January
23
/ 2022
In economics one hears talk of “the curse of oil” – and one might say wherever there is buried treasure there will be a curse, hyper-real or real. The most famous of all curses is of course that supposedly attached to the mummy of Tutankhamen; although in truth what the newspapers and novelists wrote about this in 1922 had very little to do with any actual curse. I and others have written elsewhere of how the supposed curse of Tutankhamen was “engineered by the mass media in order to suppress opposition to archaeology, a subject of increasingly lucrative press reportage. It initiated the mummy’s transformation from ambivalent figures into the more overtly evil entities they were to become in cinema.”
