Tombs and Warnings

Here’s an Ancient Egyptian tomb warning for you, just in case you were thinking of violating the resting place of the dead any time soon!

In fact, these sorts of warnings were a lot more banal than figure in the imagination — more like “no trespassing” signs and less “curse of the mummy.”.

A lot of the reason we think otherwise is because of the sensationalist news following the opening of Tutankhamun’s crypt in 1922, which insinuated that the death of the lead financial backer and excavator of the find, Lord Carnarvon, had something to do with each other.

They did, because he died in Egypt of blood poisoning from a mosquito bite that progressed to pneumonia. But not because of a curse by the Pharaoh. In fact, the association was driven further by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who suggested that an evil “elemental” from the tomb caused the death. Doyle had earlier written a short story called “Lot no. 249,” which was about an animated mummy, so he had the undead on his mind. Of course, Doyle was also a Spiritualist, believing that the dead could communicate with the living, so confirmation bias was at play.

To make my point about tomb curses clear, I am going to quote one written between c. 1295-1069 BCE: it opens with an address to anyone who finds “this tomb passage,” and admonishes them “not to take (even) a pebble from within it outside”. After all, the passage continues, potential trespassers should “look for a place worthy of yourselves and rest in it . . . ” (ie, “find your own damn tomb!”), and concludes with what will happen should the warning go unheeded –.

“As for he who covers it (the tomb) in its place, great lords of the west will reproach him very very very very very very very very much”.

So there. A lot of “veries,” not a lot of mummy-revivification slayage.