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Formerly a minor footnote in the tome of Egyptian history, Tutankhamen took the world by storm. Three millennia after his death, the once-obscure Tutankhamen became all the rage.įor several years following Carter’s discovery, no ruler was more popular than Egypt’s boy king. Experts believe King Tut left no living heirs, perhaps because he and Ankhesenamun could only conceive offspring with fatal congenital disorders. Recent DNA tests suggest that one of the mummies is that of Tutankhamen’s stillborn daughter and that the other was likely his child as well. The chamber also held two miniature coffins that contained two fetuses. King Tut wasn’t buried alone.Īs Carter ventured further into Tutankhamen’s tomb, he discovered a treasury room brimming with priceless funerary objects, including gold figurines, ritual jewelry, small boats representing the journey to the netherworld and a shrine for the pharaoh’s embalmed organs. How Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Organized for Nuclear Disarmament 5. Tutankhamen himself would eventually marry his father’s daughter by his chief wife-his half-sister, Ankhesenamun. Experts think this trend contributed to higher incidences of congenital defects-such as King Tut’s cleft palate and club foot-among rulers. Inbreeding was rampant among ancient Egyptian royals, who saw themselves as descendants of the gods and hoped to maintain pure bloodlines.

The boy king, they believed, was the product of incest between the pharaoh Akhenaten and one of his sisters.

In 2010 researchers performing DNA analyses on the remains of King Tut and his relatives made a shocking announcement. Tutankhamen was likely the product of incest. He abandoned his original name, Tutankhaten (“living image of Aten”), for Tutankhamen (“living image of Amun”). Tutankhamen is thought to have reversed these unpopular religious changes, restoring the god Amun to his former glory and moving the capital back to Thebes. Akhenaten also transferred the Egyptian capital from Thebes to a new site devoted to Aten. His father, Akhenaten, considered the god Aten to be the Egyptian pantheon’s most important deity and encouraged his worship above all others. Historians describe Tutankhamen’s reign as largely uneventful, but the young pharaoh did institute at least one major reform. Tutankhamen reversed the radicalism of his father, reinstating traditional religious beliefs.