Some have related the problem suffered by the mask of the Child Pharaoh, remember, the restoration of the sacred beard of the god Osiris glued with «superglue», with the hackneyed curse of the pharaohs. But the story goes even further; begins at ten minutes to two in the morning on Thursday, April 5, 1923 in a luxurious room at the Continental Savoy hotel from Cairo. There Lord Carnarvon , patron of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, made on November 4 of the previous year under the direction of archaeologist Howard Carter , seemed to expire his last words saying:“ I have heard… his call… and I follow him ”. A few minutes later all the lights in Cairo went out leaving the city in respectful mourning. At the same time of the death of the English nobleman, but in England, ten minutes to four in the morning, in his lavish Highclere mansion, the family dog sat on her hind legs howled piteously and died. All of this is absolutely real. This has been communicated to me by Lord Carnarvon's own descendants. Now, does it have something to do with some kind of curse?
Howard Carter examines Tutankhamun's sarcophagus
A death foretold
Carnarvon's death was the result of the "prophecy" launched weeks before, exactly on February 17, 1923, when the Mortuary Chamber of the tomb in the Valley of the Kings was going to be opened. Arthur Weigall , Inspector of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, commented to Howard Carter:“If (Lord Carnarvon) descends into that tomb, I give him six weeks to live ”, as it was. The official explanation was that he had shaved open the small wound that a mosquito bite had caused him shortly before. The area became infected and automatically the fever rose, delusions, several days in bed and finally death. We do not know who it was that finally lit the fuse of the curse. The inexplicable deaths that followed the death of Lord Carnarvon gave wings to the British press. There was talk of the supposed existence of a ceramic tablet discovered in the Antechamber and that contained the following inscription:“death will touch with its wings all those who dare to awaken the eternal sleep of the pharaoh ”. False, no such text ever appeared.
Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter
Some of the rumors surrounding Carnarvon's death mentioned the presence of a well-known medium, Velma , which the English Lord used to consult frequently. Velma published after Carnarvon's death a story titled The fatal curse from the tomb , (“The Deadly Curse of the Tomb”) in which she described the powerful occult forces surrounding her former client. According to this woman, before leaving for Egypt, Carnarvon asked her to read her palm. In it he saw a stain next to the line of life and warned the earl:“ I see great danger for you. Most likely, since the indications of esoteric interest are so strong on your hand, the danger stems from precisely that source ”.
The black list of deceased
Believe it or not, there is evidence of the death in strange circumstances of several people who in one way or another were linked to the tomb. Lord Carnarvon's little brother, Aubrey Herbert , had a sudden death in September 1923; American railroad tycoon Jay Gould he died of pneumonia from a cold caught on his visit to the grave; French Egyptologist Georges Bénédite he died of a respiratory condition after visiting the grave; Carter's assistant, Richard Bethell , died under mysterious circumstances in 1929. His father, Lord Westbury , he committed suicide upon hearing the news of the death of his son, and while he was transporting the body to the cemetery, the hearse ran over an eight-year-old boy. The director of the Antiquities Service himself, Arthur Weigall , the same one who warned of the proximity of Lord Carnarvon's death if the Sepulchral Chamber of the tomb was opened, he died of strange fevers.
These deaths by association, as the British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves has very correctly pointed out, , they distance themselves, in many cases, from the direct members of the group who in theory should have been the first to fall under the power of the curse. However, their high number, almost twenty-five during the first years of excavation of the tomb, make them a chilling figure.
Rational explanations to the enigma
In 1962, the Egyptian physician Dr. Ezz Eldin Taha announced the existence of a dangerous fungus, Aspergillus Niger , in some of the archaeologists affected by the curse. This fungus caused very high fevers and fatally affected the respiratory tract, which coincided, among other cases, with the death of Lord Carnarvon. Dr. Eldin, after leaving the press conference where he had exposed his novel theory, died in a spectacular traffic accident...
The same conclusion was reached by Dr. B Smyk a decade later when he investigated the deaths of the members of the team of researchers who had worked with him on the tomb of the Polish king Casimir. Smyk discovered that the objects found in the tomb of the Krakow Cathedral were contaminated with huge colonies of Aspergillus.
Other working hypotheses have been directed to the belief that the ancient Egyptians knew some kind of radioactive material, that the Egyptian priests used some kind of poison, histoplasmosis (bat droppings), etc.
More recently it has even been said that the American actress Brittany Murphy and her husband could die poisoned by the fungus colonies that were in her house in Los Angeles. The fact is that nobody believes in the curse, but I always say the same thing; Whatever explanation is given to the victims, we can only be sure of one thing:the deaths are verifiable. The curse is real; explaining it, one way or another, only reinforces its very existence.
Article written by Nacho Ares in iHstoria magazine
And as everything that surrounds Tutankhamun is full of surprises, we are going to draw a 3D Sculpture Puzzle of Tutankhamun among all those who comment or share this article on social media.
