It did not truly dawn on me that mummies are actually cursed until I was inside a tomb in Cairo. I had always assumed the lore around the curse was some Orientalist xenophobia that I perpetuated against my better judgment with my infatuation of The Mummy movies. One of my fellow Arab Americans on the tour had joked earlier as we climbed inside the great pyramids, hunched and breathless, “So which ones are cursed?”