Jul 12

Jul 12 Episode #83: Cursed Art: The Tomb of Tutankhamun (Season 9, Episode 7)

In our ninth season, in a topic suggested by you, our listeners, we’re uncovering the backstory behind some of the world’s most famed “cursed” objects in art, architecture, and archaeology. Today, we’re ending our season with one of the most (purportedly) cursed archaeological finds: the Tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

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Episode Credits:

Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Theme music by Alex Davis. Logo by Dave Rainey. Additional research and writing by Jessica Wollschleger.

ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.

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Links and further resources

New York Times: Times Man Views Splendors of Tomb of Tutankhamun

Expedition Magazine: THE CURSE OF THE CURSE OF THE PHARAOHS

Daily Mail: Egyptian Pharoahs kept it in the family: Scientists find proof of incest in lack of difference in the height of royal mummies

History.com: Is the curse of King Tut real?

Episode Transcript

Sometime in the mid 1980s, when I was but a wee tot, I was enjoying a little pre-bedtime snack in the kitchen while my parents watched TV in the living room nearby. I heard snippets of a show about a fascinating tomb filled with gold, an archaeological discovery unlike any other-- and one that had entranced generations. But, the TV show loudly declared, such incredible treasure came with a severe price, as so many of the major players involved in its discovery had died painfully, unexpectedly, or both. And that’s because the tomb was--is--cursed.

This narrative lodged itself in my little kid brain, and it terrified me. I recall that not too terribly long after, my mom--a big fan of all things ancient Egypt--asked me that generic childhood question: what do you want to be when you grow up? Now, please note that the answer was not art historian, and other than becoming a paleontologist, I couldn’t really come up with any good ideas. So she tossed a few ideas my way. Veterinarian? Nah. Ballerina? No. Astronaut? Definitely not, I declared--it wasn’t too terribly long after the Challenger disaster. With a gleam in her eye, she paused, and recalling that recent television special, she said, “How about an Egyptologist-- a person who studies the language, history and culture of ancient Egypt?” And I looked at her with shock. How could she--my own mother-- suggest such a career? Because based on what little I knew, exploring the tombs of the long-dead pharaohs of ancient Egypt meant one thing: certain death.

Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. This season, season nine, is all about curses in fine art and archaeology, a topic that was suggested by you, our listeners. And today, it’s our Season Nine finale, which we’ve hinted at all season long--the biggest archaeological discovery, some say, of the Twentieth Century, and whose cursedness has come to overshadow the treasure therein. Today, we’re uncovering the rumor of the evils that lurk in King Tutankhamun’s tomb. This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.

It seems like we all know about the tomb of Tutankhamun from somewhere. Maybe you were lucky enough to see the huge touring exhibition, “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” that traveled to six cities in the U.S. in the second half of the 1970s-- which might possibly be the first-ever blockbuster exhibition, according to some museum scholars. Maybe you’ve seen YouTube clips of Steve Martin hamming it up with his “King Tut'' song-and-dance routine from an early episode of Saturday Night Live-- a novelty song that actually reached #17 on the Billboard Hot 100 music charts, after selling well over a million copies. Perhaps you got an idea about the fantastic boy king in a fictionalized take with Tutenstein, a kids show that ran in the early 2000s based on a comic book character by Canadian cartoonist Jay Stephens. Or maybe, like me, you were unlucky enough to overhear a late-night TV show and let it spook you senseless. Either way, Tutankhamun is now one of the most recognizable names of an Egyptian pharaoh, second only, perhaps, to Ramses II--but my money is that more people probably know at least a little bit about Tut than they do about Ramses. But what really made Tutankhamun big-name news was the discovery of his golden tomb-- and not the king himself. If it wasn’t for that tomb, he might have been somewhat forgotten by history because Tutankhamun wasn’t a super-famous king. He was actually a rather minor pharaoh. Here’s the rough outline of Tut’s life. He lived during what is known as the 18th dynasty of the New Kingdom--a period from roughly 1550 B.C.E. to 1292 B.C.E. that was one of the greatest in ancient Egypt, one filled with big names for those who are already familiar with Egyptian art and history: Nefertiti, Akhenaten, and Hapshepsut. Born in 1342, the Boy Who Would Be Pharaoh was probably Akhenaten’s son, though archaeologists aren’t 100% certain and it’s been widely debated in recent years. What we do know is that DNA testing on mummies found in locations near Tutankhamun’s tomb have identified a familial link between Tut and the supposed body of Akhenaten, and Tut’s mother was determined by DNA to be… Akhenaten’s sister, someone just known in the literature as “The Younger Lady.” This whole family marriage thing-- I mean, we’d call it incest today but there was this practice of interfamilial marriage because closing the family ranks was considered a good thing back then. So--keep that in mind, because we’re going to be coming back to it. The things you learn when studying art history!

