Albert M. Lythgoe

Conducted by one of the most distinguished Egyptologists of his day, Albert Morton Lythgoe’s excavations, under the Metropolitan Museum’s auspices, placed that museum’s Egyptian collection among the half-dozen most important outside of Cairo. He was in the group who were present in 1923 at Lord Carnarvon’s opening of the inner tomb and sarcophagus of Tut-ankh-Amen. Lythgoe’s death in 1934 was therefore bound to revive the ancient myth of the curse which rested on intruders into the Egyptian ruler’s tomb. The idea no doubt commended itself to writers of newspaper “scare heads” and to lovers of the occult. But it elicited from Lythgoe’s associates only the remark that no such curse was inscribed upon the tomb; that even if it had been, a death from natural causes, eleven years after the incurring of the penalty, would hardly be considered summary punishment, and that thirty-three of the forty persons concerned with the opening of the tomb are still among us. This assurance seems to leave Shakespeare the one historic celebrity who inscribed and made effective a threat against disturbers of his final resting-place.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1935 Century Association Yearbook