Curse of Tutankhamun exposed: The archaeologists lived into their seventies

The mummy's curse seemed to be coming true when Lord Carnarvon died suddenly in April 1923, two months after the tomb of Tutankhamun was opened. But new research has found a flaw in the theory that anyone who disturbed the ancient Egyptian king's resting place would die horribly: most of those who should have been afflicted lived to a ripe old age.

The tale of the curse became front-page news in the Twenties after Lord Carnarvon, who married into the banking Rothschild family and funded the Tutankhamun expedition, got a mosquito bite which became infected, leading to blood poisoning and pneumonia; his dog was even said to have bayed and died at just the time his master breathed his last.

Untimely deaths are also assumed to have befallen many of the Westerners who visited the tomb in the same exploration, including Alb Lythgoe, an explorer who died in 1934 of a stroke.

But Mark Nelson, of Monash University in Melbourne, has checked the lifelines of all 26 people who would have been "exposed" to the curse. It is "assumed to be a physical rather than a metaphysical entity", Dr Nelson writes in the British Medical Journal today.

The reality is that most of the people there survived, on average, to 70. This included Howard Carter, who actually broke the seals to the tomb so would be expected to have been the principal object of any curse, physical or metaphysical. But it is true his canary was swallowed by a cobra that day.

Newspapers at the time reported that the tomb was engraved with a curse promising that "Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the king", although there is no record of such an inscription being found. More likely it was inspired by a warning by the novelist Mary Mackay in late March 1923, suggesting there would be "dire consequences" for anyone who had entered the tomb.

Dr Nelson has a simpler explanation, suggesting that "was almost certainly generated by rival newspapers shut out of the find of the century when exclusive rights were given to The Times of London."

He researched all the "exposed" Westerners, any of those who entered the tomb on the day the seal was broken in February 1923, or were at the opening of the sarcophagus in February 1926, or the opening of the coffins in October 1926, or the examination of the mummy in November 1926. That made a total of 26 people, each having between one and four "exposures" to any curse.

For comparison, he looked at those who were in Egypt but not present at any of those events. By comparing their age at death, he found no significant difference between the exposed and unexposed; the latter lived on average to 75, which is not statistically significant.

Professor Carter, who might have been expected to be worried, said he had no time for the curse. "All sane people should dismiss such inventions with contempt," he said. But he did take the precaution on entering the tomb of taking specimens of air, and swabs from the sarcophagus, fearing some sort of ancient infection. But they all turned out to be "absolutely sterile". Dr Nelson also notes that the "unexposed" group includes many spouses of the explorers, almost all women, who happen to live longer anyway.

Other sources for the myth of the mummy's curse include an 1869 short story called Lost in a Pyramid: the Mummy's Curse, by Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, and a tale by the American painter Joseph Smith about the same time of a curse on Akhenaton, Tutankhamun's father-in-law. It was said that because he unified the pantheon of Egyptian gods into the single one of Ra, the Sun God, that the priests cursed his body and soul "to wander separately in space, never to be reunited".

Dr Nelson found no evidence of a Tutankhamun curse. "Perhaps finally, it, like the tragic boy king himself, may be put to rest," he said.