When Tutankhamen was around 9 years old, he ascended the throne after Akhenaten, and ruled originally with the help of a vizier, the high official who served the pharaoh during his time on the throne, as well as some other advisers. He ruled for almost a decade-- and died, tragically, while still a teenager. But during that short period, he actually got some pretty good things done. The biggest change he made was in restoring the traditional polytheistic religion previously celebrated in Egypt after Akhenaten decreed that all faith should focus instead on one god, known as Aten, the sun disc most frequently associated with Ra, the god of the sun. Considering himself basically the high priest and potentially a prophet of Atenism--and where Akhenaten got his name--Tut’s purported daddy forbade worship of any other gods or adherence to any other religion. And because of that, he was supremely unpopular, even later referred to, in some historical records, as quote “the enemy.” Tutankhamun changed that-- a re-embracing of tradition.

In his personal life, we can see that he embraced that old family tradition, though-- and that was that he married his half-sister, a girl called Ankhesenamun, the daughter of Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti. Even though the pair were still teenagers, most likely, they did what royalty the world over has long been obsessed with: keeping that family line going. But Tut and his wife would never have a successor because their two children both died-- one was miscarried before birth, and the other one died shortly after it was born. And then Tut kicked the bucket around age 18, at which time the royal line went extinct. Given the intermarrying of siblings, cousins, and even parents and children that was common in ancient Egypt, it’s not too much of a surprise to think that Tutankhamun died early, or that neither of his children survived--because certainly that shared bloodline couldn’t have been a good thing, biologically- speaking. And recent scientific analysis backs this up. Scientists have examined Tutankhamun’s mummified remains and noted that, at the very least, the young pharaoh suffered from bone necrosis, basically the death of bone tissue due to an issue with blood supply. He also had a club foot, scoliosis, and was dealing with the ramifications of several malarial infections. We don’t know exactly what caused his death, but these issues weakened his body and probably led to a leg fracture which probably got infected. And so, around 1325 B.C.E., Tutankhamun died, his body embalmed, adorned with jewelry, wrapped, and then entombed, nestled into multiple coffins and into a huge wooden sarcophagus that was then nestled into further additional chests. Together with furniture, treasures, weapons, and even chariots used during his lifetime, the body of Tutankhamun was carried to the Valley of the Kings, the traditional burial site for the pharaohs, and there Tut was placed in a tomb, and sealed shut. And that was that. The end of the story.

Except that of course that wasn’t the end, because the young pharaoh’s tomb was discovered in the 1920s and it became spectacular headline news. It was a sensation, a cultural moment that made history. And it brought some really fascinating myths to the surface. So, how did it start, and who was involved? That’s coming up next, right after a quick break. Come right back.

Welcome back to ArtCurious.

The story of the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb begins with a daredevil Englishman in need, perhaps, of a new hobby. George Herbert, an aristocrat known as the Earl of Carnarvon--who, by the way, owned Highclere Castle, known to TV fans as Downton Abbey--and the property is still owned by his family). Lord Carnarvon was into horse racing and cars--not racing cars per se, but more like just liking to drive really, really fast. But when he was in a serious car crash in Germany in 1903, Carnarvon was grievously injured and his health never really recovered. In order to minimize further discomfort, his doctors suggested a change of weather, since those legendary damp English winters were not helpful, so Carnarvon and his wife picked up and moved to Egypt to enjoy the dry heat. They would spend most winters there for the majority of the rest of Lord Carnarvon’s life. And with so much time to spend in Egypt, it was inevitable that Lord Carnarvon would fall under the spell of Egyptology, which had veritably exploded during the 19th century after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, both of which kicked off the archaeological craze at the end of the 18th century. Lord Carnarvon really wanted to get in on all this action, and, having money, he was able to easily do so, throwing around some cash to hire a foreman and some workers to lead his own private excavations. And it went okay, as the team dug up a mummified cat and some other minor remains. But Lord Carnarvon wanted more, so he visited the Director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, the organization that tracked excavations and registered permits and licenses for those excavations. That man, a French Egyptologist called Gaston Maspero, suggested that Carnarvon needed some help. He needed Howard Carter.

