RedHanded - ShortHand: Tutankhamun's Curse

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

The gold-lined, intact tomb of Tutankhamun is without a doubt the most important archaeological discovery in Egypt's history. But what if Tutankhamun, the teenage God King, took something in return?��After the young Pharaoh was found, several people connected to his discovery died in “mysterious circumstances”, including the man who had financed the whole operation. Was this King Tut’s price for gold and riches beyond anyone's wildest dreams? We dig a little deeper…--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

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Oh, hello. Abandon Hope. Excited. I'm pretty excited as well. There's nothing I love more than a big fucking old and tiny, scary pasto-Egyptian. And that's exactly what we've got for you, and we're going to kick off with a quote that I'm going to read to you. 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.

showed that whatever lay beyond was empty, not filled like the passage we'd 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 Kavanan, Lady Evelyn, and Callender, standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict. At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flip, 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. Those are the words of Howard Carter, the man responsible for the greatest archaeological find in history, the tomb of Tutankarmoon, pharaoh, god king, and child ruler of the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt. But... Almost as soon as the discovery was made,

rumours started swirling in the press that the tomb was never meant to be found, and that everyone involved was in danger of the curse of Tutankarmoon. And then, a few months later, the expedition's main financial backer was found dead. And as for what killed him,

if you believe the rumours, it was the little pharaoh himself claiming revenge against those who had disturbed his body and this is the short hand Now before we get into the really exciting stuff about pharaohs and their curses we need to set the scene Who was Howard Carter

Well in a refreshing turn of events for us at Red Handed He seems to have been a pretty decent man Oh that's nice It is nice that one that happens Born in 1874, Carter was the youngest of 11 siblings, the son of artist and illustrator Samuel John Carter and his wife Martha. Despite coming from relative affluence, Howard Carter didn't really receive much of a formal education,

probably because he was the youngest of 11, and he was mostly into art and adventure. As a teenager, Howard was a regular visitor to Didlington Hall, a mansion owned by the wealthy Amherst family. And Sean Combs. No. I'm kidding. Oh, right.

It's because his nickname's theiddler. Oh, right. I just thought he'd bought this. No, no, no, no, no, he's in jail. That's true. This family, the Amherst family, not Sean Combs, though maybe he is. They were known to be collectors of Egyptian antiquities. And this sparked a curiosity into all things ancient and Egyptian for the young Howard

Carter. And when he showed his considerable artistic talent to Lady Amherst, she organised for him to be sent to Egypt to help a family friend excavate and record archaeological finds. Saying he showed his considerable artistic talent to Lady Amherst makes it sound like he flashed her. Unconfirmed. Don't fact-check. Lady Amherst's artist flasher. By the age of 25, Carter had been appointed inspector of monuments of Upper Egypt for the Egyptian Antiquities Service, and he was instrumental in the exploration of the Valley of the Kings. The Valley of the Kings is every bit as exciting as it sounds. It's a set of valleys and hills in Luxor and Northern Egypt, in which the new kingdom of ancient Egypt buried its leaders and high-ranking

officials. As Inspector of Monuments, Carter revolutionised archaeology by introducing a new systematic method of exploration, as well as improving the protection of excavated ruins and making them more accessible to archaeologists. Carter kept this prestigious appointment for five whole years until the Sakara affair, which, despite its romantic name, was actually a messy, violent confrontation between a group of French tourists in the Valley of the Kings and the Egyptian guards who were employed to protect the site. The tourists were being disrespectful to both the archaeological sites they were visiting and the guards

themselves. Although it's not explicitly noted, it's widely assumed that the tourists were being racist towards the Egyptian guards when they couldn't have their way, and things turned violent. The French government got involved. Howard Carter backed the guards in the official investigation, and he ended up unemployed in Egypt for several years. So, with nothing else to do, Carter sold watercolours and sketches on the Valley of the Kings, just to make ends meet. If you're waiting for me to make a derisive comment about French people, I'm not taking the bait. Luckily for Carter, and archaeology on the whole, he didn't stay unemployed forever. In 1907, Carter was recommended to George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvan.

Herbert was wealthy and obsessed with ancient Egypt. So the pair struck a partnership, working together to hunt down and excavate tombs across Egypt. The pair were responsible for some considerable find. And Carter's dedication to preservation means that many of those pieces are still viewable to this day. But by 1922, the pair had been working together for 15 years and the discoveries were dwindling. There was a growing sentiment across the archaeological community

that everything that could be found in the Valley of the Kings had been found already. There was actually some pretty sound reasoning behind this conclusion. Archaeologists had a reasonably good idea of the lineage of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, especially in the New Kingdom, which was the time when the Valley of the Kings was used, and they were pretty sure that they tracked down tombs for all of them. Plus, it wasn't just modern-day explorers tracking down and carefully chronicling these tombs. Tomb Raiders had been ransacking them for centuries.

Still, Howard Carter did have a hunch that there might be one. more tomb lurking down there somewhere. Tutankhamun wasn't a particularly well-known name within Egyptology at the time. His burial had actually already been accounted for quite some time ago, but it had never quite satisfied Carter. At a previous site, some ceremonial offerings had been found with Tutankarman's name inscribed on them, but they'd never found a body. For the wider community, this was enough to call it a day.

But Carter suspected this wasn't everything that had been laid down for the pharaoh. Regardless, George Herbert was ready to pull the plug on any more excavations. He'd spent a fortune over the last decades, and the fines weren't coming in as hot and fast as they once had. However, Howard Carter convinced him to give him one more year, or a season, in Egypt. And they called them seasons because Egypt is really, really hot, so you can only dig for a small portion of the year. Carter had systematically gone over almost the entirety of the Valley of the Kings,

in some cases more than once. But he was a completionist, and there was one last sight that they hadn't looked into. A collection of ruined huts that had been used by ancient Egyptian labourers, the ones who'd built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. It wasn't much, but it was worth a look. And it's a testament to the long-standing friendship between the two men that Herbert agreed to finance Carter's one last season

so that Carter could leave feeling satisfied. Egypt completed. Carter's final season in the Valley of the Kings began earlier than normal on the 1st of November in 1922. A lot had changed over the 16 years that he'd been working with Herbert. For a start, Egypt was now an independent country. This wasn't a big deal for Carter. He got on well with his Egyptian.

peers. In fact, he'd lost his job to back them. However, it did make archaeology in Egypt a lot more complicated than when it had been under British occupation, mostly because Egypt wanted to keep a proportion of what was found, which is fair enough. The other big challenge was Egypt had done a great job of bolstering its economy with tourism, which made excavations a lot more difficult. And that was one of the reasons that they'd started their season off so. early. Pretty quickly into this final excavation, Howard Carter's feeling that there was more

to be found was validated. On the 4th of November, a stone step was found near the ancient workers' huts. Some say that this step was found by a worker on the dig, others say it was found by an Egyptian boy who was playing nearby. Either way

it was a big deal. The step was unearthed and another step was found, then another and so on, until a stone staircase was revealed that led down to the entrance of a tomb. From the outside, this tomb was not all that remarkable. It was smaller than you would expect for a pharaoh, more likely for some sort of dignitary instead. Or a boy king who doesn't need that much room. Actually, the tomb seemed so unimportant that it had been covered thousands of years ago.

When workers building another tomb had just chucked dirt over the entrance. And that dirt chucking had kept it hidden for about 3,000 years. Once the plaster door was fully uncovered, Carter cut a small hole and peered through. On the other side was a big pile of rubble. Not exactly what he'd been hoping for. but it looked interesting enough to warrant a look. So he ordered the staircase to be covered and sent a telegram to Herbert in the UK,

asking him to get over there pronto. Because it was the olden times and Uber hadn't been invented yet, it took Herbert 19 days to arrive, by which point Carter had recruited another of his friends to come along. This man was called Arthur Callender. And he was always on time. In reality, the own...

reason we're including Arthur is A to make that joke, and B, because Carter mentions him in that opening paragraph, and we didn't want you to think that we'd missed out someone important. George Herbert finally arrived with his daughter, Lady Evelyn, in tow, and Carter's team began to unearth the entrance to the tomb once again. A closer inspection of the plaster door revealed an inscription. Tutankhamun, Carter's hunch had been right. That day, they broke through the first plaster door,

and entered a corridor filled with rubble and a loose collection of artefacts. It sort of looked like it had been used as some kind of dump. But past the dump, they found a second door. Carter once again created a peephole in the plaster and looked through it. And that's when he gave the description I read to you at the beginning. Strange animals, statues and gold. Everywhere, the glint of gold. This second room, known as the antechamber, acted as a gateway to further rooms behind

and was filled with Tutankhamun's most prized possessions. The most famous items are the wheels of several war chariots, a paper fan which depicted the pharaoh hunting and several couches whose wooden structures had been carved into the shape of a hippo, a lion and a cow. A quick Google will bring up these pictures taken before anyone entered the antechamber, showing the stacks of possessions as they had been left for over 3,000 years. In total, there were 700 objects within the antechamber,

making it one of the biggest finds in Egyptian archaeology. And things were just getting started. Coming off from the ante chamber were two doors. One was open, the other was closed. The open one led to a room that we now call the annex, which was filled with about 280 items. Most of this stuff was for Tutankarmoon to enjoy in the afterlife, stuff like food, drinks, oils, board games,

