Nightmare Now

PharaOH NO! King Tut's Curse

Episode Summary

In this one we take a look at all the deaths and destruction cause by the pharaoh's curse on King Tutankhamen's tomb. Is it real? A statistical anomaly? Ancient magicks? You decide!

Episode Notes

Ep 24 king tut’s show notes

Sources

historytoday.com/archive/months-past/tutankhamuns-curse

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/8878314/Curse-of-Tutankhamun-may-have-been-work-of-Satanist-killer.html

https://www.jstor.org/stable/593799?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

https://daily.jstor.org/was-it-really-a-mummys-curse/

https://www.nytimes.com/1923/04/06/archives/carnarvons-death-spreads-theories-about-vengeance-in-egypt-england.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptomania

https://books.google.com/books?id=y80XHUoOunwC&pg=PA66&lpg=PA66&dq=I+have+succumbed+to+a+curse+which+forces+me+to+disappear&source=bl&ots=8bfgSaLugz&sig=f6jaSZ3vdAlBB8sbPtiBUrgvpeI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiu8-7mk7zYAhVHGt8KHX4FAUsQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=I%20have%20succumbed%20to%20a%20curse%20which%20forces%20me%20to%20disappear&f=false

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YyBtMxZgQs&ab_channel=MatthewGates

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Kings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert,_5th_Earl_of_Carnarvon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_the_tomb_of_Tutankhamun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Carter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_pharaohs

