Tutankhamun: Unmasking the Curse (2024)

[bunniefuu]

Tutankhamun

has become the most famous

of all the Pharaohs.

- Most people when they think

of Tutankhamun, they see all the gold.

They see semi-precious stones,

they see alabaster vases.

The discovery of the tomb

was quite widely perceived

as something absolutely

sensational, and unique,

and unprecedented.

- Ancient Egypt has perceived as unique

and people are drawn to it.

Everyone

wanted to see Tutankhamun.

However,

stories of mysterious events

seem to follow the opening

of the ancient tomb.

- The idea of the mummy's curse

is a particularly seductive narrative.

I think a lot of people were

confirmed in their suspicions

that no good would come

of disturbing the dead.

- And then what better story to tell

than that of an aristocrat

being struck down

by an ancient curse?



Egypt, 1922,

after a lengthy seven-year search,

Howard Carter, along with his

benefactor Lord Carnarvon,

opened the tomb of Tutankhamun.

It was the first time in over 3000 years

it had been disturbed.

- As the dig progresses,

it's not long before Carnarvon

starts to develop an illness.

The story goes that he got

a mosquito bite on a cheek,

and that when he was shaving,

he caught that mosquito bite,

and reopening that wound, it got infected

and that led to blood poisoning.

And then Lord

Carnarvon dropped dead.

- Almost immediately, the

idea that he was the victim

of some kind of curse

was being put around.

The idea of the mummy's curse

quickly gained traction.

It was theorized that the Lord's death

had been caused by elementals

created to guard the royal tomb.

For many it appeared that the

Boy King's spirit was awoken

and sought revenge

against the perpetrators.

- When Lord Carnarvon died

after the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb

postdating that event

by a matter of months.

I think a lot of people were

confirmed in their suspicions

that no good would come

of disturbing the dead.

There's a story that often gets repeated

about Carnarvon's dog howling

and suddenly dropping down

dead at the same moment.

There are other stories

about various people

mysteriously dying or

suffering unexpected fates.

Stories flooded newspapers

of visitors to the tomb

developing illnesses

and dying soon after.

There were accounts of houses burning down

then flooding upon being rebuilt,

it was reported that ancient

curses were inscribed

within the tomb warning

those who disturbed it.

- So Carnarvon's death

within a matter of months

of the tomb being discovered and opened

is the event that gets people talking

about the mummy's curse.

And interestingly, it's not

actually after his death

that those rumors start to circulate.

People start to speculate

about the Pharaoh's spirit

seeking vengeance for

disturbance of his grave,

even while Carnarvon's

illness is just being reported

in the press.

So as soon as Carnarvon starts to get ill,

that's when these stories

start to circulate.

- Howard Carter was an archeologist

who'd worked in Egypt

since his late teens.

He'd also worked for

the Egyptian government

as one of the antiquity inspectors,

but then had left under

something of a cloud in 1905.

- Howard Carter was an Egyptologist

who didn't have that

privilege an upbringing.

He was from a very artistic family,

but he didn't go to public school,

he didn't go to university.

So his training was

very much on the ground

with excavators like Flinders Petrie,

he's very famous for developing

a rigorous archeological method.

I think for Carter, he had a lot to prove,

to prove himself a gentleman.

- So when he first

arrived in Egypt in 1891,

when he was only 17 years old,

he actually did not arrive

as an archeologist.

He didn't work as an archeologist,

but he was hired as an

artist, as a draftsman.

- Around the same kind of

time, the Earl of Carnarvon

had taken up an interest in Egyptology

and had obtained permission

to undertake excavations.

- The 5th Earl of

Carnarvon is an aristocrat

born with a title.

He becomes interested in Egypt

very early in the 20th-century.

- So the reason Carnarvon was

in the position to excavate,

financial position was that he was married

to a woman called Almina Herbert

and she was in all likelihood,

the illegitimate daughter

of the American banker, Alfred Rothschild.

And so when they got married,

he put up a very nice dowry

of half a million pounds sterling,

which is nowadays equivalent

to about 70 billion.

And that enabled the

couple to live very nicely,

travel, collect antiquities,

and also excavate.

And Carnarvon made it to

the point where he realized

that he needs expert help.

- Carter was introduced to Carnarvon

and the two of them henceforth

worked together as a team.

- One had the financial

support but not the expertise.

The other one had the

expertise, but not the money.

And they were kind of

a match made in heaven.

- In the 1920s and 1930s,

Egypt is a playground for the

rich and famous, the elite.

