Tutankhamun: Unmasking the Curse (2024) Movie Script
1
Tutankhamun
has become the most famous
of all the Pharaohs.
- Most people when they think
of Tutankhamun, they see all the gold.
They see semi-precious stones,
they see alabaster vases.
The discovery of the tomb
was quite widely perceived
as something absolutely
sensational, and unique,
and unprecedented.
- Ancient Egypt has perceived as unique
and people are drawn to it.
Everyone
wanted to see Tutankhamun.
However,
stories of mysterious events
seem to follow the opening
of the ancient tomb.
- The idea of the mummy's curse
is a particularly seductive narrative.
I think a lot of people were
confirmed in their suspicions
that no good would come
of disturbing the dead.
- And then what better story to tell
than that of an aristocrat
being struck down
by an ancient curse?
Egypt, 1922,
after a lengthy seven-year search,
Howard Carter, along with his
benefactor Lord Carnarvon,
opened the tomb of Tutankhamun.
It was the first time in over 3000 years
it had been disturbed.
- As the dig progresses,
it's not long before Carnarvon
starts to develop an illness.
The story goes that he got
a mosquito bite on a cheek,
and that when he was shaving,
he caught that mosquito bite,
and reopening that wound, it got infected
and that led to blood poisoning.
And then Lord
Carnarvon dropped dead.
- Almost immediately, the
idea that he was the victim
of some kind of curse
was being put around.
The idea of the mummy's curse
quickly gained traction.
It was theorized that the Lord's death
had been caused by elementals
created to guard the royal tomb.
For many it appeared that the
Boy King's spirit was awoken
and sought revenge
against the perpetrators.
- When Lord Carnarvon died
after the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb
postdating that event
by a matter of months.
I think a lot of people were
confirmed in their suspicions
that no good would come
of disturbing the dead.
There's a story that often gets repeated
about Carnarvon's dog howling
and suddenly dropping down
dead at the same moment.
There are other stories
about various people
mysteriously dying or
suffering unexpected fates.
Stories flooded newspapers
of visitors to the tomb
developing illnesses
and dying soon after.
There were accounts of houses burning down
then flooding upon being rebuilt,
it was reported that ancient
curses were inscribed
within the tomb warning
those who disturbed it.
- So Carnarvon's death
within a matter of months
of the tomb being discovered and opened
is the event that gets people talking
about the mummy's curse.
And interestingly, it's not
actually after his death
that those rumors start to circulate.
People start to speculate
about the Pharaoh's spirit
seeking vengeance for
disturbance of his grave,
even while Carnarvon's
illness is just being reported
in the press.
So as soon as Carnarvon starts to get ill,
that's when these stories
start to circulate.
- Howard Carter was an archeologist
who'd worked in Egypt
since his late teens.
He'd also worked for
the Egyptian government
as one of the antiquity inspectors,
but then had left under
something of a cloud in 1905.
- Howard Carter was an Egyptologist
who didn't have that
privilege an upbringing.
He was from a very artistic family,
but he didn't go to public school,
he didn't go to university.
So his training was
very much on the ground
with excavators like Flinders Petrie,
he's very famous for developing
a rigorous archeological method.
I think for Carter, he had a lot to prove,
to prove himself a gentleman.
- So when he first
arrived in Egypt in 1891,
when he was only 17 years old,
he actually did not arrive
as an archeologist.
He didn't work as an archeologist,
but he was hired as an
artist, as a draftsman.
- Around the same kind of
time, the Earl of Carnarvon
had taken up an interest in Egyptology
and had obtained permission
to undertake excavations.
- The 5th Earl of
Carnarvon is an aristocrat
born with a title.
He becomes interested in Egypt
very early in the 20th-century.
- So the reason Carnarvon was
in the position to excavate,
financial position was that he was married
to a woman called Almina Herbert
and she was in all likelihood,
the illegitimate daughter
of the American banker, Alfred Rothschild.
And so when they got married,
he put up a very nice dowry
of half a million pounds sterling,
which is nowadays equivalent
to about 70 billion.
And that enabled the
couple to live very nicely,
travel, collect antiquities,
and also excavate.
And Carnarvon made it to
the point where he realized
that he needs expert help.
- Carter was introduced to Carnarvon
and the two of them henceforth
worked together as a team.
- One had the financial
support but not the expertise.
The other one had the
expertise, but not the money.
And they were kind of
a match made in heaven.
- In the 1920s and 1930s,
Egypt is a playground for the
rich and famous, the elite.
So what you get is
people traveling to Egypt
for those winter months when the weather
is really, really nice.
And essentially, schmoozing and partying
and having a really good time
in European-style hotels,
very glamorous, very modern.
And just enjoying this really
quite fabulous social scene.
So there is this political
friction, this social friction
between Egyptians and
Europeans at the time.
The British invaded Egypt back in 1882
and have essentially been
in charge since that time.
Egyptian independence is on the horizon,
but certainly when it
comes to excavations,
these become particular
moments of national importance
where we see Egyptian nationalists
seizing on the Pharaohs
as symbols of Egyptian identity
and in theory, freedom.
Whereas the British, the
French, and other Europeans
still hold these really
significant roles in say,
the museums and antiquities
services in Egypt at the time.
So certainly a time of friction
between Egyptians and Europeans.
- So Carnarvon and Howard Carter
wanted to work in the Valley of the Kings.
The problem was that the
excavation permission
was in the hands of Theodore Davis,
who was an American lawyer, a
businessman come archeologist,
exploring more than 30 tombs,
royal and non-royal tombs.
- The Valley of the Kings has,
you could tell by the name,
a certain reputation for
where particular members
of Egyptian royalty are buried.
- The Valley of the Kings
is a body which is basically
a dried-up watercourse on the West Bank
near the modern city of Luxor.
And from the beginning of
the Egyptian 18th dynasty,
which is around about 1500 BC.
It'd been the place for the
burial of Egyptian Kings.
Prior to this, Kings are
generally buried under pyramids,
but those were no longer being used.
And instead, the royal tomb
comprised to have the Kings
and then a couple of kilometers away,
a temple for the worship
of the King's spirit.
- The first map of the Valley of the Kings
and first of tombs that
were known at this time
was made in 1799,
by members of Napoleon's
expedition to Egypt.
Then throughout the 19th-century,
the European exploration
of the Valley of the Kings continued.
Of course, it was hampered by the fact
that already in antiquity,
the majority of basically
all of the royal tombs
had been blocked.
Theodore Davis considered
the Valley of the Kings
to be exhausted, so he gave
up his excavation permit,
and then Lord Carnarvon
applied for it, got granted.
He signed it in early 1915.
- He knew that the valley had
been extensively excavated
over the previous century and a half.
However, he was aware there
were a number of areas
that have not yet been investigated.
And he was also aware
that there were a handful
of Kings whose tombs were unknown.
- Due to the outbreak of the first war,
there was a small delay.
- So Carter and Carnarvon
who were both excavating
before the war, paused
excavations during the war,
during which time Carnarvon
was actually hosting events
like spiritualist seances
in his ancestral seat
in Highclere Castle.
And after the First World
War, excavations resumed
and it's after the First World War,
fairly soon-ish after its conclusion
that the tomb of
Tutankhamun was discovered.
- The first thing that Howard Carter did
was that he created a map
and then through the seasons,
they would excavate from the
surface down to the bedrock
to make sure not to miss anything.
Grid square by grid square.
- The discovery of the tomb
was basically the result
of systematic clearance.
There was an area which
hadn't been touched,
partly because it was right
in front of another tomb,
which was very popular with tourists.
- Archeologists and tourists
don't go together very well,
so archeologists had
always tried to quiet it.
And Carter's solution was just to start
the excavation season a little bit earlier
before the tourists season kicked in.
So he started on the
1st of November in 1922.
- So basically they started
clearing down through debris,
then finding a layer of which contained
the remains of work or art,
which dated to two or 300
years after Tutankhamun's time.
And then under that level
where they were getting down
to the original bedrock,
one of the workmen spotted something
which looked like the edge of a step.
Carter confirmed that
and stairway leading
into Tutankhamun's tomb
was then revealed.
- On the morning of the 4th of November,
the first step of a
staircase was discovered,
rock-cut staircase.
And so on the evening
of the 4th of November,
he writes into his diary,
the only time ever,
he scribbles all over the page
instead of writing very neatly,
he writes down the now-famous words,
first steps for King Valley.
They started clearing what
proved to be a rock-cut stairway
until he hit a plastered door.
And then on the 5th of November,
he did something quite superhuman.
He decided that he cannot continue
and has to wait until his sponsor
and his friend Lord
Carnarvon is present as well.
- So they're waiting for
Carnarvon to come over
with his daughter to get to the tomb.
And they're not going to peer inside.
They're not going to make that first hole
until Carnarvon is present.
And so everyone's waiting,
you can only imagine
how much anticipation
characterized the atmosphere.
- And then on the morning
of the 26th of November,
it was finally time that Howard Carter
made a tiny breach into the doorway
and then became the first person
after 3000 years to look
inside the tomb of Tutankhamun.
He describes this moment
very vividly in his excavation journal.
When Lord Carnarvon asked
him, "Can you see anything?"
He said, "Yes, it is wonderful."
- The initial view which Carter
had into the first chamber
was that it was a rectangular
room filled with objects.
- When the tomb was first opened,
it's quite a cramped space,
it was quite a busy space.
A lot of objects were stacked
up against each other,
stacked up against the wall.
- It was likened to a townhouse
to been closed up for the summer.
The range of material found in the tomb
was quite extraordinary.
You have things intimately
related to the mummy,
so therefore you've got the nest
of coffins in which it was housed.
The great sarcophagus within
that which they were housed,
and also with the containers
for the mummified intestines of the King.
- Tutankhamen's funerary mask,
which sat directly atop
his mummified remains,
is one of the most famous
egyptological artifacts
of all time.
And I think it captures
the popular imagination
because of its glamorous gold quality.
- Before the discovery of his tomb,
Tutankhamun was known to
have been a minor king
of the late 14th century BC.
However, his exact
relationships were unclear.
He was certainly a son-in-law
of the so-called heretic King Akhenaten.
But whether he was a
member of the royal family
or simply a nobleman who'd
married a princess was unknown.
- So what was known was that
he had a very short reign,
probably ran only for 10
years and died quite young.
- So a very short reign,
but one in which crucially,
we see a reversal
of the religious reforms
brought in by his father.
So return to polytheism,
so multiple deities
rather than monotheism a single deity,
which was brought in by Akhenaten.
- I think the value of the discovery
in terms of what have we
learned about Tutankhamun
lies in the fact that
there were quite a lot
of personal items in the tomb
that actually really give
us a glimpse of that person.
So he wasn't only King,
he was also a human being.
And I'm always quite
touched by some of the finds
in his tomb.
There's for instance, small furniture
clearly made for a child.
There is a box for shaving equipment
that says for his Majesty
when he was a boy,
so probably contained his
first shaving equipment.
There's also a lock of hair
of his grandmother, Tiye,
in the tomb.
And then, of course, sadly,
there are also good
mummified remains of his two
prematurely born daughters.
- To me, the most significant artifacts
found within that tomb are the bodies
of Tutankhamun's daughters.
So we have two miniature sarcophagi,
two miniature coffins,
inside are two babies.
- Most people, when they
think of Tutankhamun
they see all the gold.
They see semi-precious stones.
They see alabaster vases.
But a lot of the material was
actually organic material.
So we are talking about
linen, clothes, robes,
yeah, even Tutankhamun's underwear,
more than a hundred pairs of them,
there were shoes made of leather.
Of course, inside the vases
you had perfumes and oils.
- So the ancient Egyptians
believed that after death,
their heart would be weighed
against the feather of truth.
And to get to the underworld
that would have to balance favorably.
If it didn't balance favorably,
they would be eaten by a devourer entity.
So hopefully you get past the first stage,
and then when you get to the afterlife,
you enjoy eternal life in
theory with all of the things
with which you are buried
and what they represent.
So you find people buried
with food and drink.
You find people buried
often with multiple shabtis,
which are little humanoid
pieces, which represent servants
or people who do various tasks
for you in the afterlife.
So the more you are buried
with supposedly the nicer
and more luxurious your
afterlife would be.
The objects within the tomb were preserved
to an incredible degree.
Obviously, this is a tomb
that has been almost entirely undisturbed.
And as a result, these
very delicate artifacts
remain almost captured
like a snapshot in time.
On the other hand, it does mean
that there are some things in there
that are incredibly delicate.
- The one thing which was in
a very, very bad condition
was the King's mummy.
And this was due to the fact
that the ancient priests
had poured large amounts of unguents,
which is various sacred
oils all over the body
before they closed the coffin.
And those sacred oils have carbonized
and gradually almost burnt
parts of the mummy's flesh.
Also, those oils had completely solidified
so that when it came to
trying to unwrap the mummy,
the mummy actually had to be cut to pieces
to actually get it outta the
coffin and outta its wrappings.
- One of the things that
people don't tend to know
about Tutankhamun's remains
is that in the process
of removing them from their coffin,
they were actually broken
up into lots of pieces.
His arms, for instance, he
was also severed at the hips,
his head was removed from his body.
