The Curse of Tutankhamen ( Is it real? or Is it a Coincidence?)

Of the original team of archaeologists who were present when the ancient tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun was opened, only one lived to a ripe old age. Was this a bizarre coincidence? Or was it the manifestation of a curse that had passed down through the centuries - a curse too sinister, too mysterious and too lethal for the modern world to comprehend? And a curse that is still exacting its deadly toll today...

The final wall of the sealed burial chamber of the boy pharaoh was breached for the first time in 3,000 years on 17 February 1923. Archaeologist Howard Carter whispered breathlessly that he could see `things, wonderful things' as he gazed in awe at the treasures of Tutankhamun. As Carter, together with fanatical Egyptologist Lord Carnarvon, looked at the treasures of gold, gems, precious stones and other priceless relics, they ignored the dire warning written all those centuries ago to ward off grave robbers. In the ancient hieroglyphics above their heads, it read:

`Death will come to those who disturb the sleep of the pharaohs.'

The final blow of the excavators' pick had set free the Curse of the Pharaoh. Lord Carnarvon had never taken lightly the threats of ancient Egypt's high priests. In England before his expedition had set out, he had consulted a famous mystic of the day, Count Hamon, who warned him:

'Lord Carnarvon not to enter tomb. Disobey at peril. If ignored will suffer sickness. Not recover. Death will claim him in Egypt.'

Two separate visits to mediums in England had also prophesied his impending doom. But for Carter and Lord Carnarvon, who had financed the dig culminating in history's greatest archaeological find, all thoughts of curses and hocus-pocus were forgotten as they revelled in the joy of the victorious end to the dig. The site of Luxor had escaped the attentions of grave robbers down through the centuries, and the treasure-packed tomb was a find beyond compare.

The accolades of the world's academics rained down on him and his team. The praise of museums and seats of learning as far apart as Cairo and California was heaped on them. Carnarvon revelled in the glittering prize of fame - little knowing that he had but two months to enjoy the fruits of his success. On 5 April 1923, just 47 days after breaching the chamber into Tutankhamun's resting place, Carnarvon, aged 57, died in agony - the victim, apparently, of an infected mosquito bite. At the moment of his death in the Continental Hotel, Cairo, the lights in the city went out in unison, and stayed off for some minutes. And if further proof were needed that it was indeed a strange force that was at work, thousands of miles away in England, at Lord Carnarvon's country house, his dog began baying and howling - a blood-curdling, unnatural lament which shocked the domestic staff deep in the middle of the night. It continued until one last whine, when the tormented creature turned over and died.

The newspapers of the day were quick to speculate that such eerie happenings were caused by the curse, an untapped source of evil which Carnarvon and Carter had unleashed. Their sensational conclusion was reinforced when, two days after Carnarvon's death, the mummified body of the pharaoh was examined and a blemish was found on his left cheek exactly in the position of the mosquito bite on Carnarvon's face. Perhaps this could have been passed off as coincidence had it not been for the bizarre chain of deaths that were to follow.

Shortly after Carnarvon's demise, another archaeologist, Arthur Mace, a leading member of the expedition, went into a coma at the Hotel Continental after complaining of tiredness. He died soon afterwards, leaving the expedition medic and local doctors baffled. The deaths continued. A close friend of Carnarvon, George Gould, made the voyage to Egypt when he learned of his fate. Before leaving the port to travel to Cairo he looked in at the tomb. The following day he collapsed with a high fever; twelve hours later he was dead.

Radiologist Archibald Reid, a man who used the latest X-ray techniques to determine the age and possible cause of death of Tutankhamun, was sent back to England after complaining of exhaustion. He died soon after landing.

Carnarvon's personal secretary, Richard Bethell, was found dead in bed from heart failure four months after the discovery of the tomb. The casualties continued to mount. Joel Wool, a leading British industrialist of the time, visited the site and was dead a few months later from a fever which doctors could not comprehend.

Six years after the discovery,12 of those present when the tomb was opened were dead. Within a further seven years only two of the original team of excavators were still alive. Lord Carnarvon's half-brother apparently took his own life while temporarily insane, and a further 21 people connected in some way with the dig, were also dead. Of the original pioneers of the excavation, only Howard Carter lived to a ripe old age, dying in 1939 from natural causes. Others have not been so fortunate.

While countless Egyptologists and academics have tried to debunk the legend of the curse as pure myth, others have continued to fall victim to it's influence...

