Arthur Conan Doyle told the American press that ‘an evil elemental’ spirit created by priests to protect the mummy could have caused Carnarvon’s death. It was not long before Lord Carnarvon died in Cairo aged 56 and the lights in the city went out, which set off a frenzy of speculation.
The Times in London and New York World magazine published the best-selling novelist Marie Corelli’s speculations that ‘the most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb’. The discovery created a worldwide press sensation and stories spread about a curse on anyone who dared to break into a pharaoh’s tomb. The 5th Earl of Carnarvon, a keen amateur Egyptologist who was financing the project, joined Carter and his team to enter the burial chambers, where they found the young pharaoh’s mummified body and a wealth of religious objects, wall paintings and inscriptions as well as equipment he would need in the afterlife. Most of the tombs had been plundered from early times and Tutankhamun’s was the first to be found almost entirely undisturbed.
Pharaohs had been buried there from the 16th to the 11th centuries BC. Late in 1922 the British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, who died in 1323 BC aged about 18, in the Valley of the Kings, across the Nile from Luxor in Egypt.
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