The malediction
The malediction
| The extraordinary discovery of Tutankhamon’s tomb
and of the treasure in it went around the world, proclaimed by newspapers and
magazines, photographic and cinema works, and by the new radio-system. Already
in March 1923 Carter and Lord Carnavon received more than 500 letters of
congratulations, but also of blame and indignation for the profanation, while
the visitors and the reporters were always more numerous and insistent. The
objects that were extracted from the tomb were the photographers’ target and
their images appeared in the press all around the world accompanied by
“impressive comments”. Tutankhamon was a star and the scoop must be fed. The
people’s interest was kept alive, although he didn’t want to, by Lord Carnavon
who died on April 6 1923, for a mosquito sting after three weeks of suffering.
The premature and sudden death of one of the men who for first, after 33
centuries, had entered Tutankhamon’s tomb, excited the people’s fantasy and soon
the “Pharaoh’s revenge” was a conversation subject and the title of a press
column that in the following years kept the readers informed about the events of
those who had dared to break into the divine sovereign’s eternal home. “Death
will quickly come down on he who has disturbed the pharaoh’s sleep”, says one of
the many versions of the “malediction” that Tutankhamon had ordered to write on
his tomb, and, actually, in 1930, the only survivor among those who had directly
taken part in the undertaking, was Howard Carter, the discoverer. After Lord
Carnavon and other personages, actually rather marginal, of the expedition, in
November 1929 Lord Westbury died, who had participated as Carter’s secretary in
the excavations of the tomb. He was found dead in his house and the precise
cause of that death has remained a mystery, as his father’s suicide, who the
following year tossed himself from a window on a seventh floor. And that’s not
all: the hearse who carried Lord Westbury’s corpse in Battersea run over two
boys, killing them and all this was attributed to the fatal power of
Tutankhamon’s malediction. “A shudder goes across England….” Titled the newspapers. Meanwhile the deaths of Arthur Cruttenden Mace, who had opened with Carte the sepulchral chamber, and of Lord Carnavon’s half-brother, Aubey Herbert, who committed suicide in a moment of “spiritual cloudiness” had caused a stir; naturally even Lady Elisabeth Carnavon appeared as a victim of Tutankhamon’s hate when, as her husband she died. In the list of deaths attributed to the pharaoh’s revenge even the name Archibald Douglas Reid appeared, who died exactly when he was about to x-ray the mummy, and the name of the Egyptologist Arthur Weigall, the twenty-first victim, struck by an “unknown fever”. Carter, who more than anybody else, should have feared the malediction, defined the whole story ridiculous stating that the scientist “works with respect and sacred honesty, but without that fear that is so easily felt by the people eager for emotions”. He must have been right because he died in 1939 at 66 years old. He wasn’t yet old, but why would the pharaoh have waited almost twenty years before taking his revenge? |
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The pharaho Tutankhamon still rests in his tomb