Luxor

The Curse of Tutankhamun

After the opening of tomb KV62 in the Valley of the Kings in 1922–23, and Lord Carnarvon's sudden death from blood poisoning following a mosquito bite, the newspapers announced the pharaoh's curse and attributed to it every death with any connection to the excavation. There is no curse inscription in the tomb. As early as 1934 the Egyptologist Herbert Winlock counted: of the twenty-six people present at the opening, six died within ten years. In 2002 Mark Nelson of Monash University published a study in the British Medical Journal of forty-four westerners who were in Egypt: the survival of those who entered the tomb and those who did not was the same. Howard Carter lived seventeen years after the dig.