King Tut’s Lineage Revealed
In a recent use of modern technology, new results for the famed Boy King reveal interesting results.
Scientists have identified Akhenaten, the "heretic" king who introduced monotheism to ancient Egypt, as Tutankhamun's father.
Akhenaten first married Nefertiti, who was renowned for her great beauty, but had no sons so he then married his sister in an effort to have a son.
This new investigation was led by Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. Hawass said it would take several months to reveal more details about the identity of the Tutankhamun's mother. His parents had been siblings and he had only paternal grandparents. His family lineage begins with his great grandparents, Thuya and Yuya. They had a daughter who has now been identified as Queen Tiye, King Tut's grandmother and the wife of Amenhotep III.
King Tutankhamun, it appears, was a frail boy who suffered from a cleft palate and club foot. He died of complications from a broken leg exacerbated by malaria. CT scans of his feet showed he had a slight deformity and a severe bone condition called Kohler Disease. "We have a club foot on one side and a flat foot on another side," Dr. Pusch said, who assisted in the investigation. "And the club foot is the foot that shows indication of bone necrosis." Bone necrosis occurs when biological tissue dies inside a body. King Tut would have been living with this painful condition for years, which would explain the 130 walking sticks found in his tomb.
In 2005, researchers studying CT scans of King Tut announced they had found a fresh fracture in his left leg and no evidence suggesting he had been hit in the head, as was once believed, but foul play wasn't ruled out as a cause of death - until now.
Scientists are also looking for the mummy of queen Nefertiti but they have identified Ankhsenamun as Tutankhamun's wife. Two fetuses found in Tutankhamun's tomb, which was full of treasure, were identified as his offspring.
February 18th, 2010 at 5:13 pm
I think the most exciting thing about this is that they identified one of the mummies as Akhenaten, who the ancient Egyptians tried to erase from the records after he committed the heresy of believing in only one god, the Aten (or Sun God.) Many of his passages praising the Aten are echoed later in the Bible. So after all these thousands of years, Akhenaten is restored to immortality. Pretty cool stuff.
February 19th, 2010 at 8:16 am
I love the history of Egypt, but in particular when studying Ancient Egypt in college, I had quite the research project on Akhenaten. Fascinating man and vision. When I traveled to Egypt for the first time and entered the Cairo Museum, I was amazed at the amount of pieces recovered detailing him and his era. Especially after his death and the eventual erasure of any memory of his city of Armarna and name. Then the San Diego History Museum had another show of his era with pieces I had never seen before. A wonderful culture indeed.