So what you get is

people traveling to Egypt

for those winter months when the weather

is really, really nice.

And essentially, schmoozing and partying

and having a really good time

in European-style hotels,

very glamorous, very modern.

And just enjoying this really

quite fabulous social scene.

So there is this political

friction, this social friction

between Egyptians and

Europeans at the time.

The British invaded Egypt back in 1882

and have essentially been

in charge since that time.

Egyptian independence is on the horizon,

but certainly when it

comes to excavations,

these become particular

moments of national importance

where we see Egyptian nationalists

seizing on the Pharaohs

as symbols of Egyptian identity

and in theory, freedom.

Whereas the British, the

French, and other Europeans

still hold these really

significant roles in say,

the museums and antiquities

services in Egypt at the time.

So certainly a time of friction

between Egyptians and Europeans.

- So Carnarvon and Howard Carter

wanted to work in the Valley of the Kings.

The problem was that the

excavation permission

was in the hands of Theodore Davis,

who was an American lawyer, a

businessman come archeologist,

exploring more than 30 tombs,

royal and non-royal tombs.

- The Valley of the Kings has,

you could tell by the name,

a certain reputation for

where particular members

of Egyptian royalty are buried.

- The Valley of the Kings

is a body which is basically

a dried-up watercourse on the West Bank

near the modern city of Luxor.

And from the beginning of

the Egyptian 18th dynasty,

which is around about 1500 BC.

It'd been the place for the

burial of Egyptian Kings.

Prior to this, Kings are

generally buried under pyramids,

but those were no longer being used.

And instead, the royal tomb

comprised to have the Kings

and then a couple of kilometers away,

a temple for the worship

of the King's spirit.

- The first map of the Valley of the Kings

and first of tombs that

were known at this time

was made in 1799,

by members of Napoleon's

expedition to Egypt.

Then throughout the 19th-century,

the European exploration

of the Valley of the Kings continued.

Of course, it was hampered by the fact

that already in antiquity,

the majority of basically

all of the royal tombs

had been blocked.

Theodore Davis considered

the Valley of the Kings

to be exhausted, so he gave

up his excavation permit,

and then Lord Carnarvon

applied for it, got granted.

He signed it in early 1915.

- He knew that the valley had

been extensively excavated

over the previous century and a half.

However, he was aware there

were a number of areas

that have not yet been investigated.

And he was also aware

that there were a handful

of Kings whose tombs were unknown.

- Due to the outbreak of the first w*r,

there was a small delay.

- So Carter and Carnarvon

who were both excavating

before the w*r, paused

excavations during the w*r,

during which time Carnarvon

was actually hosting events

like spiritualist seances

in his ancestral seat

in Highclere Castle.

And after the First World

w*r, excavations resumed

and it's after the First World w*r,

fairly soon-ish after its conclusion

that the tomb of

Tutankhamun was discovered.

- The first thing that Howard Carter did

was that he created a map

and then through the seasons,

they would excavate from the

surface down to the bedrock

to make sure not to miss anything.

Grid square by grid square.

- The discovery of the tomb

was basically the result

of systematic clearance.

There was an area which

hadn't been touched,

partly because it was right

in front of another tomb,

which was very popular with tourists.

- Archeologists and tourists

don't go together very well,

so archeologists had

always tried to quiet it.

And Carter's solution was just to start

the excavation season a little bit earlier

before the tourists season kicked in.

So he started on the

1st of November in 1922.

- So basically they started

clearing down through debris,

then finding a layer of which contained

the remains of work or art,

which dated to two or 300

years after Tutankhamun's time.

And then under that level

where they were getting down

to the original bedrock,

one of the workmen spotted something

which looked like the edge of a step.

Carter confirmed that

and stairway leading

into Tutankhamun's tomb

was then revealed.

- On the morning of the 4th of November,

the first step of a

staircase was discovered,

rock-cut staircase.

And so on the evening

of the 4th of November,

he writes into his diary,

the only time ever,

he scribbles all over the page

instead of writing very neatly,

he writes down the now-famous words,

first steps for King Valley.

They started clearing what

proved to be a rock-cut stairway

until he hit a plastered door.

And then on the 5th of November,

he did something quite superhuman.

He decided that he cannot continue

and has to wait until his sponsor

and his friend Lord

Carnarvon is present as well.

- So they're waiting for

Carnarvon to come over

with his daughter to get to the tomb.

And they're not going to peer inside.

They're not going to make that first hole

until Carnarvon is present.

And so everyone's waiting,

you can only imagine

how much anticipation

characterized the atmosphere.