all of the stuff he would need to be happy on the other side. The room had clearly been accessed by grave robbers, but none from this century or the last or the one before that. As you can imagine, any culture that puts its noble dead in big rooms full of gold and valuables will always have an issue with looting. Tutankarmoon's tomb had been looted at least once, but only for small objects like golden game pieces,

about 3,000 years ago. And since then, it had laid intact. A few days later, the team breached the second door, and this was the moment that their dreams really came true. Behind it was the Farah's burial chamber, with its walls covered in intricate paintings of Tutankarmoon chatting with the gods and being welcomed into the afterlife. In the centre was a shrine, which Carter hoped to God contained a mummy.

He'd actually been stung before, opening a sarcophagus at a dinner party, which he hoped would impress his guests, only to find nothing inside. That would be very embarrassing. Very, very anti-climatic. I am the primo Egyptologist. Nothing. Oh. I'm just like, yeah, I guess they're quite heavy, so you might not be able to tell,

that it was empty as well. Oh, God. However, this time, luckily for Carter, Tutankhamen Shrine, was almost completely intact. It consisted of four nesting wooden boxes, and within this was a carved box of quartzite, aka the sarcophagus. Within that were three nesting coffins, and within that was the mummy of Tutankhamun. His mummy was adorned with a golden death mask, which is now, become, not just a symbol of the pharaoh, but of ancient Egypt, and in some ways the study of history itself. Fun fact, the mast does not actually depict Tutankhamun himself, but the god of

the afterlife, Osiris. It's also inscribed with a spell from the Book of the Dead. As if it couldn't get any more exciting for Carter, there was still one more room behind the burial chamber, the treasury. As its name might suggest, Yes, this room was filled with the final and most valuable things that Tutankhamun would need in the Great Beyond, along with his vital organs in canopic jars, contained within an enormous golden shrine, plus 22 wooden boats, all pointing west, ready to take him across to the Great Beyond. Guarding this room was a life-sized statue of the jackal god, Anubis. I've seen a picture of this, and the, like, caption of it was like,

Oh, the jackal as discovered by Carter as they opened the tomb. But it's like wearing a little cape. And I don't know whether they're just like, just keep you safe, Mr. Jackal God, if it gets cold. Maybe it was just broken and they were like a sticker cape on it. Maybe. So all of this was, and still this, the single most important find in the history of the study of ancient Egypt,

may even be the most important find in history itself. It remains the only interesting. intact Egyptian tomb ever found. Why? Well, to understand that, we need to first talk a bit about who Tutankhamun was. The short answer is, he wasn't that important. He was most likely the son of the much more revolutionary Pharaoh Arcanactan. Arknacton was responsible for massive social reforms in ancient Egypt and converted his empire to the monotheistic worship of the god Atten. This was massive at the time, because polytheism was an essential part of ancient Egyptian culture, and it secured the pharaoh's role as a god king.

So basically the pharaohs didn't rule by divine right, nor were they the mouthpiece of God. They were the gods themselves. So that meant when Arcanatan died, a lot of people wanted their old beliefs back, especially those who just lost quite a lot of religious power. Enter the nine-year-old club-footed Tutankhamun, who we think is Arcanatan's son by some sort of minor wife that wasn't that important. After ascending to power and under the heavy influence of his advisers, the young pharaoh brought back the polytheistic worship that everyone knew and loved.

And to be brutally honest, that is kind of it. And there will be Egypt fanatics He'll say that his life was a lot more interesting And it was in the sense that he was a pharaoh And that's pretty great But he didn't really do anything He did have a wife And a enormous litany of health problems

Including a club foot A cleft palate A severe underbite One or potentially several genetic disorders And potentially Developmentally Disabled as well I mean Super Embred

Yeah Super Embred and at 19 he died. We don't really know of what, but being that impred is pretty difficult and probably some kind of infection took him out. Yeah, because like, yes, minor wife, so maybe it wasn't his dad's sister,

but like nine times out of ten it was. And, you know, there's generations of sister-brother marriages that go before him. Yeah. One non-blood-related minor wife, isn't going to solve all those problems. Now, all this might sound a little bit harsh, but it is exactly his unimportance that has led Tutankhamun to being so important today.

Just ask Kufu, Khafra, Amenikor. Those three pharaohs had the great pyramids built as their tombs. Now building a 450-foot polished white triangle with a gold tip that's the tallest building on earth for several thousands of years is indeed a great legacy. but it is also quite conspicuous. As a result, the pyramids were of course pillaged a high heaven long before even Jesus could have a look.

