• A letter by Howard Carter disputes the “Curse of the Pharaohs,” blaming journalist Arthur Weigall.
• Carter accuses Weigall of inventing the myth after being excluded from exclusive Tutankhamun coverage.
• The three-page letter, revealing tensions behind the discovery, sold at auction for $16,643.

The man who discovered the tomb of pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922 did not think much of the “Curse of the Pharaohs,” a myth that those who disturb the mummies of ancient Egyptian royalty meet a swift and unsavory end.

In fact, Howard Carter blamed a single troublesome journalist for the spread of the legend throughout global newspapers: Arthur Weigall. And so, when Weigall died, Carter was sanguine about the news, labeling the man a “menace to archaeology” who pursued short-term “excitement and amusement at the expense of others”—namely Carter himself.

This is the bitter tone that emerges from a letter Carter wrote to Helen Ionides shortly after Weigall’s death in 1934 that sold at the Boston-based RR Auctions for $16,643, on March 18.

“Carter states plainly that he believed the curse story came from Weigall and that it had no factual basis,” Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auction, said over email. “The letter is unusually direct.”

The first page of Howard Carter’s letter. Photo: courtesy RR Auctions.

The three-page letter, datelined to Luxor, Egypt, offers a peek at the backroom dealing that underwrote Carter’s archaeological breakthrough. In order to finance the excavation, George Herbert, aka Lord Carnarvon, granted the Times of London exclusive access in exchange for £5,000 (roughly $600,000 today) as well as 75 percent of the profits generated from the King Tutankhamun story. While this succeeded in bankrolling the costly project, it created animosity from reporters at other newspapers. Weigall, an Egyptologist who covered the story for the Daily Mail, was one such reporter.

Cut off from Carter’s daily updates in the Valley of the Kings, Weigall spun his readers a sensationalist yarn instead. “The ‘Tutankhamun Curse’ was his invention,” Carter told Ionides. “Believed out of pique—a sort of vengeance—towards his loyal friend Lord Carnarvon who, because Weigall came out solely as correspondent of the Daily Mail, was obliged to treat him like the other newspaper correspondents.”

The kicker? According the Carter, Weigall was not present at the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, but was several minutes late and the last of the reporters to arrive.

The golden funerary mask of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun on view at the Grand Egyptian Museum. Photo: Mohamed Elshahed / Anadolu via Getty Images.

Although half a dozen individuals connected with the project died in the years following the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, thus providing fuel to the myth, modern science has since weighed in with explanations. Most notably, the death of Lord Carnarvon, which occurred four months after the tomb’s opening, has been explained as a poorly treated infection from a mosquito bite.

Carter’s letter is not just filled with scorn, but finds time to commiserate the “sad death” of the Duchess of Alba, a Spanish-British socialite, and praise his friend Ruth Draper, an American actor whom he calls “very charming.” The letter’s recipient, Ionides, was the daughter of British art patron and collector Constantine Alexander Ionides, and received an M.B.E. following her work for the Red Cross during World War II.

The letter previously sold at RR Auctions in 2022 for $10,000.