Whatever happened to Carter's canary?: Facts, Fictions and Tutankhamun

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The discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922 is one of the best-known archaeological narratives of our age. The uncovering of the pharaoh’s final resting place with its wealth of gilded artefacts was cause for much celebration both in Egypt and abroad. But within weeks of the king’s burial chamber being opened, the man who financed the dig, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, was dead. Around the world and fuelled by tales of vengeful spirits in the press, people asked: was Carnarvon the victim of the mummy’s curse?

Eleanor Dobson examines the supernatural rumours that many archaeologists attempted to suppress, comparing the ‘official’ accounts of the dig with the lead excavator Howard Carter’s notebooks and diaries, paying particular attention to the fate of Carter's canary and those - including Carter himself - who capitalised upon this eerie tale.

What emerges is a picture of Egyptology’s conflicted status in the early twentieth century as, on the one hand, the field that claimed to piece together the truth about the past, and, on the other, a discipline inseparable from stories - however farfetched - about the power that the ancient dead continued to wield in the modern world.

About the speaker:

Dr Eleanor Dobson is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her first book, Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology, with Edinburgh University Press was released in November 2020.