that's all I know about him. Okay. So Akhenaten, by contrast, elevates the Aten, which is the Sun disc, the Benjamin Harrison of discs of Sun God mythology, elevates it to the world's

first known monotheist deity seemingly out of the blue. Oh, consolidation. Yes. Before we had singular gods, we had the Aten, the Sun disc. Right. Okay. He moved the Egyptian capital from Thebes, which in modern times is called Luxor. So if I if I ever mentioned Luxor during the story I'm talking about Thebes,

he moves the capital to an obscure city called Amarna, which he then declares that he will never leave. So he's like, I'm just not going to leave the city boundaries. I'm not going to do my pharaohly duties. I'm not going to go survey the kingdom. I'm not going to collect my tributes. I'm not going to lead my military. All of this shit.

This has some Howard Hughes vibes, feels like, you know, he's like a very, very singular figure in Egyptian history. Okay. Which is like obviously the judiciary, the priesthood, the military. They all hate him. Yeah. Our job relies on the centuries old continuity of Egypt. I was born during the one generation where this fucking pharaoh has decided

that he's above all that. I was born in the wrong generation. One of those things. Only 1390s BCE kids know. So here it might be worth getting into the tangled roots of Akhenaten's family tree, which I should add have largely been established via the scholarship acquired from the many mummies exhumed via the various excavations for which Egyptology is most famously known, which took place during the late 19th and

early 20th centuries. Yeah. When Tutankhamen was first discovered, a.k.a. Grave Robbed, he was basically a complete mystery. He was an abstraction about whose reign and parentage next to nothing was known except for vague illusions here and there that somebody named Tutankhamen existed and was pharaoh and had turned over like spoilers. But he'll go on to turn over all of these kind of wild Akhenaten things that

I'm telling you about. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Now in 2022, we know that it most likely went something like this. Akhenaten was married to a beautiful regal woman named Nefertiti of bust of Nefertiti fame. Have you heard the name Nefertiti?

I have heard the name Nefertiti. Yes. The bust of Nefertiti, by the way, if you've ever, there's like a very famous piece of art called bust of Nefertiti. And by famous, I mean, I know that it's famous because it is included in the museum and Animal Crossing. Let me just tell you here, I put into Google bust of and then it auto-corrected to Nefertiti, so.

See, they know. Auto-filled, yeah. So the bust of Nefertiti was left behind among similar unfinished, unwanted pieces in an artist's studio in Amarna after Thebis was re-established with the capital. So as I've alluded, Tutankhamen is about to do a big old Walmart style. Roll back on all of Akhenaten shit. Gotcha.

Do you remember that commercial? Roll back. The little smiley faces just as Zoro. Yeah. He's rolling back all the faces. But then he also wore a cowboy hat and he had like a whip and he was like. And then they would roll back. And then they would roll back.

Yes. He's going to pull a Walmart commercial on his father's various innovations here. Totally. And that includes the re-establishing of Thebis as the capital in Amarna there after kind of falls into nothingness. And among that, this bust of Nefertiti is just left neglected in this artist's studio and will later be found and go on to be a great artistic treasure. I believe it's in Berlin at a museum now, maybe.

Interestingly, Akhenaten himself was depicted very uncharacteristically in art for a pharaoh rather than scenes of him leading victoriously and triumphantly in war. It was a lot of family scenes. A lot of, you know, here's here's me and my six daughters and my wife, Nefertiti, loving on each other. Huh. Do you think that was a an outcome of like his total paradigm shift of Egyptian culture or?

I think it's like a very conscientious depiction of the ruler a certain way because he's also he's always depicted with an elongated head and limbs and a curvy androgynous body with no genitals. So it's hot. Yeah. It has led people to diagnose him with any number of syndromes postmortem. People have suggested that he may have been intersex. People have suggested all kinds of things, right?

Yeah. And Akhenaten and Nefertiti, who also it's also worth noting that his entire family is kind of depicted the same way in art to mimic the depiction of the pharaoh. This is really unusual because like I said, it was the same for thousands of years. Like to have and to have a to have a pharaoh seemingly seem to say, no, I would like to be depicted in this way that is completely out of the norm for the many generations of pharaohs. We're in the 18th dynasty, folks.

A lot of dynasties and you get a few pharaohs in a dynasty. You know how it goes. That's quite unusual to be like, no, this is a real disruption in not only the style of art that I'm depicted in, but also in who we worship. Fast change, for sure. A fast change to the point where he's often known in Laura's like a heretic pharaoh. So there you go. Akhenaten and Nefertiti supposedly had six daughters as well as a son named

Smenkare, who briefly ruled alongside his father as co-regent. But then whoops, he died. Oh, you know, so it goes. This stumped scholars for centuries who couldn't figure out who Tutankhamen was or how he succeeded the kingship. Since the line of succession was de facto male children of pharaohs. Later, it emerged that upon Nefertiti's death, Akhenaten took a second wife who is likely his own sister.

I believe that I'm reading that right. Okay. That this was probably Cis. This is probably a big Cis, haha. And among those children was a boy named Tutankhamen. Tutankhamen, okay. So after Akhenaten's death under unknown circumstances, Akhenaten's son Tutankhamen, only nine years old, became pharaoh.

Okay. And under the advice of various consiglieries, people with their own aspirations to power and influence and so on, Tutankhamen, which means living image of Akhen, as in the sun disk, as in, hey guys, we're totally going to worship the sun disk forever now. It's a great change, trust me, you love it. Changed his name to Tutankhamen, living image of Amen, and wasted no time completely undoing all of the religious and social changes implemented by his father.

Ooh, as this nine year old pharaoh? As a nine year old pharaoh who seems to have been influenced by, I don't know, there's an advisor named I who would go on to be a Y. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. By the way, all pronunciations in this episode are approximate. Kisses, love you. Vote for me. Vote the story for best, milty, whatever.

He is nine and was he the son of a very iconoclastic and iconic pharaoh? Yes. Did he have a great mind for like domestic policy who can say he was nine? Yeah. So a lot of it seems to have been kind of put into his mouth at least at first. Right, yeah. Amarna was instantly abandoned as the capital and faded into obscurity. The pantheon was restored and life in Egypt was more or less back to normal

after a lengthy and amusing diversion into cult worship. And if you probably lived in Egypt, paid taxes in Egypt, you had no idea. Yeah. You were not in the major cities if you weren't being relocated to the new capital. It was like, what are they doing? Who cares? Those people who came here two years ago and demanded that we started paying rent. Yeah, I remember them.

Apparently they did something different. They changed it up. Yeah. Who knows? Everyone was looking real narrow in the art and they were hugging their families, but now we're back to the old style. OK. Trends.

These, these cafe 80s of 1300s BC. So what was Chute and Common the guy like? Like the actual human being. Who was he? Deep down. Short answer, we don't know. OK. At all.

Anything, really. Long answer really depends you ask. OK. Everyone has a theory, but they basically break down into two categories. You've got your youthful, rambunctious, tut theories and your sickly frail, put theories. Oh, OK, OK. So the argument for the first case is that there are illusions to Chute and Common

being able bodied in depictions of him hunting and even leading troops into battle. Uh-huh. Yeah. OK. His tomb upon discovery with stuff full of weapons and games, the trifles of boyhood, etc. Yes, boyhood, trifles. A lot of Legos.

Yeah, I get it. I get it. Skylanders, a lot of he played Fortnite constantly. This was the life, right? He flossed, he loved to floss historically. That's why you always see all those hieroglyphics with people flossing. A really chased porn hieroglyphic scroll under his bed, under his tomb, you know? Totally.

Totally. It's just a woman holding a bird. Woo, gets me going. Steamy, steamy. Opponents to this point of view say that these are largely allegorical depictions of a king in strength. Look at a drawing of Donald Trump made by somebody who likes Donald Trump. They clean him up a bit.

Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? It's a little tighter in the... He's got a jawline all of a sudden. You know what I mean? He's got muscles, he's got biceps. And you're like, oh, damn, Donald, you've been doing your chest exercises. I didn't know.

Mm-hmm. So this is the ancient Egyptian version of that. Yeah, yeah. The second case says that Tutankhamun was plagued with all kinds of afflictions, perhaps due to the legacy of royal intermarriage. Tutankhamun was married to his own sister. Oh, yeah, rough glue. And his father as well was married to his own sister, potentially.

Fixes. So Tutankhamun's sister was named Ankh Senamun, which if you've ever watched The Mummy, you know about Ankh Senamun. Oh, yeah. That's clearly a riff on that. If you'll remember the unusual features of the artistic depictions of that particular family. Right, yeah. We're saying that this is due to a variety of possibly genetic,

possibly chromosomal, possibly inherited, whatever, just due to the legacy of intermarriage. So the people who make this argument say that he had a cleft palate, which seems to be true, like a mild cleft palate, but he did have a cleft palate. Yeah. As far as we know. Ouch. A cleft foot, scoliosis, and in this argument, he most likely just died of general fragility. Oh, damn.

Just the wind blew in a certain way. The wind blew and he was too inbred to stand up against it. And that was that. Yeah, ouch. Opponents to this point of view point out the many ways in which what seemed to be post-mortem indications of frailty may have resulted from the terrible handling that his mummy has received over the years. And we will definitely get into that. Okay, okay.

Yeah. Interesting. Were the genes mishandled? Or was the corpse mishandled? A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. You may be saying they're like, Jesus, Taylor, not only do we not know anything about this dude, his vibe, his physical body, but we don't even know how he died. Nope.

Oh, whoa. Sorry. You won't be learning facts on this 50th episode. Sorry about that. Oh. People have suggested everything, a murder, which I kind of went into a bit, a chariot accident and aneurysm, a genetic condition. One TV special very famously suggested that he had a broken leg, that the end, you know.

Yeah, killed him. It was a long time ago, yes. The suggestions are so far ranging and inconclusive that we would really only be speculating for speculation's sake, but my favorite is hippo attack. Oh, yeah, that's good, because hippos are vicious. They seem round and tubby and cute. They're cute, but they'll put you to bed. They're one of the most dangerous animals out there, babe.

It doesn't get much more dangerous than a hippo. That's like a thousand pounds of like crunch. It's a thousand pounds of crunch. You'll buy the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge. In any case, evidence suggests that however it came about, Tutankhamen died unexpectedly in January, 1323 BCE, around 19. OK, so only 10 years on the throne. Yes, if it sounds like Tutankhamen was a relatively minor pharaoh who didn't get to

achieve much in his years in power. Yeah, his prominence in modern times is largely a result of the discovery and excavation of his tomb in the 1920s, the subsequent World Museum tours of his artifacts that became popular in the 1960s, the slick documentaries on the subject that emerged after that. So Tutankhamen died and of course there's much wailing and public mourning and a lot of scrambling to get his tomb together because everyone figured such a young guy had a lot longer left in his reign, which is again, maybe vague evidence.

If you want to be somebody to push the Tutankhamen wasn't sickly theory, you're like, OK, they clearly weren't prepared for him to die. Yeah, yeah. Huh, interesting. I like that. Thank you. But as far as we know, building his tomb wasn't a priority, but over a period of 70 days, they pulled together a nice little abode in the Valley of Kings, which is on the West Bank of the Nile, hidden away again in sconce and limestone

cliffs near the modern city of Luxor, Thebes at the time. Seventy days. That's fast. You're right. And there were a few imperfections. It sounds very HG TV DIY show, you know? Well, you wrote kind of vibes, yes. Yeah, you come back and it's like, oh, you've wallpapered.

Oh, my gosh. That's really nice. I've never seen it look so brown before. It's so cool. You took my love of chocolate to another degree. OK, thank you. Wow, eternity in brown. What an idea that you had.

So that basically the way that tombs are supposed to be laid out is I don't know the exact specifics of how this went down. But as far as I'm aware, the way that tombs are supposed to be laid out is that you once you've reanimated upon your eternal life, you're supposed to be able to just kind of like go to either the left or the right, wherever the door is, and just walk into the next life like they've got it set up that way. Right. Don't make it too complicated. You're dead. You're tired.

Exactly. Your lordship. They wouldn't have called him your lordship, but I wasn't there. You know, you know, your fairer ship. Yeah, my dude, it could have been a lot of things. Yeah, your bro ship. You know how we say go to light for them? It was probably like just just look, just go to the left. It's like, you know, when you go to a hospital and there's like a black line on

the ground, they'll just follow the damn black line. It was like that. Hang a right, hang a left. Unfortunately, they installed it backwards. So he would have gone back into the wrong life. So he would have gone like back into this life. I don't know what the deal is there. Like I don't think it would have been like an eternal, an eternal rebound error

situation. I think he would have eventually figured it out, but it's an inconvenience. Oh, you got to be angry. You got to be. It's got to put you back frustrated. Yeah, if this is this is the beginning of my next life. Yeah. What the fuck?

Additionally, the young king was arranged in a series of three small nesting coffins, which is an illusion too. I decided that I wanted to bring one piece of Egyptian mythology to the table and it's this one because this is by far not just the funniest piece of mythology I've heard, but one of the funnier things I've heard. So basically the story goes, Osiris comes, discovers, gifts civilization to Egypt around the Nile and then goes off to spread civilization further in the world and leaves Isis in charge of Egypt.

Osiris, like any great character has an evil, basically an evil twin brother named Seth and Seth is always up to Shinandiga says we know. I love how his name is Seth too. It's just like Seth. I'm just imagining Seth Green in Austin Powers when he's the son of Dr. Evil. Very that, very that energy. And so Seth comes up with a he's like, I'm going to get Osiris and send him to

the afterlife and to his credit, he pulls it off. He goes to a dinner party. Everyone gets a little drunk and stuff is like, you guys, I've got a game, which key to my heart, right? I love a game. Yeah. And Seth is like, whoever fits in this coffin that I'm busting out right now gets to keep it.

And so Osiris is like, that looks like it's my size. And so of course, Osiris gets into this chest and Seth seals it and then puts it in another coffin and puts it in another coffin and then like wraps it all up and like throws it to Hal. And and frankly, not to be disrespectful of a God, but Osiris kind of had it come in. No, yeah. He got caught sleeping there. Let's call it what it was.

That's that's a fact and that's a truth. Osiris becomes the God of the underworld then. Because he knows how to get you down. He knows it's all about. It's all about fitting snugly into a box. Yeah. Three boxes. I love that.

Yeah. A trifecta of boxes. I love that it's couched in this like dinner party game, like this drunken dinner. Yes, that's very it's very real housewives, except instead of like who made this shady comment on Instagram, it's like, why don't I put you in three boxes and throw you into hell? Yeah, it's just the same basic idea. Totally.

Totally. I mean, there's no new stories, right? They just repeat very much that to common because of this story is arranged in three nesting coffins. And the first of these is made of pink quartzite. Oh, gorgeous. Well, most of it. Okay.

Someone must have broken the original lid because it was hastily replaced by a lid made of yellow quartzite painted pink. Oh, that's again, HGTV. So that's the vibe, reverent, but slapdash, one really cool mural and ten and painted walls, that kind of thing. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The body was of course mummified.

It's organs. You know what? Do what do you remember? I feel like this is the thing that everybody knows about Egypt maybe is how they made the mummies. What's your recollection of how the mummy gets made? Well, I feel like they put in every highlights magazine ever printed. They remove the brain through the nostril and then they get to show you

those little instruments. I don't know. That's all that's cut. So then they pack it into delicious salty natrin for 35 days. Okay. Okay. And then it withers up to less than 50 pounds. So it leaches out all of the fluids out of this, the agua, right?