Mohammed Ibrahim, Egypt's director of antiquities, in 1966 argued with the government against letting the treasures from the tomb leave Egypt for an exhibition in Paris. He pleaded with the authorities to allow the relics to stay in Cairo because he had suffered terrible nightmares of what would happen to him if they left the country. Ibrahim left a final meeting with the government officials, stepped out into what looked like a clear road on a bright sunny day, was hit by a car and died instantly.

Perhaps even more bizarre was the case of Richard Adamson who by 1969 was the sole surviving member of the 1923 expedition. Adamson had lost his wife within 24 hours of speaking out against the curse. His son broke his back in an aircraft crash when he spoke out again. Still skeptical, Adamson, who had worked as a security guard for Lord Carnarvon, defied the curse and ave an interview on British television, in which he still said that he did not believe in the curse. Later that evening, as he left the television studios, he was thrown from his taxi when it crashed, a swerving lorry missed his head by inches, and he was put in hospital with fractures and bruises. It was only then that the stoic Mr Adamson, then aged 70, was forced to admit: `Until now I refused to believe that my family's misfortunes had anything to do with the curse. But now I am not so sure.'

Perhaps the most amazing manifestation of the curse came in 1972, when the treasures of the tomb were transported to London for a prestigious exhibition at the British Museum. Victim number one was Dr Gamal Mehrez, Ibrahim's successor in Cairo as director of antiquities. He scoffed at the legend, saying that his whole life had been spent in Egyptology and that all the deaths and misfortune through the decades had been the result of `pure coincidence'. He died the night after supervising the packaging of the relics for transport to England by a Royal Air Force plane.

The crew members of that aircraft suffered death, injury, misfortune and disaster in the years that followed their cursed flight. Flight Lieutenant Rick Laurie died in 1976 from a heart attack. His wife declared:

`It's the curse of Tutankhamun - the curse has killed him.'

Ken Parkinson, a flight engineer suffered a heart attack each year at the same time as the flight aboard the Britannia aircraft which brought the treasures to England until a final fatal one in 1978. Before their mission to Egypt neither of the servicemen had suffered any heart trouble, and had been pronounced fit by military doctors. During the flight, Chief Technical Officer Ian Lansdown kicked the crate that contained the death mask of the boy king, `I've just kicked the most expensive thing in the world,' he quipped. Later on disembarking from the aircraft on another mission, a ladder mysteriously broke beneath him and the leg he had kicked the crate with was badly broken. It was in plaster for nearly six months.

Flight Lieutenant Jim Webb, who was aboard the aircraft, lost everything he owned after a fire devastated his home. A steward, Brian Rounsfall, confessed to playing cards on the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun on the flight home and suffered two heart attacks. And a woman officer on board the plane was forced to leave the RAF after having a serious operation.

The mystery remains. Were all those poor souls down the years merely the victims of some gigantic set of coincidences? Or did the priestly guardians of the tomb's dark secrets really exert supernatural forces which heaped so much misery and suffering on those who invaded their sacred chambers - and exact a terrible punishment on the despoilers of the magnificent graves of their noble dead?

The most intriguing theory to explain the legend of the curse was advanced by atomic scientist Louis Bulgarini in 1949. He wrote:

`It is definitely possible that the ancient Egyptians use atomic radiation to protect their holy places. The floors of the tombs could have been covered with uranium. Or the graves could have been finished with radioactive rock. Rock containing both gold and uranium was mined in Egypt. Such radiation could kill a man today.'

Source:

www.qsl.net

Samy said:

Since I was a kid, I really love mysteries, especially things that were unusual like different forms of writing of different nations. But my curiosity about hieroglyphs and Egyptians made me more interested in reading about pharaohs. And I found out the fact about the youngest king of Egypt, Tutankhamen or King Tut.

During those time, I was really amazed on how the Egyptians gave importance to the King. My theory was, because of being the youngest king to rule Egypt, his people loved him for being a good ruler. But that was only a theory of mine.

Then later on, after reading the facts about him, the dig of his tomb caught my attention. Its because of the materials used to make his coffin. But there was a line in that article in the magazine that I was reading that there was a curse in the chamber of the king but they did not give further information about that matter.

I got so curious about the curse. I did a lot of reading to get what I want to know about that curse. Then years passed by until this time that we, in the English class of Philippine Christian University was given a requirement to make a personal blog to put our reading assignments here. A lot of things to this assignment, I found what I am looking for-for a very long time.

