The discovery of the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922 is one of the best-known archaeological narratives of the modern age. The uncovering of the pharaoh’s final resting place with its wealth of gilded artefacts was cause for much celebration both in Egypt and abroad. But within weeks of the king’s burial chamber being opened, the man who financed the dig, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, was dead. Around the world and fuelled by tales of vengeful spirits in the press, people asked: was Carnarvon the victim of the mummy’s curse? Eleanor Dobson examines the supernatural rumours that many archaeologists attempted to suppress, comparing the ‘official’ accounts of the dig with the lead excavator Howard Carter’s notebooks and diaries. What emerges is a picture of Egyptology’s conflicted status in the early twentieth century as, on the one hand, an objective science, and, on the other, the field that claimed to be able to raise up the dead and enable them to speak again.
For more information and booking: https://bmi.org.uk/event/tutankhamun-facts-fictions-and-the-mummys-curse-with-dr-eleanor-dobson/
