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Mummy's curse unwrapped

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Imhotep
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« on: November 09, 2007, 10:46:01 pm »

Mummy's curse unwrapped
NICK PISA



The mummy's golden death mask
 
ON 26 November 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter broke through the sealed wall of a miraculously undisturbed pharaonic tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings and was struck dumb for several minutes by the riches within.

"Can you see anything?" Carter's sponsor, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, eventually blurted, unable to bear the suspense. "Yes," Carter whispered. "Wonderful things."

In fact, the gilded couches and animal sculptures glinting in the antechamber represented a mere fraction of the riches buried with the boy king Tutankhamun, whose mummified body, complete with the dazzling gold and lapis-lazuli death mask, was finally revealed two years later. By then Lord Carnarvon, two of his relatives, and several others involved in the dig were dead, giving rise to rumours of a mummy's curse on the families of those who had opened the tomb.

As archaeologists in Luxor this weekend revealed the face behind the golden death mask and London prepares for new exhibition of Tutankhamun artefacts, I have come the library of the Carnarvon family seat, Highclere Castle in Berkshire, to talk to the eighth earl, Geordie Herbert, about his ancestor's discovery.

Highclere is a grand, foursquare, not very welcoming house, and the room is a mix of the very expensive and the shabby: priceless paintings, pre-war lamp flex, flaky Morocco-leather volumes fenced in with picture wire and screw-eyes. The current Lord Carnarvon himself is 51 but seems younger, with his floppy toff's fringe, arresting blue eyes and rather hurried air of noblesse oblige (I've arrived appallingly late).

"Great-grandfather was a bit of a rakish character and a gambler," he says. "He had hurt himself quite badly in several car smashes, damaging his ribs, which is why he went to Egypt in the winter, to avoid catching pneumonia in England. He was a man of endless thoughts and ideas and would have been bored silly by the social scene there very quickly. And if you're in Egypt, why not look for ancient objects? He was a passionate collector, who genuinely liked uncovering objects of beauty."

The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb was the last in a long series of excavations the fifth earl carried out with Carter in Egypt from 1908 onwards, during which he amassed a vast amount of scholarly knowledge as well as a matchless collection of ancient relics. He also spent around £2 million of the family fortune, thanks in part to his wife, Almina Wombwell. "My great-grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of Alfred Rothschild," Carnarvon explains. "He thought she was just the best thing, and helped fund Highclere, which freed up great-grandfather to spend money in Egypt."

The unsullied tomb, which provided and still provides a peerless insight into a past civilisation, should have been the crowning glory of the fifth earl's life. Instead, it killed him.

"He was not a strong man, and the stress of the discovery was quite huge," says Carnarvon. "He thought he'd made this good, practical deal with the Times, so all the news about the dig would be funnelled through one paper, but others like the Express ended up fomenting nationalist discontent in Cairo because they didn't have access to the story.

"This caused rows between my great-grandfather and Carter, so he took a few days off to go to Aswan, and was bitten by this blasted mosquito. The bite swelled on his face, and he cut it with his razor, which made it worse. He died of septicaemia, although he fought it for several weeks."

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Imhotep
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« Reply #1 on: November 09, 2007, 10:47:10 pm »




Tutankhamun's body is removed from its sarcophagus Picture: AFP/Getty

The fifth earl's son, Geordie's grandfather, seems to have believed in the curse: "My grandfather didn't make much of the Tutankhamun story for largely superstitious reasons. The two omens he did talk about were that the power failed completely in Cairo the night my great-grandfather died and his little dog, Rosie, let out a howl and died the same night, at home here in Highclere." The current earl tut-tuts at the notion of a curse. "First, Howard Carter lived on until 1939 [he died of lymphoma, in Kensington], and he cleared the tomb out completely and ensured everything was sent to Cairo. Second, a number of other people lived on for a long time, including my great-aunt, who was one of the first people to go inside the tomb."

Egypt and Tutankhamun continued to exert an influence on the family. Alfred Rothschild had died in 1918, and falling rates and rising taxes in the aftermath of the First World War pushed the fifth earl into debt.

In a letter written to his agent, he said he would sort out an overdraft with the bank on his return from Egypt. After he died in the Continental Hotel in Cairo, his wife continued to bankroll Howard Carter's work on the dig.

Although this money was eventually repaid by the Egyptian government in 1936, she was forced to sell her husband's collection of Egyptiana to an American collector for $145,000 to pay death duties. It is now in the Met in New York.

The current earl remembers being taken by his parents, and the aforementioned great-aunt, to the blockbuster 1972 exhibition of Tutankhamun's treasures at the British Museum. (On a second visit, with his classmates from Eton, he had to queue for hours like the rest of us.)

Then, after his grandfather's death in 1981, a letter was unearthed from Carter saying that he'd left "a few, unimportant items at Highclere". These artefacts - a noblewoman's sarcophagus, various trinkets, papyrus sheets from the book of the dead, all predating the Tutankhamun find - are on display in Highclere's basement.

"It was extraordinary to feel that connection to both my great-grandfather and to a civilisation that ended 3,000 years ago," says Carnarvon.

The exhibition helps Highclere to just about pay for itself. The estate is a working farm, and the house is open to the public some months of the year, and for hire for concerts, conferences and weddings. "You may have heard about some of the weddings," Carnarvon says dryly, referring to Jordan's showy nuptials there. His younger brother Harry runs a thoroughbred syndicate, and his sister Carolyn controls the Highclere stud founded by their father, "Porchie" Herbert, who was the queen's racing manager and also her "closest male friend" after Prince Philip. Meanwhile, Carnarvon himself has re-established the family's connection with Egypt.

