The Shadow King (9 page)

Although Lord Carnarvon’s death irrevocably linked the “mummy’s curse” with Tutankhamun, the idea itself is of course much older. It doesn’t stem particularly from ancient Egypt though, and there are very few documented examples from real tombs. Most of the known written warnings are from the Old Kingdom, around the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth centuries BC. They are found in nonroyal tombs rather than those of the pharaohs, and warn for example against removing stones or bricks. The threatened vengeance tends to be promised only for the afterlife, however.* In ancient times, the greatest deterrent against robbing a tomb was earthly reprisal, not fear of a curse—anyone caught looting was punished or executed for theft.

The curse myth as we would recognize it today began instead in nineteenth-century England. According to Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat, who investigated its origins, the trail leads back to a little-known English author in the 1820s called Jane Loudon Webb. After attending a bizarre “striptease” show near London’s Piccadilly Circus, in which Egyptian mummies were publicly unwrapped, she was inspired to write an early science fiction book called The Mummy. Set in the twenty-second century, it featured a vengeful mummy who threatened to strangle the book’s hero, a young scholar called Edric.

In 1869, the author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, developed the concept in a short story called Lost in a Pyramid. An explorer inside a pyramid uses a mummified princess as a torch, and by the light of the burning mummy, steals a gold box containing three strange-looking seeds. After returning home to America, he gives the seeds to his fiancée who plants them. She wears the flowers at their wedding, but as she inhales their scent, she transforms into a living mummy. The curse idea was subsequently copied by other novelists in Britain and America, until Corelli applied it to the real-life discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

The newspapers loved the story, running daily updates on the arguments surrounding Carnarvon’s death. Ernest Budge, keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum in London, was quick to describe Corelli’s tales as “bunkum,” while his assistant, H. R. Hall, added that if there really were a curse on ancient tombs, “there would not be any archaeologists left today.”4

Emotions ran high. The adventure writer Rider Haggard described the curse idea as “dangerous nonsense” because “it goes to swell the rising tide of superstition which at present seems to be overflowing the world. Do you suppose that God Almighty would permit a Pharaoh, who after all was only a man with a crown on his head, to murder people by magical means, thousands of years after his own death?”5

But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, supported the curse theory. Evil spirits associated with the tomb could have led Carnarvon to his death, he argued. “There are many legends about the powers of the old Egyptians, and I know I wouldn’t care to go fooling about their tombs and mummies,” he said.6 “I didn’t say that some Egyptian spirit did kill Carnarvon, but I think it is possible. There are many malevolent spirits.”

Conan Doyle, as opposed to his rational hero Holmes, was a leading figure in the popular spiritualist movement, which held that spirits of the dead (sometimes called “elementals”) could communicate with the living, for example through séances. He also had an answer to why Tutankhamun’s curse hadn’t targeted other members of the excavation team, such as Carter. “It is nonsense to say that because ‘elementals’ do not harm everybody, therefore they do not exist. One might as well say that because bulldogs do not bite everybody, therefore bulldogs do not exist!”7

Carnarvon’s son seems to have bought into the curse idea too, saying in interviews that at the moment his father died, Cairo suffered a mysterious power cut, and that Carnarvon’s beloved terrier, Susie, let out a long howl back home in Highclere and dropped dead at exactly two in the morning, the moment of her owner’s death. Of course, inexplicable power cuts were common in Cairo in those days, and it’s unclear who would have been around to witness the dog’s sudden death in the early hours (not to mention that 2:00 A.M. in the UK would actually be 4:00 A.M. in Cairo8).

On April 16, Lady Carnarvon left Egypt with her husband’s remains, carrying him home on a P&O steamer. Several fellow passengers canceled their passage, fearing the body’s presence might cause some misfortune to befall the ship. Meanwhile, back in Britain, Carnarvon’s death caused panic among collectors of Egyptian antiquities. The British Museum was deluged by mummy-related parcels, containing shriveled hands, feet, ears, and heads, as well as wooden, limestone, and ceramic figures and other relics, posted to the museum by owners fearful that they too might become victims of the curse.

