Tutankhamen (34 page)

Carnarvon's death certificate confirms that he died in Cairo shortly before 2 a.m. In 1923 there was a two-hour time gap between the two countries but England, being the more westerly country, was two hours behind Egypt. Rather than enjoying simultaneous deaths, Susie actually died four hours after her master.

Marie Corelli was the first to mention the ancient curse ‘death comes on wings to he who enters the tomb of a pharaoh'. Soon it was an accepted fact that this, or a slight variant, ‘death comes on swift wings to him that toucheth the tomb of the pharaoh', was carved over the entrance to Tutankhamen's tomb, or carved above the entrance to the Burial Chamber, or inscribed on a mud-brick tablet found in either the Antechamber or the Burial Chamber. Naturally, so potent a curse could not be allowed to taint the excavation:

A second, slightly less explicit curse was apparently written on the back of ‘a statue … this magic figure was discovered in the main chamber of the tomb':

This is a mangled version of the genuine inscription on a small reed torch discovered immediately in front of the Anubis shrine in the Treasury. The torch was covered in gold and mounted on a brick-like pottery pedestal bearing the simple yet explicit spell, ‘to repel the enemy of Osiris [the deceased] in whatever form he may come':

Soon it was rumoured that the last line of this inscription, ‘… I will call all those who cross this threshold into the sacred precincts of the King who lives for ever', had been erased by Carter to prevent panic spreading among his workforce. Meanwhile, a ‘necromancer' and self-proclaimed archaeologist announced yet another curse discovered in the tomb:

While ‘scientific' and Christian Westerners were only too eager to believe in the supernatural curse, Egyptians ancient and modern were not unduly troubled by it, and were certainly not averse to violating the tomb and stealing from the dead. They may have believed in ghosts, but they did not accept the Western phenomenon of the vindictive, re-awakened mummy. Scrutiny of the original excavation photographs, available to everyone via the website of the Griffith Institute, Oxford, confirms that they were correct in their disbelief. There is in fact nothing written above either the tomb entrance or the doorway to the Burial Chamber, and there never was. Nor, as this is a royal tomb, would we expect there to be. To understand why Tutankhamen would not have felt the need to protect his tomb with curses, we need to consider the role of the ancient Egyptian tomb in more detail.

The tomb served several purposes. It was a magical place, furnished with ritual artefacts, where the latent mummy could be transformed into a living being.
¹⁵
At the same time it was the home of the deceased, furnished with grave goods appropriate to his or her social status. At its most basic level, however, it was simply an elaborate storage box designed to protect the mummified tomb owner until the end of time.

Life beyond death meant different things to different classes of people at different times, but fundamental to all beliefs was the idea that the
ka
spirit needed to live close to the corpse. If the mummy was destroyed and the
ka
could not find an alternative home – a statue perhaps, or an image or even a memory – the deceased would die the terrible Second Death, from which there could be no return. It was therefore vital that no one should interfere with the tomb and its mummy. This could have been achieved with remarkable ease had the Egyptians been prepared to revert to the Predynastic tradition of
burial in simple pits cut into the desert sands. There would then have been no need of artificial mummification, as the hot and sterile sand would have created a naturally dried mummy and, with no grave goods, no one would have had any desire to disinter the newly impoverished dead. But that was never an option. The elite could not face eternity without a vast array of material goods, and their insistence on burial in what were essentially ill-guarded warehouses full of desirable objects made the vulnerable dead far richer than many of the living. Naturally, thieves were attracted to the cemeteries.

Many of the dead were robbed before they even reached the tomb. We have no means of knowing how many families paid for amulets and jewellery which unscrupulous undertakers simply neglected to place within the wrappings, but with the benefits of modern science we are able to peek beneath the neat bandages and see that some superficially perfect mummies, particularly those dating to the Late and Graeco-Roman Periods, are nothing more than a jumbled mass of bones and rubbish. The undertakers were not the only ones to rob the dead. The workmen who built the elite tombs, the grave diggers who worked in the public graveyards, and even the cemetery guards and priests; all might have been tempted to profit from their specialised knowledge. Once the thieves had accessed the burial chamber, the jewellery and amulets within the bandages made the wrapped corpse particularly vulnerable to attack. Mummies were hacked to pieces, or burned, in the frantic search for metals, glass and semi-precious stones.

It was therefore important that wrongdoers be discouraged from entering the tomb. The easiest way to do this was to seal the tomb, then hide it away. But the pyramid-building kings of the Old and Middle Kingdoms had no wish to hide their tombs; they wanted them to stand proud and tall, as a permanent memorial to their own greatness. The royal architects experimented with a range of physical barriers, incorporating hidden entrances, false chambers, stone portcullises
and backfilled corridors in their designs, but all these systems failed. With the move to the Valley of the Kings, and the separation of the memorial temple from the burial, the 18th Dynasty pharaohs reduced the likelihood of robbery by random thieves but remained vulnerable to those who built and guarded their tombs.

Non-royal tomb owners were equally conflicted. Their tombs included both an accessible chapel (the sacred place where families and well-wishers would leave the offerings that would nourish the
ka
) and a hidden burial chamber (the sacred place where the mummy rested). Tomb owners wished to attract family members, friends and decent passers-by who might be persuaded to leave offerings, and so their tombs had to be conspicuous. At the same time, they wished to discourage those who might rob or vandalise the tomb. And so, from the 5th Dynasty onwards, we find written messages from the non-royal dead to the living, designed to warn against any improper behaviour. For example, a loose stone block from a private tomb, found near the pyramid of Teti at Sakkara, bears an obviously unheeded warning to ‘any man who shall take stone from this tomb or who shall not enter in a pure state'.
¹⁶
Usurpation was a constant worry, as it was far easier and quicker to eject a long dead owner from either part of, or all of, an old and unvisited tomb, or to dismantle it and re-use its pre-cut blocks, than it was to build a new tomb from scratch. The façade of the tomb of Ankhi at Sakkara provides a dire warning to anyone who might be tempted to do this:

In a land where maybe just 5 per cent of the population was literate, it seems unlikely that those tempted to rob could have actually
read and understood this warning, but that, of course, would not have prevented the warning from becoming effective. It was accepted that the dead had the power to interfere with the living. They could help those in need, and might even punish those who had done wrong. And so, in the Giza tomb of Peteti, we read how:

Royal tombs were, however, a different matter. They did not have integral offering chapels – they had memorial temples where the deceased could receive offerings without any need for the living to approach the resting place of the dead. During the Old and Middle Kingdoms these temples had been included within the pyramid complex; during the New Kingdom they were situated on the desert edge, a considerable distance away from the rock-cut tombs of the Valley. A similar system existed for the few non-royals buried in the Valley; Yuya and Thuya, for example, lay in the Valley but would have received their mortuary offerings in a dedicated place – a small chapel, stela or statue within a larger temple, perhaps – somewhere else. No one was expected to visit the tomb itself and, without visitors, and random passers-by, there was no need to include warning messages on the tomb walls.

The absence of a written curse (which some, naturally, believe has
been suppressed by ‘the authorities') has done nothing to stem the idea that Tutankhamen first killed Carnarvon, and then went on to kill others. For example:

The number of curse victims varies from account to account, but the list generally includes the following: