Who Was King Tut 图坦卡蒙法老 Chapter 4 An Early Death

During Amenhotep’s sixteen-year-long rule, the empire did not run smoothly 1. The lands under Egypt’s control had to pay tribute 2. This meant that every year they had to send riches to the pharaoh. For instance, from Nubia in the south came gold. Lebanon had to send rare cedar 3 wood. But the Egyptian army had grown weaker. Tribute had stopped coming in.

Then Amenhotep IV was gone. And King Tut was just a child. How could he be expected to make the empire strong again?

The real power now lay with Tut’s vizier, or chief minister, and one of the army generals. Tut was the ruler in name only. He appeared at important ceremonies and holidays.

If Tut had lived beyond his teen years, perhaps he would have grown up to become a strong and wise ruler. Or maybe he always would have been under the thumb of his advisers 4.

Perhaps they were afraid that if Tut had more power, he might try to bring back the strange ways of Amenhotep IV. Instead, the temples of the older gods were reopened. And Thebes, not Amarna, became the royal city once again. Tut moved back there with his queen. They may have had children. In Tut’s tomb, along with his coffin 5, two tiny coffins 6 were also found. They contained the bodies of two baby girls. It is possible that they were Tut’s children.

King Tut and his wife

What we do know is this: He didn’t leave a son behind to become pharaoh after his death. And even in a time when most people did not live to age forty, Tut still died very young. He was only eighteen or nineteen.

It is not surprising that some historians 7 have suspected foul 8 play. Perhaps the vizier or the general decided 9 to get rid of Tut. (Each of them became pharaoh after Tut by marrying into the royal family.)

In modern times a popular notion 10 was that Tut died from a blow to the head. But in 2005, CAT scans 11 were done on the pharaoh’s three-thousand-year-old body. Over two months, cross-sectional images were taken of Tut, from head to toe. (Think of Tut’s body as a loaf of bread, with each image as a slice of bread.) When all the images were assembled, they created a three-dimensional picture of his body, inside and out.

So what did scientists learn?

There appeared to be an injury to his head, but it did not happen when he was alive. Tut’s skull 12 may have been injured when his mummy was found in 1922, so he was not killed by a blow to the head. However, the tests were not able to rule out all other methods of murder. For example, there was no way to tell if Tut had been poisoned. Evidence of poison wouldn’t have shown up on the scans.

The scientists did find out that Tut had a broken leg. It is possible that this injury may have caused an infection that led to his death.

The tests on Tut are over now. His body probably does not need to be examined anymore. The man who headed the testing said, “We should leave him in peace.” Tut was placed in his coffin and returned to his burial chamber 13.