Intro
It’s 1922 literally over 100 years ago so it’s tough to call this modern, but it is 1900s. And god damn if I aint hangin on to the 1990s being modern.
Today we are talking about cracking open the real OGs tomb, king tutankhamun.
1. I was also thinking about how weird english is, come and comb versus tome and tomb. I get why none of this makes sense if you’re being held hostage by the duolingo owl.
More importantly, we’re talking about the curse that came with it, and if we have time some some general ancient egyptian creepiness, I could do a multipart series on that so we’ll focus on tut today and maybe dip into the other stuff on another episode
What’s a mummy’s favorite music genre? Rap
1. I have a baseline assumption that everyone had a weird phase where they wanted to be an egyptologist. So I think for a lot of you this stuff is gonna sound pretty familiar. But we’re all about the inclusion here so I want to give a quick overview of what was going on as far as western interest in egypt went at the time.
2. So 3000 years ago ancient egypt was in full swing, you got aliens showing up to help with the pyramids, you have dynasties of pharaohs, you got plagues of locusts, you got cat worshipping, finally something we can emphasize with
3. At some point later on, egypt kinda wanes down and gets absorbed into the roman empire
4. Eventually holy roman empire
5. Eventually crusades, and we’ve got a lot to talk about when it comes to crusades, the knights templar, hidden treasures, conspiracies, the free masons and all sorts of assassins creed bullshit. So that’ll be another episode. I hope someone is keeping track of when I say that.
6. Anyway knights templar came back with a ton of treasure from the fallen ancient egypt so tomb raiding had been in vogue for some time leading up to 1922.
7. At the turn of the 19th century, so 1798 to 1801 our favorite manlet, napoleon had something of a crusade of his own in egypt to “protect french trade interests, and establish scientific enterprise in the region. And the paintings for this are fucking awesome, I haven’t dug too deep into the french ottoman conflict in egypt, in fact I didn’t know it was a thing until 2 days ago, but the image of a bunch of poofy-hatted french gunners facing down a horde of clones of the scimitar guy from raiders of the lost ark while there’s a fucking pirate ship being attacked by nile crocodiles. All in the shadow of the great pyramid, looks too radical to be true but, that’s apparently what happened.
  1. This is definitely gonna be one of those episodes that spawns 10 other episodes on spurious details, which I love.
8. At any rate, his campaign might have been an overall failure but his scientists did discover the rosetta stone which spawned the whole field of egyptology. The rosetta stone allowed us to compare what we knew about ancient greek with egyptian hieroglyphs and finally gave us the means to translate those glyphs.
9. I think the american obsession with mummies is worth covering in it’s own nite bite episode, maybe I’ll do that next week. It also feels like too much to cover here and the more sensational aspects don’t really have a place in this episode. Suffice to say, from 1800 to the 1920s and certainly beyond, a ton of americans were interested in the exotic and fantastical elements of ancient egyptian society, mummies, cat worship, pyramids, a unified artistic aesthetic, a pantheon of animal headed gods, and so much more it’s so cool!
  1. Rich people had mummies in their living rooms as a conversation piece, people were grinding them up to make a certain kind of paint, I’m pretty sure people were grinding mummies up and eating them to make them cum harder too.
    1. Man, humanity as a species is far to susceptible to the X is a powerful aphrodisiac meme.
    2. More on all that next time
10. So leading up to the 1920s interest in egyptology had been building to a fever pitch, and in the 1880s archeologists started excavating the valley of the kings, where all the pharaohs’ tombs were. By the 1910s everyone thought all of them had been found. But the hero of this story howard Carter, correctly guessed that there was a missing tomb, the tomb of king tut. Tootan kamoon? Tuten kamen? I don’t know, I’ve heard both.
11. A piece of mummy bandage with his name on it was found in another tomb, suggesting that
  1. He was mummified
  2. He had a tomb
  3. It hadn’t been found.
12. Because of this egyptomania sweeping the west, archeologists often relied on bored, rich westerners to finance their expeditions
13. Enter the first victim of king tut’s curse.
George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, or lord carnarvon
1. Dude was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and his jobs were basically sitting around in manors and castles and the like. He was interested in egyptology as a hobby though which led to him financing Howard Carter’s various expeditions to find the tomb
2. He has a gnarly car accident in 1903 and his doctors tell him to go to drier warmer air to avoid the consumption during the english winters, because his immune system was shit. so he started wintering in egypt where he financed digs for artifacts, not unlike me trying to get my friends to do a scars of mirrodin draft in holy fuck 2010?
3. through his connections he gets the OK to dig around in the valley of the kings and he finances carter’s expeditions in 1914. Some of you students of history may know why his excavations had to be put on pause in mid 1914. Little thing called the great war. Honestly not even gonna touch that, google world war one, bit of a scrap that one.
4. Anyway the digs resumed in 1917, and continued until 1921. In 1921 he’s like howie my good chap, you haven’t found shit, you get one more shot then we’re calling it.
5. And so he got 1 more season, and in early november of that last season, him and his crew discovered a carved stone step beneath the sands because thor water boy tripped over it. Where’s the water boy’s credit? I guess he did get an adam sandler movie…
6. Over the next few days and weeks they excavated the entrance to the tomb of tutankhamun
Phew now we can get into the story, context is important. Right?
