Nelson's (2002)[1] refutation of the 'mummy's curse' provides a humorous demonstration of applying statistical techniques for solving health problems, even those of mythical origins. Nelson used a 'retrospective' cohort design for comparing the survival of 25 'Westerners' who were physically exposed to the curse, with 11 controls who were in Egypt at the time but were unexposed. The data for dates of birth and death for the participants were collected from the various biographical sources and newspapers.

A quick glance at the sample data on page 1483 leads to the appalling impression that the curse had taken its' toll given that the exposed sample died at an earlier age and post-exposed survived for fewer years than controls. Then multivariate statistics and SPSS came to the rescue; demonstrating that the sample differences simply reflected unequal ages at exposure and gender differences between the two groups. As the null hypotheses was retained, Nelson concluded that there was no evidence for the existence of the 'mummy's curse' and expressed the hope that the myth would finally be put to rest.

All afficionados of horror films know that it is not so easy to dispose of a mummy. Deciding to retain Ho results in multiple interpretations, including that the study lacked sufficient power and accuracy to identify the patterns in the population [2] as Nelson recognised in 'Limitations of the study' (p.1484). The inferential statistical 'ju-ju' works only under auspicious circumstances. Some of the of the data were based on educated guesses (eg. women's dates of birth). Also, the sample size for one of the groups was very small (n=11); the sample sizes unequal (robustness compromised); and when there is a high variability and skew (survival in years) the parametric inferential analysis loses power. The 95% confidence interval (0.20 to 9.6) for survival for death within 10 years demonstrates the weak inferences afforded by the study. Any odds are possible given such a wide range; the real outcome of the exposure could either be the 'elixir of life' (0.20) or like a good dose of arsenic (9.6) and anything in between! As we cannot be confident one way or the other, the evidence has not dispelled the curse.

Sometimes monsters can be dispatched 'Buffy-style;' a swift kick up the backside followed by a stake in the heart: a simple approach can be effective. It is evident that the average age of death for the Westerners (24 males and 1 female) was 75 years; giving a 95% confidence interval of approximately 65-75 years. Which is not a bad trot for men born in the late Nineteenth Century, considering that life expectancies were little over 50 years [3]. More detailed analyses using historically available mortality statistics could perhaps finally dispose of the myth of this curse. But then, why bother? 'Return of the Mummy 10' is now playing at a cinema near you. Watch and enjoy!

References

1. Nelson, M. The mummy's curse: historical cohort study BMJ 2002; 325: 1482-4.

2. Polgar, S. and Thomas, S. Introduction to Research in the Health Sciences 4th edition Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 2000, p. 257.

3. Preston and Haines, 1991 in http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~maggiel/Swedlund.pdf

Competing interests:  
None declared

Mark Nelson concluded his excellent paper by suggesting that finally
the curse "may be put to rest". I doubt that will be so. It would take
much more than an article in the BMJ to put an end to this nonsense. After
all, in the mid 1970s a complete book put to rest the ridiculous Bermuda
Triangle myths, but they have been repeated time after time since then.
("The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved" by Lawrence Kusch, New English
Library, c1976).

James Randi (www.randi.org) did similar research to Mark Nelson in
1978 ("King Tut's 'Revenge'", The Humanist, March/April 1978). Randi
included a table showing the deaths of twenty-two of the people involved
in the opening and excavation of Tutankhamen's tomb. I revised that table
for my co-written book "Bizarre Beliefs" by Simon Hoggart and Mike
Hutchinson, (Richard Cohen Books, 1995). This table and the full text from
our book can be seen at www.hutch.demon.co.uk/bizarre.

In addition to Randi's twenty-two people I added Richard Adamson who
claimed that he had guarded and slept in the tomb for seven years. His
story was told in the "Daily Mail" (29 August, 1980). Adamson claimed
that, in order to keep away 'armies of curious people' a journalist was
encouraged to write about a curse.

The curse of Tutankhamen is a manufactured one. With no good evidence
that the people who excavated the tomb of Tutankhamen were victims of a
curse, and no good evidence that there even was such a curse, I am
surprised that people try to find rational explanations for one. But then
again, people have tried to find rational explanations for ships
disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle; ships which were seen to sink,
disappeared in severe storms, or were nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle
when they were lost.

Competing interests:  
Co-author of "Bizarre Beliefs" which included a chapter on the curse of Tutankhamen

I would like to thank Mark Nelson for using science to
remind gullible people and sensation-seeking
journalists that the “curse of the pharaohs” does not
physically exist. Every so often the media concocts
another case of a curse, so such occasional reminders
never go amiss. However, Nelson’s capacity to
undertake a statistical medical evaluation of
Tutankhamun’s curse derives from his particular
definition of it. My doctoral anthropological research into
the representation of Egyptian mummies in British and
American popular culture and museums since the early
Nineteenth Century (Day 2001 MS) demonstrates that
definitions of “the curse”, including its alleged causes,
manifestations and results, have changed over time. In
effect there have been many curses, not a single curse
(“the curse”) as is often stated, but Nelson has
evaluated only one of them.