The excavators themselves
essentially glued the pieces
of his body back together.
I think that's one of the
things, one of the parts
of the story that's been
deliberately obscured
because people find
that idea so horrifying
that we would treat human
remains in that way.
- The world reaction to
the tomb of Tutankhamun
was of course absolutely
spectacular, phenomenal,
the general public reacted
in an unprecedented way.
And it's important to keep
in mind that of course,
this was the first time an
event like this was transmitted
around the globe in real-time.
The discovery also had a major
impact on popular culture
in every sector, literature, theater,
and fashion, in design, you name it.
- The discovery of the tomb
sparked a wave of Egyptomania,
this ranged from fashion
to music, to advertising.
Egyptomania is the term
that people use to describe
a fascination for ancient Egypt,
which can actually be quite
divorced from ancient Egypt
as it existed as an ancient civilization.
It's the ancient Egypt of the imagination.
It's a fantastical take on ancient Egypt.
And often this falls back to
stereotypes like this idea
of an exotic culture, an orientalized,
erotic culture often as well,
and often falling back to tropes of Egypt
being a place of despotism in the Bible.
So actually, Egyptomania
doesn't necessarily represent
ancient Egypt as it
was, but a version of it
that can be quite dark, dangerous,
and that often is the version of Egypt
that captures the popular imagination.
- So tourists flooded
the Valley of the Kings.
Everyone wanted to see
Tutankhamun, children, academics,
journalists, royalty alike.
And so the wish to report on the tomb
and the discovery from
the side of the media
was massive as well.
Journalists like the tourists flooded
the Valley of the Kings
trying to get a picture
of the archeologists or objects
when they left the tomb.
And in the first month,
this all happened in a very chaotic way.
- The excavators were besieged
by journalists wanting a story.
This led to the Carnarvon
making the Times Newspaper
the only route for news to
come outta the excavation team.
- And so that meant that only
the journalist from the Times
was allowed to make
the official interviews
with the excavators.
And only the Times got
the official photographs
that were taken by Harry Burton,
and then the other newspapers
had to buy the photographs off the Times.
And as you can imagine,
that very much angered
and alienated not only the foreign,
but also the Egyptian press.
- The reason the deal with
the Times caused controversy
in Egypt is because the Egyptians
weren't being given access
to information about their
own cultural heritage.
And politically this was
seen as a real misstep
because the British are being
fed this information directly,
which the Egyptians are
then getting secondhand.
So there really was a two-tier system.
And it was the British press
specifically, the Times
that were getting all of the information,
all of the interviews
and the Egyptian press
and other news outlets who were
coming to the table second.
But this just simply annoyed
and also led directly to the ledging
of the curse of Tutankhamun.
- And so what happens,
is we start to get this almost snowballing
where anybody with any connection
whatsoever to the tomb,
whether they visited it briefly,
or whether they're an
excavator involved in the dig,
as soon as anything bad happens to them,
it just gets attributed
to the mummy's curse.
But I think the idea of the mummy's curse
is a particularly seductive narrative
because burial sites of
the ancient Egyptian dead,
of royalty in particular, are so lavish.
- From the beginning,
people were interested in ancient Egypt.
It was very clear that ancient
Egyptian funerary beliefs
played a very crucial role
in ancient Egyptian culture.
And it was known that ancient Egyptians
prepared very carefully for their journey
through the underlife,
or they had a very distinct idea
about what comes after death.
So already in Victorian
times, this was perceived
as a crucial element of
ancient Egyptian culture.
In the Victorian society,
people did indulge in events
like mummy unwrappings.
And the idea of ancient
Egyptian curses already existed.
- After the enormous losses
of the First World War is we see
a resurgence in interest in spiritualism.
Spiritualism is the belief that
we can contact the deceased
after they've died.
What you start to see,
is spiritualists claiming
that Tutankhamun's spirit
is communicating with them.
This is particularly interesting, I think,
given that Lord Carnarvon
himself was a spiritualist.
- In the early 1920s.
So people had just gone
through a global pandemic,
also through a war where a
lot of young men had died
very early on.
It was a time when the
discovery of the remains
of a very young man who
had also died prematurely
very much resonated in the Western world.
And also, quite frankly,
people wanted to be distracted.
We are talking about a time
with severe economic problems.
Life wasn't easy,
and I think it's simply
part of your nature
that when the opportunity comes,
people like to be distracted.
And then better story to tell
than that of an Aristocrat
being struck down by an ancient curse.
I think that the discovery
of the tomb was quite rightly perceived
as something absolutely
sensational, and unique,
and unprecedented.
It really was the first
time that a royal tomb
was discovered more or less intact.
And Carter was swamped
in letters and telegrams
and Tut-mania kicked in.
And all of that very much
prepared the grounds for,
of course, that's the moment
when myths are created.
I think this is something
that is really important
to be considered when it comes
to the birth of the curse
of Tutankhamun.
The other newspapers didn't
have their own story to tell,
but finally with the curse,
they had their own story to tell.
- The press has an absolute field day,
and the people who were
interviewed by the press crucially,
who push the story of
supernatural forces at work
who suggest that there
are secret hidden poisons
within the tomb are authors
who have themselves written stories
about vengeful ancient Egyptian entities,
people like Marie Carelli
and Arthur Conan Doyle.
So one of the things that you see
after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb
and certainly after the death
of Lord Carnarvon in 1923,
is a republication of lots
of 19th-century texts,
specifically Victorian texts,
which feature these ancient
Egyptian antagonists.
So Marie Carelli's novel "Ziska"
from 1897 is republished.
You also get Arthur
Conan Doyle's mummy story
"Lot No. 249", which comes out again.
So you could very skeptically look at this
and think that these
authors have an interest
in the mummy's curse because
their work will be republished.
There may be some kind
of financial incentive
to speak to the papers
and push those theories,
but certainly, in terms of
what people want to consume
audiences were returning to this fiction
and rereading it again in
light of contemporary events.
But I think ancient Egypt captures
so many occult imaginations
in the late 19th,
early 20th centuries because
of its very complicated
funerary rites, so "The Book of the Dead"
becomes incredibly
popular with occultists.
I think ideas of the various components
of the soul in ancient Egypt.
So things like the Ka,
being able to exit the body
and almost functioning as a
kind of double of the body
felt quite a lot like the
concept of astral projection,
of being able to leave one's
body and go somewhere else.
So I think there were lots of concepts
that really appealed to occultists
that seemed to chime
with ideas that they were interested in.
And they could chart that back in theory
to an ancient Egyptian origin point
and almost give an
authority or authenticity
to what they themselves were doing.
Simply put, the evidence that
the curse is more fiction
than fact is the average life
expectancy of people who were
involved in the excavations.
