An ancient evil unleashed on an unsuspecting land? Well, that's what the stories would have you believe. From weird coincidences to creepy legends to a very unlucky canary, here's the truth about King Tut's curse.
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00:00An ancient evil unleashed on an unsuspecting land?
00:03Well, that's what the stories would have you believe.
00:06From weird coincidences to creepy legends to a very unlucky canary, here's the truth
00:11about King Tut's curse.
00:13When Howard Carter opened the tomb of King Tutankhamen in 1922, the world went a little
00:18nuts.
00:19What could be more captivating than a bunch of rooms full of glittering treasure, buried
00:23under the sands of the Valley of the Kings for more than 3,000 years?
00:27Curse, that's what.
00:30Depending on who you ask, there were 11 so-called victims of King Tut's curse, but most of the
00:34deaths really weren't that mysterious, with the exception of Lord Carnarvon, the first
00:38and most famous.
00:40Carnarvon was the wealthy financier of Howard Carter's expedition, and the legend says that
00:44the curse first caught up with him in the form of a mosquito.
00:47After that, Carnarvon cut himself while shaving over the raised mosquito bite.
00:51That's really not something you would expect to kill someone, so the fact that it did kill
00:55him is part of what really gave momentum to the idea of a curse.
00:59The bite became infected, and Carnarvon died from blood poisoning.
01:02The timing was pretty ominous, too.
01:04His death occurred just two months after King Tut's tomb was opened.
01:08Carnarvon was already in poor health, though, and had been for more than 20 years, so on
01:12a logical level, it's really not surprising that he was so susceptible to developing an
01:17infection.
01:18His death wasn't the only one linked to the tomb.
01:20Fifty-eight people were present for the sarcophagus's opening, and eight of them passed away within
01:2412 years.
01:26The other 50 people presumably lived long, fulfilling lives, so if there was a curse,
01:31it wasn't a very efficient curse.
01:33We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that there was some pretty creepy stuff that went down
01:36after the tomb was opened.
01:38When the archaeologists broke through the first room, they found two statues of Tutankhamun.
01:42The statues were life-sized, and on each head was a crown decorated with cobras.
01:46The workers were spooked by the images of the snakes, because cobras were symbolic of
01:50the king's justice.
01:51Then, later that day, Carter's pet canary was literally eaten by a cobra, so that spooked
01:57the locals even more.
01:58Some of them believed the spirit of the dead king was warning the archaeologists away.
02:02It's worth noting, though, that Egyptian cobras aren't exactly uncommon in Egypt.
02:07For every canary that died in Egypt the day King Tut's tomb was opened, there were probably
02:11a few thousand other small animals that also got eaten by cobras — and not because they
02:15had anything to do with the opening of a pharaoh's tomb.
02:18Still, the only cobra prey that gained notoriety was that one little yellow canary, who happened
02:24to be unfortunate enough to get eaten at precisely the right moment in history.
02:28Phew.
02:29I should be safe in here.
02:31If the story about the canary is even true, there isn't any proof that it is.
02:36According to Skeptoid, the media was responsible for most of the stories about a curse on King
02:40Tut's tomb.
02:41And the media in the 1920s wasn't exactly known for its commitment to the truth if the
02:45truth might get in the way of a sensational story.
02:48Evidently, the canary story was just one of a bunch of cursed stories told by the papers.
02:52The papers also said that all the lights in Cairo went out at the exact moment of Lord
02:55Carnarvon's death, and that his dog, which he'd left behind in England, howled and then
03:00died for no apparent reason, also at the exact moment of his death.
03:04But then Skeptoid points out that these stories only ever appear in the papers, and not in
03:09any of the writings of people who mattered, like Howard Carter or any of those who worked
03:13with him.
03:14Traditional stories sell papers, so publishers would have every reason to keep milking the
03:18so-called curse as long as possible.
03:21Another popular legend is that Howard Carter and his team encountered a written curse in
03:25the antechamber.
03:26The curse was inscribed into a clay tablet, and it went like this,
03:30"'Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh.'"
03:35Pretty grim, but Carter failed to make any written note of this tablet's existence, and
03:39then evidently also lost it, since it has never been seen by anyone.
03:44People who believe in the curse say that the absence of the clay tablet in historical
03:47records is simple.
03:48Carter just scrubbed all mentions of it so as to not upset the locals.
03:52But that doesn't seem like something an archaeologist would be inclined to do.
03:56Also, there's the part where none of the deaths that had been loosely associated with King
04:00Tut's tomb had anything to do with wings.
04:03Well, except for that canary.
04:05A lot of people assume the mummy's curse is part of ancient Egyptian mythology, meant
04:09to deter grave robbers from stealing the king's treasures.
