April 23 | Rupert Brooke

August 3, 1887 - April 23, 1915: Age 27

Rupert Brooke was a British poet famous for his sonnets about The Great War, and to a lesser extent for being a good-looking bisexual.

His most famous sonnet, The Soldier, is rather idealistic and contrasts with the bitter nature of the work of poets like Wilfred Owen. It is quoted a lot by people who want to celebrate the "supreme sacrifice" of a young man dying in combat. Weirdly enough, although Brooke died in 1915, it was not combat: like George Herbert, he died of an infected mosquito bite. He was on his way to a battle at Gallipoli. His friend William Brown was with him:

"...I sat with Rupert. At 4 o’clock he became weaker, and at 4.46 he died, with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea-breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme."

He was buried in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros. The text of The Soldier is included below. It was part of a series of poems entitled 1914.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Source: Wikipedia

April 5 | George Herbert

June 26, 1866 – April 5, 1923: Age 56

George Herbert, or rather George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, was the man who financed the excavation of King Tut's tomb by Howard Carter. He was present in February 1923 when the tomb was opened, and the greatest treasures of Egyptian archaeology were exposed to light and air for the first time in millennia.

He was still in Cairo several months later when he accidentally opened an infected mosquito bite while shaving. The resulting blood poisoning killed him at 1:55 a.m. on April 5, 1923. At the same moment, all the lights in Cairo went out. Back in England, Herbert's dog, Susie, let out a howl and died.

Over the next 10 years, a dozen others who went inside the tomb met untimely deaths, leading to speculation about the Pharaoh's Curse. Herbert's own son was so frightened that when boxes of treasure arrived back in England, he hid them unopened in the gap between two rooms. Herbert's hotel room in Cairo has never since been made available to anyone else.

Over the course of his life, Herbert collected a vast trove of Egyptian antiquities. The terms of his will stated that, should his wife wish to dispose of his collection, it should be offered to the British Museum for 20,000 pounds, a fraction of their real value. Lady Carnarvon made the offer, but gave the Museum until 4pm the same day to pay in full. When they could not, she was free to sell the collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a much higher price: $145,000.

Sources: Wikipedia, Top News

The Boy King | Tutankhamun

1341 BC - 1323 BC: Age 18

Tutankhamun is the most famous pharaoh today, but this is so by virtue of his obscurity: his tomb was robbed only two or so times before being forgotten. It was buried by stone chips from subsequent tombs, either dumped there or washed there by floods, and eventually some workers built their huts over the entrance, oblivious to the riches beneath. Within two hundred years, at a time when all the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were being dismantled, his was overlooked, and possibly even his name was forgotten.

In 1922, more than 3,000 years after his death, Howard Carter discovered the tomb, setting off a mania for all things Egyptian that has continued to this day. By post-20th Dynasty standards the tomb was in fantastic shape, still full of treasure and many things in their proper place, relatively undisturbed. He was able to photograph things like a tiny wreath of olive leaves and flowers on one of the king's sarcophagi: flowers that had bloomed three millenia before. It took eight years to clean out the tomb, carefully recording every detail.

Tutankhamun was only nine when he became pharaoh. His parentage is uncertain, as it's not specified exactly in the writings ("king's son" — pretty vague) but it seems likely he was the son or grandson of Akhenaten. He was married to his half-sister or aunt, and they had two babies who died very young, probably stillborn. During his short rule, the spiritual innovations of Akhenaten were being reversed (they centred around elevating a single minor deity, Aten, to one-god status).

Well-fed teenagers don't generally just drop dead, even 3,000 years ago. His remains have been X-rayed three times since the tomb was opened: in 1968, 1978 and 2005 (when a CT scan was also performed). Notable findings included a great deal of physical information, especially from the CT scan, leading to the National Geographic-sponsored recreation of his face and head (shown above). He had a "slightly" cleft palate and an elongated head, both family traits, and he was 5 feet 11 inches tall, taller than originally supposed. Initial speculation was that he was murdered, as the first set of X-rays seemed to reveal a dense spot at the lower back of his skull, the spot that normally only gets knocked by bad guys with coshes sneaking up from behind. This theory is doubted now as the CT scan revealed no such spot.


