This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 2, Issue 6, from 1988.
Some claims of the paranormal have been shown to be completely wrong; others, although unlikely and as yet unproven, may still have a small chance of being right. In the latter I include ESP, ghosts, life-after-death, UFO’s, and even dowsing. These phenomena are so ethereal that even if any of them exist they would be difficult to prove. That is surely the whole basis of our interest and skepticism. We believe that these things have not been proven in spite of the enormous amount of publicity and support given to them.
The former category includes astrology, iridology, palmistry, the Bermuda Triangle and any phenomenon which has rules or which has a base of checkable facts. These claims are easily looked into, and have been—many times. They consistently fail to support the claims made for them. Among these phenomena is one which is regularly mentioned by the media but which has received comparatively little skeptical comment: The Curse of Tutankhamen. I covered this briefly in my review of Time-Life’s awful series Mysteries of the Unknown (B&IS 11.4) and thought I would enlarge on it in this issue. The earliest and best skeptical article on the curse I can find was—not surprisingly perhaps—written by James Randi and appeared in The Humanist (March/April 1978).
The article was motivated by a television special on the curse and a popular book The Curse of the Pharaohs by Philipp Vandenberg. The first claim made by supporters of this myth is that a tablet with a curse inscribed on it was found in Tutankhamen’s tomb. It is supposed to have said: ‘Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the rest of the Pharaoh’, or similar depending upon the source. The tablet has since vanished, they tell us. But in reality there is no evidence that such a tablet ever existed. As in any archaeological dig all items found in the tomb were carefully noted and documented. No mention of such a tablet is made. Or are the archaeologists guilty of a cover-up?
We are asked to believe that the earliest victim of the curse was Lord Carnarvon, the patron of the expedition to find the tomb. When he died in Cairo, the lights of the city were reported to have gone out, and back in England at that very moment his favourite fox terrier ‘howled, sat up on her hind legs, and fell over dead’, as if in sympathy, or sorrow. As I mentioned in my previous review, Carnarvon was a sick man when he went to Egypt on his doctor’s advice. After recovering from a mosquito bite he contracted pneumonia and died one April morning at 1.55a.m. at the age of fifty-seven.
The lights often went out in Cairo, so it is no surprise that they did so at, or about the time Carnarvon died. As for the dog, at least one believer has reported Carnarvon’s son as saying that it died at 4a.m., which taking the two hour time difference between England and Egypt, meant that the dog died within five minutes of Carnarvon. Wrong! Even if the event occurred as stated (and why was there a witness with the healthy fox-terrier at four o’clock in the morning?). England was behind, not ahead, of Egyptian time.
As the ultimate penalty of a curse is death it is therefore not surprising that most of the tales in support of Tut’s curse involve the deaths of those who defiled the tomb. The odd thing though is how selective the curse is. It doesn’t seem to affect those closely involved in the opening of the tomb—as we shall see— so much as those who were on the side-lines. George Jay Gould, son of financier Jay Gould, is reported to have died within days of visiting the tomb. But he was just one of many thousands of tourists who have visited the tomb. Perhaps the curse thought that he had lived long enough for he died at the age of fifty-nine, which wasn’t too bad for the early twentieth century.
Another side-liner we are asked to believe is that a victim of the curse was Lord Westbury, the father of Howard Carter’s assistant Richard Bethell who died suddenly of a circulatory collapse some six years after the tomb opening. Grief stricken by his son’s death, Westbury committed suicide. Do curses have no compassion?
Randi checked Howard Carter’s writings and determined who had been most directly involved in the tomb discovery and exploration. Included in his Humanist article was a table listing the names of these people, the years of their deaths, their ages, and the number of years they survived the opening of the tomb in 1922. Some of Randi’s data was incomplete as he couldn’t trace details of all of the people in American libraries. I have therefore updated his list, and have calculated the average life-span and ‘curse survival’ rates of those whose ages we have been able to find.
Of the twenty-two people on the list we know the ages at death of eleven and the years in which another three were known to be alive. On average the eleven lived to at least 72, and all fourteen survived with a curse over their heads for almost twenty-five years each. The shortest and longest survival rates were, ironically, for two of the people present at the initial break-in of the tomb. Lord Carnarvon survived for only four months; his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert for fifty-eight years. She died in 1980, at the age of 79. The average survival rate of the twenty-two main participants was 20.9 years. As Randi wrote, ‘Perhaps we have here a beneficent curse that “inhibits” the Grim Reaper’.
But was there a curse in the first place? Not according to Carol Andrews, an Egyptologist from the British Museum, who said on LBC Radio in July 1988 that the idea of a curse probably dates from a Victorian novelist—Marie Corelli—who wrote ‘No good will come of disturbing Pharaoh’s bones… ’. But more directly, Andrews said that the Egyptians didn’t write curses in their tombs; she confirmed that no such curse was found in Tutankhamen’s tomb and that Egyptologists wouldn’t have expected to find one. She explained that the only curses made by the Egyptians were not against grave robbers but against anyone disturbing their funerary offerings of food and drink which were placed daily in chapels for their spirits to consume.
Although the general idea of a curse might have originated with a Victorian novelist, the Tutankhamen one certainly couldn’t—except by precognition, which we won’t address here. Nearer the truth is the suggestion that it was a story made up by newsmen. On 29 August 1980, the Daily Mail published an interview with ‘old soldier’ Richard Adamson, then 81 years old. As a military policeman in Egypt in 1922, Adamson was ordered to assist Carnarvon’s archaeological expedition to leave the Valley of the Kings. Before they could do so, the tomb was discovered and Adamson was to spend the next seven years actually sleeping in the tomb as a guard.
Adamson told the Daily Mail that as crowds were hampering the digging work and as they were also worried about the possibility of thieves coming in the night: ‘Quite suddenly we thought about a curse. Inscriptions laying curses on intruders had been found on the walls of tombs nearer Cairo and it so happened that a reporter had been hanging around, asking about curses. We saw no such inscriptions laying curses in Tut’s tomb, but let’s say we didn’t discourage him from thinking there was.’
Adamson’s story is possibly true, although his claim about curses on the walls of other tombs seems to contradict Carol Andrews. Perhaps these were curses against anyone disturbing the funerary offerings. Nevertheless, if there really is a curse, having lived to be at least 81 and surviving the curse by at least 58 years, Adamson only supports Randi’s suggestion that the curse is beneficent.