Oh, gosh. Get in that natrin, rub around. It's like when you go to JJ family spa in, in Coquitlam and you go in the salt bath, you know how that is. You know that life real, real tiny. Okay. I get it. The body was wrapped with 150 pieces of jewelry and amulets at symbolically

appropriate places in the body. This one over the heart. This one by the way, sorry, actually one thing that we should clarify before we go any further is it's very funny because the Egyptians, I think they were very sophisticated. They were very clocked on to a lot of shit. You look at the marvel of those pyramids and the workmanship that must have gone into them over generations, dear Lord.

Yeah, but some shit that they just kind of miss the mark on and they would keep your heart, your various other organs in canopic jars on the idea that you would need them in the next life. Yeah, like earn type thing. Yeah. But the brain, they were like, we don't know what this does and we don't care. It can't be important.

Whoa. So then they were like, let's just get this shit out of the nose, swirl it around, dump out the brain and whatever this big stupid pink thing in the cocoa head. I think that maybe what I wonder what they think. And maybe they just thought it was your blinking muscle. I don't know. They weren't into the brain.

That's very interesting. So they thought that you thought with your heart and the reason that they believe that evidently is because when you get excited, your heart starts beating really fast. And so I go, I'm thinking really hard right now. That must be what this is. Oh, that is interesting. Also, I'm going to drop all my, I'm going to drop all my ancient

Egypt shit that I didn't write into the script now folks, because I'm not going to get another chance. I'm not going to be back here for a while. Yeah, who knows? So let me tell you the ancient Egyptians invented the 365 day calendar. They had three seasons of however many days works there and added up to 360 and then they just gave you five extra five bonus days

because we love you. Yeah. Yeah, literally shake it out. So that's what's up. So in addition to all of this ceremonial activity around placing these, these jewellery's and amulets at the right places. We also see hundreds of ushab tea, which are small statuettes that were meant to come to life and serve the king in the next

existence. That sounds a lot like the terracotta soldiers. Like that was that whole vibe. Very that very that and then they needed a gold coffin, but they didn't have any time to prepare one. So they just stole Smenkares and I don't know if you remember that's Tutankhamun's deceased half brother who co-ruled with Akhenaten for a cup of coffee in the big time and then he died.

Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. Okay. So they just steal his coffin, his gold coffin. Let's get this name off there. Just chisel it off and they replaced it with Tutankhamun's name. Easy come, easy go, baby.

You know, you know. In for a penny, in for a pound. Yeah. Yeah. Hand me downs, you know. Upon the Pharaoh's interment, there was much public mourning. The body was dragged on a sled past women who were paid to wail and throw dirt over their heads.

Yeah, good. I'm glad they're getting paid. That's great. It's true. That's emotional labor. You're right. Yeah. The shrines in which Tutankhamun laid were surrounded by an

antechamber filled with every conceivable treasure a boy King could want. Legos, gushers. Yep. Yep. Definitely video games. Creepycrawlers, NES system, SNES, Xbox 360 in there. The things you throw against the wall, they stick, but then

they climb down. My mom gave me those for Christmas, the little bugs. Oh man, they get gunk on the wall. But you know what? So quick, dude. It's your tomb. Who cares? I didn't know that anyone else knew about these things.

Yeah, exactly. It's my fucking tomb. Yeah. It is my fucking tomb and I will do what I want. You know what? I bet he also had one of those little like light projectors that like puts the stars up on your ceiling. I love that.

Oh my God. Yeah, that's good. He's like a little dorm room. Yeah, really nice. Yeah, who knows? Maybe there was a mini-fridge. You don't know. You weren't there.

He had golden couches, statues, sticks, stays, fans, weapons, cosmetic items, ornate vessels for storage and service. You name it, imagine it in gold and it's in there. Damn. And then that anti-chamber got plastered off and sealed over with an image of a jackal standing over nine bound captives in victory representing mighty Egypt in its conquests. Also, stay the fuck away.

Probably too. It is not, you may notice, a rant about death on wings, which is not great for our curse theory. They lift me up onto the left wings. Okay. Exactly. That's exactly how that went.

The jackal is not a curse necessarily. Oh, okay. It's not as explicit a curse as death on swift wings, but we'll see. Okay. We press onward. The traditional ceremonies for the death of a pharaoh are carried out.

One last meal was had at the entrance of the tomb. The dishes were broken and the shards and bones put in jars. The floors were swept and those brooms were put in jars, big jars, broom-sized jars. Whoa. All the jars were buried and that was that for Tutankhamun. Holy shmaw. I didn't know all of those ins and outs.

That's really... Oh, I cut it down. Oh, I bet. No, I bet. It's a whole big thing. Okay. Okay. Very cool.

Very cool. I didn't know they made broom-sized jars. Yeah. That was interesting to me. Jars as big as brooms. Yeah. Small brooms, big jars. Who knows?

So after Tutankhamun's death, it seems like there was actually a lot of drama about the succession. Ankhsennaman sent some very extra letters to the Hittites demanding that a prince marry her immediately. Oh, wow. Yeah. And she was like, I'm in danger. I'm basically this whole big drama plays out where Ankhsennaman

implies that we need a prince right here right now. And in the end when the Hittites come in, somebody gets assassinated so we don't know if it was like a military tactic or somebody got got. And in the end, the next two pharaohs would be a pair of guys named I who I mentioned a little bit earlier. Yeah, as an advisor. And Haremheb.

Yes. So they were Tutankhamun's advisor and military general respectively and a lot of the Tutankhamun was murder theories that existed for a while centered around I and Haremheb and occasionally Ankhsennaman, but mostly I. Like Bob Briar was like, it was I who did it. But we know now that that's not true. Our boy Bob.

So they shared the throne. No, no, I held the pharaoh shit for I believe and I apologize if I'm speaking out of school. I believe he held it for the remainder of his life. And then Haremheb was the next in line after that. But either way, they're not of the royal bloodline of the of the sibling centric royal bloodline as murky as it is. It has been extinguished.

Okay. Okay. And so that is where Tutankhamun's first life in the literal and metaphorical senses comes to a close seal that vault plaster away, smash a plate, put it in a jar. Let's go. And so we've tucked in for a few millennia of uninterrupted sleep in our cozy little tomb.

Josie, doesn't that sound nice? Oh, I am so ready. Thank God. Just hibernate me, please. Then we wake up from our little Moomin hibernation and our story resumes in 1881 AD. Okay. Here we go.

Get your britches on. Get your britches on, as they say. They will say now. That's a good line. I like that. In the words of that song. Oh, put your britches on. You know that one?

Yeah, I do. I like that a lot. By now, most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings have been plundered of their valuables many times over, if not by local grave robbers, then by international exploration. So international grave robbers, basically. Egyptology at this point has a long history as this sort of trifle of the British upper class or wealthy Americans who

fancy themselves adventurers. There's no particular reverence to the way the tombs or the remains found therein are treated. And of course, anything of value is quickly absconded with and sold. Yeah. Indiana Jones, Dizzy, you know? Yeah, it's just so rough, you know?

It's very rough. Yeah. It's unnecessarily rough. Yeah. And yet it is where we will dwell in this, our 50th episode. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Nacho! All right.

One way, if you're into the Egyptological circles at around this time, one way to figure out whether new discoveries have been made is to keep your eye on the antiquity shops. As minor Egyptian artifacts have a tendency to pop up here and there. And if all of a sudden you see an influx of new... rings, ceremonial implements, whatever it is, you see those popping up.

