Since that's exactly what happened in several high-profile cases, including the much-publicized death in 1922 of a British aristocrat who entered King Tutankhamun's tomb, Egyptian officials have decided to dispel the mythical curse using science.
Led by Zahi Hawass, the secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, the study will examine unexcavated tombs for dangerous substances, such as gases or germs, that might explain the curse. In other words, are dangerous germs that have been built up from the decaying bodies escaping when the tomb is opened and causing the death of anyone who breathes them in? If so, that's no curse. That's microbiology.
Hawass theorizes that dangerous germs--which weren't there when the bodies were first entombed--may have developed over the centuries in the mummified human remains. The germs lie dormant in the tomb until it is opened and humans are exposed to them. Scientists have long speculated that this is exactly what caused the death of British aristocrat Lord Carnarvon, who sponsored archaeologist Howard Carter. Reuters notes that in 1922, the two were among the first to enter the tomb of the boy-king Tutankhamun, who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago. Lord Carnarvon died shortly afterward from an infected mosquito bite, but it was widely publicized at the time that he was done in by the curse of the pharaohs.
But what about death by crocodile, hippo, or lion? "It doesn't mean that this will actually happen," Hawass told Reuters in an interview. "Scientifically we want to show when the Egyptians put a curse inscription on a tomb, they did not mean they could hurt anyone today who opened the tomb."
He's putting a lot of faith in those words. "We are going to study in unexcavated, intact tombs," Hawass told Reuters. And then he acknowledged this: He was once knocked unconscious in an ancient Egyptian tomb. "When I woke up I told people if anything had happened to me, people would think this was the curse of the pharaohs. But it was just an accident."
Or was it?
