Pix Of The Day: Last Survivor Of Mummy's Curse
CREDIT: © Sonny Stengle/TourEgypt.net
WHERE: Qurna, Egypt. WHAT: the last survivor from the Howard Carter team.
MAP: Egypt. Thumbnail click pops-up larger image on source page.

The man in today's picture is Sheik Hussein Abd el Rassuhl (1910-1997), said to be the last survivor from the Howard Carter team that discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.

The picture appears on a page of photos of Egyptian people on the TourEgypt.net web site. As a young water carrier with the team when it discovered the tomb in 1922, the boy posed wearing Tutankhamun's pectoral jewelry for a newspaper article that was widely read. You may read photographer Sonny Stengle's account of his meeting with Hussein in Qurna, across the Nile from Luxor.

Jimmy Dun, the webmaster for TourEgypt.net, has an article about Thebes that is based on the Stengle story. The nonsense about curses is revealed in an article by John Warren: the list of team members and their ages at death should finally lay that old tale to rest. Visitors interested in Tutankhamun may enjoy another Jimmy Dun article, this one concentrating on the boy king whose name survived into modernity.

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, is Britain's oldest public museum, and its Griffith Institute has the largest specialized Egyptological archive in the world, with a scholarly online presentation 'Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation', which goes into great detail. There is, however, a succinct summary of Howard Carter's life and work. There is also a scholarly presentation on Carter's five seasons of sponsored excavations in Egypt 1915-1922, which culminated in the Tutankhamun find. The About.com web site has a readable account in six parts, focussed mostly on the 1922 discovery. The Egypt State Information Service (SIS) web site has various related sections, including a page of historic photographs of the discoveries.

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