- And then on the morning

of the 26th of November,

it was finally time that Howard Carter

made a tiny breach into the doorway

and then became the first person

after 3000 years to look

inside the tomb of Tutankhamun.

He describes this moment

very vividly in his excavation journal.

When Lord Carnarvon asked

him, "Can you see anything?"

He said, "Yes, it is wonderful."

- The initial view which Carter

had into the first chamber

was that it was a rectangular

room filled with objects.

- When the tomb was first opened,

it's quite a cramped space,

it was quite a busy space.

A lot of objects were stacked

up against each other,

stacked up against the wall.

- It was likened to a townhouse

to been closed up for the summer.

The range of material found in the tomb

was quite extraordinary.

You have things intimately

related to the mummy,

so therefore you've got the nest

of coffins in which it was housed.

The great sarcophagus within

that which they were housed,

and also with the containers

for the mummified intestines of the King.

- Tutankhamen's funerary mask,

which sat directly atop

his mummified remains,

is one of the most famous

egyptological artifacts

of all time.

And I think it captures

the popular imagination

because of its glamorous gold quality.

- Before the discovery of his tomb,

Tutankhamun was known to

have been a minor king

of the late 14th century BC.

However, his exact

relationships were unclear.

He was certainly a son-in-law

of the so-called heretic King Akhenaten.

But whether he was a

member of the royal family

or simply a nobleman who'd

married a princess was unknown.

- So what was known was that

he had a very short reign,

probably ran only for 10

years and died quite young.

- So a very short reign,

but one in which crucially,

we see a reversal

of the religious reforms

brought in by his father.

So return to polytheism,

so multiple deities

rather than monotheism a single deity,

which was brought in by Akhenaten.

- I think the value of the discovery

in terms of what have we

learned about Tutankhamun

lies in the fact that

there were quite a lot

of personal items in the tomb

that actually really give

us a glimpse of that person.

So he wasn't only King,

he was also a human being.

And I'm always quite

touched by some of the finds

in his tomb.

There's for instance, small furniture

clearly made for a child.

There is a box for shaving equipment

that says for his Majesty

when he was a boy,

so probably contained his

first shaving equipment.

There's also a lock of hair

of his grandmother, Tiye,

in the tomb.

And then, of course, sadly,

there are also good

mummified remains of his two

prematurely born daughters.

- To me, the most significant artifacts

found within that tomb are the bodies

of Tutankhamun's daughters.

So we have two miniature sarcophagi,

two miniature coffins,

inside are two babies.

- Most people, when they

think of Tutankhamun

they see all the gold.

They see semi-precious stones.

They see alabaster vases.

But a lot of the material was

actually organic material.

So we are talking about

linen, clothes, robes,

yeah, even Tutankhamun's underwear,

more than a hundred pairs of them,

there were shoes made of leather.

Of course, inside the vases

you had perfumes and oils.

- So the ancient Egyptians

believed that after death,

their heart would be weighed

against the feather of truth.

And to get to the underworld

that would have to balance favorably.

If it didn't balance favorably,

they would be eaten by a devourer entity.

So hopefully you get past the first stage,

and then when you get to the afterlife,

you enjoy eternal life in

theory with all of the things

with which you are buried

and what they represent.

So you find people buried

with food and drink.

You find people buried

often with multiple shabtis,

which are little humanoid

pieces, which represent servants

or people who do various tasks

for you in the afterlife.

So the more you are buried

with supposedly the nicer

and more luxurious your

afterlife would be.

The objects within the tomb were preserved

to an incredible degree.

Obviously, this is a tomb

that has been almost entirely undisturbed.

And as a result, these

very delicate artifacts

remain almost captured

like a snapshot in time.

On the other hand, it does mean

that there are some things in there

that are incredibly delicate.

- The one thing which was in

a very, very bad condition

was the King's mummy.

And this was due to the fact

that the ancient priests

had poured large amounts of unguents,

which is various sacred

oils all over the body

before they closed the coffin.

And those sacred oils have carbonized

and gradually almost burnt

parts of the mummy's flesh.

Also, those oils had completely solidified

so that when it came to

trying to unwrap the mummy,

the mummy actually had to be cut to pieces

to actually get it outta the

coffin and outta its wrappings.

- One of the things that

people don't tend to know

about Tutankhamun's remains

is that in the process

of removing them from their coffin,

they were actually broken

up into lots of pieces.

His arms, for instance, he

was also severed at the hips,

his head was removed from his body.