You're like, okay, somebody somewhere discovered a new cash. Right. It might be worth looking into. Aha. So you just keep a pulse on the antique stores. It's, it's antiques roadshow. Stay away from those pee bottles. So the story goes that in 1881, a flood of new Egyptian

antiquities suddenly appears on the black market and in Curio stores and so on. And this attracts the attention of the Egyptian antiquity service who sent a guy named Emil Bruksh to investigate. The Egyptian antiquity service in brief has had many names and is now an independent ministry of the Egyptian government, but its job around this time is to oversee and maintain tombs, deal with archaeological tourism and give out what are

called concessions. So if you have the concession to the Valley of the Kings, you're allowed to dig up the Valley of Kings at your leisure and whatever you find, you split 50-50 with antiquities. So a permit. It's a permitting process. Yeah, exactly. It's extra gross.

I got to say that's extra gross. It's a highly, highly regulated grave robbing. Yes. Yes. Well, the basically the idea was that antiquities had all of this interest in these finds, but didn't have the resources to do it. Whereas these people who had an abundance of change and this

interest in Egyptology because they wanted to play Indiana Jones so they could come in and be like, let's saw this mommy up the middle. You get half, I get half. Right. Yeah, basically, not literally, but based in some cases. I don't know. You're going to hear about some mummies getting broken in half.

So the trail of evidence leads brooks to a family called the Abdel Rasouls in a nearby village called and I would pronounce this Gordna. I'm not sure how to pronounce it, but I would pronounce it Gordna where homes were built into the exterior chambers of tombs. Whoa, dude. Yeah, very fascinating stuff and grave robbing is of course

the local industry. They're like shit. We're out of milk money. Let's go rob some graves because it's right here and no one will see our houses are but yeah, it's right here and also nothing else is anywhere near here. Yeah. So let's do grave robbing and under questioning one of the Abdel

Rasouls, Muhammad leads brooks to a massive newly discovered cash at their little body that includes a bajillion previously thought lost major mummies of note including Ramses the second who prior to King Tutankhamen or King Tut as he will come to be known Ramses the second is our A list pharaoh right. It's not just Ramses the second though. It's Ramses the second and like a bunch of other big names right and they're all grouped up together.

Yeah. So basically the story goes that as the Egyptian dynasties wound on it was determined that these deceased pharaohs and queens and major nobles were susceptible to evil doers and thieves and so they were all placed together in a location that was then forgotten to time and then rediscovered by the Abdel Rasouls. So now that the secrets out it's a race against time before

the grave robbers set in so rather than risk such a major discovery being leaked, brooks acting on behalf of the antiquity service orders the immediate evacuation of the tomb and the treasures within because there is simply no time to waste none of the positions or details of any of the fines are recorded before the evacuations begin. Oh and what year was this 1881 I believe this also by the way leads to speculation that brooks walked out with cement

equities in his pocket because none of it was documented. Yeah, yeah, he put his britches on for sure and big pocket it was britches. Those britches were a bit heavy that he had those you know on survivor when someone comes back from looking for an immunity island the pocket of their cargo pants slang a little low little back low yet this major discovery creates much new excitement around the Valley of the Kings and is very invoked

for wealthy and romantic types to head out to the desert by a concession for a particular area and a particular amount of time and hire a brain and some local muscle and see what turns over the years more and more mummies get discovered more and more treasure grows legs and walks off and we naturally see the rumblings of unease between the local Egyptians and the colonial powers meddling in their history especially for that town that their main source of income seems to be

grave robbing and all of a sudden it's yeah why these foreigners are taking our jobs exactly my family has been grave robbing here for 200 years fuck off yeah exactly you can't come in here in your khakis and pith helmet tell me what to do your pith your fucking little little drawstring hat fuck you one foreigner who is excited for adventure is an American guy named Theodore Davis who rules in on a lavishly appointed house boot named the Bedouin oh wow and this has a chandelier and

a grand piano by the way it's a chandelier on this house but and there's also a grand piano and he's he's hoping to hit her big in the Egypt sweepstakes like he's heard it's it's like a gold rush yeah in in let's dig up mummies knowledge information adventure legacy something to put my name on but also we can steal some things that are are literally made of gold and resell them so that's in there too yeah yeah and perhaps depending who you are that's number one for his brains Theodore

Davis hires a guy named Howard Carter who has a great pedigree his father was a painter and as a child he Carter Howard Carter followed his father to paint Lord Amherst at Didlington Hall love Lord Amherst at Didlington Hall where one goes so not for me I would pass on the invite to Didlington Hall but we go we we we go we paint Lord Amherst to scratch up a couple to balloons and it emerges well while he's painting Lord Amherst it emerged that one of his lordships friends needed someone

of lower breeding to draw paintings from tomb walls because when people are when people are of poor breeding you can get away with paying them less you know how it is yes yes so Howard who is not at this point a trained artist he is the son of an accomplished artist of not particularly high breeding I believe okay he's got some talent that we can nurture and also we don't have to pay him any money because when he's a fucking kid and two he's poor it's the unpaid intern thing

yeah I get it exactly that Carter got chosen for this position he took to it he became immersed in Egyptology learning under the famous archaeologist Flinders Petrie by 1899 yet what you don't like Flinders you love Flinders you're always talking about how you wish your name was Flinders Petrie you say that all the time it's true it's definitely true it's in the will it's don't do this to me Flinders don't sell me out on air like this okay I'm together I'm here I'm here I'm

here okay thank you president we're all here in president it's hot in this Egyptian desert we're gonna keep digging by 1899 Howard Carter works his way up to Chief Inspector of Southern Egypt for the antiquity service installing lighting and steel gates and so on in the tombs in 1904 Carter resigns the position after an international brew haha as happens from time to time called the Sakara affair where some French tourists attack Egyptian guards at a tomb so I don't know if they were pissed

up or if they were just very moved but you know that vacation induced psychosis that we've discussed before yes sometimes it's also moving that you fucking snap maybe that happened we don't know okay Carter told them to fight back basically Carter gets his guards and he's like you know Egyptian guards I authorize you to clatter these you know yeah these French tourists mailed yes yeah need to get their shit together yeah need to get their mail together asking an Egyptian

to strike a European in colonial times was of course very taboo and you know so Carter gets reprimanded for this and he ends up quitting in protest as a matter of pride he's very proud okay Howard so Carter becomes Theodore Davis's guy this is this is our man with the houseboat okay and they do all right they part ways and Davis hires another guy named Ayrton and they go on exhuming the Valley of the Kings and every year Theodore Davis puts out this report enumerating his many

exciting discoveries in the Valley but all good things come to an end the tombs dry up the excitement dwindles and in his final report Davis notes quote I fear that the Valley of the tombs is now exhausted this tombs are tired you got some tired tombs out there we have tuckered out the to use is what he is feared of Theodore Davis gives up his concession on the Valley of the Kings and who should take up the hunt next in 1917 but Davis his old partner Howard Carter there we go back by

some new money in 1904 George Herbert 5th Earl of Carnarvon of the intro fame intro fame story intro fame I do if you're like where have I heard that name recently it just happened it was 45 minutes ago okay yeah he has survived one of the world's first auto accidents having flipped his car trying to avoid a horse drunk cart as you do cars are dangerous it's true so what is a roguish aristocrat at the turn of the century with a last for life to do while recovering from such

an event dabbling Egypt pay some lower-bred Egyptologist to child to Carnarvon and Carter have worked together in the past so in 1917 Carnarvon takes over the Valley of the Kings concession and Carter takes on the tedious work of slowly methodically excavating the Valley dreaming of a great discovery and specifically he would love to discover the lost King Tutankhamun who has been conspicuously missing since the Pharaoh started getting discovered in the Valley in

1881 and about whom we know at this point fucking dirt nothing except that he existed in made reforms right yeah yeah he set back daddy's laws yeah exactly which is you know what it's hard to stand up against daddy there's a lot of 80s movies about this and a Madonna song oh Papa don't Papa don't preach is the one yeah this search goes on for about five years Carter sweeping the Valley of the Kings methodically under Carnarvon's name during which time nothing all that

interesting turns out the excitement deflates and Carnarvon is like yo Theodore Davis was right the Valley is pooched no point putting good money after bad I'm pulling up pooched Valley let's Vamanos gotcha verbatim I believe is how it went pooched Valley bro Vamanos that's how it went down the most West Coast podcast in existence West Coast West Coast

Howard Carter leaves his beloved Egypt and he comes all the way to Carnarvon's lavish English estate high clear which you might know because it's Downton Abbey oh wait it is literally Downton Abbey you know when you watch Downton Abbey yeah and they use a real estate but it yeah oh wow yeah it's his mother fuckers high clear and so the reason they only fell when you're you know how it's like kind of an upstairs downstairs show that yeah when you see

the downstairs that's not the real downstairs of high clear because the real downstairs is the Egypt artifacts and then the upstairs when you're going into like Lady Mary Lady Mary's bedroom and shit as well as all of like the outdoor shots of this like sweeping crazy giant grand castle with these sprawling grounds that is Lord Carnarvon's home you're fucking with my brain so Dame Maggie Smith is sitting in an ornate armchair above this cash of Egyptian Tom's oh my

god whoa dude whoa when worlds fucking collide and they don't tell you making an early case by the way for our next our next Melty's award for best celebrity cameo Downton Abbey houses can win that for sure I'm putting it down I'm including this in the episode so we have to hold to it I don't know best best house name might be what was it? Tittingly Manor? Diddlington Hall Very good very good we're children

Howard Carter leaves Egypt and he comes all the way to Downton Abbey and he begs Carnarvon to extend the to to extend the concession sorry I got a little bit Scottish there so he comes to Dut Nubi and he's like listen I will personally I Howard Carter will personally fund this and you can have everything we find with it I guess the fit whatever of the 50% that we find because 50% of it goes to antiquities right yeah and a quick cameo and season two please thank you

Carnarvon is so touched by this offer that he extends the concession and in November 1922 Howard Carter finds a step a single step a single stone step and then that one step leads to another and another down into the opening of a tomb filled with limestone chips Carter sends a wire back to Highclair quote at last have made wonderful discovery in Valley a magnificent tomb with seals intact recovered same for your arrival congratulations the tomb is refilled until

Carnarvon and his daughter Lady Evelyn Carnarvon arrive for the grand reveal delicious tomb filled with limestone chips I'm in I'm in and fans of the best movie in cinematic history the mummy may observe that the name Evelyn Carnarvon has a similarity to the name of Rachel Weiss's character Evelyn Carnarvon was that you Rachel Weiss sound different that didn't sound like you at all so they reopen the entrance and I assume for my take at first I was like oh why would they

refill it but then I assume it's like okay if we it's the same logic that led that brooks guy to just evacuate that fucking tomb which is if we leave this open other people will come and see it and so on right yeah so they reopen the entrance and they get through the limestone chips and now they observe some evidence that grave robbers have been in and amongst so they're a little concerned they're like oh shit yeah we thought this was completely undiscovered but now we see

that things have been disrupted and there's some footprints and some you know signs of disruption yeah but they press on until they find the steel chamber with the jackal mark in the plaster you will again note that that is not explicitly a curse and now I will turn it over to Howard Carter in what is been described as one of the most famous passages in archaeological history with trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner darkness and blank

space as far as an iron testing rod could reach show that whatever lay beyond was empty and not filled like the passage we had just cleared candle tests were applied as a precaution against possible foul gases and then widening the hole a little I inserted the candle and peered in Lord Carnarvon Lady Evelyn and calendar don't know who that is standing anxiously beside me he's anxious at first I could see nothing the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker

but presently as my eyes grew accustomed to the light details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist strange animals statues and gold everywhere the glint of gold which must have been a fucking crazy that is tfw you you disturb somebody's grade but gold carnarvon asks Carter if he can see anything to which Carter is said to reply and there's different variations of the wording here but it's something to the effect of yes wonderful things supposedly

this is when the investigation of the tomb is paused to allow for the presence of the antiquity service although apparently Carter and the Carnarvon sneak in the night before just the three of them oh yeah I know totally but that's something to note in terms of the curse and we are going to talk about work from whence emerged at the curse okay they seem to me to be among the most likely to be affected by a curse given that they were explicitly the first three to go in so that's

Carnarvon his daughter Evelyn and Howard Carter oh yeah that seems pretty cursey to me not only is it not officially allowed but like you've got to be the first to disrupt the seal you're like no no no no death cometh for us bitch we got here first swift wings baby swift swings so not now not only have we discovered the tomb of the boy King Tutankhamen the exact tomb Carter wanted for his birthday you'll note but it is relatively untouched apart from some evidence of very

early burglary so as as I kind of alluded before those those grave robbers that came in were contemporary with the time that the tomb was originally built right but it got sealed off and forgotten pretty quick in the realms of things so it has largely not been disturbed right okay why so untouched it was carved into the ground and the debris of the construction of other tombs covered it as well as the environmental effects of the desert so we found a great a great undisturbed

cash in the tomb of Tutankhamen or as the media has rechristened him by this point King Tut and this is sort of a separate entity to me when we conceive of the afterlife of Tutankhamen it's helpful to think of him in terms of King Tut this westernized media icon who has been distributed about whom not much is known other than whatever we project on to him about whatever documentary special has given us the latest version of the quote unquote terms of his

death yeah whatever artifacts we've seen from the like it's the Nat Geo features yeah yeah yes it's Tutankhamen via the poster that you have in your attic I'm also remembering I don't know if this ever came across your recess playgrounds but there was like a hand clap game and the chant to it or no it wasn't a hand clap it was like a round circle hand clap game so you played with like multiple people like a cello cellola yeah what was it okay you said King Tut had a but what color

was it and then whoever lands on has to say a color and then you spell out the color so it's like King Tut had a but what color was it green G R E E in yeah okay interesting and we didn't have King Tut had a but yeah he did most certainly we all do well other than Hank Hill so naturally the world is hanging on to every breath of this discovery for Egyptians it's a moment of huge cultural galvanization around this new national icon and treasure for onlookers around the world

it's this very romantic adventure upon which we look from a far or depending on who you ask it's imperialism car Darwin sold exclusivity rights on all interviews and discoveries and shit around this excavation to the London Times he boxed out Cairo right yeah yeah no totally and for many it's morbid it's a desecration it's tampering with the forces of life and death it's something that should not be happening and yet is and Josie that mindset that vague anxiety about

something inarticulatably abhorrent that is the ground fertile like the banks of the Nile from which curses grow Nigel did a lot of words right there huh did Nigel River right those were good the Nigel River absolutely I didn't get Nigel River on the horn but I can tell you what historian Christopher Frayling had to say about it okay hit me Chris he says quote the balance of opinion was that the archaeologists were transgressing a deeply felt taboo and

that they would surely pay for it like doctors Faustus Frankenstein and Jekyll the scientists who dug into the sand would be destroyed by the results of their researches because they had gone too far so where do we get this idea of the curse it wasn't from Tutankhamun's tomb obviously I probably would have mentioned it by now as mentioned before George Herbert the 5th Earl of Carnarvon and the man who financed the discovery of King Tut's tomb unfortunately

died at 57 on April 5th 1923 just as things were getting good he nicked a mosquito bite while shaving he got an infection in his blood and that was that oh and it took a bit of time to so yeah slow painful death by shaving that is cursey that is definitely cursey as to whether there was a blackout the night that he died it's actually likely Cairo was afflicted by very regular blackouts at the time okay okay yeah it would maybe be more strange if there wasn't a