"Gloomy Sunday" (The Deadliest Song Ever Created)

WARNING!!

DO NOT PLAY THE VIDEO IF YOU ARE DEPRESSED!
BETTER READ THE ARTICLE FIRST BEFORE PLAYING IT. IT COULD END UP YOUR LIFE.

In December, 1932, a down and out Hungarian named Reszo Seress was trying to make a living as a songwriter in Paris, but kept failing miserably. All of his compositions failed to impress the music publishers of France, but Seress carried on chasing his dream nevertheless. He was determined to become an internationally famous songwriter. His girlfriend had constant rows with him over the insecurity of his ambitious life. She urged him to get a full-time 9 to 5 job, but Seress was uncompromising. He told her he was to be a songwriter or a hobo, and that was that.

One afternoon, things finally came to a head. Seress and his fiancée had a fierce row over his utter failure as a composer, and the couple parted with angry words.

On the day after the row - which happened to be a Sunday - Seress sat at the piano in his apartment, gazing morosely through the window at the Parisian skyline. Outside, storm-clouds gathered in the grey sky, and soon the heavy rain began to pelt down.

"What a gloomy Sunday" Seress said to himself as he played about on the piano's ivories, and quite suddenly, his hands began to play a strange melancholy melody that seemed to encapsulate the downhearted way he was feeling over his quarrel with his girl and the state of the dispiriting weather.

"Yes, Gloomy Sunday! That will be the title of my new song" muttered Seress, excitedly, and he grabbed a pencil and wrote the notes down on an old postcard. Thirty minutes later he had completed the song.

Seress sent his composition off to a music publisher and waited for acceptance with a lot more hope than he usually had in his heart. A few days later, the song-sheet was returned with a rejection note stapled to it that stated: "Gloomy Sunday has a weird but highly depressing melody and rhythm, and we are sorry to say that we cannot use it."

The song was sent off again to another publisher, and this time it was accepted. The music publisher told Seress that his song would soon be distributed to all the major cities of the world. The young Hungarian was ecstatic.

But a few months after Gloomy Sunday was printed, there were a spate of strange occurrences that were allegedly sparked off by the new song. In Berlin, a young man requested a band to play Gloomy Sunday, and after the number was performed, the man went home and blasted himself in the head with a revolver after complaining to relatives that he felt severely depressed by the melody of a new song which he couldn't get out of his head. That song was Gloomy Sunday.

A week later in the same city, a young female shop assistant was found hanging from a rope in her flat. Police who investigated the suicide found a copy of the sheet-music to Gloomy Sunday in the dead girl's bedroom.

Two days after that tragedy, a young secretary in New York gassed herself, and in a suicide note she requested Gloomy Sunday to be played at her funeral. Weeks later, another New Yorker, aged 82, jumped to his death from the window of his seventh-story apartment after playing the 'deadly' song on his piano. Around the same time, a teenager in Rome who had heard the unlucky tune jumped off a bridge to his death.

The newspapers of the world were quick to report other deaths associated with Seress' song. One newspaper covered the case of a woman in North London who had been playing a 78 recording of Gloomy Sunday at full volume, infuriating and frightening her neighbors, who had read of the fatalities supposedly caused by the tune. The stylus finally became trapped in a groove, and the same piece of the song played over and over. The neighbors hammered on the woman's door but there was no answer, so they forced the door open - only to find the woman dead in her chair from an overdose of barbiturates. As the months went by, a steady stream of bizarre and disturbing deaths that were alleged to be connected to Gloomy Sunday persuaded the chiefs at the BBC to ban the seemingly accursed song from the airwaves. Back in France, Rizzo Seress, the man who had composed the controversial song, was also to experience the adverse effects of his creation. He wrote to his ex-fiancée, pleading for a reconciliation. But several days later came the most awful, shocking news. Seress learned from the police that his sweetheart had poisoned herself. And by her side, a copy of the sheet music to Gloomy Sunday was found.

At the end of the 1930s, when the world was plunged into the war against Hitler, Seress' inauspicious song was quickly forgotten in the global turmoil, but the sheet-music to the dreaded song is still available (on the Net too) to those who are curious to know if the morbid melody can still exert its deadly influence...