The excavators themselves

essentially glued the pieces

of his body back together.

I think that's one of the

things, one of the parts

of the story that's been

deliberately obscured

because people find

that idea so horrifying

that we would treat human

remains in that way.

- The world reaction to

the tomb of Tutankhamun

was of course absolutely

spectacular, phenomenal,

the general public reacted

in an unprecedented way.

And it's important to keep

in mind that of course,

this was the first time an

event like this was transmitted

around the globe in real-time.

The discovery also had a major

impact on popular culture

in every sector, literature, theater,

and fashion, in design, you name it.

- The discovery of the tomb

sparked a wave of Egyptomania,

this ranged from fashion

to music, to advertising.

Egyptomania is the term

that people use to describe

a fascination for ancient Egypt,

which can actually be quite

divorced from ancient Egypt

as it existed as an ancient civilization.

It's the ancient Egypt of the imagination.

It's a fantastical take on ancient Egypt.

And often this falls back to

stereotypes like this idea

of an exotic culture, an orientalized,

erotic culture often as well,

and often falling back to tropes of Egypt

being a place of despotism in the Bible.

So actually, Egyptomania

doesn't necessarily represent

ancient Egypt as it

was, but a version of it

that can be quite dark, dangerous,

and that often is the version of Egypt

that captures the popular imagination.

- So tourists flooded

the Valley of the Kings.

Everyone wanted to see

Tutankhamun, children, academics,

journalists, royalty alike.

And so the wish to report on the tomb

and the discovery from

the side of the media

was massive as well.

Journalists like the tourists flooded

the Valley of the Kings

trying to get a picture

of the archeologists or objects

when they left the tomb.

And in the first month,

this all happened in a very chaotic way.

- The excavators were besieged

by journalists wanting a story.

This led to the Carnarvon

making the Times Newspaper

the only route for news to

come outta the excavation team.

- And so that meant that only

the journalist from the Times

was allowed to make

the official interviews

with the excavators.

And only the Times got

the official photographs

that were taken by Harry Burton,

and then the other newspapers

had to buy the photographs off the Times.

And as you can imagine,

that very much angered

and alienated not only the foreign,

but also the Egyptian press.

- The reason the deal with

the Times caused controversy

in Egypt is because the Egyptians

weren't being given access

to information about their

own cultural heritage.

And politically this was

seen as a real misstep

because the British are being

fed this information directly,

which the Egyptians are

then getting secondhand.

So there really was a two-tier system.

And it was the British press

specifically, the Times

that were getting all of the information,

all of the interviews

and the Egyptian press

and other news outlets who were

coming to the table second.

But this just simply annoyed

and also led directly to the ledging

of the curse of Tutankhamun.

- And so what happens,

is we start to get this almost snowballing

where anybody with any connection

whatsoever to the tomb,

whether they visited it briefly,

or whether they're an

excavator involved in the dig,

as soon as anything bad happens to them,

it just gets attributed

to the mummy's curse.

But I think the idea of the mummy's curse

is a particularly seductive narrative

because burial sites of

the ancient Egyptian dead,

of royalty in particular, are so lavish.

- From the beginning,

people were interested in ancient Egypt.

It was very clear that ancient

Egyptian funerary beliefs

played a very crucial role

in ancient Egyptian culture.

And it was known that ancient Egyptians

prepared very carefully for their journey

through the underlife,

or they had a very distinct idea

about what comes after death.

So already in Victorian

times, this was perceived

as a crucial element of

ancient Egyptian culture.

In the Victorian society,

people did indulge in events

like mummy unwrappings.

And the idea of ancient

Egyptian curses already existed.

- After the enormous losses

of the First World w*r is we see

a resurgence in interest in spiritualism.

Spiritualism is the belief that

we can contact the deceased

after they've died.

What you start to see,

is spiritualists claiming

that Tutankhamun's spirit

is communicating with them.

This is particularly interesting, I think,

given that Lord Carnarvon

himself was a spiritualist.

- In the early 1920s.

So people had just gone

through a global pandemic,

also through a w*r where a

lot of young men had died

very early on.

It was a time when the

discovery of the remains

of a very young man who

had also died prematurely

very much resonated in the Western world.

And also, quite frankly,

people wanted to be distracted.

We are talking about a time

with severe economic problems.

Life wasn't easy,

and I think it's simply

part of your nature

that when the opportunity comes,

people like to be distracted.

And then better story to tell

than that of an Aristocrat

being struck down by an ancient curse.

