Google Doodle: Howard Carter and the pharaoh's curse (+video)

Rumors of the curse came to America through an author named Marie Corelli, who had a letter published in the newspaper the New York World in which she stated that she was concerned by the opening of King Tut’s tomb. Corelli quoted a book she said she owned called “The Egyptian History of the Pyramids,” which she said stated, “The most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb.”

“The book names 'secret poisons enclosed in boxes in such wise that those who touch them shall not know how they come to suffer,' wrote Corelli. "That is why I ask, Was it a mosquito bite that has so seriously infected [Carter's financial backer] Lord Carnarvon?” 

The furor increased when several other people who had been present at the tomb when it was opened, or later visited it, died over the next few years. Four other people died the year after the tomb was opened, including Egyptian Prince Ali Kahmel Falim Bey and British diplomat Colonel Aubrey Herbert.

However, none of these deaths were classified as unexplained or mysterious – Bey was killed by his wife, Herbert died after a botched dental procedure, and the other two who died in the year after the tomb was open, George Jay Gould and Woolf Joel, died of a fever and a gunshot wound, respectively.

Reportedly Carter gave a friend of his, Sir Bruce Ingram, a mummified hand with a bracelet on it to use as a paperweight. Ingram said that soon after accepting the gift, his house burned down, was subsequently rebuilt, and then sustained damage in a flood.

Some other Egyptian tombs referred to supposed curses, including one in the tomb of a vizier, Khentika Ikhekhi. The hieroglyphs read, “As for all men who shall enter this my tomb... impure... there will be judgment... an end shall be made for him... I shall seize his neck like a bird... I shall cast the fear of myself into him.”

No such inscriptions were found in the tomb of King Tut.

It's worth noting that Carter never believed in the superstition. He died more than a decade after opening the tomb. 

Despite naysayers, the idea of cursed mummies who rise from the dead continues to live on in popular imagination. Walking mummies were a regular feature in the Scooby-Doo cartoons that originally began airing in the 1960s, and a 1932 film simply titled “The Mummy,” starring Boris Karloff as the title character followed a group of archaeologists who accidentally woke a dead pharaoh. The movie was remade into a 1999 film of the same name starring Brendan Fraser that spawned two sequels, and another is planned.

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