Sources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiOyvxgcob4
http://www.qsl.net/w5www/gloomy.html

First Exercise in Adobe Photoshop

This image is actually two different images combined into one to make an illusion that both scaters are racing with each other.

The tools used in this photo manipulating are;

1. Crop tool
2. Move tool
3. Free Transform

First Output In Photoshop

This is our first output in Photoshop. Combining different pictures to form another image.

My Dream House

All of us has a dream of having the perfect house in the future.
This photo shows my dream house. ^^

Boys with Unpopular Names More Prone to Commit Crime?

According to the results of a study carried out by economists at the Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, the more atypical is a boy's name the greater is the probability he will commit crimes as a teenager.

The goal of the researchers was to analyze the "the relationship between first name popularity and juvenile delinquency".

Two researchers, David E. Kalist and Daniel Y. Lee, made a comparison of the first names of adolescent offenders in one of US states with the first names of youngsters that are part of the general population of that state. Each name has been assigned, what researchers call popularity-name index or PNI.

The assignment was based on the number of people with a certain name and the likelihood of that name to be linked with criminal behavior. Thus for the name Michael, the popularity-name index is 100 while foe the name David the PNI is 50. For less common names, including Alec, Ernest, Ivan, Kareem, and Malcolm the PNI was around 1.

During the analysis of young criminals, researchers found a dissimilar distribution of names compared to that of the youngsters from the general population.

The results of the study showed that young people with less common name were more likely to commit crimes, regardless of their race. The research and its results were included in a report entitled First Names and Crime: Does Unpopularity Spell Trouble? The report was published in the journal Social Science Quarterly. It outlines the fact that the names themselves are less likely to be the reason for illegal actions.

The study says that young people will less common names are more likely to get involved in a crime due to the fact that they "are treated differently by their peers, making it more difficult for them to form relationships". The authors of the research also mentioned that teenagers with unpopular names are more likely to commit crimes due to the fact that they consciously or unconsciously hate their names.

In conclusion the authors of the study state that "First name characteristics may be an important factor to help identify individuals at high risk of committing or recommitting crime, leading to more effective and targeted intervention programs".

www.infoniac.com

Samy said:

This information is amazing. It gives idea to what name will I give to my son or daughter in the future. But on the other hand, I think it depends on the person and how he or she is guided by his/her parents and the environment they belong.

Dirt Is Good For Our Health

Recently, an interesting article about the use of belly parasites, viruses and bacteria was published in The New York Times by the correspondent Jane Braudey.

It is widely known that children tend to put into their mouths all that comes into their hands, and that also includes all types of dirt. It is considered that they do it instinctively. "Since instinctive models of behaviour give an evolutionary advantage (on the contrary, they wouldn't have been saved for so many years), there exists the possibility that this one also helped the human beings survive", Braudey says. She also affirms that there exist serious proofs for the hypothesis, according to which dirt is useful for our health.

The mechanism of the useful influence of microorganisms, viruses and parasites on the human organism is the following: being introduced into the organism, they stimulate the development of the healthy immune system. More than that, according to some data of unfinished yet researches, belly worms even help repair some "mistakes" in the immune system, which lead, in their turn, to asthma, allergy and autoimmune diseases.

The microbiologist-immunologist Mary Rubush, who recently published a book called "Why Dirt Is Good", has claimed in an interview in The New York Times that "by introducing different objects into their mouths, children give their immune systems the opportunity to study their surroundings".

This is absolutely necessary for the right functioning of the immune system, because in a newborn "it's similar to an unprogrammed computer. It needs instructions", says Dr. Joel Weinstock from the Medicine Center Tufts in Boston. According to him, "the majority of belly worms are harmless, especially for people who eat well".

Belly worms have a very good influence on the human immune system, according to Dr. David Elliot who's a gastroenterologist at the University of Iowa. Together with Weinstock, they made experiments on mice, during which, with the help of worms, they could not only prevent autoimmune diseases, but also treat them.

Dr. Rubush recommends refusing the use of antibacterial soap, in order not to kill the necessary human bacteria. He advices using common soap, and, in its absence, cleaning the hands with special alcoholic solutions. Dr. Weinstock goes far than that: he advices letting children out barefooted, allowing them playing in the dirt and not to wash their hands before eating, and, for a better effect, living with a pair of dogs and a cat in the same house.

www.infoniac.com

Samy said:

This is amazing. I can't imagine myself with belly worms inside my tummy. I used to hate worms, but not anymore. Thanks to this information