I think that the discovery

of the tomb was quite rightly perceived

as something absolutely

sensational, and unique,

and unprecedented.

It really was the first

time that a royal tomb

was discovered more or less intact.

And Carter was swamped

in letters and telegrams

and Tut-mania kicked in.

And all of that very much

prepared the grounds for,

of course, that's the moment

when myths are created.

I think this is something

that is really important

to be considered when it comes

to the birth of the curse

of Tutankhamun.

The other newspapers didn't

have their own story to tell,

but finally with the curse,

they had their own story to tell.

- The press has an absolute field day,

and the people who were

interviewed by the press crucially,

who push the story of

supernatural forces at work

who suggest that there

are secret hidden poisons

within the tomb are authors

who have themselves written stories

about vengeful ancient Egyptian entities,

people like Marie Carelli

and Arthur Conan Doyle.



So one of the things that you see

after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb

and certainly after the death

of Lord Carnarvon in 1923,

is a republication of lots

of 19th-century texts,

specifically Victorian texts,

which feature these ancient

Egyptian antagonists.

So Marie Carelli's novel "Ziska"

from 1897 is republished.

You also get Arthur

Conan Doyle's mummy story

"Lot No. 249", which comes out again.

So you could very skeptically look at this

and think that these

authors have an interest

in the mummy's curse because

their work will be republished.

There may be some kind

of financial incentive

to speak to the papers

and push those theories,

but certainly, in terms of

what people want to consume

audiences were returning to this fiction

and rereading it again in

light of contemporary events.

But I think ancient Egypt captures

so many occult imaginations

in the late 19th,

early 20th centuries because

of its very complicated

funerary rites, so "The Book of the Dead"

becomes incredibly

popular with occultists.

I think ideas of the various components

of the soul in ancient Egypt.

So things like the Ka,

being able to exit the body

and almost functioning as a

kind of double of the body

felt quite a lot like the

concept of astral projection,

of being able to leave one's

body and go somewhere else.

So I think there were lots of concepts

that really appealed to occultists

that seemed to chime

with ideas that they were interested in.

And they could chart that back in theory

to an ancient Egyptian origin point

and almost give an

authority or authenticity

to what they themselves were doing.

Simply put, the evidence that

the curse is more fiction

than fact is the average life

expectancy of people who were

involved in the excavations.

So there's actually been a medical study

which looked at the average age of death

of the people involved with the tomb

and the average age of death

in the general population.

And they found that you

are slightly more likely

to die a little bit younger

if you were involved

in the Tutankhamun excavations.

But statistically speaking,

there was nothing really in it.

- So we are looking at a period

of time without vaccines,

without any antiviral drugs,

even without any antibiotics.

Penicillin was only developed in 1928.

The average life expectance of a man

in the 1920s and 30s was 60.

So looking at the

people, the photographer,

Harry Burton died age 60 of diabetes.

The engineer Arthur Callender died age 60.

Arthur Mayes died a few years

after he left the excavation team.

He worked on the tomb from 1922 to 1924,

but he already left for health reasons.

He was suffering from pleurisy

and then died of tuberculosis.

Looking at Carter

himself, he died in 1939,

age 64 from Hodgkin's disease.

The most prominent case is

obviously Lord Carnarvon.

He was bitten by a mosquito

and then while he was shaving,

the wound got infected,

got blood poisoning, which

developed into pneumonia,

and then he died.

Lord Carnarvon died on

the 5th of April 1923.

Arthur Mayes left the

excavation team in 1924,

but the mummified body of Tutankhamun

was actually not unwrapped

until November 1925.

So neither Mayes nor Carnarvon ever saw

or came in contact with

the body of Tutankhamun.

- The question as to why

the curse got so popular

is a really interesting one.

And I think we get a sense

of perhaps imperial guilt

on the part of the British

and other Europeans.

The sense that disturbing

these resting places

is something that actually

feels uncomfortable.

And you start to see people

writing to newspapers saying,

surely we shouldn't be doing this,

and surely we shouldn't be

putting mummified remains

in museums in glass cases.

It's not what those

individuals would've wanted.

So we definitely get more of

a sense of a moral gray area

that people are exploring here.

And I wonder whether

some of the curse stories

is responding to that discomfort actually.

- It's worthwhile noting

that the Egyptians

did actually include curses in some tombs,

but they were normally

against the embezzlement

of funerary endowments

rather than anything to do

with actually penetrating a tomb.

- One of the things that the

ancient Egyptians believed

was that the body had to remain intact

and that you needed everything

for the afterlife to be buried with you.