So there's actually been a medical study
which looked at the average age of death
of the people involved with the tomb
and the average age of death
in the general population.
And they found that you
are slightly more likely
to die a little bit younger
if you were involved
in the Tutankhamun excavations.
But statistically speaking,
there was nothing really in it.
- So we are looking at a period
of time without vaccines,
without any antiviral drugs,
even without any antibiotics.
Penicillin was only developed in 1928.
The average life expectance of a man
in the 1920s and 30s was 60.
So looking at the
people, the photographer,
Harry Burton died age 60 of diabetes.
The engineer Arthur Callender died age 60.
Arthur Mayes died a few years
after he left the excavation team.
He worked on the tomb from 1922 to 1924,
but he already left for health reasons.
He was suffering from pleurisy
and then died of tuberculosis.
Looking at Carter
himself, he died in 1939,
age 64 from Hodgkin's disease.
The most prominent case is
obviously Lord Carnarvon.
He was bitten by a mosquito
and then while he was shaving,
the wound got infected,
got blood poisoning, which
developed into pneumonia,
and then he died.
Lord Carnarvon died on
the 5th of April 1923.
Arthur Mayes left the
excavation team in 1924,
but the mummified body of Tutankhamun
was actually not unwrapped
until November 1925.
So neither Mayes nor Carnarvon ever saw
or came in contact with
the body of Tutankhamun.
- The question as to why
the curse got so popular
is a really interesting one.
And I think we get a sense
of perhaps imperial guilt
on the part of the British
and other Europeans.
The sense that disturbing
these resting places
is something that actually
feels uncomfortable.
And you start to see people
writing to newspapers saying,
surely we shouldn't be doing this,
and surely we shouldn't be
putting mummified remains
in museums in glass cases.
It's not what those
individuals would've wanted.
So we definitely get more of
a sense of a moral gray area
that people are exploring here.
And I wonder whether
some of the curse stories
is responding to that discomfort actually.
- It's worthwhile noting
that the Egyptians
did actually include curses in some tombs,
but they were normally
against the embezzlement
of funerary endowments
rather than anything to do
with actually penetrating a tomb.
- One of the things that the
ancient Egyptians believed
was that the body had to remain intact
and that you needed everything
for the afterlife to be buried with you.
So there are instances
where you get people
protecting their burials
and say, don't come and
disturb these remains,
or all of my things or bad
things will happen to you,
but certainly not the
mummy's curse as we know it
as a modern cultural phenomenon.
There are other stories of
supposedly unlucky artifacts
that cause people to suffer misfortune
and premature death,
certainly in the 19th-century
and early 20th-century
before the discovery
of Tutankhamun's tomb.
So one famous example concerns an artifact
which is held in the British Museum.
It's referred to as the
unlucky mummy colloquially,
but it's actually a wooden mummy board.
So it's not human remains at all.
It's a wooden resemblance of
an individual which would sit
atop their body in the sarcophagus.
The unlucky mummy's been
tied to loads of accidents
that have befallen people over the years.
And supposedly it was
given to the British Museum
to stop its previous owner from suffering
these misfortunes themselves.
It was donated to the British Museum
to get it out of the house, essentially.
The unlucky mummy has such
an interesting, again,
snowballing of mythology surrounding it,
that you actually get one
Egyptologist, Margaret Murray,
where she told some Egyptology students
that this mummy board had actually been
on the Titanic when it sank.
But, of course, it never was.
It's just an instance of an Egyptologist
telling a spooky story.
And of course, this is
exactly the kind of thing
that gets repeated and goes
down through the decades,
ad nauseam.
Yes, there were some
very high-profile deaths
connected to the Tutankhamun excavations,
but we all have to die someday.
And it may just be after we've
entered an Egyptian tomb.
- It took Howard Carter
and his team altogether 10 years
to fully excavate the tomb,
to clear it, to transport
the objects to Cairo.
And this is a number I think
many people are not aware of.
Archeology is not what Indiana
Jones is doing in the movies
as much as I love the films.
But we do not run into a temple,
grab a goblet, and run out again.
So instead, we have a lot of
specialists on excavations,
and we produce thousands of records.
- Following discovery of the tomb,
the objects were progressively taken
to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Then as we moved into the 1960s,
a number of exhibitions
of material from the tomb
started to leave Egypt.
These exhibitions, in many
ways revived the Tut-mania
of the 1920s and 1930s.
- So in terms of the
exhibitions themselves,
the amounts of objects from
Tutankhamun's tomb is enormous.
And so there's a very
careful curation process
in terms of what actually gets selected
and what travels around the world.
And of course, those most famous artifacts
like Tutankhamun's funerary mask,
it's just gonna be one of those artifacts
that people want to
see all over the world.
And so when you see photographs
of the exhibitions themselves,
you see photographs
of particularly that most famous artifact,
the funerary mask with
celebrities, royalty, politicians,
the most famous, and
important, and powerful people
all over the world, engaging
with these symbols of power
and absolute monarchy in really
interesting symbolic ways.
- I think our persisting interest
and fascination for ancient Egypt
comes partly from its recognizability.
It's one of the few cultures
where almost anybody can recognize it,
it's a certain number of icons
which have passed into
international culture.
And there's also this
underlying feeling of mystery.
In most countries
in the Western world,
in North America, if you
go to a bigger museum,
you will find an Egyptian collection.
So it is very accessible.
Ancient Egypt is part
of school curriculum.
Kids already grow up with ancient Egypt.
- If you walk around
museum displays devoted
to ancient Egypt, we almost see one
of two stories cropping up.
The first is that they were just like us.
So you walk into the gallery
and you see ancient Egyptian eyeliner
and you think, oh yeah, just like me.
The other story, of course,
is one that's very different.
You walk into a gallery and
the story that is curated
for you is these people
are very different to us.
And I think that difference is something
that people find utterly captivating.
Ancient Egypt
is perceived as unique
and people are drawn to the unique.
- This idea of a very
complex funerary culture.
This idea of monumentality
and the idea of Egypt
that actually perhaps isn't
quite historically accurate,
but the version of Egypt
we have in our heads,
which is kind of gilded,
and luxurious, and opulent,
despite the fact that
the gilded artifacts,
the opulence is reserved
for the elite few.
So I think it is those
two different stories
that work in tandem.
They're just like us,
but they're so different.
And I think we yearn for that connection,
but we're also really struck
and startled by that huge gulf I think
that separates us from them.
- And then on top of that,
I think there are unfortunately
are a lot of things
that I would call stereotypes.
That's what people are fascinated with,
and which as an Egyptologist,
I fight very hard
to help people to overcome the stereotypes
and see that there is so
much more to ancient Egypt
than just gold, and mummies, and pyramids.
