The Curse Of King Tut
The Curse of King Tut
Some stories of alleged supernatural occurrences cannot really be classified as either urban legends or hoaxes, but as accounts that have been told so often that the truth of the original report has become obscured over the years. Perhaps a classic story of this type would be the curse of King Tut.
When Howard Carter opened Tutankhamen 's tomb in November 1922, he found a number of magical objects buried with the boy king. One item reported found was a clay tablet with a curse carved on it: "Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh". It is doubtful that the table ever existed, but magic played a big part in sending the boy king to the next world. In the first room, the antechamber, …show more content…
Human beings were thought to be made of clay. Angels were believed to be made of light. Fire creatures were invisible except when they took specific forms and performed particular types of magic, such as obeying the commands of the person who summoned them. For instance, an jinn would appear and faithfully serve the person who invoked the jinn by rubbing a magic lamp. This was an important form of magic in the great literary compilation The Thousand and One Nights. Intermediaries between mortals and the jinn were the diviners called kahana. If an jinn entered a person and transformed him, the person was called majnun, "crazy, mad, out of his wits." The kahana spoke in a rhymed prose, called in Arabic saj, and swore oaths. A branch of letter magic that later became important as a form of divination with calibrated lists of numbers to carry out magical calculations was the zairaja. This was related to the horoscope and astrology, called ahkam al-nujum. In his introduction to the study of history, al-Muqaddima, the 15th-century philosopher Ibn Khaldun mentions several books on the subject of zairaja, most notably by a 14th-century astrologer, Abul-Abbas al-Sabti, who dedicated an entire book to the
Some stories of alleged supernatural occurrences cannot really be classified as either urban legends or hoaxes, but as accounts that have been told so often that the truth of the original report has become obscured over the years. Perhaps a classic story of this type would be the curse of King Tut.
When Howard Carter opened Tutankhamen 's tomb in November 1922, he found a number of magical objects buried with the boy king. One item reported found was a clay tablet with a curse carved on it: "Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh". It is doubtful that the table ever existed, but magic played a big part in sending the boy king to the next world. In the first room, the antechamber, …show more content…
Human beings were thought to be made of clay. Angels were believed to be made of light. Fire creatures were invisible except when they took specific forms and performed particular types of magic, such as obeying the commands of the person who summoned them. For instance, an jinn would appear and faithfully serve the person who invoked the jinn by rubbing a magic lamp. This was an important form of magic in the great literary compilation The Thousand and One Nights. Intermediaries between mortals and the jinn were the diviners called kahana. If an jinn entered a person and transformed him, the person was called majnun, "crazy, mad, out of his wits." The kahana spoke in a rhymed prose, called in Arabic saj, and swore oaths. A branch of letter magic that later became important as a form of divination with calibrated lists of numbers to carry out magical calculations was the zairaja. This was related to the horoscope and astrology, called ahkam al-nujum. In his introduction to the study of history, al-Muqaddima, the 15th-century philosopher Ibn Khaldun mentions several books on the subject of zairaja, most notably by a 14th-century astrologer, Abul-Abbas al-Sabti, who dedicated an entire book to the