Tutankhamun

Tutankhamun was born around 1343 BCE at Amarna, the new capital city that the pharaoh Akhenaten had built on the east bank of the Nile in Middle Egypt ^[1]. His birth name was Tutankhaten, meaning "living image of the Aten", a name that tied the infant prince directly to the sun disk that Akhenaten had elevated above all other gods ^[2]. The identity of his parents was debated for decades, but genetic testing of royal mummies published in 2010 indicated that his father was the mummy found in tomb KV55, widely identified as Akhenaten, and that his mother was a woman buried in tomb KV35, a full sister of his father ^[3].

The world of his childhood was unlike anything Egypt had known before. Akhenaten had closed the temples of Amun, the powerful state god of Thebes, redirected their wealth, and ordered the god's name chiseled from monuments across the country ^[1]. The court at Amarna worshipped the Aten alone, and the young prince grew up surrounded by the distinctive art of the period, with its elongated figures and intimate royal family scenes ^[2].

Evidence from his mummy and from objects in his tomb suggests that Tutankhamun was never a robust child. Examinations have identified a clubbed left foot and signs of bone disease in his feet, and around 130 walking sticks were recovered from his burial, many showing wear from use ^[3]. Whatever the precise combination of ailments, the boy who would inherit the throne carried physical burdens from an early age.

Akhenaten died around 1336 BCE, and the succession that followed remains one of the murkiest passages in Egyptian history. One or possibly two short-lived rulers, known from inscriptions as Smenkhkare and Neferneferuaten, held the throne briefly before the young prince became king ^[1]. Tutankhaten was crowned at roughly eight or nine years of age, far too young to govern, and real authority rested with senior officials, above all the courtier Ay and the general Horemheb ^[2].

Around the same time he married Ankhesenamun, a daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, which made his wife also his half sister. Royal sibling marriage was an established practice in the 18th dynasty, used to concentrate the bloodline and reinforce a young king's claim ^[1]. The marriage anchored him within the Amarna royal family even as his government began to dismantle much of what that family had built.

For anyone asking who was Tutankhamun in political terms, the honest answer is that he began as a figurehead. The decisions issued in his name during the first years of the reign almost certainly originated with his advisers, and historians read the policies of the period as the work of an experienced court steering the monarchy back toward orthodoxy ^[4].

The defining act of the reign, and the core of any account of Tutankhamun achievements, was the abandonment of Akhenaten's religious revolution. Early in his rule the court left Amarna and returned the administration to the traditional centers of Memphis and Thebes ^[1]. The king changed his name from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamun, "living image of Amun", and his queen became Ankhesenamun, publicly signaling the restoration of the old chief god ^[2].

A granite stela erected at Karnak, now known as the Restoration Stela, describes the condition of Egypt when the young king took power: temples fallen into neglect, shrines overgrown, and the gods having turned their backs on the land. It then records the king's program of rebuilding sanctuaries, refashioning cult images in gold and precious stone, and reinstalling priests and temple staff ^[4]. The text is royal propaganda, yet it documents a genuine and expensive campaign to repair the damage of the Amarna years.

Building work resumed at Karnak and Luxor in the king's name, and sculptors produced statues of Amun bearing Tutankhamun's youthful features ^[2]. Abroad, Egyptian forces campaigned in Nubia and in Syria against the expanding Hittite empire, and scenes of the king in battle appear on objects from his tomb, though scholars doubt he ever fought in person ^[4]. Much of this legacy was later claimed by others: Horemheb, who eventually took the throne, systematically replaced Tutankhamun's name with his own on many monuments ^[1].

Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamun appear together on many objects from the tomb, shown in relaxed domestic scenes: the queen handing her husband an arrow while he hunts birds, or anointing him with perfume. Such images follow the affectionate style of Amarna art, and while they are conventional rather than documentary, they are among the most intimate royal images to survive from ancient Egypt ^[2].

The couple had no surviving children. Two mummified fetuses, both female, were found in a box in the treasury of the tomb, and DNA analysis indicates they were the king's daughters ^[3]. Their deaths, one apparently premature and the other near full term, meant the royal line of the 18th dynasty would end with Tutankhamun.