Tutankhamun
has become the most famous
of all the Pharaohs.
- Most people when they think
of Tutankhamun, they see all the gold.
They see semi-precious stones,
they see alabaster vases.
The discovery of the tomb
was quite widely perceived
as something absolutely
sensational, and unique,
and unprecedented.
- Ancient Egypt has perceived as unique
and people are drawn to it.
Everyone
wanted to see Tutankhamun.
However,
stories of mysterious events
seem to follow the opening
of the ancient tomb.
- The idea of the mummy's curse
is a particularly seductive narrative.
I think a lot of people were
confirmed in their suspicions
that no good would come
of disturbing the dead.
- And then what better story to tell
than that of an aristocrat
being struck down
by an ancient curse?
Egypt, 1922,
after a lengthy seven-year search,
Howard Carter, along with his
benefactor Lord Carnarvon,
opened the tomb of Tutankhamun.
It was the first time in over 3000 years
it had been disturbed.
- As the dig progresses,
it's not long before Carnarvon
starts to develop an illness.
The story goes that he got
a mosquito bite on a cheek,
and that when he was shaving,
he caught that mosquito bite,
and reopening that wound, it got infected
and that led to blood poisoning.
And then Lord
Carnarvon dropped dead.
- Almost immediately, the
idea that he was the victim
of some kind of curse
was being put around.
The idea of the mummy's curse
quickly gained traction.
It was theorized that the Lord's death
had been caused by elementals
created to guard the royal tomb.
For many it appeared that the
Boy King's spirit was awoken
and sought revenge
against the perpetrators.
- When Lord Carnarvon died
after the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb
postdating that event
by a matter of months.
I think a lot of people were
confirmed in their suspicions
that no good would come
of disturbing the dead.
There's a story that often gets repeated
about Carnarvon's dog howling
and suddenly dropping down
dead at the same moment.
There are other stories
about various people
mysteriously dying or
suffering unexpected fates.
Stories flooded newspapers
of visitors to the tomb
developing illnesses
and dying soon after.
There were accounts of houses burning down
then flooding upon being rebuilt,
it was reported that ancient
curses were inscribed
within the tomb warning
those who disturbed it.
- So Carnarvon's death
within a matter of months
of the tomb being discovered and opened
is the event that gets people talking
about the mummy's curse.
And interestingly, it's not
actually after his death
that those rumors start to circulate.
People start to speculate
about the Pharaoh's spirit
seeking vengeance for
disturbance of his grave,
even while Carnarvon's
illness is just being reported
in the press.
So as soon as Carnarvon starts to get ill,
that's when these stories
start to circulate.
- Howard Carter was an archeologist
who'd worked in Egypt
since his late teens.
He'd also worked for
the Egyptian government
as one of the antiquity inspectors,
but then had left under
something of a cloud in 1905.
- Howard Carter was an Egyptologist
who didn't have that
privilege an upbringing.
He was from a very artistic family,
but he didn't go to public school,
he didn't go to university.
So his training was
very much on the ground
with excavators like Flinders Petrie,
he's very famous for developing
a rigorous archeological method.
I think for Carter, he had a lot to prove,
to prove himself a gentleman.
- So when he first
arrived in Egypt in 1891,
when he was only 17 years old,
he actually did not arrive
as an archeologist.
He didn't work as an archeologist,
but he was hired as an
artist, as a draftsman.
- Around the same kind of
time, the Earl of Carnarvon
had taken up an interest in Egyptology
and had obtained permission
to undertake excavations.
- The 5th Earl of
Carnarvon is an aristocrat
born with a title.
He becomes interested in Egypt
very early in the 20th-century.
- So the reason Carnarvon was
in the position to excavate,
financial position was that he was married
to a woman called Almina Herbert
and she was in all likelihood,
the illegitimate daughter
of the American banker, Alfred Rothschild.
And so when they got married,
he put up a very nice dowry
of half a million pounds sterling,
which is nowadays equivalent
to about 70 billion.
And that enabled the
couple to live very nicely,
travel, collect antiquities,
and also excavate.
And Carnarvon made it to
the point where he realized
that he needs expert help.
- Carter was introduced to Carnarvon
and the two of them henceforth
worked together as a team.
- One had the financial
support but not the expertise.
The other one had the
expertise, but not the money.
And they were kind of
a match made in heaven.
- In the 1920s and 1930s,
Egypt is a playground for the
rich and famous, the elite.
So what you get is
people traveling to Egypt
for those winter months when the weather
is really, really nice.
And essentially, schmoozing and partying
and having a really good time
in European-style hotels,
very glamorous, very modern.
And just enjoying this really
quite fabulous social scene.
So there is this political
friction, this social friction
between Egyptians and
Europeans at the time.
The British invaded Egypt back in 1882
and have essentially been
in charge since that time.
Egyptian independence is on the horizon,
but certainly when it
comes to excavations,
these become particular
moments of national importance
where we see Egyptian nationalists
seizing on the Pharaohs
as symbols of Egyptian identity
and in theory, freedom.
Whereas the British, the
French, and other Europeans
still hold these really
significant roles in say,
the museums and antiquities
services in Egypt at the time.
So certainly a time of friction
between Egyptians and Europeans.
- So Carnarvon and Howard Carter
wanted to work in the Valley of the Kings.
The problem was that the
excavation permission
was in the hands of Theodore Davis,
who was an American lawyer, a
businessman come archeologist,
exploring more than 30 tombs,
royal and non-royal tombs.
- The Valley of the Kings has,
you could tell by the name,
a certain reputation for
where particular members
of Egyptian royalty are buried.
- The Valley of the Kings
is a body which is basically
a dried-up watercourse on the West Bank
near the modern city of Luxor.
And from the beginning of
the Egyptian 18th dynasty,
which is around about 1500 BC.
It'd been the place for the
burial of Egyptian Kings.
Prior to this, Kings are
generally buried under pyramids,
but those were no longer being used.
And instead, the royal tomb
comprised to have the Kings
and then a couple of kilometers away,
a temple for the worship
of the King's spirit.
- The first map of the Valley of the Kings
and first of tombs that
were known at this time
was made in 1799,
by members of Napoleon's
expedition to Egypt.
Then throughout the 19th-century,
the European exploration
of the Valley of the Kings continued.
Of course, it was hampered by the fact
that already in antiquity,
the majority of basically
all of the royal tombs
had been blocked.
Theodore Davis considered
the Valley of the Kings
to be exhausted, so he gave
up his excavation permit,
and then Lord Carnarvon
applied for it, got granted.
He signed it in early 1915.
- He knew that the valley had
been extensively excavated
over the previous century and a half.