blackout kind of deal and as for poor Susie who howled out at 2am on the dot and parish don't think that I forgotten Susie have not whether or not that's actually true it's probably worth noting that 2am is not the same time in England as it is in Egypt okay so we've got like four hours to play with there actually yeah yeah considerate of Susie to like make up the time zone difference for the sake of Laura though I know good dog is she's the hero here one last trick on the

way out as I mentioned this was something that happened gradually Carnarvon's death and so it allowed folks to stick their necks and speculate that this may have been the Earl simply reaping what he'd sown for disturbing the grave of a great man protected by his gods yes this idea has precedent and earlier fictional stories in the 1820s a writer named Jane Webb Ludin saw some macabre fucking show called a mummy striptease near London's Piccadilly Circus and translated

her subsequent angst into a story called the mummy yeah that sounds gross yeah that's nearly nasty don't do that in 1869 Louisa May Alcott wrote a story where a looting Egyptologist girlfriend grows seeds he gifts her from a tomb so he gives her these seeds that he finds in somebody's burial place yeah and when she wears the flowers as a wreath at their wedding she turns into a mummy yeah that's good Louisa May Alcott huh I didn't know she had that like

horror vibe but in the context of King Tutankhamen it's novelist Marie Carelli stoking the flames and I deeply regret that this edit of this story is already a little jam packed because I would love to spend more time with Marie Carelli she sounds like a hoot to give you a bit of context of Miss Carelli real name Mary McKay does not speak Italian although she apparently socially claims to like she's a mass I love her a Hilaria Baldwin it very that exactly that yeah she is a

best-selling author of melodramatic religious novels about Christian mysticism and astral projection oh wow that's up someone's alley I don't know who's but okay to quote Britannica dot com through her immensely successful career she was accused of sentimentality and portaste so well she just writes like gutter pulp that people love but anybody with a brain is like this is vile this is terrible you put it like that she sounds great

perhaps her most enduring missive is a letter to New York World a magazine that I surely made up and yet somehow didn't quote I cannot but think that some risks are run by breaking into the last rest of a king of Egypt whose tomb especially and solemnly guarded and robbing him of possessions this is why I ask was it a mosquito bite that has so seriously infected Lord Carnarvon Carelli claims further that she has a book on Egyptian history

apocryphal specious that warns that secret potions could cause harm to trespassers of the pharaohs to the various mystics and psychics then start to come out of the woodwork to follow Carelli's lead and say yeah I also I warned Carnarvon he had a sesh with me my name is what was her name she Velma my name is Velma Carnarvon had a sesh with me and I warned him about the curse and he didn't listen he said all the mummies in Egypt couldn't keep me away and still he went in spite of mine and

now also Maria Carelli real name Mary McKay does not speak Italian her curse you know like it's all happening and the journalists are very into curse stories because it's stories about Tutankhamun that they don't have to wait to hear from the London Times who have been given exclusivity rights right so there's a there's a function here and you'll hear over and over that like Tutankhamun does ratings the people turn up for this shit museum exhibit smash records discovery

channel specials bring in numbers these kind of things Oh totally posters are bought and hung in addicts and finally this curse has one very famous and vocal advocate and I wonder if you can figure out who it is sir Sir Conan Doyle sure locks dad friend of the podcast is it really it absolutely is he is very into the curse okay quote there are many legends about the power of the old Egyptians and I know I wouldn't care to go fooling about in their tombs and mummies I didn't say that

some Egyptian spirit did kill Carnarvon but I think it is possible there are many malevolent spirits and when Doyle was pressed to why others like Howard Carter hadn't died he offered and this is this is just beautifully if you listen to our last episode the Coddingley varies this is a gorgeously in character piece of rhetoric quote it is nonsense to say that because elementals do not harm everybody therefore they do not exist one might as well say that because bulldogs

do not bite everybody therefore bulldogs do not exist I love him he's so dumb I love him more of him please there's your trilogy yeah so we had we have Marie Corelli we've got Sherlock Holmes we've got everybody who is not the London Times but needs to common material to push yeah we've got all these folks sounding the alarm about this curse right and we also start to see you know different variations of the story different texts of the curse one telling says that

Carnarvon was bitten by a mosquito whose bite was laced with embalming fluid from also having bitten the mummy which is you know sort of an ironic and deadly kiss situation that's beautiful I do like that okay people start mailing their illicitly obtained mummy parts to British museums trying to rid themselves of curses oh shit that's good I like that that's a short story I mean it's all a short story but that's a short short story everyone who walked off with a hand is

now all of a sudden like hey British Museum do you want my hand I've heard I'm just having a little dumb second thoughts when Lady Carnarvon leaves Cairo on April 16th by a steamer people reschedule their passage so they're not on the ship with Carnarvon's remains oh I mean yeah totally I get that I'm right there cursed though they are yeah thankfully there are folks like adventure rider Haggard to set us all straight quote do you suppose that God Almighty would permit a pharaoh

who after all was only a man with a crown on his head to murder people by magical means thousands of years after his own death okay some some Judeo-Christian perspective all right mm-hmm do you think God would allow supernatural magic that makes no sense so yeah that's the take have you read the old testament okay tight tight tight have you read the Bible no big deal right right right as for Howard Carter he says quote all sane people should treat such inventions with contempt goes

on to say it is rather too much to ask me to believe that some spook is keeping watch and ward over the dead pharaoh ready to wreak vengeance on anyone who goes to near Carter claims that the only curse comes from Monsieur's creepy Crawley bitum and co aka the desert insects oh interesting little turn there at the end okay little pun that he wanted to use which I know what that's about to be fair I've been there yeah sometimes you have a little pun Jersey I'm also thinking

of the mummy where the creepy Crawley's creep pretty deep the scarra yeah they puncture your skin and it's gross and that's part of the curse so Carter watch out so Lord Carnarvon has just died his wife is in charge of the money and Howard Carter is flying solo you may remember from the Sakura affair this incident between the French tourists in the Egyptian guards that Carter is a bit of a loose cannon and in life the more charming Lord Carnarvon had been his

publicity arm now he's stuck dealing with folks one on one and all kinds of shit is already simmering because he's a more abrasive guy yeah yeah for example when the lid of the King sarcophagus is lifted he tries to make arrangements for the wives of the European investigators to be present for the next unveiling so you know the next part of the the opening of this tomb so why does he want the why their wives there because the wives want to see it okay okay he's arranging

things and so antiquities is like that's fine as long as the Egyptian wives can be present too yeah and hers like no that's stupid no why would we do that I don't get it why would we want the Egyptian wives there that makes no sense and so antiquities is like no then bitch you can't just bring in the white wives you don't think everyone's wife wants to see this shit and like all the why it's not just the European wives for all the why this is a universal wife thing okay yeah all wives love

is so it is known and so Carter storms out and he posts a big flouncy notice at a Luxor hotel saying he can't work under these conditions and he refuses to go any further until his demands are met and so antiquities is like okay then we're locking you out of the two yeah and they do the peasy done the opening of the sarcophagus has been delayed the lid is suspending there in midair we're just waiting to unwrap but now we can't okay so Carter goes to do a speaking tour of the

