The tomb and treasures of the child pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt, are still considered one of the most legendary finds in archaeology.

The tomb was discovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. The day Carter opened the tomb, his canary was eaten by a snake. Some of the Egyptian workers interpreted this as an event from the pharaoh's spirit.

When people who had worked on the excavation began to die, rumours began to swirl that Carter had released the mummy's curse. As the years passed, more and more members of Carter's team died, and scientists began to wonder if there was a more mundane cause for the deaths. So they set out to investigate.

The number of deaths attributed to the curse by the newspapers is sometimes 9 and sometimes 20. This number varied because some accepted the number 20 because it included visitors to the grave and relatives of the diggers, while others counted only those who worked on the dig.

Among the various causes of death attributed to the curse were car accidents, armed conflicts, house fires, and self-murder.

The Western media had a great appetite for the mummy curse. But even so, they rarely included the deaths of Egyptians in their reports of the curse. In fact, dozens of Egyptian labourers worked on the dig. Carter did not name most of them in his notes. Since they were rarely mentioned in the press, it is not clear how cleaning up millennia of dust and debris affected the health of these people.

Perhaps the most mundane explanation of the Tutankhamun mummy curse comes from Dr Frank McClanahan, who treated one of the excavation's patients. "The deaths are actually a small fraction of the visitors to the tomb," says McClanahan.

"There were archaeologists here from all over the world coming and going all the time," he said in an interview in 1972:

"If you take any large crowd of people and check them again later, you will find a certain mortality rate among them."

With this statement, Dr Frank McClanahan emphasises that the statistics do not paint an unusual picture of deaths in the region and that the figures have been misinterpreted because of rumours of a curse.

 

Source: https://www.indyturk.com/