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.
The Vinland Map
A parchment that surfaced with a European dealer in 1957 and was bought for Yale: a fifteenth-century world map with an island of Vinland drawn west of Greenland — America, decades before Columbus. Yale announced it in 1965, on the eve of Columbus Day, and the argument ran for half a century. In 1974 Walter McCrone found anatase in the ink, a form of titanium dioxide first manufactured in the 1920s. Yale gave the final answer in September 2021: X-ray fluorescence mapping showed titanium ink along every line of the map, and beneath it an erased medieval inscription. The parchment is genuine; the map on it is not.
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