Real Life Influences: The Mummy’s Curse

Real Life Influences: The Mummy’s Curse?

"This discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen represents the very summit of success in archaeological effort" (Ceram 1971: 176)

This archaeological discovery made by Howard Carter and colleagues in 1922 was indeed a very important event for the study. Archaeology was thrust into the spotlight. As Cerman notes:

"During the two hundred years, more or less, of archaeological history, no revelation of the lost world of antiquity received more publicity than that of Tutankhamen" (Ceram 1971: 204)

However, what is also remembered about the story of the discovery is the so called ‘pharaoh’s curse’. This ‘curse’ focuses mainly on the fact that many people involved with the excavation of the King’s tomb, "mysteriously", as we are led to believe, met premature deaths of all descriptions. As Ceram (1971) notes:

"more than twenty persons connected at some time of other with the unsealing of the famous tomb died under mysterious circumstances" (Ceram 1971: 204)

The beginnings of this legend of the curse can not really be traced. Ceram suggests that it could have been started with the sudden death of Lord Carnarvon, who was heavily involved in the excavations, who dies in 1923:

"after a three week losing battle with the effects of a mosquito bite" (Ceram 1971: 205)

It was not uncommon for headlines to appear such as "Revenge of the Pharoahs". Ceram uses a newspaper extract from the time to sum up the tone of these articles:

"Today the 78 year old Lord Westbury jumped from the window of his seventh story London apartment and was instantly killed. Lord Westbury’s son, who was formerly the secretary of Howard Carter, the archaeologist at the Tutankhamen diggings, was found last November dead in his apartment, though when he went to bed he appeared to be in the best of health" (Ceram 1971: 205-206)

The curse was said to have been written inside the Pharaoh’s tomb. Allegedly, the curse was as follows:

"Death will come on swift pinions to those who disturb the rest of the Pharaoh" (Ceram 1971: 206)

It would seem then that some aspects of archaeologically based films may have been based on actual facts. The original 1932 version of the film The Mummy was said to have been based on the King Tutankhamen story and the curse which struck its discoverers. In one scene of the 1999 version of the film, where the ‘Book of the Dead’ is about to be discovered, one of the characters reads from the inscription on the chest:

"There is a curse upon this chest…death will come on swift wings to whomsoever opens this chest" (The Mummy: 1999)

This is one example of how some films use ideas from real life even though they may be padded out with ideas of pure fiction.