LONDON (dpa) – Many visitors to the British Museum in London experience a feeling of foreboding when looking at exhibit number 22,542.
Museum guides were often heard to advise visitors not to stay too long in front of the sarcophagus in the glass case with the number 35, for a curse was reputed to have been cast on the head priestess of the temple of Amun-Ra, which has claimed the lives of thirteen people since 1880.Now British Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat is keen to put visitors’ minds at rest. According to Montserrat, the curse was an invention of storywriter Jane Loudon Webb 180 years ago. “The ancient Egyptians knew nothing about it,” assures the researcher from the Open University.The authoress, says Montserrat, visited a show in 1821 in which an Egytpian mummy was unwrapped, stimulating the 25-year-old Loudon Webb to pen a science fiction tale in which a mummy is brought back to life and which wreaks revenge, strangling archaeologist Edric.The book was first published in 1869, titled “The Curse of the Mummy”, and by 1912 the story was so popular and widespread that newspaper journalists of the day even attributed the sinking of the British luxury liner Titanic to the presence on board of a sarcophagus of the above mentioned high priestess of the temple of Amun-Ra.But the biggest headlines were to appear ten years later when researchers Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter first opened the burial chambers of Pharaoh Tutenkhamen in the Valley of the Kings in Thebes, Egypt.“Can you see anything,” asked Carnarvon as Carter entered the grave. “Yes, wonderful things,” was Carter’s now famous reply. Again it was an authoress, this time Marie Corelli, who uttered the fateful words that “every intruder of the sealed burial chamber will incur the most horrific punishment.”And indeed the prophecy seemed at first to fulfil itself when Lord Carnarvon died soon after entering the burial chamber of the murdered Pharaoh, various other researchers succumbed only weeks or months later.For the newspapers it was a clear cut matter: All these were victims of the curse of the Pharaoh. Even today newer and ever wilder theories abound as to the cause of death, ranging from fatal bacteria, to lethal viruses or spores, which the ancient Egyptians had immured with the coffin and mortal remains of Tutenkhamen.“The Egyptians knew nothing about the connection between such micro-organisms and infection,” says Dominic Montserrat with a smile. “This was only discovered in the l9th century, thousands of years later.“The truth of the matter is that Carnarvon suffered from frail health. Of the 26 original expedition members present at the opening of the burial chamber, 20 were still living ten years later. The expedition’s doctor, Douglas Derry, who dissected the mummy of Tutenkhamen, lived to the ripe old age of 87.”“In addition, we don’t have one single item of proof from Egyptian sources of a curse,” says Montserrat. Court records from the time of the opening of the chamber report only that graverobbers were charged with theft and not with defilement of the graves, even in one case where the graverobbers set a mummy on fire to obtain more light.In fact, according to Montserrat, the opening of King Tut’s burial chamber was in a certain way a positive development and in the pharaoh’s own interests. According to ancient Egyptian traditions and beliefs the soul of the departed pharaoh can only survive as long as his name is still known on earth.Without a doubt, the opening of his grave ensured Tutenkhamen everlasting fame and for this reason the researchers, instead of facing an ancient Egyptian curse, deserve indeed a pharaonic blessing.
