The Unbroken Seal on Tutankhamun's Shrine and the Curse Myth

The Seal on Tutankhamun’s Shrine That Stayed Unbroken for 3,245 Years

The photograph above shows one of the most remarkable small objects ever recorded in Egypt: a cord tied between the bolts of a gilded shrine in Tutankhamun's tomb, sealed with a lump of clay stamped with the royal necropolis seal, the mark of the officials who guarded the burials of the Valley of the Kings. It had stayed unbroken since the king's funeral, around 1323 BC, until Howard Carter's team recorded and removed it. That is where the oft-quoted figure of 3,245 years comes from.

The seal matters because it proved something Carter had hoped for but could not be sure of: thieves had broken into the tomb in antiquity, yet they had never reached the king himself. Here is the story of that seal, how the burial chamber was opened step by step, and what is true and false about the famous "curse".

What the seal is and what it shows

Tutankhamun's body lay at the centre of a set of nested containers. Around his mummy were three coffins, the innermost made of solid gold and weighing about 110 kg. These sat in a quartzite sarcophagus, which was enclosed in four gilded wooden shrines, one inside the next, almost filling the burial chamber.

The double doors of the inner shrines were closed with bolts, and the bolts were bound with cord wound in several strands. Over the cord, officials pressed a lump of clay and stamped it with the necropolis seal, which shows a recumbent jackal, the animal of Anubis, the god of embalming and protector of the dead. Seal impressions of this kind are a form of official tamper-evidence: if the clay is intact, nobody has opened the doors.

The expedition's photographer, Harry Burton of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, documented the sealed doors before anything was touched. His glass-plate negatives, now held by the Griffith Institute in Oxford, are the source of the famous image. Some websites date the photo to 1922, but the burial chamber had not yet been entered then; the shrine seals were photographed during 1923 and early 1924.

Why the cord and clay survived

Organic materials such as rope, linen and wood usually rot within decades. In Tutankhamun's tomb they lasted more than three thousand years because the conditions were unusually kind. The Valley of the Kings lies in one of the driest regions on Earth, and the tomb's sealed chambers kept out water, light and most insects.

Preservation was not perfect everywhere, and some leather and textiles had decayed. But the cord on the shrine doors and its clay seal came through intact, along with thousands of other fragile objects. The tomb's contents are catalogued at 5,398 items.

How the tomb was found

Tutankhamun was a minor king in the eyes of later Egyptians. He came to the throne as a child, reigned for about nine or ten years and died young; anatomists who examined his mummy in 1925 estimated his age at close to 18. His name was later left out of official king lists, which helped keep his burial obscure.

His tomb, now known as KV62, is small for a royal burial and lies on the valley floor, just below the much larger tomb of Ramesses V and Ramesses VI (KV9). Flood debris covered its entrance, and later workmen built huts over the spot while cutting other tombs. That cover hid the stairway for more than three millennia.

Carter's workers found the first step on 4 November 1922, with funding from George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon. They reached the antechamber at the end of that month. Robbers had entered twice in antiquity, shortly after the burial, and officials had tidied up and resealed the tomb each time. The question was whether the thieves had reached the burial chamber.

Opening the shrines, step by step

The sealed wall of the burial chamber was officially opened on 16 February 1923, before an invited group of officials. Behind it stood the outermost shrine, a gilded box almost filling the room. When Carter opened its doors, he found a second shrine with its doors still bolted and sealed. That was the moment of certainty: the robbers had never got this far.

Work stopped for the season shortly afterwards, and dismantling the shrines was a long engineering job in a cramped room. Arthur Mace's notebook, now published by the Griffith Institute, records that the seals on the second shrine were photographed and removed in the last days of December 1923. On 3 January 1924, the team opened the doors of the inner shrines. Mace noted that the cord on the third shrine bore a variant of the necropolis seal with a royal cartouche above the jackal, and that it too was photographed before it was carefully detached.

The lid of the sarcophagus was raised on 12 February 1924. The coffins were opened in 1925, the gold coffin's lid in October of that year, and the examination of the mummy began in November.

In another of Burton's photographs, Howard Carter and an Egyptian member of the team lean over the open innermost coffin to inspect the wrapped king. The Egyptian workers and foremen who did much of the heavy labour are rarely named in accounts of the excavation, though Burton's pictures show them throughout.

The "curse of the pharaohs": what is true

No curse inscription has ever been found in Tutankhamun's tomb. The story was born in the press. Lord Carnarvon died in Cairo on 5 April 1923, less than two months after the burial chamber was opened. He had nicked an infected mosquito bite while shaving and developed blood poisoning; The Lancet later described his death as pneumonia following a streptococcal skin infection.

Newspapers seized on it. The novelist Marie Corelli had just published a letter warning, on the authority of an obscure old book, of dire punishment for anyone entering a sealed tomb. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a firm believer in spiritualism, suggested that spirits created by the king's priests might be responsible. Every later death connected with the excavation was added to the legend.

The numbers tell a different story. A 1989 study by David Vernon found that of the 58 people present at the opening, only eight died within the next twelve years. Howard Carter, the man who did more than anyone to disturb the king, lived until 1939 and died of lymphoma in his mid-sixties.

Myths that still circulate

"The mummy was in five sarcophagi inside five shrines." There were three coffins inside one stone sarcophagus, inside four shrines.
"The tomb was built under other pharaohs' tombs." It lies below the entrance to KV9 and was hidden by debris and workmen's huts, not by another tomb built on top of it.
"The tomb was untouched." Robbers entered twice in antiquity. What stayed untouched was the burial chamber and the king inside his shrines.
"Everyone who entered died." Most of the team lived ordinary lifespans, and no curse text was found.

The real story is more interesting than the legend: a thumb-sized lump of clay that told archaeologists, without a word, that they were about to see the only largely intact royal burial ever found in the Valley of the Kings.

Sources: Photographs by Harry Burton, Griffith Institute archive; Griffith Institute: Arthur Mace's notebook, 31 December 1923 to 3 January 1924; Wikipedia: KV62; Wikipedia: Curse of the pharaohs; Wikipedia: Tutankhamun's mummy; History.com: Archaeologist opens tomb of King Tut.

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