Studies of the king's remains fill out a portrait of a slight young man about 167 centimeters tall, with the elongated skull seen in other members of his family ^[3]. The genetic study of 2010 also reported DNA from the malaria parasite in his tissues, evidence that he suffered from the disease, possibly in a severe form ^[3]. Among the more evocative Tutankhamun facts is the presence in his tomb of childhood possessions alongside royal regalia: game boards, a slingshot, and undersized furniture kept from his earliest years ^[5].

Tutankhamun died around 1324 BCE, at about nineteen years of age, and the cause has been argued over since his mummy was first examined ^[1]. An early theory of murder by a blow to the head, based on X rays taken in 1968, was set aside after a CT scan in 2005 found no evidence of such an injury but did reveal a badly broken left leg sustained shortly before death ^[3]. Many researchers now favor a scenario in which the fracture, perhaps from a fall or an accident, became infected, with malaria possibly compounding the crisis ^[3]. Certainty is out of reach; the sources record no account of his final days.

His death was evidently unexpected, because the tomb in which he was buried, now numbered KV62, is small and oddly arranged for a king, and was probably intended for a private individual or adapted in haste ^[5]. Traces of the funeral survive in the embalming materials and the remains of the funerary meal buried nearby. The elderly official Ay, who appears performing the ritual of Opening the Mouth on the wall of the burial chamber, succeeded him as pharaoh ^[1].

Within the cramped chambers the burial party packed more than 5,000 objects: dismantled chariots, gilded couches, statues, jewelry, weapons, food, and wine ^[5]. The king's body lay within three nested coffins, the innermost of solid gold, his face covered by the gold portrait mask inlaid with lapis lazuli and colored glass that has become the emblem of ancient Egypt ^[2]. Later kings' lists omitted him, lumping his reign in with the discredited Amarna episode, and within a few generations his name had slipped from official memory ^[4].

That official forgetting proved to be Tutankhamun's strange good fortune. Flood debris and the huts of later tomb builders buried the entrance to KV62, and although robbers entered at least twice in antiquity, they were caught or interrupted before stripping the burial ^[5]. Every other royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings was emptied over the centuries; his alone kept most of its contents.

The British archaeologist Howard Carter, funded by the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, spent years searching the valley for the missing king. On 4 November 1922 his workmen uncovered a stone step beneath the remains of ancient workmen's huts, and on 26 November Carter breached the sealed doorway and peered in by candlelight, famously answering Carnarvon's question about what he could see with the words that he saw wonderful things ^[6]. The clearance and documentation of the tomb occupied Carter and his team for a full decade ^[5].

The find caused a worldwide sensation. Newspapers competed for access, Egyptian motifs swept through fashion and design, and the death of Lord Carnarvon from an infected mosquito bite in April 1923 fed popular talk of a pharaoh's curse, a legend with no factual basis but remarkable staying power ^[6]. The discovery also became entangled in Egyptian politics, strengthening demands that the country's antiquities remain on Egyptian soil, and the tomb's contents were kept in Egypt rather than divided with the excavators ^[7].

Measured by the standards of Egypt's great builders and conquerors, Tutankhamun was a minor king with a short reign. Measured by cultural reach, no pharaoh comes close. The gold mask, the nested coffins, and the treasures of KV62 have been seen by tens of millions of people, and touring exhibitions beginning in the 1960s and 1970s drew record crowds in Europe, the United States, and Japan ^[7]. The 1976 to 1979 American tour alone attracted more than eight million visitors and helped invent the modern museum blockbuster ^[7].

For Egyptology the tomb remains an unmatched resource. Because royal burials elsewhere were plundered, KV62 preserves the only complete picture of the equipment a New Kingdom pharaoh took to the grave, from ritual figures to linens, foodstuffs, and everyday tools ^[5]. Study of the objects continues a century after the discovery, and the collection is now displayed at the Grand Egyptian Museum near the pyramids of Giza ^[7].

Any Tutankhamun biography ends with a paradox the ancient Egyptians would have appreciated. They believed that to speak the name of the dead is to make them live, and the boy king whose name was erased by his successors is now spoken more often than that of any other ruler of the Nile ^[4]. His historical role, closing the door on the Amarna revolution and restoring Amun, mattered in its own time; his accidental role as ancient Egypt's ambassador to the modern world has mattered far more since ^[1].