Chances are that if you know anything about the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, you know the name Howard Carter--Carter, the discoverer, the big man himself. Carter came to Egypt early, at age 17, after his talents as a draftsman garnered him a position as an illustrator of tomb decorations on several excavations. With that experience came a growing knowledge of Egyptian culture, art, and history, and he worked his way up into being a sought-after and successful Egyptologist in his own right, one who could speak Arabic, and could decipher hieroglyphics. Carter popped around, overseeing excavations under the purview of the Antiquities Service, before a formal inquiry over a confrontation between Egyptian guards and French tourists led to his resignation. He worked as an artist, selling tourist art in the Luxor area, and acting as a freelance draftsman for various archaeological projects. But Lord Carnarvon came a-’calling, and so did history.

Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter had been working together on several smaller-scale projects for almost a decade when Carnarvon finally received permission to start digging in and around the Valley of the Kings, a place previously unavailable to them because the permits to do so had been given to other archaeological teams. So Carter moved in, with hopes of finding tombs that may have been missed by previous work in the area. And he was right to want to do this, because he was keenly aware that basically every pharaoh from the New Kingdom had been buried in the Valley, and only one of them--Tutankhamun-had not yet been discovered. But then World War I hit, keeping Carter away from his efforts until 1917, and then he toiled with his team for nearly 6 years. And while the team uncovered a few minor tombs, nothing huge was panning out, and Lord Carnarvon was getting antsy. He wanted to stop digging and threatened to stop funding Carter’s excavation, but after cooling down and conversing with Carter, he decided to do it for one more dig. One more season.

Carter felt that they had a good shot at uncovering something, because he knew that there was a place he wanted to search. There was a pit near the tomb of the pharaoh Ramesses VI where some materials that seemed to relate to Tutankhamun’s rule had been found. And that seemed as good a place as any to begin digging, and so Carter and his team did just that, beginning on November 1st, 1922. All was a bit uneventful for three tiring days, but something happened on that fourth day, November 4. After a young assistant stumbled on a rock protruding from the ground, Carter’s team took a closer look and realized it wasn’t just a stone--it was a step, a step carved down into the bedrock. I can only imagine that little feeling in the stomach-- that little butterfly of excitement--that must have accompanied this discovery. And sure enough, the next day, their excavation revealed 12 more steps, leading down to the upper section of a mud-plastered doorway, and this part is crucial: the plaster was intact and marked with cartouches--these little oval or circular seals with hieroglyphics on them--with the symbols of the ancient guards of the Valley. So whoever was buried there had stayed buried, and probably for millennia. And in a time of not only rampant excavation and exploration but also centuries of rampant grave-robbing, this was huge.

But here’s where Howard Carter did a really smart thing: instead of surging forward impatiently with his team, he ordered that the newly-uncovered stairway be covered back up again, re-filled in with dirt and rock. Only then did he send a telegram to his sponsor and employer, Lord Carnarvon, writing, quote, “At last have made wonderful discovery in valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival; congratulations. Carter.” Carter, you see, was no dummy, and he knew that he needed his Egyptomaniac patron to be physically present for whatever was coming next, because whatever was coming next was surely going to be big. Almost three weeks later, he finally had his moment on November 23, when, in the presence of Carnarvon and his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, Carter’s team uncovered the stairs again. And it was at this point where they must have had two contradictory feelings, because now that they could more fully see the door in front of them, they saw that the door had been broken into, though the signs of grave-robbing were very old indeed, so potentially had occurred not long after the tomb was originally sealed. But that feeling was certainly displaced, at least a bit, by a growing excitement, because the door did indeed bear the seal of the pharaoh Tutankhamun. This was the boy king’s long-lost tomb. This was Howard Carter’s white whale. And he finally found it.

