King Tut's Tomb: The Real 1922 Story and the Curse That Never Was

On 1 November 1922, Howard Carter began the dig season in the Valley of the Kings that his financial backer, Lord Carnarvon, had planned as the last. Carter had been searching for years for the tomb of a little-known pharaoh named Tutankhamun, and Carnarvon was tired of pouring money into the sand. Three days later, one of Carter's men stumbled on a step in the rock. It was the start of the most famous archaeological discovery in history.

This article tells how it came about, what allegedly happened the night after the glimpse through the tiny hole, what dispute followed, and why the most famous "curse" in archaeology was more the work of newspapers and novelists than of a mummy.

In short: the tomb of Tutankhamun (KV62) was discovered by Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings on 4 November 1922, and the burial chamber was opened on 16 February 1923. There was no curse: Lord Carnarvon died on 5 April 1923 from the effects of an infected mosquito bite.

By then, Carter had been digging in Egypt for roughly thirty years. Around 1907 he had come into contact with Carnarvon, a collector of antiquities, who commissioned him to supervise excavations in the Valley of the Kings. Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, had recommended him to Carnarvon because he applied modern methods and recording. The First World War interrupted the work, and during the war years Carter worked for the British government as a courier and translator. Afterward he searched specifically for Tutankhamun, but the finds stayed away until Carnarvon made clear in 1922 that he would pay for only one more season.

On 4 November 1922, someone on Carter's team discovered a step in the rock. Who it was is unclear: according to Carter's own account, the workers found it while digging beneath the remains of workers' huts, while other accounts name a water boy. Carter had the staircase covered up again until Carnarvon arrived and sent him a telegram: he had made a wonderful discovery, a magnificent tomb with seals intact, which he had recovered for Carnarvon's arrival. Carnarvon arrived on 23 November, together with his daughter Lady Evelyn.

By 24 November the staircase had been cleared. On the outer door, a seal bearing Tutankhamun's name turned up, behind it a rubble-filled corridor and a second sealed door. On 26 November, Carter used a chisel his grandmother had given him for his 17th birthday to make a small hole in the upper left-hand corner of that door, and held a candle inside.

At first he saw nothing, because the hot air made the flame flicker. Then strange animals, statues, and the glint of gold everywhere emerged from the darkness, along with gilded furniture and chariots, jumbled together. When Carnarvon asked whether he could see anything, Carter is said to have replied: "Yes, wonderful things!" The line appears in Carter's later account and became the most famous quote in archaeology. Whether it was exactly said that way can no longer be checked. Incidentally, a paraphrased extract from Carter's diary of 26 November 1922 serves as the plaintext for part 3 of the encrypted sculpture Kryptos at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The find hadn't officially been opened yet, and there were rules. Even so, Carter, Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn, and Carter's assistant Arthur Callender are said to have made an unauthorized visit that same night, becoming the first people of modern times in the tomb. According to one account, they found a small hole in the sealed door that Carter, Carnarvon, and Lady Evelyn crawled through, while the heavily built Callender couldn't fit.

The next morning, 27 November, an inspection followed in the presence of an Egyptian official, and on 29 November the tomb was officially opened in the presence of invited guests and Egyptian officials. The nighttime visit is documented only through later accounts, and whether it happened that way is disputed.

Carter opened the burial chamber itself on 16 February 1923 and found the sarcophagus. It was made of stone and held three nested coffins, the innermost of solid gold, with the mummified body of the young king, who had lain there for around 3,300 years. Cataloguing and removing the finds took nearly ten years. The team included the photographer Harry Burton and the chemist Alfred Lucas, lent by the Egyptian government. Over 5,000 objects came out of the tomb, including the famous gold mask, until Carter ended the work in 1932. Most of the pieces are in Cairo.