US and blow off some steam and so finally in October 1925 like a year plus later when we've all calm the fuck down we open the sarcophagus minus I assume our wives like I don't know how exactly how this resolved itself but I can't imagine the wives got it you heard me in the beginning I was like whoa wives were even gonna make it I didn't know that was on the table okay you're telling me I could have married an Egyptologist this whole time I thought we weren't I think the wives got

to be there for that kind of shit so through careful ingenuity we're able to get to the central coffin which is made of pure gold and weighs over 800 pounds and we find tootin commons mummy in its famous gold mask as depicted in your childhood attic yes and this gives its wearer divine attributes and repels enemies except an animal crossing where it gives you the curse of King Tut and you start to fall down when you run oh no but see the curses even made it to animal crossing

is the point yeah good point Howard Carter requires the services of an anatomy professor from Cairo University named Douglas Dairy to conduct the final autopsy of the royal mummy Dairy starts by making an incision and proceeding slowly and deliberately to piece through the black and ashes of the wrapping and discover the glinting ambulance amongst them and then he needs to move the mummy and he discovers to chagrin that it's been glued to the coffin by the

congealing of sacred oils liberally applied to the body which you know heat millennia fuse also I don't know I've been there waxing your legs it's hot yeah I get it totally you fall asleep in bed you wake up you're stuck to the bed exactly stuck to the sheets yeah so Dairy rips off the arms and just breaks the body in half the waist it is a disaster oh my God bones are broken and dislodged there's an eyewitness account of Dairy using a torch to melt resin off one of the

feet potentially causing a toe to fall off none of which is noted in Dairy's official records so God knows what else happened this treatment of the body deeply compromises feature study of the Teenage King as people come up with murder theories based around what is most likely Dairy's unnecessary roughness with the body oh my gosh Dairy's disrespect doesn't stop there found within Tutankhamun's tomb are two small fetuses one mummified one not widely believed to be the

miscarried children of Tutankhamun and Ankh Senemun his wife sister cousin Joe Marchant describes Dairy's interaction with one of these sets of remains thusly quote never one to worry about preserving a mummy comma Dairy broke through the cranium to remove the linen and there found the wire used to force the fabric into the skull this is the only embalmers tool ever to be found inside a mummy Dairy threw it away oh my God why are you throw why siren is the archaeology please

yes exactly why are you throwing anything away you keep every single fucking scrap that is ridiculous the thing that I gather is that back then there wasn't much reverence paid to the actual human remains either as a oh this is the sacred remains of a person not only just any old person all of which are equally worthy of empathy after death right yeah and so on yeah but also like a person who was like a sacred God to his people in many ways and they literally just came in and

like I snapped that shit off yeah no big deal that went over there they took a lot of records of things like they would sit there and like meticulously sketch the pattern of bead work on a garment for three weeks in case it disintegrated when they picked it up but the actual mummies the actual remains themselves seem to have treated very badly that's so strange you would hope that the human remains have the most you know have the best treatment the colonial powers

that are exhuming these graves have a different idea of the person hood of people yes from this culture than they have of their own person hood yeah yeah exactly which sounds like it's curse making that sounds curse making them that's some cursey shit that is me we curse out later in 1971 a researcher named F. Filtz leak is given permission to investigate and examine the fetuses but they're gone vanished into thin air not to be seen again until June 1992 when someone looks in a

storage room at Caster Aligny Hospital and finds a cache of 528 mummies and parts of mummies which Douglas Dairy the autopsy guy had researched and then checked into a closet these are reminds you human remains oh my god that's insane what the dairy that's the guy who got first crack at King Tutankhamen's undisturbed remains okay so our yeah anything that could be gleaned from his remains is oh done big done total question mark yeah but people people will continue

to attempt to do so over the next generation like we haven't stopped trying to glean you things from Tutankhamen's remains via like things like ancient DNA studies which the field is 5050 on whether you can even glean anything from DNA this old the fragments there of how much of it is just like contamination from the recent modern researchers etc. Wow by 1930 Carter has wrapped up his excavation little mummy humor there in total 5398 objects are cataloged if

you're interested in an exhaustive documentation of Carnarvon and Carter's foray into King Tut's tomb the Griffith Institute has compiled everything Google Tutankhamen Anatomy of an Excavation that's T U T A N K H A M U N Anatomy of an Excavation when asked what he plans to do next after the excavation of Tutankhamen's tomb Howard Carter tells reporters that he knows exactly where to find the tomb of Alexander the Great oh just totally different era

totally okay okay around yeah unfortunately he seemingly keeps that secret to himself because he retires back to England and spends the remainder of his days telling rip roaring adventure stories he dies March 2nd 1939 of Hodgkin's disease or a curse yes the epitaph well he dies about so okay so let's put that in perspective he dies Hodgkin's about nine years after the finish of the excavation of Tutankhamen's tomb okay he dies at 64 yeah that's not super

early for that time period but even still the male life expectancy around this time is like 50 something so he does beat life expectancy okay yeah yeah the epitaph on his gravestone taken from a cop found within Tutankhamen's tomb reads may your spirit live may you spend millions of years you love Thevis sitting with your face toward the northwind your eyes be holding happiness that's a nice little I want I want I'm gonna put that in my will and my funeral I want

to be hold happiness as well bury me toward the northwind please pass out cups that have that printed on them that be great Zazzle that shit up I'm in not Zazzle will discuss Zazzle yes it's going to instruct so that is the end of the line for Carnarvon and Carter but not for Tutankhamen who has a new life and undergoes further investigation as technology and interest grow and grow the worldwide buzz around him never quite goes away nor do the theories nor do

the people holding him up as a totem of identity right Christians seeking him evidence of various biblical figures and events oh okay even though it's 1300 years before Christ okay some black Americans recast Tutankhamen as symbolic of their own struggles and glories to the point where we see pushback when recreations depict him as looking Middle Eastern funnily enough there's a quote in our Vanessa Williams episode episode 27 by a scholar named Gerald

early that kind of talks about this royal blood means a lot to people who've been denied their mythology right yeah totally the Mormons get in there for a bit seeking to incorporate Tutankhamen into their own extensive genealogy I gather that by Mormon rules around genealogy if you can discover one of your ancestors names they can be posthumously saved like you can give them the good word kind of deal they were in there for a while trying to figure out like are

any of our people your people you know and all of this goes a bit Magna when King Tut and again this is not Tutankhamen by this point now we're now this is King Tut he goes on tour in the late 60s and early 70s Tut mania sees its second wave when key artifacts and recreations from Tutankhamen's tomb toward the world though not the king himself who remains in repose in his tomb having seldom been interrupted in the 1970s as America brokers peace talks between Egypt and Israel

King Tut finally makes it stateside the expedition is seen as a crucial piece of diplomacy and an important bit of global PR for the Egyptians at some point there was some danger of it being shut down and Kissinger stepped in was like no this would this has to go forward. Oh yeah kissinger's in on this little thumb prints on it to running from 1976 to 1979 the exhibition smashes American records with millions of attendees more than a quarter of whom have never been to a

museum before. Okay that must be where because I was thinking 80s but that must be where that poster it was such a hit that they redid it in the 80s and when they redid in the 80s so these 70s to 80s exhibitions you start seeing all of this like kitschy you know we'll do a car show with a King Tut car that has like a fiberglass grill and a Cobra gear shift. Yeah and we start to see vibrating plug-in King Tut wall pillows. Yeah specifically

the 80s one that you're talking about we started to see Tatini tumblers so if you wanted to make a Tatini behind the home bar that we were all getting put in you could get a Tatini tumbler. Wow so the kitchen is on fire. Absolutely and again this is an anonymous boy king about whom we know absolutely nothing and right it's so fun. Yeah it's it's it's very DeLorean we don't we just project right yeah just project whatever it

is and speaking of projection is also around this time that the idea of the curse gets a slight recasting we're changing the way that we investigate questions around this so-called curse. Okay we're now too sophisticated to believe in the magical power of the ancients so we look to the scientific reasons that this curse absolutely exists. One theory has it that the tomb floors were lined with uranium acquired through what means I'm not sure but radiation yeah

yes we've got a radiation situation one theory has it that the mummies bandages are laced with cyanide acquired from peach pits yeah so this is this is your like you touched the mummy now you're fucked we have a lot of theories about airborne illness from fungal spores or ancient bacteria overwhelming modern modern immune system so this is the they left a booby trap German there kind of deal right yeah we have belief that the ancient Egyptians chose a remote site

