Some claims of the paranormal have been shown to be completely wrong; others, although unlikely and as yet unproven in proper observing conditions, may still have a small chance of being real. In the latter I include ESP, ghosts, life-after-death, UFOs, and even dowsing. These phenomena are so ethereal that even if any of them do exist they would be difficult - but not impossible - to prove. The former category includes astrology, iridology, graphology, palmistry, the Bermuda Triangle and any phenomenon which has rules or which has a base of checkable facts. These claims are easily looked into, and have been - many times. They consistently fail to support the claims made for them. Included in this category is a claim which is regularly mentioned by the media but which has received comparatively little skeptical comment: The Curse of Tutankhamun.
The earliest and best skeptical article on the curse was - not surprisingly perhaps - written by Canadian magician and skeptic James Randi. It appeared in 'The Humanist' for March/April 1978. Randi was motivated to research the article by a television special on the curse and a popular book called 'The Curse of the Pharaohs' by Philipp Vandenberg.
The initial claim made by supporters of the curse is that a tablet with a curse inscribed on it was found in Tutankhamun's tomb. It is supposed to have said: 'Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the rest of the Pharaoh'; or similar depending upon the source. The tablet has since vanished, they tell us. But in reality there is no evidence that such a tablet ever existed. As in any archaeological dig all items found in the tomb were carefully noted and documented. No mention of such a tablet is made. Or are the archaeologists guilty of a cover-up?
We are next asked to believe that the first victim of the curse was Lord Carnarvon, the patron of the expedition to find Tutankhamun's tomb. When he died in Cairo, the lights of the city were reported to have gone out, and back in England at that very moment his favourite fox terrier 'howled, sat up on her hind legs, and fell over dead', as if in sympathy, or sorrow. Now it is a matter of fact that Carnarvon was already a sick man when 'on his doctor's advice' he went to Egypt. While in the Valley of the Kings, Carnarvon was bitten by a mosquito. When the bite turned septic he was rushed off to Cairo. After recovering from the mosquito bite he contracted pneumonia and died one April morning at 1.55 a.m. at the age of fifty-seven.
The lights often went out in Cairo, so it is no surprise that they did so at, or about the time Carnarvon died. As for the dog, at least one believer has reported Carnarvon's son as saying that it died at four a.m., which taking the two hour time difference between England and Egypt, meant that the dog died within five minutes of Carnarvon. Wrong! Even if the event occurred as stated - and why was someone there to witness the death throes of a healthy fox-terrier at four o'clock in the morning? - England was behind, not ahead of, Egyptian time.
As the ultimate penalty of a curse is death it is therefore not surprising that most of the tales in support of Tut's curse involve the deaths of those who defiled the tomb. The odd thing though is how selective the curse is. It doesn't seem to so much affect those closely involved in the opening of the tomb - as we shall see - so much as those who were on the side-lines. George Jay Gould, son of financier Jay Gould, is reported to have died within days of visiting the tomb. But he was just one of many thousands of tourists who have visited the tomb. Perhaps the curse thought that he had lived long enough, for he died at the age of fifty-nine, which wasn't too bad for the early twentieth century.
Another side-liner we are asked to believe was a victim of the curse was Lord Westbury, the father of Howard Carter's assistant Richard Bethell who himself died suddenly of a circulatory collapse some six years after the tomb opening. Grief stricken by his son's death, Westbury committed suicide. Do curses have no compassion?
James Randi checked Howard Carter's writings and determined who had been most directly involved in the tomb discovery and exploration. Included in his 'Humanist' article was a table listing the names of these people, the years of their deaths, their ages, and the number of years they survived the opening of the tomb in 1922. Some of Randi's data was incomplete as he couldn't trace details of all of the people in American libraries. I have therefore updated his list, and have calculated the average life-span and 'curse survival' rates of those whose ages we have been able to find.
Of the twenty-two people on the list we know the ages at death of eleven and the years in which another three were known to be alive. On average the eleven lived to be at least 72, and on average the fourteen survived with a curse over their heads for almost twenty-five years each. The shortest and longest survival rates were, ironically, for two of the people present at the initial break-in of the tomb. Lord Carnarvon survived for only four months; his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert for fifty-eight years. She died in 1980, at the age of 79.
The average survival rate of the twenty-two main participants was 20.9 years. As Randi wrote, 'Perhaps we have here a beneficent curse that 'inhibits' the Grim Reaper'.
But was there a curse in the first place? Not according to Carol Andrews an Egyptologist from the British Museum who said on London's LBC Radio in July 1988 that the idea of a curse probably dates from a Victorian novelist - Marie Corelli -who wrote 'No good will come of disturbing Pharaoh's bones.....'. But more directly, Andrews said that the Egyptians didn't write curses in their tombs; she confirmed that no such curse was found in Tutankhamen's tomb and that Egyptologists wouldn't have expected to find one. She explained that the only curses made by the Egyptians were not against grave robbers but against anyone disturbing their funery offerings of food and drink which were placed daily in chapels for their spirits to consume.
Although the general idea of a curse might have originated with a Victorian novelist, the Tutankhamun one certainly couldn't - except by precognition which we won't address here. Nearer the truth is the suggestion that it was a story made up by newsmen.
On August 29th 1980, the 'Daily Mail' published an interview with 'old soldier' Richard Adamson, then 81 years old. As a military policeman in Egypt in 1922, Adamson was ordered to assist Carnarvon's archaeological expedition to leave the Valley of the Kings. Before they could do so, the tomb was discovered and Adamson was to spend the next seven years actually sleeping in the tomb as a guard.
Adamson told the 'Daily Mail' that as crowds were hampering the digging work and they were also worried about the possibility of thieves coming in the night 'Quite suddenly we thought about a curse. Inscriptions laying curses on intruders had been found on the walls of tombs nearer Cairo and it so happened that a reporter had been hanging around, asking about curses. We saw no such inscriptions laying curses in Tut's tomb, but let's say we didn't discourage him from thinking there was.'
Adamson's story is possibly true, although his claim about curses on the walls of other tombs seems to contradict Carol Andrews. Perhaps these were curses against anyone disturbing the funery offerings. Nevertheless, if there really is a curse, having lived to be at least 81 and surviving the curse by at least 58 years, Adamson only supports Randi's suggestion that the curse is beneficent.