King Tut’s Curse FINALLY Explained By Josh Gates

It’s 1923. About 18 miles from the city  of Luxor, Egyptologist Howard Carter has spent five long years searching for  the tomb of King Tut. Time and money are running out. His financier and business  partner, Lord Canarvin, agrees to fund one last season of digging. This is the final  chance for this self-taught Egyptologist.

On November 4th, Carter gets lucky at last.  He hits pay dirt when a 12-year-old local water boy stumbles over a low hill, dropping  his jar but revealing a hidden stair. Over the next 24 hours, Carter and his team  uncover 16 steps leading down to a wall.

[Music] What they find on the other side of the wall is  astounding. A room packed with the treasures of a pharaoh. Hundreds of artifacts, chariots, and  weapons. Never before has such a complete royal Egyptian tomb been found. Carter has discovered  the anti-chamber containing the pharaoh’s riches.

But there is one thing missing. The  sarcophagus of the king buried here.

He believes the shrine might be behind the  next wall. However, before they continue, Carter, Lord Canarvin, and the crew have  a hearty lunch in the tomb of Ramsay’s 11. The photo of this lunch will take on  tremendous significance as the years go by.

Many of the guests at this table will mysteriously  die before the decade is through. [Music] After they finish eating, Carter and his team break  through another wall in the anti-chamber. On the other side, there’s an open area leading to the  door of a burial chamber. Carter’s team is ready to break through to the next room. But in Carter’s  way stands a lock made of rope and a clay seal of Anubis, the god of the underworld, that hasn’t  been touched by human hands in over 3,000 years.

Carter doesn’t think twice  about cutting it open. [Music] Under four outer shrines, the crew finds a  quartzite sarcophagus. Inside is a series of nested gilded coffins, and at the center  lies a mummy hidden behind a now famous golden mask. King Tut has been found. The Tuden  common discovery makes news around the world, but it doesn’t take long before  very bad things start happening.

Just days after the discovery, Lord  Canarvin falls ill, developing a nasty blood infection. His condition worsens. Less  than two months after entering Tut’s burial chamber, Canarvin dies from pneumonia and blood  poisoning. His death makes worldwide headlines.

A new mania takes hold. Fear of the pharaoh’s  curse. But is it merely a catchy tabloid headline?

One person who promotes the curse is the master  of who done it murder mysteries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. [Music]  For all of Sherlock’s cold, calculating reason, Conan Doyle is a spiritualist and a firm believer  in powers beyond the grave, an idea present in some of his short stories. The day after  Canarvin’s death, Conan Doyle tells US reporters the death may have been due to elementals,  primitive spirits invoked by ancient Egyptian priests to guard tombs, and that this must have  been a peculiar element of an Egyptian curse.

World leaders even get in on the panic. After  reading about Lord Canarvin’s death, Italy’s dictator Bonito Mussolini frantically orders a  mummy he had received as a gift to be removed from his private home in Rome. There is one man who  is certainly skeptical of the curse. The man who discovered the tomb, Howard Carter himself. Though  Carter is distraught by the death of his friend and patron, he calls the curse Tommy rot. In  other words, nonsense. Carter gets back to work, but then rather inconveniently, other people  connected to the discovery of the tomb start dying. George J. Gould, an American financier  and railroad executive, falls sick after visiting the monument and dies from pneumonia one month  after Lord Canarvin. Two other men who helped with the excavation, including Canarvin’s own  half-brother, die from pneumonia in the years following. Newspapers sensationalize Tut’s curse  and report when a premature death strikes anyone

who enters the tomb. Multiple men are later killed  by gunshot, including an Egyptian prince who was shot in the head by his wife. One man is smothered  to death with a pillow in a gentleman’s club.

And archaeologist Hugh Evelyn White dies by  suicide, reportedly leaving a note that says, “I have succumbed to a curse which forces me  to disappear.” The curse of King Tut is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th  century. But is the curse real or is it just a series of unfortunate tragedies? In 2003,  two London physicians, Sheree and Tariq Elaw, published a letter in the Lancet Medical  Journal proposing a possible origin for the notorious curse. The unexpected culprit,  fungus. It is believed that a toxic fungus could have festered for centuries in the tomb,  just waiting for Carter’s crew to breathe it in.

This could explain the deaths that were  caused by respiratory diseases and pneumonia.

Some say that toxic fungus is the true culprit  in the curse of King Tut’s tomb. But there’s one problem with that theory. It doesn’t explain  the death of the very first man inside, Howard Carter. [Music] Despite rumors of a curse on King  Tut’s tomb, archaeologist Howard Carter continues to catalog and examine the tomb until 1932. That’s  a solid decade of getting on the wrong side of the pharaoh. What happens to him? Well, nothing for  a long time. Carter, the man most responsible for the excavation and the first one into the  tomb, does die relatively young at age 64, passing away from lymphoma? That isn’t a condition  a fungus could cause. If there were a curse on King Tut’s tomb, did it miss its main target, or  could there be some other unseen force at play?

In 2024, a scientific paper makes a different  case for the pharaoh’s curse, poisonous radon. Bioarchchaeologist Rosalyn Campbell has  studied the theory and believes it makes sense.

radioactive gas could explain the mysterious  deaths. So, the symptoms of radon poisoning can be very similar or identical to the symptoms of  different types of cancers. One of the things that we know about limestone is it emits radon, which  is a radioactive gas. And in the Valley of the Kings, all of the tombs are cut into the naturally  occurring limestone that makes up this valley.

Normally, this isn’t necessarily a huge problem,  but if you’re in an area with a lot of limestone and very poor ventilation, then you are being  exposed to potentially unsafe levels of radon that can cause serious health problems. Toutin Commons  tomb is actually unusually small for a royal tomb.

They would have been in daily contact with a lot  of this limestone that was emitting radon gas.

And we do see for example various other people  who worked in that tomb also were diagnosed with cancer and Howard Carter died of lymphoma. So  radon might have caused very serious health concerns over the years and eventually  led to the death of these individuals.