that was susceptible to harmful cosmic radiation and then subsequently architected the tomb in such a way that the chambers magnify Earth's magnetic field which drives you mad if you enter I think I like that one the best so far covers all the bases I have no questions about it no no I have not it's a very thorough explanation what could I just if you ask me if I can't disprove it then it's real yeah exactly and of course other conspiracy suggest that the

is merely a smoke screen for people getting assassinated one by one for getting too close to some dangerous truth so you know you've got Carter Carter is selling antiquities out of here and someone finds out pop pop you know something like this right right so conspiracy theory that's a little bit more like current so in 2002 Mark Nelson pulls together a clinical study of Tutankhamun's curse which determines that there is no significant difference between the

survival rate of those who might have been exposed to the curse versus a control group do we ever know whatever came of Evelyn I will tell you that the biggest difference maker in life expectancy seems to be your sex the only woman in the discovery party Lady Evelyn lived happily to 75 look at the timing of that question damn it's almost like you've done this before to recap the three people who busted in early who in my opinion quite susceptible to curses we've got Lord

Carnarvon mosquito bite shaving incident dies prematurely RIP Howard Carter dies about 10 years later in his sixties of Hodgkin's Lady Evelyn lives to 75 dies of natural causes yeah put it to you this way I wanted to have a whole big section me reading out here are the people who are supposed to have fallen prey to the curse of Tutankhamun and you go and you look at these listicles these like mental floss listicles and whatever and you see the examples they give and they're

so specious it's like this person knew somebody who visited the tomb and then his wife shot him and I'm like I'm sorry the curse there is a bad marriage yeah he visited the tomb and then his brother's house burnt down yeah nine people who fell victim to Tutankhamun's curse and you're like two of these are any good I think that the curse is born of an instinct that it is wrong to disturb graves and pillage other people's culture and so on yeah and that I'll agree with

yeah but in terms of like a physical thou must not blank and if thou dost locust supani I'm not a believer do you remember Douglas Derry the old mummy tamper who is like snapping people off at the waist chucking people into closets etc yeah yeah Dr break a bone no big deal yeah he died at 87 in February 1961 in what I saw described as mostly perfect health although it is perhaps worth noting that his pilot son John died September 6th 1952 in the worst air show disaster

in British history the Farnsboro air show crash basically in the middle of a trick the whole plane just randomly disintegrated as part of a structural failure he and his co-pilot were killed as were 29 spectators 60 injured so whoa so the plane just like disintegrated around them fell out of the sky yes but but interpreted as as a freak accident for whom nobody is at fault yes yes wow spooky so you could you could if you would like interpret that as curse behavior

but to me that inter assumes a very wide scope of curse as most online listicles do when they remind you that various friends in laws tourists children have met with tragedy you're merely through association or blood relation to people who know people who know that like we're on the chop hypothetically for doing this right now sorry probably me more than you realistically but I either whole point in making this little little comment is that anybody who has

touched it and that is me thank you yeah yeah but the thing is like that's to me is to that's just hazards of living is that people by suddenly tragically unexpectedly unfortunately irregardless of the like I like there was a study done and the survival rate was not found to have been significantly different right yeah yeah exactly there's a whole bunch more to the story of Tutankhamen and his mummy that I've omitted for time and because you know we've got

like thousands of years of history in this one right yeah the modern update on on Tutankhamen news updates alerts bulletins is that National Geographic is currently touring and immersive experience featuring replicas of Tutankhamen's treasures currently playing in Washington DC and Boston waitlist only in Atlanta NYC in San Francisco and selling tickets for upcoming shows in Los Angeles and Vancouver B.C. so maybe yeah maybe if I'm up to it now that I've done all

this research anyway do you get invited to a dinner party and then asked if you could fit into the sarcophagus you got to sweep the floor first to put the broom in the broom jar no it's going to be great yeah that'll be fun so top mania drums on as people continue to speculate revere and imprint upon this elusive young man who lived such an extraordinary life and died such a mysterious death lately it seems we're in a quieter place for Tutankhamen and his

remains you can still visit him in the Valley of the Kings his original coffin remains in play coffins really remain in place while the king himself has been moved to an anonymous anti chamber where he lives in a nitrogen filled temperature controlled glass case in order to stave off deterioration okay a little bit more respect good yes and no because his original mummification in concert with the seals sarcophagus and the sealed tomb would have kept him preserved for many

but between the many disruptions desecrations procedures change in humidity with so many people constantly coming in and out of the tomb exposure to light surviving multiple wars revolutions whatever's yet to come Tutankhamen will sadly someday degrade into dust so much for eternal life huh turns out the whole time the curse went the other way King Tut so sorry about that King but you had a blue but King's had a but what color was it so Josie yes in your

opinion what do you make of it now that you've heard the whole case do you believe in curses do you believe that estes un tomb curseado like what's your vibe you know I think you got to believe in curses just so that you're like covering the gamut you know why take that player off the chessboard curses keep you humble curses keep you humble exactly if you think there's a curse maybe you don't rob this grave and that's good for everybody exactly yeah yeah

there's like a karma curse to you know where it's like around with that bullshit because you know what your bullshit is going to get fucked around if that's the case you know so it's true I don't know if I believe in like the mosquito took the embalming fluid into its into its body shouldn't that's bullshit that makes no that's not how that works do love that though but how do you feel I believe that a curse exists in this case it is a metaphorical curse not

a literal curse okay I believe the curse that we're dealing with here is really our inherent knowledge that it is wrong as much as we like to sell our exclusivity rights the London Times it's wrong for us just because we're right white British folks from the 19th century to come around here and storm and disrupt these remains and sell Brick of Brack to curio shops in your waters guilty conscience bitch you know that's not right and so in order to come up

with that we come up with this idea of the curse and when we see somebody like Lord Carnarvon who is intimately involved in this process die that validates the curse so that's my thought yeah yeah the curse to me is a Western invention the curse to me is is much like Egyptology itself it's the history of and much like even this podcast it's the history of this particular area through a Western lens yeah I'm going to go watch the mummy now I'm not going to moon thank you for

50 episodes everybody thank you for putting up with our little award show and in all of our little weirdo stupid theater kid quirks it's very nice of you Taylor thank you for 50 episodes Jesse thank you as well I've really really enjoyed myself here's to 50 more smash the champagne bottle thanks for tuning in if you want more infamy go to bittersweet me dot com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts we usually release new episode every other Sunday and you

could also find us on Instagram at bittersweet me and if you liked the show consider subscribing leaving a review or just tell friend my sources for this week's episode were a complete to common by Nicholas Reeves the shadow King by Joe Marchant and the murder of Tutankhamen by Bob Briar PhD I also read was it really a mummy's curse on Jace for daily by Allison C Meyer August 22nd 2019 as well as a curse of pink type facts and fable live science by Benjamin Radford

published March from the first 2014 we also use music and effects from sassaby MPT sound and daddy's music on Pixabay my caning on sound Bible think media and Windows 10 paradox mirror and sound ideas topic on YouTube our interstitial music was by Mitchell Collins you also heard some music from the night trap soundtrack theme song by sunny blue skies a stereo version by VG suite on YouTube so you're currently listening to his T Street by Brian Steele thanks for 50

episodes more and more from CDC bucket let's switch tonight trap. Yeah. Speaking of stories where nothing happens that reminds me of how we got this let me how do I I've forgotten how to say sentences. They're hard they're hard. You know when you're reading lines you just like make up

intonations for a sentence that never spoken like your sentence is doing the worm because you're just putting emphasis on random places in it and like that's not how anybody talks. Who knew that scripting would be so hard fuck.