Even among those who didn’t believe in the curse itself, Carnarvon’s death strengthened a feeling that perhaps the dead were better left undisturbed. One letter to the New York Times quoted a story by H. G. Wells, The Treasure in the Forest.9 Two British men steal gold from a dead Chinaman, only to find that it is poisoned, and it kills them too.

Carter himself had no time for any such nonsense, however: “It is rather too much to ask me to believe that some spook is keeping watch and ward over the dead Pharaoh, ready to wreak vengeance on anyone who goes too near.”10 He wrote in his notebook that if there was any curse, it took the form of “Messrs Creepy, Crawly, Biteum and Co.,” the company of nasty insects that bit him when he was out in the desert.11

Carter had traveled to Cairo to be with Carnarvon before he died, but he returned to Luxor on April 15 to finish the season’s work. While he was away, Mace, Lucas, Callender, and Burton had been photographing, recording, and conserving the rest of the objects from the antechamber, and over the next few weeks, they packed the full haul—around five hundred items—into cases for the trip to the Egyptian Museum by barge.

First, though, the treasures had to be carried across the five winding miles to the river. Carter and his workmen used the hand-pushed railway cars that had proved so useful in the grunt work of earlier seasons. There were only ten lengths of rail, so they had to pick up track from the back and move it to the front so the cars could move forward, in scorching temperatures that made the metal rails almost too hot to touch. But they covered the distance in fifteen hours (plus an overnight stop), and soon the cases were on the boat to Cairo.

After helping to unpack the objects for display, Carter traveled home to London after the most incredible archaeological season he could ever have imagined. And the mummy that had caused so much furor got to rest in peace for one more summer.

THAT PEACE WAS SOON disturbed by hammering and swearing in several different languages. Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, for so long a black, silent sanctuary, was now infested with loud, sweaty men stripped to vests and trousers, their faces glistening white under the glaring electric lights. The mummy’s golden shrines were systematically and very ungracefully being taken apart.

Work had restarted in November 1923. It turned out there were four shrines, fitting tightly inside one another. They formed reportedly the largest area of plated gold in existence in the world, and it took Carter’s team two months of tense, back-breaking work to dismantle them. The men were working in a horribly confined space, squeezing like weasels between unyielding rock and fragile three-thousand-year-old wood. Gradually, they peeled away the pharaoh’s protective layers, easing the delicate woodwork apart “as gently as a hospital nurse.”12

Unlike other parts of Tutankhamun’s tomb, which have bare walls, the walls of his burial chamber are brightly painted with scenes and inscriptions. As Carter removed the bulky shrines, he got his first proper look at these paintings.

One scene, on the east wall, shows the king’s funeral procession, with twelve mourners in white tunics pulling his mummy to the tomb. The mummy lies on a wooden bed, or bier, which is in turn on a sledge, and is covered by a shrine decorated with strings of flowers (or “festoons of garlands,” as Carter delightfully put it13).

The burial party would have walked from Tutankhamun’s mortuary chapel on the riverbank, where his body was embalmed, accompanied by mourning women with disheveled hair and exposed breasts. The mummy would have been followed by the canopic chest containing Tutankhamun’s internal organs, and servants carrying his possessions—furniture, clothing, jewelry, chariots—everything he would need for the afterlife. When the procession reached the entrance to the tomb, the mummy would have been placed upright on a small heap of sand and subjected to various rituals, traditionally carried out by the king’s eldest son, who was to succeed his throne.

But Tutankhamun didn’t have a son. On the north wall of the burial chamber, facing you as you look in, Tutankhamun’s successor, King Ay, is shown dressed in a leopard skin, enacting one of the key parts of the funeral ritual—the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, in which the mummy is magically brought back to life. The scene is unique, because in most royal tombs, the priest carrying out the ritual isn’t named. Ay wasn’t of royal birth; he had been a high-ranking official under Tutankhamun’s revolutionary predecessor, Akhenaten. The unusual scene suggested to Egyptologists that in order to legitimize his claim to the throne, he had needed publicly to act the part of the loyal son. And it led to the first suggestions of foul play in Tutankhamun’s death—that perhaps the king had been murdered by a scheming, power-hungry Ay.

