The History Of A Cursed Ancient Egyptian Tomb | The Curse Of Tutankhamun | Channel 5 #AncientHistory

Tutankhamun was one of the last pharaohs of 18th dynasty royalty. His reign lasted little more than a decade. Tutankhamun came to the throne at a very strange time. His predecessor Akhenaten had decided to change the whole focus of the monarchy and had worshipped just one god, the Aten, the Sundisk. Tutankhamun, when he came to the throne, reversed that decision. We know that he came to the throne at about eight years of age and we know that after he'd done this, the old gods were reinstated. So if you like, he's a king who restores Egypt. We also know that he married his sister or his stepsister but beyond that we don't know a great deal about him. By his late teens, the young pharaoh was dead. Tutankhamun's reign was never forgotten. There were statues of Tutankhamun and his name was dotted about Egypt but his tomb was forgotten. After five years of excavating in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, archaeologist Howard Carter and his team had found the long-lost tomb of Tutankhamun. So we have in front of us a glass negative, one of several thousand created by the photographer Harry Burton who was assigned to Carter's team right from the beginning of the excavation. So this is the first room that they entered in between with Tutankhamun. All of these objects were just as if they had been placed over 3,000 years ago. So on the left-hand side, you can see we have the dismantled chariots of the king for use in the afterlife. With thousands of grave goods to remove, catalogue and restore, the task ahead was monumental. Carter was prepared to take years if necessary because he wanted to do it correctly because he recognised that in excavating Tutankhamun's tomb he would be destroying it. You could never recreate it so he knew he had to get it absolutely right. So he did things that hadn't really been done before. He assembled a big team of experts and he planned out a methodology which was so good that we can still use his cards today to see what he has found and where. In February 1923, after the opening of the burial chamber, an exhausted Lord Carnarvon took some time out with his daughter Evelyn. So he rented a dahabaya and he decided to sail up towards Aswan to sail on the Nile and have a few days of rest. Unfortunately, as he sailed, he was bitten by a mosquito on his left cheek and instead of dabbing it with iodine, he nicked it with his razor when he was shaving and he became infected. Evelyn brought her father back to Luxor where his condition worsened. So then she took him up to Cairo where there were better doctors but I think he was stressed and exhausted. He got probably a form of septicemia. It probably went to his lungs and then sadly he died on April the 6th, 1923. The moment he died, Cairo was plunged into darkness. And by some mischance or not, the lights in Cairo did go out on that night and actually his dog Susie howled and died back here at the same time. So it is... I suppose maybe I just think of it as a respect for the past. We don't know what happens after we die. It does seem to me so sad that Lord Carnarvon died in the hour of his triumph. He had made the most extraordinary discovery of all time. With Lord Carnarvon's sudden death, the press excluded from the tomb now had a story they could run wild with. In Egypt, visitors flocked to the open tomb, attracted as much by the legendary curse as of the chance to step into a chamber of the far distant past. Mystics the world over, led by Sir Arthur Colin Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, cried out that the tomb's curse had claimed its desecrator. It's difficult to imagine a more perfect storm in the sense of the creation of a curse narrative than Lord Carnarvon's death in 1923, hot on the heels of, of course, the discovery of the tomb. And it fits a preconceived narrative of mystery, of danger, of threat, and it absolutely runs like wildfire through the popular press. It was in the Valley of the Tombs that Howard Carter and his expedition party first discovered the tomb of King Tut in 1922. In the dead king's crypt was the inscription, Death shall come with swift wings to him who touches the tomb of the pharaoh. We all say, as a culture, really like stories about bad luck befalling very rich people. We love it. That's what the whole of tabloid culture is about. Build people up and then destroy them. That kind of sense of revenge, of justice, of a kind of natural justice that is hitting back. Cursed stories are nearly always told by the poor, the oppressed, about their masters. As Tutankhamen's body was removed from his burial chamber, the public, in increasing numbers, believed that Carnarvon had paid the price for disturbing the dead pharaoh. It was only when the body was discovered that it suddenly became very apparent that this was a young man. Particularly being close to the First World War, it really sort of made people feel they could relate. In May 1923, George J. Gould, an American railroad magnate, died of pneumonia after visiting the tomb. July that same year, Egyptian playboy, Prince Ali Fahmy Bey, after seeing the tomb, was later shot by his wife in the Savoy Hotel. Key members of Carter's team soon followed. It's well known that Howard Carter's account of the whole opening of the tomb was co-written by another Egyptologist, Arthur Mace. And within a year, Arthur Mace had had this major physical breakdown and had to retire from Egypt entirely. And he went back to New York, and he died in 1928. The person who worked with Howard Carter to X-ray and photograph some of the artefacts was Sir Archibald Read, and he died in January 1924. And then there was a French Egyptologist, very eminent, called Georges Bénédict, and he had inspected the tomb and fell very badly outside on the steps and died in 1926. Others soon followed. Lord Carnarvon's secretary was called Richard Bethel, and he died in mysterious circumstances in 1929, thought to have committed suicide in his London club. And the great confirmation of that story was that his father had heard this news and had kind of cried, it's the curse of the mummy, the curse of the mummy. And within a few weeks, his father had thrown himself out of a window and died as well. Within 10 years of the discovery, 13 deaths had been linked to the curse. But while the press lapped up such stories, others were sceptical. Some of those who died had never even visited Egypt.