The Curse of the Pharaohs

In November 1922, Howard Carter opened a small hole into a sealed tomb in the Valley of the Kings, held up a candle, and was asked if he could see anything. "Yes," he said, "wonderful things." Within months, the world's newspapers had decided those wonderful things came with a price.

Death on swift wings

The legend of the pharaoh's curse claims that whoever disturbs a royal tomb will be struck down, and Tutankhamun's tomb gave it a perfect cast of victims. Lord Carnarvon, who funded the dig, died just months after the opening, from an infected mosquito bite that turned to blood poisoning. The papers reported that at the moment of his death the lights of Cairo failed, and that back in England his dog howled and dropped dead. A famous inscription was said to guard the tomb: "Death shall come on swift wings to him that toucheth the tomb of Pharaoh." No such inscription exists, but by then the curse no longer needed evidence.

The inconvenient survivors

The curse has one large problem: the people closest to the tomb mostly lived long lives. Howard Carter, who spent a decade working inside it, died of ordinary illness seventeen years later. The soldier who guarded the tomb lived into his eighties. A study of those present at the opening found no unusual pattern of early death. Some researchers have floated the idea of ancient mould or bacteria sealed in tombs, which makes for a good headline, but nothing has ever been shown to have harmed the excavators. The curse, as far as anyone can measure, is a story.

Why the story refuses to die

It refuses to die because it is irresistible. Real ancient tombs do carry warnings against violators, the way old graves everywhere do, and Egypt in the 1920s was the biggest news story on earth. A young king, a golden mask, a lord dead within months: no editor alive could resist connecting them. A century later, every documentary still opens with the same question, and every visitor to the valley still feels a small, pleasant shiver walking down into the cool dark.

Walking into the legend

• The Valley of the Kings - Tutankhamun's tomb itself, and the painted royal tombs around it, in the cliffs at Luxor.
• The Pyramids of Giza - the older royal tombs that started four thousand years of tomb-robber warnings.
• The Grand Egyptian Museum - where the treasures of Tutankhamun now rest, curse-free, behind glass.

Desert practicalities

The valley is a furnace for much of the year, and the legend does not excuse you from sun sense: the desert and strong sun kit is the one to read first. A wide-brim hat and far more water than feels reasonable are the honest essentials; the tombs themselves are mercifully cool.

The only curse reliably recorded in the Valley of the Kings is sunburn. Bring the hat.