So carter and his crew dig u the site and are overjoyed to find a door, still sealed with it’s original rope, meaning nobody has busted the thing open yet, and what does it say on the door, but the tomb of Tutankhamun
He’s like oh shit I need to tell my boy lord carnarvon, so he dips out and head to luxor to send a telegram to him to get his ass down there from england.
1. During the time he’s doing that, his crew are probably chilling out lighting cigars and that’s when the bad omen rears it’s slithering head.
2. THis dude arthur calendar hears a scream from carters tent and finds some real looney tunes shit going on. A Cobra has eaten Carter’s pet canary.
3. Of course the cobra was the symbol of the pharaohs, well for a while anyway, there was also birds and scorpions and other symbols for a while, but cobras re the big one
4. So a cobra, the symbol of the kings in the valley of the kings at Carters pet hours after they discover the tomb. Weird right?
Carter really doesn’t pay the omen much heed mostly because as he’s brushing away the sand all he can see are the big fucking dollar signs going across his eyes, actually I guess they would be pound signs? The squiggly L thing? Not nearly as compelling
1. Next he carves out a little hole in the wall and goes full nic cage in national treasure and sticks his arm through with a torch to see if it’s booby trapped or whatever
  1. I bet you he screamed and was like sike
2. He digs into the wall and I’ll just quote from his journal:
  1. “With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. Darkness and blank space, as far as an iron testing-rod could reach, showed that whatever lay beyond was empty, and not filled like the passage we had just cleared. Candle tests were applied as a precaution against possible foul gases, and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in, Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Callender standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict. At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold – everywhere the glint of gold.”
  2. This was the motherlode, and lady evelyn was carnarvon's daughter, not to mention her mother was a rothschild. Hmm interesting but unimportant, unless the rothschilds are controlling banks with ancient egyptian magicks but we’ll put a pin in that
  3. And so they cut the rope and entered the tomb, met with chariots, idols, canopic jars, where organs were stored, and all manner of other treasure, scrolls, fine clothes and more
  4. It’s kind of fun what happens next because this is just the ante chamber, in the interest of cataloging history, they can’t move forward to te burial room until this place is cleaned out
  5. A process that took 3 months
  6. They actually used other tombs that had already been cleared in the valley as their lab it’s pretty funny. Like rameses’ tomb was just their cafeteria, Seti’s tomb was their darkroom and staging area so on and so forth
  7. The burial room was still sealed.
3. February 16th 1923 they finally crack that sucker open, Carnarvon is there from england
  1. The tomb sews forth a putrid, hot, 3000 year old blast of air and there in the middle of the chamber is the sarcophagus.
  2. And the thing with the sarcophagus, like a tootsie pop, it takes a lot of licks to get to the corpse filling. There’s three layers of ornate coffins within coffins before even gettin to tut’s mummy
4. Overnight they become superstars, and if you thought egyptomania was in high gear before you better believe the whole world was going nuts over this discovery. And then the pharaohs curse begins reaping the lives of those that disturbed his slumber.
  1. Tut was 17 when he died, have you tried waking up a 17 year old? Good fucking luck, especially when they’ve been sleeping for 3 hours, let alone 3000 years.
The curse
1. Carnarvon gets bit by a mosquito on his cheek in March, less than a month after cracking the tomb open. Where are the mosquitos coming from? Where are the pools for them to breed? I didn’t even know there were mosquitos there, then again wait nevermind WNV.
2. The wound doesn’t heal like a normal bite, it becomes infected and turns into a gnarly welt on his face.
  1. There’s a couple of really cool things about this, not for him but for podcasters one hundred years later.
  2. Number 1, an inscription on a tomb in the valley of the kings, not tut’s but regardless, “Death comes on swift wings for those who enter the tomb of a pharaoh. What has wings. A Mosquito. Boom prophecy fulfilled, catch you all next week.
  3. Number 2. Later on when the actually opened the sarcophagus and did an autopsy on the king himself, they found he had a fucking infected mosquito bite sore on his mummified cheek as well? COINCIDENCe?
  4. Shaving didn’t help, that’s why I let my beard grow, because slicing the infected bite allowed the infection to spread to his blood.
  5. Within a month he was dead from the bite, and ensuing infection, and the pneumonia it caused.
    1. None of this is verifiable, but:
      1. All the lights in cairo or his house went out when he died depending on the source
      2. His dog back home in england howled in agony and then exploded into bats, not really but it keeled over and died after howling.
  6. THe curse claims its first victim, unless you count the canary I guess
Then it continues. And take fully into account, the press is going absolutely hog wild with this story so a lot of it is embellished.
1. I think the times got exclusive rights to the story as it were, as far as speaking to participants but other papers weren’t gonna miss their shot at the biggest post WW1 human interest story around so some of this might be made up or just a take it and run scenario
George Jay gould- Railroad man, not directly involved, visited the tomb. also got pneumonia and died in may 1923
Arthur cruttendon mace: opened the tomb, died of pneumonia in 1928 years after carnarvon
1. Mold everywhere a compelling case for pneumonia, but later tested to find it was not hazardous.
PRINCE ALI Kamel fahmy bey, shot by his wifey in 1923. He had vivisted the tomb, he was tangentially related according to some sources, maybe political schemes and squabbles over the artifacts I don’t know, there’s a lot of fucking dead people okay.