Knowing that Tutankhamun’s tomb had been robbed at some point probably meant that Carnarvon, Carter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, and the rest of their gang kept their expectations low for the following three days as excavations continued. But they were about to be very happily surprised. That first door led to a rubble-filled tunnel, and after three more days of parsing through that rubble, they uncovered a second doorway. Intrigued, Carter chipped a hole into the upper corner of the door while Carnarvon, Evelyn, and Carter’s assistant stood anxiously nearby. After first inserting a candle through the hole--as a test for the presence of any dangerous gases potentially trapped inside--Carter was able to peer inside himself. And that’s when one of the most famous exchanges in archeology occurred. Impatiently, Lord Carnavon whispered, “Can you see anything?” And Carter’s reply--three little words-- changed history. “Yes,” he said. “Wonderful things.”

Those wonderful things, as they’d soon discover, included an amazing number of gold-covered items, from disassembled chariots to couches and beds, to sculptures, games, and a whole lot of weapons. These items were scattered haphazardly, most likely due to those ancient tomb robbers, but they were still in amazing shape and showcased an incredible degree of craftsmanship, with over 5,000 objects eventually to be catalogued there. And yet the best was yet to come, and came it did, in February 1923, when Carter’s team finally opened another door located off of their original antechamber and uncovered Tutankhamun’s burial chamber. Though it had been broken into, Tut’s sarcophagus was intact, and his mummy was still in the same condition that it was thousands of years earlier. He was buried in a gigantic sarcophagus made out of quartzite, and then nested in three coffins of diminishing size, with the interior one--the one that housed the pharaoh's remains--made of solid gold and containing the incredibly intricate funerary mask, one of the most famous items ever uncovered from ancient Egypt.

Coming up next, all the world goes Egypt-mad for the discovery of King Tut’s tomb--and some people, it is said, pay the ultimate price for their enthusiasm. Don’t go away.

Welcome back to ArtCurious.

You can imagine that all the hubbub around these history-making discoveries meant that there was a lot of attention suddenly thrown upon everyone involved-- Howard Carter, Lord Carnarvon, and so forth--and even more attention on the site itself as a wonderland full of ancient and mysterious treasures. Suddenly, the world’s eyes were on Egypt and soon the Valley of the Kings was practically overrun with both tourists and journalists, all jockeying for a view. And that most likely made it difficult for the excavations to continue smoothly. It’s at this point, some historians have argued, that the idea of the Curse of King Tutankhamun’s Tomb first came to light. And it's entirely possible that it was brought up to the public by none other than Howard Carter himself, as a way to potentially stave off looky-loos who might trample the delicate excavation. Whether or not this is true, the concept of the cursed Egyptian tomb wasn’t a new one, and in some cases, it had been swirling around since ancient times. There have been examples of tombs from both the Old Kingdom and New Kingdom in Egypt where a few tombs or complexes bore inscriptions warning of curses, but in most of those cases, historians believed that it was a way to keep the tombs pure from a spiritual standpoint for the pharaoh’s journey into the afterlife, and not even necessarily to dissuade grave-robbers. That being said, there is at least one Old Kingdom tomb that, according to modern-day Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, might raise some eyebrows, reading, quote, “Cursed be those who disturb the rest of a Pharaoh. They that shall break the seal of this tomb shall meet death by a disease that no doctor can diagnose."

There did seem to be at least one example, though, of a “proposed mummy’s curse” in Europe a couple hundred years before the opening of Tut’s tomb. In 1699, an author named Louis Penicher published a book on the embalming practices of societies throughout time, in which he covered the ancient Egyptians, of course. But in the process, Penicher also shared a story of a curse that supposedly haunted a Polish traveler who sought to bring two mummies back to his home country after ferrying them away from Alexandria. On the voyage across the Mediterranean sea, not only was the traveler and his crew met with awful, dangerous weather, but the traveler himself was haunted by two specters--of the mummified people, one assumes--and continued to be plagued by terrible visions until the mummies were thrown overboard, at which time the seas calmed. And as the centuries progressed, so did the increase in the number of stories dedicated to cursed tombs and mummies rising from the dead. These works proliferated in the 19th century, with some of the earliest stories of the so-called “Curse of the Pharaohs” coming from women writers, interestingly, and even include big names, like Louisa May Alcott, the writer of Little Women. The timing of the rise of these stories about cursed tombs and mummies and all that jazz makes excellent sense. After all, this is the 19th century we’re talking about, with the rise of the Gothic and the theory of the Sublime, all of which revolves around big emotions and drama--and what is more dramatic than a good ghost story? It’s no coincidence that the first so-called “horror story” was written only a few decades earlier, and one of the earliest mummy tales was published only a few years after Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published Frankenstein. Creepy tales were all the rage, so the Mummy’s Curse fits right in. And for the most part, it showcases what any so-called Pharaoh’s curse was: a story. Just a good old-fashioned ghost story.