However, he was aware there
were a number of areas
that have not yet been investigated.
And he was also aware
that there were a handful
of Kings whose tombs were unknown.
- Due to the outbreak of the first war,
there was a small delay.
- So Carter and Carnarvon
who were both excavating
before the war, paused
excavations during the war,
during which time Carnarvon
was actually hosting events
like spiritualist seances
in his ancestral seat
in Highclere Castle.
And after the First World
War, excavations resumed
and it's after the First World War,
fairly soon-ish after its conclusion
that the tomb of
Tutankhamun was discovered.
- The first thing that Howard Carter did
was that he created a map
and then through the seasons,
they would excavate from the
surface down to the bedrock
to make sure not to miss anything.
Grid square by grid square.
- The discovery of the tomb
was basically the result
of systematic clearance.
There was an area which
hadn't been touched,
partly because it was right
in front of another tomb,
which was very popular with tourists.
- Archeologists and tourists
don't go together very well,
so archeologists had
always tried to quiet it.
And Carter's solution was just to start
the excavation season a little bit earlier
before the tourists season kicked in.
So he started on the
1st of November in 1922.
- So basically they started
clearing down through debris,
then finding a layer of which contained
the remains of work or art,
which dated to two or 300
years after Tutankhamun's time.
And then under that level
where they were getting down
to the original bedrock,
one of the workmen spotted something
which looked like the edge of a step.
Carter confirmed that
and stairway leading
into Tutankhamun's tomb
was then revealed.
- On the morning of the 4th of November,
the first step of a
staircase was discovered,
rock-cut staircase.
And so on the evening
of the 4th of November,
he writes into his diary,
the only time ever,
he scribbles all over the page
instead of writing very neatly,
he writes down the now-famous words,
first steps for King Valley.
They started clearing what
proved to be a rock-cut stairway
until he hit a plastered door.
And then on the 5th of November,
he did something quite superhuman.
He decided that he cannot continue
and has to wait until his sponsor
and his friend Lord
Carnarvon is present as well.
- So they're waiting for
Carnarvon to come over
with his daughter to get to the tomb.
And they're not going to peer inside.
They're not going to make that first hole
until Carnarvon is present.
And so everyone's waiting,
you can only imagine
how much anticipation
characterized the atmosphere.
- And then on the morning
of the 26th of November,
it was finally time that Howard Carter
made a tiny breach into the doorway
and then became the first person
after 3000 years to look
inside the tomb of Tutankhamun.
He describes this moment
very vividly in his excavation journal.
When Lord Carnarvon asked
him, "Can you see anything?"
He said, "Yes, it is wonderful."
- The initial view which Carter
had into the first chamber
was that it was a rectangular
room filled with objects.
- When the tomb was first opened,
it's quite a cramped space,
it was quite a busy space.
A lot of objects were stacked
up against each other,
stacked up against the wall.
- It was likened to a townhouse
to been closed up for the summer.
The range of material found in the tomb
was quite extraordinary.
You have things intimately
related to the mummy,
so therefore you've got the nest
of coffins in which it was housed.
The great sarcophagus within
that which they were housed,
and also with the containers
for the mummified intestines of the King.
- Tutankhamen's funerary mask,
which sat directly atop
his mummified remains,
is one of the most famous
egyptological artifacts
of all time.
And I think it captures
the popular imagination
because of its glamorous gold quality.
- Before the discovery of his tomb,
Tutankhamun was known to
have been a minor king
of the late 14th century BC.
However, his exact
relationships were unclear.
He was certainly a son-in-law
of the so-called heretic King Akhenaten.
But whether he was a
member of the royal family
or simply a nobleman who'd
married a princess was unknown.
- So what was known was that
he had a very short reign,
probably ran only for 10
years and died quite young.
- So a very short reign,
but one in which crucially,
we see a reversal
of the religious reforms
brought in by his father.
So return to polytheism,
so multiple deities
rather than monotheism a single deity,
which was brought in by Akhenaten.
- I think the value of the discovery
in terms of what have we
learned about Tutankhamun
lies in the fact that
there were quite a lot
of personal items in the tomb
that actually really give
us a glimpse of that person.
So he wasn't only King,
he was also a human being.
And I'm always quite
touched by some of the finds
in his tomb.
There's for instance, small furniture
clearly made for a child.
There is a box for shaving equipment
that says for his Majesty
when he was a boy,
so probably contained his
first shaving equipment.
There's also a lock of hair
of his grandmother, Tiye,
in the tomb.
And then, of course, sadly,
there are also good
mummified remains of his two
prematurely born daughters.
- To me, the most significant artifacts
found within that tomb are the bodies
of Tutankhamun's daughters.
So we have two miniature sarcophagi,
two miniature coffins,
inside are two babies.
- Most people, when they
think of Tutankhamun
they see all the gold.
They see semi-precious stones.
They see alabaster vases.
But a lot of the material was
actually organic material.
So we are talking about
linen, clothes, robes,
yeah, even Tutankhamun's underwear,
more than a hundred pairs of them,
there were shoes made of leather.
Of course, inside the vases
you had perfumes and oils.
- So the ancient Egyptians
believed that after death,
their heart would be weighed
against the feather of truth.
And to get to the underworld
that would have to balance favorably.
If it didn't balance favorably,
they would be eaten by a devourer entity.
So hopefully you get past the first stage,
and then when you get to the afterlife,
you enjoy eternal life in
theory with all of the things
with which you are buried
and what they represent.
So you find people buried
with food and drink.
You find people buried
often with multiple shabtis,
which are little humanoid
pieces, which represent servants
or people who do various tasks
for you in the afterlife.
So the more you are buried
with supposedly the nicer
and more luxurious your
afterlife would be.
The objects within the tomb were preserved
to an incredible degree.
Obviously, this is a tomb
that has been almost entirely undisturbed.
And as a result, these
very delicate artifacts
remain almost captured
like a snapshot in time.
On the other hand, it does mean
that there are some things in there
that are incredibly delicate.
- The one thing which was in
a very, very bad condition
was the King's mummy.
And this was due to the fact
that the ancient priests
had poured large amounts of unguents,
which is various sacred
oils all over the body
before they closed the coffin.
And those sacred oils have carbonized
and gradually almost burnt
parts of the mummy's flesh.
Also, those oils had completely solidified
so that when it came to
trying to unwrap the mummy,
the mummy actually had to be cut to pieces
to actually get it outta the
coffin and outta its wrappings.
- One of the things that
people don't tend to know
about Tutankhamun's remains
is that in the process
of removing them from their coffin,
they were actually broken
up into lots of pieces.
His arms, for instance, he
was also severed at the hips,
his head was removed from his body.
The excavators themselves
essentially glued the pieces
of his body back together.
