Despite these ominous words the tomb was opened. Six months later Earl Carnarvon died in Cairo from an infected insect bite on his cheek. His son reported that the Earl’s favourite dog howled and dropped dead on the same day. When Tutankhamen’s mummy was finally unwrapped in 1925 it was found to have a wound on its left cheek – in exactly the same position where Earl Carnarvon had been bitten. By 1929 eleven people connected with the discovery of the tomb had died of unnatural causes. These included two of Carnarvon’s relatives, his private secretary Richard Bethell and Bethell’s father, Lord Westbury.

The tablet containing the curse, although documented, was never photographed, and disappeared from the artefacts collected from the tomb. By 1935 there were 21 deaths linked to Tutankhamen’s Curse.

Perhaps the power of a curse is in the mind of the person who believes in it. Howard Carter, the man who opened the tomb, never believed in the curse. He lived to the respectable age of 66 before dying of entirely natural causes… although he apparently withdrew into himself and suffered with depression for several years before he died.