The UnXplained

A priceless diamond with a deadly past.

A picturesque lake

that hides a ghost town.

And a pharaoh's tomb

that was not meant

to be disturbed.

Throughout recorded history,

every major civilization

has believed in curses

and their power to inflict harm

on the unsuspecting.

Even today, many people are afraid

of walking into a so-called cursed place

or touching a reportedly cursed object.

But if curses are, in fact, real,

then what brings them into existence?

And how are they triggered?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

A young boy working for a British excavation team

led by archaeologist Howard Carter

is riding his donkey home one night

when suddenly the animal's hoof slips

into a hole below the sand.

Carter and his team later excavate the site

and discover a mysterious chamber

hidden deep beneath the shifting sands.

Peering inside, they lay their eyes upon

one of the most incredible

archaeological finds in history.

A massive treasure trove of gold

and ebony artifacts,

all laid out before another chamber

guarded by two imposing statues

and sealed shut

with an intricate combination

of rope knots and clay.

The long-lost tomb of King Tutankhamen.

It was absolutely a magnificent discovery,

it made headline news all over the world,

and really sort of captured public imagination

at just the right time.

Unlike most of the other tombs

that had been discovered of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs,

King Tut's tomb was untouched.

It had not been plundered,

it had not been destroyed,

and so there was a tremendous wealth of archaeological data,

as well as just a stunning display of artifacts.

After spending nearly three months cataloging

the more than 5,000 relics

found within the tomb's antechamber...

on February 16, 1923,

at just after 2:00 in the afternoon,

members of the press gathered to watch

Howard Carter finally break the seal

protecting King Tut's burial chamber,

which had lain undisturbed

for more than 3,000 years.

Carter started excavation of the burial chamber

within Tutankhamen's tomb,

and he found the intact burial of Tutankhamen,

which was contained, essentially, within

nine protective layers.

The sarcophagus is very elaborate.

It's got gold,

it's inlaid with precious stones,

and there's several layers of it

before you get down to the central layer,

which is of course the mummy of King Tutankhamen himself.

Once Carter began unwrapping the mummy of Tutankhamen

and removed the funerary death mask

and made his way through the different

mummy bandages and the bundle itself,

he was able to see the face of Tutankhamen,

which hadn't been seen by any living person

for nearly 3,500 years.

So, in a way, the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamen

is a kind of a resurrection.

The discovery of King Tut's mummy

launched an international media frenzy,

making headlines in every major newspaper around the world.

But Howard Carter and his team

had barely begun enjoying their success

when several strange things started happening to them.

That evening, Howard Carter is having his dinner,

and hears a commotion in the next room.

Goes in, and his

pet canary is being attacked

inside its cage by a king cobra.

Now, the king cobra is a symbol for the pharaoh.

And a canary, the symbolism.

The canary is the first to go.

The canary is the weakest and a warning.

After that, Lord Carnarvon,

the financier of the whole expedition,

was there on-site,

and then, while they're inventorying the treasures,

he gets a mosquito bite.

A few days later, accidentally nicks the bump with his razor.

The bump gets infected.

It leads to blood poisoning,

and he dies of it.

A prominent British radiologist

came out to the site to X-ray King Tut,

and shortly after handling the mummy,

he catches a mysterious disease that cannot be diagnosed,

cannot be treated, and it kills him.

All told, the deaths of no fewer than

seven members of Howard Carter's expedition

took place shortly after the reopening

of Tutankhamen's burial chamber.

While it was certainly possible

their untimely deaths were nothing more than coincidences,

many believed that by disturbing King Tut's mummy,

the archaeologists had somehow triggered

a deadly curse.

To the ancient Egyptians, death was not the end.

But in order to guarantee yourself eternal life,

you actually had to preserve

your earthly body for the spirit

to be able to function properly.

The idea of a mummy curse

is to keep those people out of the tombs.

The Egyptians said, if you bothered these mummies,

you would have a problem.

And people who have discovered those tombs

actually ended up dying weird ways.

If that's not a curse, what would be?

The ancient Egyptians, uh,

prepared the body for mummification

by removing the internal organs.

They would remove the brain through the nose

with a metal hook,

and clean out all of the organs

and put them in jars, except for the heart

because, for them, uh, the heart was the key to the afterlife.

And then, at that point, they'd wrap the body in linen,

and then they'd put them in sarcophagi

that looked like human beings,

and they were made to resemble the deceased.

The Egyptians thought the soul had multiple parts.

Upon death, certain parts of the soul

went down into the earth,

certain parts went up into the sky,

and then other parts remained with the actual body.

If you want that person perpetuated for eternity,

you need to maintain all aspects of the soul together.

That can happen if the body is preserved.

The idea was that, at some point, you will face the gods,

and those who are unworthy

would be obliterated for all time.

So these tombs were meant to be there until the day of judgment.

You were not supposed to open these.

Is it possible that the ancient Egyptians

were able to preserve the soul of King Tut

within his mummified remains,

effectively keeping his spirit alive for thousands of years?

And if so, could the pharaoh's spirit

have unleashed a curse

upon the men responsible for disturbing

his sacred burial chamber? Perhaps.

But there are some researchers

who claim that even before King Tut's tomb was disturbed,

there was already a pharaoh's curse in place.

A curse that was associated not with King Tut

but with his father Akhenaton.

Akhenaton was controversial

because he used his considerable power as pharaoh

to change the religious system.

Ancient Egypt had always been polytheistic...

Many gods... and then

there is a new pharaoh with a new idea.

Akhenaton announces there will be one god,

they will be a monotheistic people.

Aten, the sun god, would be

the one divinity they all worshipped.

The sun disc.

It shook the empire in really terrible ways.

Part of this religious revolution

included purposely erasing the names of older gods,

closing down their temples,

erasing their names from monuments,

and trying to obliterate these other deities

that the Egyptians used to worship.

Before the reign of Akhenaton,

the most sacred deity of the ancient Egyptians

was known as Amun-Ra, the chief of all Egyptian gods.

According to legend, Amun-Ra was angered

by Akhenaton's acts of heresy

and took vengeance upon the pharaoh.

For his offense,

Akhenaton was cursed by Amun-Ra,

a curse unique

to religious views in Egypt.

He would be cursed after death

to wander endlessly.

His soul would never be reunited with his body,

which was the point of all those funerary practices.

He would be disconnected and dislodged forever.

Was King Tut's body mummified