Nelson states that ‘[t]he mummy's curse is assumed to
be a physical rather than a metaphysical entity’, some
unknown but tangible phenomenon able to be
identified through scientific study. In fact, since its
inception in early Nineteenth Century fiction (Montserrat
1998; Montserrat cited by Keys 2000), “the” curse has
never assumed a single, fixed manifestation. In popular
culture (from fiction books and films to everyday
conversations and some very fanciful newspaper
reports), curses have been said to operate via a variety
of means. These include scientifically unverifiable,
esoteric means – such as attacks by living mummies
or by ancient magic spells – as well as by physical
means potentially able to be scientifically studied, such
as poisons in the air inside tombs or secreted within
artefacts. Only the consequences of being cursed,
which range from sudden death to illness, injury and
"bad luck" according to various sources, constitute
physical, observable phenomena which are invariably
associated with curses in popular lore.

It is only in recent times that "the” curse has been
treated as a predominantly physical, potentially
scientifically verifiable phenomenon, albeit mainly by
pseudoscientists. No study has convincingly linked it
exclusively or with certainty to any known force or
substance. Philipp Vandenberg attempted to explain
The Curse of the Pharoahs (1976) as radioactivity or
poisons, but assumed from the outset that it did exist,
and used subjective methodology and reasoning. This
latest paradigm of “the” curse as a physical
phenomenon in disguise is the only curse definition
which is amenable to scientific study, earlier definitions
having been associated with magic.

Such emphasis upon the manifestation of “the” curse
appears to have evolved as popular faith and interest in
its original ideology waned in the late Twentieth
Century. For “the” curse originated as a (possibly
Christian-influenced) moral tale that disturbing the
dead was sinful and would bring doom. This belief was
so ingrained in Britain, Europe and the United States
throughout the Nineteenth and early Twentieth
Centuries that even though the various curse legends
which preceded that of Tutankhamun claimed that
curses worked in different ways (caused not only by
entering tombs as Nelson assumes, but by owning
cursed artefacts, dissecting mummies or visiting
museums), they all agreed that the hubris of disturbing
the dead deserved nemesis. Hubris was not always
measured in the “doses” of tomb visits which Nelson
discusses; one incident of tomb-trespassing was
regarded as sufficient to cause death. However, with
the growth of public interest in archaeology there arose
a need to disavow guilt at exhuming the dead, so
cinema began to depict curses as evil by representing
horrible living mummies as the means of their
execution. People no longer supported mummies’
revenge, but were curious to know how it occurred –
and appropriated (and refashioned) scientific
methodologies to find answers. This appropriation,
incidentally, vented public frustration at the
concentration of scientific, especially archaeological,
authority in the hands of a few (Frayling 1992:39, 46).

So only the evolution of mummies and curses from
justified avengers to evildoers, with its resulting shift of
focus from the causes to the means of curses’
execution, makes a study such as Nelson’s possible.
In this sense he is working not beyond, but well within
the domain of popular discourse because it has
dictated the terms of his research. This introduces
sources of bias; for instance, the fact that
‘documentation of [Westerners] was more likely to be
complete’ results from many Europeans’ disinterest in
the welfare of “inferior” colonised peoples and their
fascination with the doings of their upper classes. As
narratives invented both by and for Westerners, curses
usually were not said to strike down non-Westerners. It
may be said that an academic study of the curse is
bound to disprove its physical existence, but I would
add that it is impossible to speak from outside popular
culture – from a “purely” scientific perspective – in order
to conduct such a study and reach this conclusion!
Egyptian mummy curses are clearly not physical
phenomena but what social scientists call discourses,
and in my view they can therefore be most productively
studied with a social scientific approach rather than a
medical or other hard scientific approach.

Dr Jasmine Day
Department of Anthropology
University of Western Australia

REFERENCES:

Day, J. 2001 The Mummy’s Curse: the origins,
development and roles of popular visions of Egyptian
mummies and their relationships with representations
of mummies in museums in Britain and the United
States of America during the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries. Doctoral dissertation, Department of
Anthropology, The University of Western Australia,
Australia. MS.

Frayling, C. 1992 The Face of Tutankhamun. London,
Boston: Faber and Faber.

Keys, D. 2000 Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb Invented By
Victorian Writers. Independent.co.uk News, U.K.
Available online:
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/UK/This_Britain/2
000-12/mummy311200.shtml> 31 December.

Montserrat, D. 1998 Louisa May Alcott and the
mummy’s curse. KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient
Egypt 9(2):70-5.

Vandenberg, P. 1976 [1973] The Curse of the Pharaohs
(trans. T. Weyr). London: Book Club Associates.

Competing interests:  
None declared

In reply to Harper the curse quoted is not associated with
Tutankhamon's tomb. The 'curse' was any death, however tenuous, linked to
this excavation by the press. The Times of London was granted exclusive
rights to the find and hence it is not too difficult to imagine the rival
press being deperate for any copy and being worked into a frenzy by the
death of Lord Carnarvon soon after the initial exploration of the tomb.

White is correct in pointing out that I dismissed the possibility of
a metaphysical effect. I did this under the epidemiological principle of
biological feasibility. I certainly hope there is not one as I visited the
tomb in 1985! Howard Carter, the most likely of those exposed, to my
knowledge did not suffer any of the effects that White proposes.

In reply to Kamat. There was some concern at the time about a
biological agent being a risk to those who entered the tomb. As pointed
out in the paper specimens were taken and were reported as sterile. My
understanding is that it is very unlikely that biological specimens could
survive millenia, even those that form spores. There was a rumour that
wheat left as food for the afterlife was germinated by scientists and
gained the name 'mummy's wheat'. I recall that an article in New Scientist
magazine debunked this.

Competing interests:  
None declared