After the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, Tutankhamun was placed into his coffins and sarcophagus, and the golden shrines erected around him before the tomb was filled and the door sealed. On the west wall was an excerpt from the journey that the Egyptians believed Tutankhamun’s spirit would then take.

A pharaoh’s route through the underworld is commonly shown on the walls of royal tombs from the Eighteenth Dynasty, in a set of scenes known as the Book of Amduat (which translates as “that which is in the after-world”). They tell the story of Ra, the Egyptian sun god, who travels through the underworld each night, from sunset in the west to sunrise in the east. The dead pharaoh was said to take the same journey, ultimately to become one with Ra and live forever.

The Amduat contains scenes from the twelve hours of the night, and details all of the challenges that the sun god will encounter, mapped out like the ultimate adventure game. Because Tutankhamun’s tomb is so small, there was only room on the wall for the first hour, the transition between day and night on the western horizon. If there had been space, further scenes would show Ra—accompanied by various other deities and deceased souls—rowing across the “Waters of Osiris” (hence the need for the magic oars around Tutankhamun’s golden shrines), and navigating dark zigzag pathways on the sandy, snake-infested island of the hawk god Sokar.

Eventually, Ra reaches the tomb of Osiris, king of the underworld, where the two briefly unite, a key moment that rejuvenates them both. Then there’s just the small matter of Ra defeating his archenemy, a giant serpent called Apep who is out to annihilate all of creation, before rowing back through the waters toward the eastern horizon, ready to rise again as the new day’s sun.

THROUGHOUT THIS TIME, Carter’s work was impeded by having to show a constant stream of journalists and other visitors around the tomb, and make repeated trips to Cairo to discuss his project with the Egyptian government. Since Carnarvon’s death, Carter was digging under the name of the Earl’s widow, Almina, though she didn’t take an active interest in what he was up to. The circumstances were difficult—Carter was upset at having to spend so much time as a tour guide, while much of the international, including Egyptian, press was waging a campaign against his team in protest at their policy of only talking to The Times of London. Without Carnarvon’s clout and diplomatic skills to help smooth things over, Carter’s relations with the government were rapidly falling apart.

By the beginning of February, though, Carter’s men finally managed to remove the last shrine from the burial chamber, revealing a huge stone chest, or sarcophagus,* of a very tough rock called quartzite. The decoration on the pinkish stone was understated yet elegant, with reliefs of four goddesses (Isis and her sister Nephthys, plus two others called Neith and Selquet) carved onto each corner, their outstretched winged arms protecting the sides and ends of the casket. It was beautiful and in perfect condition. If you rapped the walls of the sarcophagus with your knuckles, it rang like a bell.†

On February 12, Carter held another opening ceremony full of VIPs. The sarcophagus lid was a huge slab of stone weighing more than one and a quarter tons. Rather than quartzite, it was made of cheaper granite and had broken in two in ancient times—perhaps it was dropped during Tutankhamun’s funeral. But with a delicate pulley system, Carter raised the whole thing as one piece. There was silence as the lid rose. Light shone into the sarcophagus for the first time in 3,300 years, but the spectators couldn’t make out any details and struggled at first to make sense of what they were seeing. Then they realized that the contents were covered by linen shrouds. Carter rolled them back, and “a gasp of wonderment escaped our lips, so gorgeous was the sight that met our eyes.”14

A glorious golden figure filled the sarcophagus: it was a man-shaped coffin, seven feet long and made of wood that was covered in gold. It lay on a wooden bier, just as shown in the tomb paintings a few feet away. Its arms were folded across its chest, hands clasping a flail and crooked scepter made of gold and faience. The twin heads of a sacred cobra and vulture—protectors of Upper and Lower Egypt, respectively, and important symbols of a pharaoh—were mounted on its golden forehead.

To the Egyptians, this was Tutankhamun as a god. It was a portrait of the king, but not as a man—it represented his transformed immortal state, physically perfect and eternally young, with flesh of gold.* But in contrast to this eternal, divine figure, there was also a sign of human grief and frailty. A tiny wreath of olive leaves and cornflowers had been placed on the king’s forehead, with fragile petals that still had a tinge of blue.