Pharaoh’s Curse — An inexplicable message of the dead!
Ever experienced some itchy feeling in your stomach where everything was perfect, a moment before and now some unending insidious feeling creeps you inside. It’s turning everything into something unexplainable and dangerous. Probably, that feeling comes when someone has cursed you. Curses, expletives, and abuses are all embedded in a culture. People often use these tools to bring harm, injury or suffering. But in the ancient Egyptian era, not only the common people but the pharaoh’s curse was considered much worse. Having a pharaoh’s curse on your head was like a death threat, constantly hovering above you. You can’t escape it and have to carry its burden till death does you apart. Once your life is over, by murder, death, suicide or illness, whatsoever might be the reason, only then you are absolutely free. That was the intensity of a pharaoh’s curse of that eon.
In the Egyptian period, the most inescapable and condemnable curse was the ‘Curse of the Pharaoh,’ also known as King Tut’s Curse. King Tut or Tutankhamun was one of the most famous Egyptian pharaohs of the 18th century. His tomb was discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter, a British archaeologist, who became world famous as an excavation expert and exploiting the pharaoh’s curse, after this discovery.
The Curse of the Pharaoh, as people believed, revolved around those who violated the boy king’s final resting place. Perceiving this curse from a different angle, that is, from the viewpoint of the excavator can present a different picture altogether. Howard Carter, being the Egyptologist, after discovering the tomb realized that it was a major archaeological event. In order to have his own copyright to the invention and save it from being stolen, he put forward a story of a curse that would inseminate fear in anyone who comes near to the tomb. This alleged foul play would serve two purposes. First, it would keep his invention in hindsight from the media and second, his discovery would remain his own, protected from other archaeologists and grave robbers. One would logically say that Carter did not himself invent the idea of a cursed tomb, but he did exploit it to keep intruders away from his history-making discovery.
Following the discovery of the tomb, the sequence in which some of the important people related to the tomb died paved way for the suspicion of an existing curse on the tomb. However, as history would have it Howard Carter molded it to his advantage. The people, believed to have died as a response from the curse actually died due to some mild illness or some animal bite, more or less a very natural death. But, since the numbers of such deaths were comparatively more after the tomb was excavated, people began to consider the curse as a real thing. However, an investigator, James Randi, notes in his book that Howard, who not only discovered the tomb but took out the mummy from the sarcophagus, died 16 years after the episode. Not only him but Sir Richard Adamson, who guarded the sarcophagus and King Tut’s remains for years, died 60 years after King Tut in 1982. This only shows how history has been distorted and presented in the past.
The episode of Tutankhamun reminds us that people’s minds can be played with and their thinking can be coerced to change shape depending upon the plan of one master who wants to leverage it to his full advantage. In any era, the succession of events is extremely important to understand the way things are meant to work and the way they work. Apart from that, important scientific alibis should play a key role in determining what the truth is and how it has been manipulated over the years.