I think that's one of the
things, one of the parts
of the story that's been
deliberately obscured
because people find
that idea so horrifying
that we would treat human
remains in that way.
- The world reaction to
the tomb of Tutankhamun
was of course absolutely
spectacular, phenomenal,
the general public reacted
in an unprecedented way.
And it's important to keep
in mind that of course,
this was the first time an
event like this was transmitted
around the globe in real-time.
The discovery also had a major
impact on popular culture
in every sector, literature, theater,
and fashion, in design, you name it.
- The discovery of the tomb
sparked a wave of Egyptomania,
this ranged from fashion
to music, to advertising.
Egyptomania is the term
that people use to describe
a fascination for ancient Egypt,
which can actually be quite
divorced from ancient Egypt
as it existed as an ancient civilization.
It's the ancient Egypt of the imagination.
It's a fantastical take on ancient Egypt.
And often this falls back to
stereotypes like this idea
of an exotic culture, an orientalized,
erotic culture often as well,
and often falling back to tropes of Egypt
being a place of despotism in the Bible.
So actually, Egyptomania
doesn't necessarily represent
ancient Egypt as it
was, but a version of it
that can be quite dark, dangerous,
and that often is the version of Egypt
that captures the popular imagination.
- So tourists flooded
the Valley of the Kings.
Everyone wanted to see
Tutankhamun, children, academics,
journalists, royalty alike.
And so the wish to report on the tomb
and the discovery from
the side of the media
was massive as well.
Journalists like the tourists flooded
the Valley of the Kings
trying to get a picture
of the archeologists or objects
when they left the tomb.
And in the first month,
this all happened in a very chaotic way.
- The excavators were besieged
by journalists wanting a story.
This led to the Carnarvon
making the Times Newspaper
the only route for news to
come outta the excavation team.
- And so that meant that only
the journalist from the Times
was allowed to make
the official interviews
with the excavators.
And only the Times got
the official photographs
that were taken by Harry Burton,
and then the other newspapers
had to buy the photographs off the Times.
And as you can imagine,
that very much angered
and alienated not only the foreign,
but also the Egyptian press.
- The reason the deal with
the Times caused controversy
in Egypt is because the Egyptians
weren't being given access
to information about their
own cultural heritage.
And politically this was
seen as a real misstep
because the British are being
fed this information directly,
which the Egyptians are
then getting secondhand.
So there really was a two-tier system.
And it was the British press
specifically, the Times
that were getting all of the information,
all of the interviews
and the Egyptian press
and other news outlets who were
coming to the table second.
But this just simply annoyed
and also led directly to the ledging
of the curse of Tutankhamun.
- And so what happens,
is we start to get this almost snowballing
where anybody with any connection
whatsoever to the tomb,
whether they visited it briefly,
or whether they're an
excavator involved in the dig,
as soon as anything bad happens to them,
it just gets attributed
to the mummy's curse.
But I think the idea of the mummy's curse
is a particularly seductive narrative
because burial sites of
the ancient Egyptian dead,
of royalty in particular, are so lavish.
- From the beginning,
people were interested in ancient Egypt.
It was very clear that ancient
Egyptian funerary beliefs
played a very crucial role
in ancient Egyptian culture.
And it was known that ancient Egyptians
prepared very carefully for their journey
through the underlife,
or they had a very distinct idea
about what comes after death.
So already in Victorian
times, this was perceived
as a crucial element of
ancient Egyptian culture.
In the Victorian society,
people did indulge in events
like mummy unwrappings.
And the idea of ancient
Egyptian curses already existed.
- After the enormous losses
of the First World War is we see
a resurgence in interest in spiritualism.
Spiritualism is the belief that
we can contact the deceased
after they've died.
What you start to see,
is spiritualists claiming
that Tutankhamun's spirit
is communicating with them.
This is particularly interesting, I think,
given that Lord Carnarvon
himself was a spiritualist.
- In the early 1920s.
So people had just gone
through a global pandemic,
also through a war where a
lot of young men had died
very early on.
It was a time when the
discovery of the remains
of a very young man who
had also died prematurely
very much resonated in the Western world.
And also, quite frankly,
people wanted to be distracted.
We are talking about a time
with severe economic problems.
Life wasn't easy,
and I think it's simply
part of your nature
that when the opportunity comes,
people like to be distracted.
And then better story to tell
than that of an Aristocrat
being struck down by an ancient curse.
I think that the discovery
of the tomb was quite rightly perceived
as something absolutely
sensational, and unique,
and unprecedented.
It really was the first
time that a royal tomb
was discovered more or less intact.
And Carter was swamped
in letters and telegrams
and Tut-mania kicked in.
And all of that very much
prepared the grounds for,
of course, that's the moment
when myths are created.
I think this is something
that is really important
to be considered when it comes
to the birth of the curse
of Tutankhamun.
The other newspapers didn't
have their own story to tell,
but finally with the curse,
they had their own story to tell.
- The press has an absolute field day,
and the people who were
interviewed by the press crucially,
who push the story of
supernatural forces at work
who suggest that there
are secret hidden poisons
within the tomb are authors
who have themselves written stories
about vengeful ancient Egyptian entities,
people like Marie Carelli
and Arthur Conan Doyle.
So one of the things that you see
after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb
and certainly after the death
of Lord Carnarvon in 1923,
is a republication of lots
of 19th-century texts,
specifically Victorian texts,
which feature these ancient
Egyptian antagonists.
So Marie Carelli's novel "Ziska"
from 1897 is republished.
You also get Arthur
Conan Doyle's mummy story
"Lot No. 249", which comes out again.
So you could very skeptically look at this
and think that these
authors have an interest
in the mummy's curse because
their work will be republished.
There may be some kind
of financial incentive
to speak to the papers
and push those theories,
but certainly, in terms of
what people want to consume
audiences were returning to this fiction
and rereading it again in
light of contemporary events.
But I think ancient Egypt captures
so many occult imaginations
in the late 19th,
early 20th centuries because
of its very complicated
funerary rites, so "The Book of the Dead"
becomes incredibly
popular with occultists.
I think ideas of the various components
of the soul in ancient Egypt.
So things like the Ka,
being able to exit the body
and almost functioning as a
kind of double of the body
felt quite a lot like the
concept of astral projection,
of being able to leave one's
body and go somewhere else.
So I think there were lots of concepts
that really appealed to occultists
that seemed to chime
with ideas that they were interested in.
And they could chart that back in theory
to an ancient Egyptian origin point
and almost give an
authority or authenticity
to what they themselves were doing.
Simply put, the evidence that
the curse is more fiction
than fact is the average life
expectancy of people who were
involved in the excavations.