And yet there are these events that occurred after the discovery of King Tutanhkamun’s tomb that can, to those with a suggestive mind, be considered the outcomes of a terrible curse. Little things, and then big things, that can be pulled together by threads that produce, at the end, a scary story, a warning, a new thing to be feared. And that’s what may have happened here. On the day after Carter and his team discovered the doorway into what they’d come to realize was Tut’s tomb, a member of Carter’s team--and Egyptologist named James Henry Breasted-- was sent on a quick errand back to Carter’s house. While he was there, he was greeted with a terrible sight: Carter’s pet canary had been snatched away by a cobra. That wasn’t great, of course--but it caused a panic in Carter’s household, because cobras had long been considered symbols of the pharaohs, and you can even see the Royal Cobra--the so-called Uraeus--the symbol of an ancient Egyptian protector goddess--on Tut’s golden funerary mask. The cobra broke into Carter’s home, it was said, in response--or probable revenge-- on the same day that Carter broke into Tut’s eternal resting place. This story was then picked up by none other than the New York times, who included this tidbit in an article from December 1922. One wonders if this inclusion greatly affected the story of the curse--that it was reported internationally, and by a credible media outlet.

So, the death of a bird is, again, not ideal. But it’s not anywhere close to the kind of curse that readers might have come to expect, given the penchant for spooky mummy revenge stories from the 19th century. But, of course, the curse was really just ramping up, and it was ready to take out one of the big guys next. In March of 1923, only a few months after the tomb’s discovery, Lord Carnarvon was shaving and accidentally nicked a mosquito bite that had been languishing on his cheek. The cut quickly became infected and developed into blood poisoning, and Carnarvon spiked a fever. After rallying for a brief time, Carnarvon died from pneumonia on April 5, 1923, at the age of 57.

It was a tragedy, a loss of a father, a husband, a keen amateur Egyptologist and a supportive patron. But it just so happened that two weeks before Carnarvon’s untimely death, the English novelist Marie Corelli mailed in a letter to New York World magazine where she claimed that she had warned Lord Carnarvon about the so-called “dire punishment” that would surely come to bite him, which she had learned about reading some ancient text, she said. That alone got newshounds and news junkies alike all riled up, and soon it was everywhere: the curse of Tutankhamun, with Carnarvon as its first victim. With the cat out of the bag, lots of people took up the tale, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes himself, stepping in to declare that, quote, “an evil elemental spirit,” unquote, had been conjured by ancient Egyptian priests to protect the tomb from invaders… and alas, they had exacted revenge on Carnarvon himself. And the tales kept coming. It was said that back in England, the Lord’s favorite dog had howled and collapsed, dying on the same night as his beloved master did in Egypt. And when the first examination of Tutankhamun’s mummy was conducted, approximately six months after Lord Carnarvon’s death, there was a report of a lesion found on the pharaoh’s cheek-- just like--GASP!-- Lord Carnarvon’s deadly mosquito bite--it had been on his cheek, too! What are the chances?!

