Tutankhamun: The Boy King Whose Tomb Shook the World

Tutankhamun, often simply called “King Tut”, is the most famous pharaoh of ancient Egypt. Yet he was a minor ruler in his own time, a sickly teenager who reigned for only about nine years (c. 1332-1323 BCE) and died before his twentieth birthday. What made him immortal, as Nicholas Reeves (The Complete Tutankhamun, 1990, rev. 2008) has documented in detail, was the discovery, on 4 November 1922, of his nearly intact tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the most spectacular archaeological find of the twentieth century.

The standard scholarly read of Tut, and the one I held myself for a long time, is that he was a minor king of a minor reign, mostly a name on a restoration stela. The recent literature, Aidan Dodson’s Amarna Sunset (2009), Nicholas Reeves’s The Complete Tutankhamun, and the more technical work of the Amarna project on the Amarna succession, has made me less sure of that. The restoration of the old gods under his name, the return of the court from Akhetaten to Memphis, and the renegotiation of the Nubian and Levantine frontiers were not trivial political projects. They were, perhaps, the work of his advisors rather than his own. But Tut’s name was on the stelae, and that is what mattered. I am now inclined to read him as a more substantial figure than the old textbook view allowed, while still acknowledging that the question is, in the end, an evidentiary one.

Family and Background

Tutankhamun was born around 1341 BCE, during one of the most turbulent periods in Egyptian history. His father was almost certainly the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, the king who had tried to replace Egypt’s many gods with a single sun disk, the Aten. His mother is more uncertain; she is sometimes identified as one of Akhenaten’s minor wives, sometimes as the mysterious The Younger Lady whose mummy was found in tomb KV35.

The boy grew up in Amarna, the short-lived capital city Akhenaten had built in middle Egypt for his new religion. After Akhenaten’s death, the throne passed through a series of short-lived rulers, including the pharaoh Smenkhkare and the female pharaoh Neferneferuaten. Around the age of nine, Tutankhamun became pharaoh.

The Religious Restoration

Tutankhamun’s most important act as king was to undo the religious revolution of his father. Within the first years of his reign, the young pharaoh issued a decree restoring the old gods of Egypt, including Amun of Thebes, Mut, and Khonsu. He changed his own name from the Atenist Tutankhaten, “Living Image of the Aten”, to Tutankhamun, “Living Image of Amun.” Aidan Dodson (Amarna Sunset, 2009, pp. 94-115) treats this restoration decree as the founding act of the late Eighteenth Dynasty.

The court abandoned Amarna and returned to Memphis, and work began on restoring the great temples that Akhenaten had neglected. The Temple of Karnak in Thebes, in particular, was revived as a major center of worship. Tutankhamun’s advisors, including the vizier Ay and the general Horemheb, appear to have done much of the actual governing of Egypt during his minority. For the religious context, see our guide to the Egyptian gods and goddesses.

Reign and Death

Tutankhamun’s reign was brief and, in conventional terms, uneventful. Egypt lost some of its imperial holdings in the Levant, and a few minor military expeditions were sent south into Nubia. His most visible legacy is the small collection of monuments and objects that bear his name, the restoration stela, several statues, and a great many items from his tomb.

He married Ankhesenamun, a daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, but the couple had no surviving children. Two mummified fetuses were found in his tomb, both tragically stillborn.

Tutankhamun died around 1323 BCE, somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty. The cause of his death was long a mystery. CT scans of his mummy, first published in 2005 by a team led by Zahi Hawass and revisited in 2010, suggest he suffered from a combination of malaria and a severe bone disease, possibly introduced by inbreeding in the royal line. There is also evidence of a leg fracture shortly before death, leading to theories of a chariot accident. The summary by Nicholas Reeves (The Complete Tutankhamun, 1990, rev. 2008, pp. 100-118) remains the standard introduction. For the discovery of his mummy and tomb, see our article on Howard Carter and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

The Tomb and Its Treasures

Tutankhamun was buried in a small tomb in the Valley of the Kings designated KV62. Unlike most royal tombs in the Valley, his had been hastily cut and never fully decorated, suggesting his death was unexpected. The burial itself, however, was spectacular. As Howard Carter wrote in the final inventory published in 1933, the tomb contained 5,398 objects (T. G. H. James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun, 1992, pp. 314-316), including:

• A solid gold funeral mask, one of the most iconic objects in the world.
• Three nested golden coffins, the innermost made of solid gold.
• Chariots, thrones, beds, and chairs inlaid with gold and semiprecious stones.
• Statues of the king and of the gods who would protect him in the afterlife.
• A collection of Canopic jars holding his internal organs.
• A large collection of food, wine, and clothing for his use in the next world.

The contents, painstakingly catalogued by Howard Carter over more than ten years and finalized in his three-volume Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen (1923-1933), are now the centerpiece of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza.

The “Curse”

Almost from the moment Carter lifted the first stone seal, stories began to circulate about a curse of the Pharaohs that would strike down anyone who disturbed Tutankhamun’s rest. The press, eager for sensation, promoted the story. Within a decade, several members of the original expedition had died, though in numbers and from causes that, statistically, were unremarkable. For the full story, see our article on the curse of Tutankhamun.

Why Tutankhamun Still Matters

In one sense, Tutankhamun was a footnote in Egyptian history: a minor king of a minor reign, overshadowed by Akhenaten, Hatshepsut, and Ramesses II. In another sense, he has become the face of ancient Egypt itself. The 1970s touring exhibition of his treasures drew more visitors than any other museum show in history and introduced a generation to the wonders of pharaonic civilization.

His golden mask is on currency, on T-shirts, on the covers of books, and on the opening credits of films. His name is, for most of the world, the name of ancient Egypt. As Reeves has written (The Complete Tutankhamun, 1990, rev. 2008), Tutankhamun’s afterlife in modern culture has come to define the popular image of pharaonic Egypt more powerfully than any other pharaoh, a status achieved, paradoxically, by being the least powerful of all the kings buried in the Valley of the Kings.