Tutankhamun (Nebkheperure)

The boy king

Tutankhamun ascended the throne at just nine years old. Born as Tutankhaten ("Living image of the Aten"), he was the son of Akhenaten and an unidentified royal woman known today as the "Younger Lady." Because he was a child without living elder relatives, he was heavily guided by senior officials, particularly his vizier Ay.

Return to the old gods

Under Ay's influence, the young pharaoh abandoned his father's radical religion and moved the court back to Memphis. He changed his name to Tutankhamun to reflect a renewed devotion to the god Amun. He issued a major decree to repair neglected temples, restore the traditional polytheistic priesthoods, and cast new statues of the old gods using electrum and lapis lazuli.

A frail life and an intact tomb

Tutankhamun suffered from severe health issues, including malaria, sickle cell anemia, and a compound fracture in his leg. He died at the age of 19. His enduring global fame stems entirely from the discovery of his tomb in 1922 by Howard Carter. Because the tomb miraculously escaped ancient looters, it contained over 5,000 intact artifacts, including his famous solid gold funerary mask and innermost coffin.

Two stillborn daughters and an iron blade from the sky

Among the tomb's more poignant discoveries were two small gilded coffins found inside a plain wooden box, each holding the mummified remains of a stillborn daughter, one miscarried at roughly five months and the other close to full term. DNA testing conducted between 2007 and 2009 as part of the Egyptian Mummy Project identified Tutankhamun as the most likely father of both fetuses, though their mother has not been identified. Metallurgical analysis published in 2016 also confirmed that the iron blade of a dagger buried with the king was forged from meteoritic iron, a material ancient Egyptians associated with the heavens and treated as more precious than gold.