So there are instances

where you get people

protecting their burials

and say, don't come and

disturb these remains,

or all of my things or bad

things will happen to you,

but certainly not the

mummy's curse as we know it

as a modern cultural phenomenon.

There are other stories of

supposedly unlucky artifacts

that cause people to suffer misfortune

and premature death,

certainly in the 19th-century

and early 20th-century

before the discovery

of Tutankhamun's tomb.

So one famous example concerns an artifact

which is held in the British Museum.

It's referred to as the

unlucky mummy colloquially,

but it's actually a wooden mummy board.

So it's not human remains at all.

It's a wooden resemblance of

an individual which would sit

atop their body in the sarcophagus.

The unlucky mummy's been

tied to loads of accidents

that have befallen people over the years.

And supposedly it was

given to the British Museum

to stop its previous owner from suffering

these misfortunes themselves.

It was donated to the British Museum

to get it out of the house, essentially.

The unlucky mummy has such

an interesting, again,

snowballing of mythology surrounding it,

that you actually get one

Egyptologist, Margaret Murray,

where she told some Egyptology students

that this mummy board had actually been

on the Titanic when it sank.

But, of course, it never was.

It's just an instance of an Egyptologist

telling a spooky story.

And of course, this is

exactly the kind of thing

that gets repeated and goes

down through the decades,

ad nauseam.

Yes, there were some

very high-profile deaths

connected to the Tutankhamun excavations,

but we all have to die someday.

And it may just be after we've

entered an Egyptian tomb.

- It took Howard Carter

and his team altogether 10 years

to fully excavate the tomb,

to clear it, to transport

the objects to Cairo.

And this is a number I think

many people are not aware of.

Archeology is not what Indiana

Jones is doing in the movies

as much as I love the films.

But we do not run into a temple,

grab a goblet, and run out again.

So instead, we have a lot of

specialists on excavations,

and we produce thousands of records.

- Following discovery of the tomb,

the objects were progressively taken

to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Then as we moved into the 1960s,

a number of exhibitions

of material from the tomb

started to leave Egypt.

These exhibitions, in many

ways revived the Tut-mania

of the 1920s and 1930s.

- So in terms of the

exhibitions themselves,

the amounts of objects from

Tutankhamun's tomb is enormous.

And so there's a very

careful curation process

in terms of what actually gets selected

and what travels around the world.

And of course, those most famous artifacts

like Tutankhamun's funerary mask,

it's just gonna be one of those artifacts

that people want to

see all over the world.

And so when you see photographs

of the exhibitions themselves,

you see photographs

of particularly that most famous artifact,

the funerary mask with

celebrities, royalty, politicians,

the most famous, and

important, and powerful people

all over the world, engaging

with these symbols of power

and absolute monarchy in really

interesting symbolic ways.

- I think our persisting interest

and fascination for ancient Egypt

comes partly from its recognizability.

It's one of the few cultures

where almost anybody can recognize it,

it's a certain number of icons

which have passed into

international culture.

And there's also this

underlying feeling of mystery.

In most countries

in the Western world,

in North America, if you

go to a bigger museum,

you will find an Egyptian collection.

So it is very accessible.

Ancient Egypt is part

of school curriculum.

Kids already grow up with ancient Egypt.

- If you walk around

museum displays devoted

to ancient Egypt, we almost see one

of two stories cropping up.

The first is that they were just like us.

So you walk into the gallery

and you see ancient Egyptian eyeliner

and you think, oh yeah, just like me.

The other story, of course,

is one that's very different.

You walk into a gallery and

the story that is curated

for you is these people

are very different to us.

And I think that difference is something

that people find utterly captivating.

Ancient Egypt

is perceived as unique

and people are drawn to the unique.

- This idea of a very

complex funerary culture.

This idea of monumentality

and the idea of Egypt

that actually perhaps isn't

quite historically accurate,

but the version of Egypt

we have in our heads,

which is kind of gilded,

and luxurious, and opulent,

despite the fact that

the gilded artifacts,

the opulence is reserved

for the elite few.

So I think it is those

two different stories

that work in tandem.

They're just like us,

but they're so different.

And I think we yearn for that connection,

but we're also really struck

and startled by that huge gulf I think

that separates us from them.

- And then on top of that,

I think there are unfortunately

are a lot of things

that I would call stereotypes.

That's what people are fascinated with,

and which as an Egyptologist,

I fight very hard

to help people to overcome the stereotypes

and see that there is so

much more to ancient Egypt

than just gold, and mummies, and pyramids.