So what killed him? The most likely theory is based on evidence of a severe fracture to his left leg. It was initially thought to have been caused either by embalmers or by Carter and his team (they had to do some pretty hairy things to peel that gold mummy-form sarcophaguss off him, including sawing the body into sections. The CT scan confirmed that the fracture happened before death, probably just a few or hours before. The consensus at the moment seems to be that he died of an infection after severely fracturing his leg, falling from a height. A likely cause would be a chariot accident. Which would mean that, like so many tragic teenagers today, Tut died in a car crash.

The new National Geographic exhibition "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" is in London now, and will be in Dallas in October.

Lots of fun extras here. Now that the tomb is open to the public, the small amounts of humidity and warmth finding their way into the tomb have been accelerating the decomposition of Tut's body. On November 4, 2007, 85 years to the day since Carter discovered the tomb, Egyptian curators lifted the linen-wrapped mummy from its sarcophagus to put it on display in a climate-controlled glass box. And YouTube has it for you to view.

The Boy King has inspired a lot of fun in recent years. When a large exhibition of his artifacts toured the world 30 years ago, it was a sensation. The brilliantly funny Steve Martin did a classic routine on it on Saturday Night Live, and you can see it...you know where.

Finally, here is Adam West as Batman, his mind destroyed by torture, forced to dance for the evil supervillain King Tut. He does the Batusi, of course. The music is fabulous, and it all ends with a classic Batman and Robin fist fight...well, have a look.

Sources: Wikipedia pages on Tutankhamun and his tomb

December 24 | Alban Berg

February 9, 1885 - December 24, 1935: Age 50

Alban Berg was a Viennese composer. He was a student and lifelong friend of Arnold Schoenberg, and his compositions combined Schoenberg's 12-tone technique with a romantic style.

In the summer of 1935, Berg was stung on the back by a wasp. The bite became infected, and Berg developed septicemia, a condition in which bacteria enter the bloodstream and the immune response causes the body to go into shock. The treatment, today, is antibiotics, but penicillin, the first effective modern antibiotic treatment, hadn't come into broad use yet.

Like all of Schoenberg's students, he was obsessed with numbers. Berg calculated his chances based on a personal numerology, and predicted he would die on December 24 — and he did.

Here is a link to Glenn Gould playing Berg's first published piece of music: a stunning piano sonata. It's about 10 minutes long. Enjoy!

Sources: Wikipedia, Brain-Juice, Death myths of the great composers

October 10 | Jack Daniel

September 5?, 1846? - October 10, 1911: Age 65?

Jasper Newton Daniel, the founder of the American whiskey distillery, was one of 13 children, which might explain why there is so much uncertainty as to the date, and even the year, of his birth. Some sources have it as late as 1850, but that would have the distillery founded when he was 16, which seems unlikely.

One day, coming to work early, he was unable to open his safe, having trouble remembering the combination. In frustration he kicked it, injuring his toe. The toe became infected and he died of blood poisoning.

Source: Wikipedia

September 19 | James Garfield

November 19, 1831 - September 19, 1881: Age 49

James A. Garfield was the 20th President of the United States. He served as a general for the Union in the Civil War, and was elected President in 1880. He took office on March 4, 1881, but would serve only a little over six months.

A religious fanatic named Charles Junius Guiteau shot him twice as he was walking through a railroad station in Washington. It turned out that Guiteau was upset at not being given the US consulship in Paris despite repeated attempts to apply for the job. He shot Garfield twice, once in the arm and then again somewhere near his spine. The second bullet stayed in his body until he died; all attempts to find it and remove it failed. Alexander Graham Bell even invented a metal detector to try to find it, but the machine was foiled by the metal bed frame and nobody realized the cause of the malfunction. As infection set in, Garfield became sicker and sicker, confined to his bed with fevers and pain. He died of a heart attack and blood poisoning 80 days after he was shot.

People now believe his death was hastened or even precipitated by bad medical care. Several doctors attempted to get the bullet out by sticking their (non-sterile) fingers into the would, and one punctured his liver in the process. It may be that this introduced bacteria deadly enough to kill him.

Guiteau was sentenced to death and hanged the following June.

Source: Wikipedia