In between, the dispute with the Egyptian authorities escalated. After Carnarvon's death in April 1923, the Egyptian government insisted that his widow could not access the tomb and that the finds be documented in Egypt rather than sent abroad. Carter found the Antiquities Service's control excessive, and work stopped from February 1924 to January 1925, almost a year, until the authorities agreed he could finish the clearance. Carter never received an honor from the British government.

Howard Carter was born on 9 May 1874 and died on 2 March 1939. That he of all people made the find was also down to his persistence: he stayed convinced that the tomb of the little-known Tutankhamun could still be found, even as the years passed without results. Maspero had recommended him because he applied modern methods and recording, and that very thoroughness is why we know so much about the discovery.

Carter became famous through this one find, but was hardly honored in his homeland. That doesn't change the fact that his name is still tied to the tomb today, even though the pieces themselves mostly went to Cairo.

Around 6 March 1923, a mosquito bit Lord Carnarvon on the cheek. The wound became infected, pneumonia followed, and he died on 5 April 1923 in Cairo, in his mid-fifties. After a serious car accident in 1901, he had been prone to chest infections.

Even before his death, on 24 March 1923, the writer Marie Corelli, an elderly novelist with a taste for the supernatural, had warned in the British press that, according to a rare book she owned, "the most dire punishment" followed anyone who rashly entered a sealed tomb. When Carnarvon died, she seemed to have been proven right. The author Arthur Conan Doyle, a proponent of the curse theory, spoke of an "evil elemental" conjured by Egyptian priests. Curse stories were not new in literature, Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker had also tried them out in fiction, but only Corelli applied one to a real tomb.

Then came the press situation: Carnarvon had sold The Times exclusive rights to the coverage in order to recoup part of his costs.

A curse inscription was never found. The often-quoted line that death comes on swift wings to whoever touches the tomb of the pharaoh appeared in the press and closely resembles what Corelli quoted from an alleged Arabic book. According to one account, a reporter embellished a real inscription into a threat. The story of the canary supposedly eaten by a cobra on the day of the tomb's discovery isn't documented either: Carter did have a canary, but gave it to a friend named Minnie Burton to look after, and the bird was still alive later. The legends of power cuts in Cairo and a dog said to have died in England at the same moment belong in the same category.

The statistics also argue against a curse. The Egyptologist Herbert Winlock, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, counted in 1934 that of those present at the opening of the burial chamber, only six had died within ten years, depending on the count out of 22 to 26 people. In 2002, Mark Nelson of Monash University in Melbourne confirmed this direction: the 25 people most likely to fall victim to a curse died at an average age of 70. Carter himself died in 1939 at 64, Lady Evelyn only in 1980. That leaves the black mold: researchers found bacteria in the tomb that, inhaled in large amounts, could conceivably cause lung problems, but there is no evidence that anyone died of it. In Western media, the curse was later blamed for all sorts of things, from the first Gulf War to the chaos of the Egyptian revolution, supposedly triggered by a blast on a horn from the tomb. And the mummy motif lives on in cinema, most recently in "Lee Cronin's The Mummy" (2026), a horror film that has nothing to do with Tutankhamun.

Tutankhamun's tomb shows why an era needs more than one person. That's why every season in HistoryBytes is split into five categories, and this story touches all five: Howard Carter as a person, the Valley of the Kings with tomb KV62 as a place, 26 November 1922 as an event, the curse as an idea, the gold mask as an object. That's how the Pharaos of Egypt season builds the whole picture of a time, how people lived, believed, and built, not just a list of pharaohs.

For a quick lookup of the sequence, here are the key dates, split between discovery and aftermath.

To wrap up, the short version, so fact and story don't blur.

In the end there is an unusual combination: a little-known pharaoh, a backer on the verge of giving up, a small hole in a door, and a curse that was never inscribed in stone but printed in newspaper columns. The tomb was real, the treasure was real, the archaeologists' effort was real. The curse was not. Perhaps that is exactly why the story is still told so eagerly after more than a hundred years: it offers both, the documented discovery and the legend that attached itself to it.