He first went there in 1998 for a Channel 4 film in which he retraced his great-grandfather's footsteps, undertaking the 13-hour train journey from the grand temples of Luxor to the heady bustle of Cairo, soaking up the eerie stillness of the Valley of Kings, and - in a possible cursed moment - falling down a tomb shaft designed to fox grave-robbers. He has returned several times with his second wife, Fiona Aitken, and was most recently there this August for a Five programme which pieced together new information about Tutankhamun's life and death.

Contrary to earlier belief, it seems the king was neither a weakling when he died at 19, nor was he murdered by a jealous rival. Rather, it seems he was a keen, athletic huntsman who may - in an eerie prefiguring of the fifth earl's fate - have died from an infected thigh fracture sustained during a chariot accident.

It was also revealed recently that, possibly during the war, Tutankhamun's body had been violated. Some of his ribs were hacked away, along with a piece of jewellery stuck to his chest with embalming fluid. Also, his **** is missing. "I can't believe it could have been soldiers that did it," says the Earl, "but local people might have realised they could sell such a thing."

Lord Carnarvon is looking forward to taking his three children - Lady Saoirse and George, Lord Porchester, from his first marriage, and eight-year-old Edward from his second - to the new exhibition being held at the 02 (formerly the Millennium Dome). But, somewhat controversially, the great gold mask and many of the larger, grander artefacts from Tutankhamun's tomb will not be on show there.

The Egyptian government says they are too fragile to move from Cairo. "Well, I don't think the mask is too fragile, because it's mostly gold," says Carnarvon, "but it would be unfair to disappoint the people who go to Egypt specifically to see it and the other relics. My great-grandfather didn't live to see the mask, but if he were alive today, I'm sure he'd be the first one off to Cairo to see it. And I'm sure he'd be delighted that objects he found in the tomb are coming to London."

• Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs is at the O2 Bubble from 15 November. See www.theO2.co.uk for details.

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Imhotep
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« Reply #2 on: November 09, 2007, 10:48:09 pm »

Bad omens?
TUTANKHAMUN


HOWARD Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 made the 3,300-year-old Egyptian boy king a household name. But fame became notoriety as, amid rows with the Egyptian authorities and arguments between Carter and his patron, Lord Carnarvon, the latter died in Cairo of an infected mosquito bite.

The lights, they say, went out across Cairo at the moment of death, his dog died, and the British press went to town. The curse story was further fuelled over the years by the deaths of others associated with the discovery. Only six of the two-dozen people who attended the tomb opening died during the following decade, and the much-quoted inscription allegedly found in the tomb - "Death shall come on swift wings to him that toucheth the tomb of Pharaoh" - was based on a Victorian literary invention.

Recent research, however, has suggested that opening mummies' tombs could indeed be a health hazard, owing to potentially dangerous mould spores found in such environments.

THE HOPE DIAMOND

ONE of the world's largest diamonds, the blue, 45.52-carat Hope reputedly bore a curse because it was stolen from the eye of a statue of the Hindu goddess Sita by a French merchant, Jean Baptise Tavernier, in the 16th century. Tavernier was said to have been torn to pieces by wild dogs in Russia, while both diamond and curse were passed on to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who were decapitated during the French Revolution.

It was eventually acquired by the banker Henry Philip Hope, whose family went bankrupt, then by the Washington mining heiress Evelyn Walsh McLean - whose son died in a car crash, whose daughter committed suicide and whose husband was declared insane.

Today the alluring diamond sits securely in the Smithsonian Institution.

THE OMEN

VARIOUS films have been associated with hexes, and not always those with supernatural plot lines.

The Omen, below, however, notched up a litany of terrifying incidents, sometimes eerily mirroring those in the film. The designer, John Richardson, survived a car smash in 1976 (on Friday 13 August), a year after he had worked on the occult thriller, but his passenger, assistant Liz Moore, was sliced in half by the wreckage. The son of the film's star, Gregory Peck, shot himself shortly before filming began, and two separate flights carrying Peck and screenwriter David Seltzer to London were struck by lightning. Other incidents afflicting those involved included IRA bombing, and a last-minute re-booking which avoided a fatal plane crash.

Some cast members still won't speak about the movie. A Scottish film team which made a recent Channel 4 documentary, The Curse of the Omen, had themselves blessed before they started filming.

TECUMSEH

SOMETIMES known as the "zero factor curse", this malediction looms over American presidents and is supposed to have been pronounced by a native American known as the Prophet, following the death of his brother, the warrior-statesman Tecumseh, killed fighting on the side of the British against American forces in Ontario in 1813.

The man leading the American campaign was General William Henry Harrison, who later became the ninth president of the United States - and the first incumbent to die while still in office (in 1840).

Since then, a string of presidents, all elected during a year ending in 0, have died in office, including Lincoln (elected in 1860), Garfield (1880), Roosevelt (1940) and JF Kennedy (1960). Lincoln, Garfield and Kennedy were, of course, all assassinated.

However, the present incumbent George W Bush took the 2000 election and so far remains with us.

This article: http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1761342007

Last updated: 06-Nov-07 00:46 GMT

http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1761342007
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