So there's actually been a medical study
which looked at the average age of death
of the people involved with the tomb
and the average age of death
in the general population.
And they found that you
are slightly more likely
to die a little bit younger
if you were involved
in the Tutankhamun excavations.
But statistically speaking,
there was nothing really in it.
- So we are looking at a period
of time without vaccines,
without any antiviral drugs,
even without any antibiotics.
Penicillin was only developed in 1928.
The average life expectance of a man
in the 1920s and 30s was 60.
So looking at the
people, the photographer,
Harry Burton died age 60 of diabetes.
The engineer Arthur Callender died age 60.
Arthur Mayes died a few years
after he left the excavation team.
He worked on the tomb from 1922 to 1924,
but he already left for health reasons.
He was suffering from pleurisy
and then died of tuberculosis.
Looking at Carter
himself, he died in 1939,
age 64 from Hodgkin's disease.
The most prominent case is
obviously Lord Carnarvon.
He was bitten by a mosquito
and then while he was shaving,
the wound got infected,
got blood poisoning, which
developed into pneumonia,
and then he died.
Lord Carnarvon died on
the 5th of April 1923.
Arthur Mayes left the
excavation team in 1924,
but the mummified body of Tutankhamun
was actually not unwrapped
until November 1925.
So neither Mayes nor Carnarvon ever saw
or came in contact with
the body of Tutankhamun.
- The question as to why
the curse got so popular
is a really interesting one.
And I think we get a sense
of perhaps imperial guilt
on the part of the British
and other Europeans.
The sense that disturbing
these resting places
is something that actually
feels uncomfortable.
And you start to see people
writing to newspapers saying,
surely we shouldn't be doing this,
and surely we shouldn't be
putting mummified remains
in museums in glass cases.
It's not what those
individuals would've wanted.
So we definitely get more of
a sense of a moral gray area
that people are exploring here.
And I wonder whether
some of the curse stories
is responding to that discomfort actually.
- It's worthwhile noting
that the Egyptians
did actually include curses in some tombs,
but they were normally
against the embezzlement
of funerary endowments
rather than anything to do
with actually penetrating a tomb.
- One of the things that the
ancient Egyptians believed
was that the body had to remain intact
and that you needed everything
for the afterlife to be buried with you.
So there are instances
where you get people
protecting their burials
and say, don't come and
disturb these remains,
or all of my things or bad
things will happen to you,
but certainly not the
mummy's curse as we know it
as a modern cultural phenomenon.
There are other stories of
supposedly unlucky artifacts
that cause people to suffer misfortune
and premature death,
certainly in the 19th-century
and early 20th-century
before the discovery
of Tutankhamun's tomb.
So one famous example concerns an artifact
which is held in the British Museum.
It's referred to as the
unlucky mummy colloquially,
but it's actually a wooden mummy board.
So it's not human remains at all.
It's a wooden resemblance of
an individual which would sit
atop their body in the sarcophagus.
The unlucky mummy's been
tied to loads of accidents
that have befallen people over the years.
And supposedly it was
given to the British Museum
to stop its previous owner from suffering
these misfortunes themselves.
It was donated to the British Museum
to get it out of the house, essentially.
The unlucky mummy has such
an interesting, again,
snowballing of mythology surrounding it,
that you actually get one
Egyptologist, Margaret Murray,
where she told some Egyptology students
that this mummy board had actually been
on the Titanic when it sank.
But, of course, it never was.
It's just an instance of an Egyptologist
telling a spooky story.
And of course, this is
exactly the kind of thing
that gets repeated and goes
down through the decades,
ad nauseam.
Yes, there were some
very high-profile deaths
connected to the Tutankhamun excavations,
but we all have to die someday.
And it may just be after we've
entered an Egyptian tomb.
- It took Howard Carter
and his team altogether 10 years
to fully excavate the tomb,
to clear it, to transport
the objects to Cairo.
And this is a number I think
many people are not aware of.
Archeology is not what Indiana
Jones is doing in the movies
as much as I love the films.
But we do not run into a temple,
grab a goblet, and run out again.
So instead, we have a lot of
specialists on excavations,
and we produce thousands of records.
- Following discovery of the tomb,
the objects were progressively taken
to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Then as we moved into the 1960s,
a number of exhibitions
of material from the tomb
started to leave Egypt.
These exhibitions, in many
ways revived the Tut-mania
of the 1920s and 1930s.
- So in terms of the
exhibitions themselves,
the amounts of objects from
Tutankhamun's tomb is enormous.
And so there's a very
careful curation process
in terms of what actually gets selected
and what travels around the world.
And of course, those most famous artifacts
like Tutankhamun's funerary mask,
it's just gonna be one of those artifacts
that people want to
see all over the world.
And so when you see photographs
of the exhibitions themselves,
you see photographs
of particularly that most famous artifact,
the funerary mask with
celebrities, royalty, politicians,
the most famous, and
important, and powerful people
all over the world, engaging
with these symbols of power
and absolute monarchy in really
interesting symbolic ways.
- I think our persisting interest
and fascination for ancient Egypt
comes partly from its recognizability.
It's one of the few cultures
where almost anybody can recognize it,
it's a certain number of icons
which have passed into
international culture.
And there's also this
underlying feeling of mystery.
In most countries
in the Western world,
in North America, if you
go to a bigger museum,
you will find an Egyptian collection.
So it is very accessible.
Ancient Egypt is part
of school curriculum.
Kids already grow up with ancient Egypt.
- If you walk around
museum displays devoted
to ancient Egypt, we almost see one
of two stories cropping up.
The first is that they were just like us.
So you walk into the gallery
and you see ancient Egyptian eyeliner
and you think, oh yeah, just like me.
The other story, of course,
is one that's very different.
You walk into a gallery and
the story that is curated
for you is these people
are very different to us.
And I think that difference is something
that people find utterly captivating.
Ancient Egypt
is perceived as unique
and people are drawn to the unique.
- This idea of a very
complex funerary culture.
This idea of monumentality
and the idea of Egypt
that actually perhaps isn't
quite historically accurate,
but the version of Egypt
we have in our heads,
which is kind of gilded,
and luxurious, and opulent,
despite the fact that
the gilded artifacts,
the opulence is reserved
for the elite few.
So I think it is those
two different stories
that work in tandem.
They're just like us,
but they're so different.
And I think we yearn for that connection,
but we're also really struck
and startled by that huge gulf I think
that separates us from them.
- And then on top of that,
I think there are unfortunately
are a lot of things
that I would call stereotypes.
That's what people are fascinated with,
and which as an Egyptologist,
I fight very hard
to help people to overcome the stereotypes
and see that there is so
much more to ancient Egypt
than just gold, and mummies, and pyramids.