Lord Carnarvon’s untimely death would prove to be only the first in a round of deaths associated, some have said, with the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. There was also Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey, an Egyptian aristocrat who visited the tomb site in either 1922 or 1923 and was shot dead by his wife not long after. Another early visitor, the American financier George Jay Gould I, caught a terrible fever in Egypt before dying quickly after. Sir Archibald Douglas Reid, the man who supposedly first examined and X-rayed Tut’s mummy, died mysteriously in 1924; several of Carter’s closest associates--Arthur Mace from his excavation team, and Richard Bethell, his personal secretary, died in 1928 and 1929, respectively, again from unnatural causes: Mace succumbed to arsenic poisoning, and Bethell was smothered in his own bed. And these are just the big deaths. There were also little occurrences that struck the superstitious as being a little too coincidental: after receiving a mummified hand as a paperweight, a friend of Carter’s named Sir Bruce Ingram experienced a double-whammy of real estate woes with his house burning down to the ground, and then flooded after it had been painstakingly rebuilt. And oh yeah, that mummified hand paperweight? Besides being a really creepy present, it was said to have been adorned with a scarab bracelet that read, quote, “Cursed be he who moves my body. To him shall come fire, water, and pestilence.” It makes me understand the oft-repeated story about the fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who was once given a mummy as a diplomatic gift and subsequently freaked out about it and ordered its immediate removal from his palazzo in Rome.

Alright. Now let’s get to Howard Carter. Carter is the main guy in our story, the one most fully responsible for the excavation team who discovered, and opened, King Tutankhamun’s tomb. If anyone was going to be cursed by the long-dead boy king, it would be him, right? And yet Carter lived almost two more decades after his famed discovery, finally passing away in 1939 at 64 years of age from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. All in all, kind of a normal-ish way to die, or at least not an unheard-of cause of death. In total, it’s said that out of the nearly 60 people who were present when either the tomb itself, or that incredible sarcophagus was first opened, only eight of them died over a span of the next twelve years. Given the odds of anyone dying at any time, really--and especially in an age before the discovery and wide usage of penicillin and other luxuries of modern medicine--I think we can chalk all of this up to not a mummy’s curse, but just… life.

All this season on ArtCurious, we’ve talked about the ability of these stories--stories of cursed paintings, cursed sculptures, cursed tombs, cursed buildings--to bring these objects and places to the forefront of our minds, to grow our interest in them long after their heydays. It’s the reason I always look warily across the Grand Canal at Venice’s Palazzo Dario; why I will totally seek “Black Aggie” out during the daytime but probably won’t do so at night, just because I’m a bit of a wuss; and why the name “Tutankhamun” alone is one of the most exciting, most mysterious, and most entertaining of the Egyptian pharaohs. The story of the pharaoh’s curse--regardless of its accuracy--is just cool. And I can’t help but wonder if that’s one of the big reasons that Egyptomania swept the world in the late ‘70s, why ticket sales for the world’s first-ever “blockbuster exhibition” changed museums as we know them. Was it just that everyone wanted to see all those glittering gold treasures from the past? Or was there also that little twinge of excitement, that hint of danger, when they’d consider this idea of the Tutankhamun curse? And really, is that such a bad thing? Because as long as the curse lives on in our memories, then excitement about Tut, his tomb, and all things Egyptology won’t die, either. We’ll keep coming back, hoping to see more, wanting to feel a little spookier when we approach Tut’s famed funerary mask, just like we want to gape just a little bit longer at the cursed Hope Diamond. It’s human nature. Those fanciful stories keep us wanting more.

But it’s also fascinating to note that there might be a small element of truth to the stories of a “curse,” in this case-- though it’s probably not the kind of curse you’re imagining, nor is it necessarily specific to Tutankhamun’s tomb. In the past few decades, scientists have posited that some mysterious deaths linked to archaeological discoveries like this one may be linked to mold, spores, bacteria, and other naturally-occurring elements that proliferate there, to which our delicate systems may violently rebel. In the case of the curse of King Tut, this theory might not apply--and those deaths and occurrences, if anything, are just super coincidental and random, in my skeptical line of thinking-- but it does go a long way to potentially help us understand why these kind of stories keep popping up over time. It is so much a curse of the pharaoh as a curse of biology.

Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal, with additional writing and research by Jessica Wollschleger. Our theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, and our logo is by Dave Rainey at daveraineydesign.com. Our podcast services are provided by our friends at Kaboonki. Subscribe now to their new show, Subgenre, a podcast about the movies, hosted by Josh Dasal, and visit subgenrepodcast.com for more details. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com.

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Y’all, this is the last episode of the season, but you know we’ll be back for more super soon, with all-new bonus content coming your way later this summer, and a fresh season of “ArtCurious” starting this fall. Stay subscribed, keep following, and check back with us soon as we explore the unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful in potentially cursed works and artifacts in art history.