Their only two daughters were stillborn.īecause Tutankhamun’s remains revealed a hole in the back of the skull, some historians had concluded that the young king was assassinated, but recent tests suggest that the hole was made during mummification. DNA tests published in 2010 revealed that Tutankhamun’s parents were brother and sister, and that King Tut’s wife Ankhesenamun was also his half-sister. Traditional inbreeding in the Egyptian royal family also likely contributed to the boy king’s poor health and early death. He is the only pharaoh known to have been depicted seated while engaged in physical activities like archery. He was tall but physically frail, with a crippling bone disease in his clubbed left foot. There are many theories as to what killed King Tut at the age of 19.

He also worked in concert with his powerful advisers Horemheb and Ay-both future pharaohs-to restore Egypt’s stature in the region. Tutankhamun reversed Akhenaten’s reforms early in his reign, reviving worship of the god Amun, restoring Thebes as a religious center and changing the end of his name to reflect royal allegiance to the creator god Amun. More than a dozen deaths have been attributed to the curse, but studies have shown that those who entered the tomb on average lived just as long as their peers who didn’t enter. Akhenaten upended a centuries-old religious system to favor worship of a single deity, the sun god Aten, and moved Egypt’s religious capital from Thebes to Amarna.Īfter Akhenaten’s death, two intervening pharaohs briefly reigned before the nine-year-old prince, then called Tutankhaten, took the throne.ĭid you know? Carter’s patron, Lord Carnarvon, died four months after first entering the tomb, leading journalists to popularize a “Curse of the Pharaohs,” claiming that hieroglyphs on the tomb walls promised swift death to those who disturbed King Tut. Genetic testing has verified that King Tut was the grandson of the great pharaoh Amenhotep III, and almost certainly the son of Akhenaten, a controversial figure in the history of the 18th dynasty of Egypt’s New Kingdom (c.1550-1295 B.C.).

The back of mummy gold mask clipart