Hugh evelyn-white, visited the tomb, not directly involved. archeologist with a sense of impending doom. Hanged himself in 1924 after writing in blood that "I have succumbed to a curse which forces me to disappear."
Aaron ember: present at the opening, john hopkins professor of egyptology in baltimore
1. Had a dinner party, showed off treasures from the tomb
2. House caught fire, slowly at first
3. Wife convinced him to save his manuscript of the book he was working on while she rescued their son. As they went into the fire the blaze kicked into high gear, instead of the slow burn they had seen before.
4. His wife and son perish, so does the maid.
5. He makes it to the roof holding the pages of his book and passes out and falls down, he is rescued but succumbs to his burns the next day
6. The name of his manuscript, the egyptian book of the dead.
7. Also Dr. Ember the egyptologist that perished in a FIRE is a fucking awesome comic book villain. When he comes back with mummy powers.
Richard bethell- Carter’s secretary and number 2 in the tomb, 1929 died of smothering in locked from the inside hotel room. This is obviously a case of the mummy turning into a horde of scarabs and flying through the window, reforming into the CGI mummy and choking him out personally.
1. His maid also said they had a couple of small fires where they kept the treasures from the tomb
Lord westbury Richard bethells father cast himself from the seventh story window like he’s the protagonist from H.P. Lovecraft’s Dagon. He also had artifacts from the tomb
These connections are getting thinner now, Lets talk about audrey herbert, he was carnarvon’s half brother. Born with eye disease slowly eating away at his vision, and eventually came completely blind. A dentist thought maybe his rotten teeth were causing it, and so they pulled every one of his teeth and he was still blind. Seems like less of a curse and more of a shitty dentist. September 1923, he died of sepsis from getting all his teeth pulled. Sounds like a fucking awful way to go. He also just got back from egypt. Hmm. why fucking bother if you can’t see anyway?
Then we have Bruce Ingham. He died many years later but he had his fair share of misfortune from the tomb. He was Carter’s friend and was given a mummy hand with a bracelet that literally said “Cursed be he who moves my body.” He used it as a paperweight. Very tasteful. Anyway his house immediately burned down. When he rebuilt it, it was immediately destroyed by a flood. He got rid of the hand just in case.
Sir Archibald Douglas Reid- died of a mysterious disease in 1926. He X-rayed tut and died three days later. Don't x ray the mummies. Don’t turn the mummies into a parlor decoration or a paperweight, don’t try to have sex with the mummies, don’t grind up the mummies to eat, don’t grind them up for paint like renaissance painters did, the flowchart for what to do with a mummy is pretty simple. Find mummy what would you like to do with the mummy?
1. Option A. Leave the mummy alone, maybe respectfully observe it.
  1. Proceed with caution
2. Option B. anything else.
  1. Do not proceed, you may already be doomed. insert 25c to try again.
George bendite- 1926 died a three stooges death falling down the stairs after visiting the tomb.
1. Examining it for the lourve
There’s one author that suggests non other than the great beast aleister crowley actually was the curse and the whole thing was a fucking scooby doo setup, where he murdered people involved with the tomb, because his thelemic religion, philosophy? Was steeped in ancient egyptian lore and cracking open the tomb was a heretical act to him that needed to be punished. I don’t really buy that personally
1. I might pick that up and report back, seems like a wild ride but personally I think crowley was too busy getting dicked down by his students and eating human dookie to plan a bunch of murders.
Noticeably absent from this list is carter himself who died in 1934 at the age of 64, due to a seemingly unrelated lymphoma. He called the curse theory tommyrot and codswallop. Which is one of my favorite words.
So a ton of people died indirectly, but most of the people who were actually there didn’t die for years, which from a numbers perspective, 8 of the 58 people present when the coffin was opened died in the next ten years, that isn’t a very compelling curse. But from the sensationalism of the actual deaths, yeah something is going on there, mysterious fires, invisible stalkers, analogous wounds, brendan fraser, the works.
I think ultimately, everyone can decide if the curse is real or not for themselves:
1. Even if it is some mold based pneumonia, sealed up for eons, that’s kind of a curse in its own right, even if it isn’t strictly magic. And that does indeed happen in these sealed chambers
2. You can be a skeptic about stuff like this but in the end the wild stories speak for themselves, the dude being immolated after showing off his ill gotten treasures looking for the book of the dead? Carnarvon Having the exact same wound as tut, the written curses everwhere?
3. At some point I think if enough people believed in the things they would manifest in one way or another, you can tell the dude that killed himself and wrote a message in his own blood “Umm actually the curse is psychosomatic, you’re just imagining it” but in the end it was certainly real for him.
4. Our perceptions shape reality, and in a time where this was the biggest news story the world over in the recovery period of WW1, there’s a lot of weird fucking psychic energy floating around, focused on this very story at the time. Mummy tulpas, 3000 years of intentionality, millions dead, I’m just saying it’s quite a mix.
5. There’s so much more to get into in this time period it’s impossible to cover it all in one episode.
  1. In short the takeaway is not to desecrate ancient burial grounds, if you can avoid it. At least wear a gas mask or something so you aren’t sucking up mummy dust.
6. There’s a couple of other cool mummy tidbits I Couldn’t get to this week so I’ll carry it over to next week, and the we’ll come at it with something totally new after that. Thanks for listening, as always, I’d say sweet dreams but we all know it’s only gonna be nightmares now
7. Gnight