04:12While it is true that ancient tombs were designed to confuse potential thieves, in King Tut
04:16and common's time, there was no concept of a written curse, per se.
04:20That might have something to do with the fact that only about 1% of the Egyptian population
04:24could read hieroglyphics.
04:25Notes, ancient origins, and it's pretty unlikely that anyone that educated would be robbing
04:31tombs.
04:32So writing down a curse to scare away robbers would be pointless.
04:36According to National Geographic, the late Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat concluded
04:40that there was no ancient Egyptian origin in the mummy's curse concept.
04:43Instead, Montserrat said a 19th-century London stage performance, which featured the onstage
04:48unwrapping of real Egyptian mummies, was the inspiration for the original stories.
04:52Dig back deep enough into Egyptian history, though, and there does seem to be a tomb or
04:56two that promise divine retribution for grave robbers.
05:00Early Mastaba-type tombs, which predate King Tut by some 15 dynasties, sometimes included
05:05curse-like threats of death by wild animals.
05:07Perhaps these inscriptions persisted in the verbal mythology of ancient Egypt.
05:12Still, it really didn't seem to work very well as a deterrent, since tombs were usually
05:16completely picked over and looted by the time modern people discovered them.
05:20Seventeen years after he opened the tomb of King Tutankhamen, Howard Carter finally succumbed
05:24to the mummy's curse.
05:26After achieving archaeological fame and touring the world as a lecturer and expert on Egyptian
05:30archaeology, Tut smoked Carter by giving him lymphoma.
05:34So if there was a curse, Carter didn't seem to get much of it.
05:37But according to Skeptoid, believers like to say Carter was indeed cursed.
05:41Cursed to live a long life wherein he would have to watch all his friends and colleagues
05:44as one by one they were taken down by a 3,000-year-old Egyptian corpse.
05:48Of course, with a couple exceptions, most of the curse's victims were only casual acquaintances
05:53of Carter's, not close friends.
05:56It makes you wonder.
05:57Shouldn't the prime target of the curse be the dude who accidentally decapitated the
06:01boy king while trying to remove his golden death mask?
06:04That's right.
06:05In their eagerness to reveal the face of the boy king, Howard Carter and his workers tore
06:09the whole head off along with the mask they were trying to remove.
06:13I did it!
06:18There's also the tomb toxin theory, which goes like this.
06:21Pharaoh gets sealed in tomb.
06:23Bacteria and other pathogens take hold and multiply.
06:25Tomb is opened thousands of years later, releasing said toxins into the lungs of unsuspecting
06:30archaeologists.
06:37It's a nice, tidy way to explain away mysterious deaths without acknowledging supernatural
06:41forces.
06:42But it's not a very solid theory.
06:44According to National Geographic, labs have indeed discovered potentially dangerous molds
06:48growing on Egyptian mummies and tomb walls, including one that can cause bleeding in the
06:53lungs and another that can cause lung infections.
06:56That could explain one of the deaths.
06:57George J. Gould died from pneumonia shortly after entering the tomb, writes Roger Luckhurst
07:02in The Mummy's Curse.
07:04But it seems odd that a deadly pneumonia-causing bacteria would only infect a single person
07:08when there were plenty of other people who spent a lot more time in the tomb than Gould
07:12did.
07:13Skeptoid also notes that if tomb toxins were the real cause, there would probably be some
07:17sort of record of lots of people falling ill in other parts of Egypt.
07:20But there isn't.
07:22You might still be clinging to the notion that if there weren't a curse, surely there
07:25wouldn't have been so many deaths that were directly linked to the opening of the tomb.
07:29So let's just break it all down.
07:31According to Live Science, noted skeptic James Randi wrote in his book An Encyclopedia of
07:35Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural that the people who were involved
07:40in the opening of King Tutankhamen's tomb lived an average of 23 years afterwards.
07:45And those were mostly old guys, so that figure doesn't even represent a shortened lifespan.
07:50They made it to 73 years old on average, at a time when the average lifespan was 72, according
07:56to Randi.
07:57So if a curse did exist, it seems to have given everyone an extra 12 months or so over
08:00what they'd normally get if they weren't cursed.
08:03Not bad.
08:04But what about all those people who died within the first few years?
08:07Well, that can be explained by random chance.
08:10Pretty much any significant event involving a large number of people is going to have
08:14an occasional death associated with it.
08:16Finally, in 2002, a study found no statistically significant difference between the death rates
08:21of the tomb enterers and the death rates of the tourists in Egypt at the time.
08:25So, case closed.
08:26No mummy's curse.
08:27Your soul-sucking days are over, amigo.