Whereas for Tutankarmoon, his tomb was only robbed once, and they barely took anything interesting. Still, though, this find was an international sensation, and Tutomania swept the globe. All sorts of house parties and even home decor suddenly became King Tut themed. That's so random. In it. We don't need much, do we?

You've got to love it. You've got to love how simple we are. I love that. So, like, in the mid-20s, everyone's just throwing king-tut parties. It would seem so. Wow. And with the new ancient celebrity came ancient celebrity accusations, namely the Pharaoh's curse.

For as long as people have been digging up people's tombs, there have been rumours of curses. Whether it's a Viking one, a Saxon one, an ancient Greek one, or an ancient Egyptian. one. And to be fair, in the old kingdom of ancient Egypt, curses were often written on tomb doors to try and stop people from looting them. It really isn't more complicated than that. But because we're in the know, we all realise that King Tut was a new kingdom pharaoh, so his tomb did not have any curses written on it at all. But that didn't stop the press. As soon as it was common

knowledge that on the day that Carter had first opened the tomb, he had sent a messenger boy up to his house, and when that boy arrived, he found that a cobra had broken into Carter's bird cage and eaten his canary. And obviously, if you need it spelling out, the cobra is a long-standing symbol of the pharaoh. But also, he is in Egypt. Yeah, with a fucking canary on show. Well, one would assume he's taking it into caves with him. Left it at mine that day. Well, quite. Keep him safe from the cobras. But as we hinted towards the beginning of this episode, it doesn't end there. Because four months after they'd breached the walls of Tut's tomb, George Herbert upped and died.

Naturally, this pushed the rumours of the Pharaoh's curse into overdrive because so far the death toll had just been one canary. And the British press swirled with both supernatural and scientific explanations for Herbert's death. Obviously, the supernatural explanation was the curse, which is clearly bollocks, but some of the scientific explanations did hold some water. Most notably the suggestion that some kind of bacteria or poison had been hidden in the tomb to attack and kill anyone who entered.

Unfortunately though, as fun as this sounds, it isn't quite true. In reality, Herbert snagged a mosquito bite while shaving and died of a resulting infection. Although rumour has it that King Tut's body also had a scar in the same exact spot on his face. Good enough for me. Honestly, sold. Following Herbert's death, the rumours of a supposed curse

continued and various other deaths were chalked up to Tutankhamun's wrath. In total, about 17 deaths have been accounted to the curse, that's 17 people and one canary, but the four most high profile are these. George Day Gould, a tourist who visited the dig site and died shortly afterwards in the French Riviera, having contracted a fever whilst in Egypt.

Then Arthur Mace, a member of the excavation team, who died of pluracy and pneumonia in 1928, four years after entering the tomb. Then Richard Bell, Howard Carter's secretary, who died on the 15th of November, 1929, seven years after entering the tomb. Is this basically just anyone who died? Yes, it does seem like that.

His death is interesting, but not for Egypt reasons. It's because he died suspiciously in a Mayfair nightclub. And then finally, Howard Carter, who died a whopping 16 years after first poking a hole in that plaster door on the 2nd of March 1939, having fully cemented his legacy as possibly the most influential archaeologist in the history of the world. That's quite a long time after he found it.

It is. And it was the 1920s when he... when he pokes his hole in that particular tomb, and he dies in 1939. I'm going to guess that the average life expectancy was not super high. How old do you think he was when he died? I've got it in front of me. It's not like...

Howard Carter. Yeah. 54. Oh, come on. 1939. I'm like, that's no curse. And he's been fucking in Egypt. Grand malaria for his entire career.

I feel like he did all right. So yes, his death is a bit of a damp squib. Which is a bit of a letdown. But wait. What if we finished you off with a case where a tomb really did kill some people? Carol Wachatier Tyler, aka the future Pope John Paul II, authorise the opening of the tomb of Casimir IV and his wife Elizabeth of Austria. Of the 12 men who opened the tomb, 10 of them.

died prematurely over the next three years. That's more like it, right? And it was all to do with Aspergellius Flavus. Sounds cursy enough to me, but while that might sound like a spell, it's actually just a fungus that produces a highly carcinogenic toxin. This fungus had been lurking inside the tomb and was inhaled by the team as they prized it open. Was it put there deliberately?

We'll never know. But probably not. Well, I want to believe. So believe. So that is it, guys. That is the story. I mean, it's very exciting that they found the two. But the curse, probably less exciting when you find out he died fucking ages later.

Yeah, a bit of a bumerino. But, you know, maybe one day we will all get the curse that we want. We can only dream And until then We'll just have to keep covering ones like this We'll see you next week For a different episode Look upon my works

You mighty and despair There you go And then I'll see you next week After you've done despairing Bye up.