Tutankhamun

Tutankhamun was a pharaoh of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty who came to the throne as a child around 1332 BCE and died about nine years later, aged roughly nineteen. In his own time he was a minor king whose main achievement was undoing the religious revolution of Akhenaten. He is famous today almost entirely because his tomb in the Valley of the Kings, found in 1922, was the only royal burial of the period to survive largely intact.

He was born around 1342 BCE, in the reign of Akhenaten, and was first named Tutankhaten, "living image of the Aten", after the sun disc that Akhenaten had made the centre of state religion. An inscription from Hermopolis calls him a "king's son", so his royal birth is secure, but his parents are never named in any surviving text. Most Egyptologists think his father was Akhenaten or his shadowy successor Smenkhkare.

DNA studies published in 2010 identified his father as the man buried in tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings, usually thought to be Akhenaten, and his mother as an unnamed mummy known as the "Younger Lady", who appears to have been her partner's full sister. These results are widely cited but also questioned, because ancient DNA degrades and heavy inbreeding in the royal family makes kinship hard to read. The idea that Nefertiti was his mother is now generally doubted, though not ruled out by every scholar. He was nursed as a baby by a woman called Maia, whose tomb was found at Saqqara.

Tutankhaten became king at about eight or nine years old, after the brief and confused reigns that followed Akhenaten's death. He married Ankhesenpaaten, a daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti and probably his half-sister. Within a few years both changed their names, he to Tutankhamun, "living image of Amun", and she to Ankhesenamun, a clear signal that the old god of Thebes was back in favour.

A young child could not govern, and real power lay with senior officials, above all Ay, an elderly courtier with the title God's Father, and Horemheb, commander of the army. Under their direction the court left Akhenaten's new capital at Amarna and returned to Memphis, and the traditional cults were revived. The Restoration Stela, set up at Karnak, describes temples that had fallen into ruin and gods who had turned away from Egypt, and records the king's gifts of new statues, priests and income. Whether the young king had any personal say in this policy is unknown.

Egypt's foreign affairs continued under his name. Scenes from the period show campaigns in Nubia, the region of the later Kingdom of Kush, and in the Near East, though it is unclear whether the king took part himself. Building work resumed at Thebes and elsewhere, and he began a royal tomb and a mortuary temple, neither of which was finished.

The highest securely recorded year of his reign is year nine, and he died around 1323 BCE. The cause has been debated for a century. An old theory that he was murdered with a blow to the head has been largely dismissed, since the damage to his skull most likely happened during mummification or later handling. CT scans and DNA work in the 2000s found a fracture of the left leg that had not healed, a club foot and other bone problems, and traces of the malaria parasite; the research team proposed that malaria combined with the injury killed him. Other researchers dispute parts of this, and no single cause is accepted.

His two daughters, both stillborn or dying at birth, were buried with him, and his death ended the royal bloodline of the dynasty. Because his own tomb was not ready, he was placed in a small tomb, now numbered KV62, that may have been intended for someone else. Ay, who succeeded him, is shown on the burial chamber wall performing the funeral rites. A letter in the Hittite archives from an Egyptian queen, named in the text as Dakhamunzu, asking the Hittite king for a son to marry because her husband had died, is often linked to Ankhesenamun, though some scholars attribute it to Nefertiti or another queen. The Hittite prince who was sent was killed on the way.

Ay reigned only a few years and was followed by Horemheb, who completed the return to the old religion and took over many of Tutankhamun's monuments by replacing his name with his own. The kings of the next dynasty, including Seti I and Ramesses II, left Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Ay out of the official king lists altogether. His tomb, low in the valley floor, was robbed at least twice soon after his burial and resealed. Later it was buried under debris from the building of a nearby tomb in the Ramesside period, which hid its entrance for more than three thousand years.

The British archaeologist Howard Carter, funded by George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, had searched the Valley of the Kings for several seasons without success when, on 4 November 1922, his workers found a step cut into the rock. Behind the sealed doors lay four crowded chambers holding more than 5,000 objects: chariots, beds, weapons, clothing, jewellery, shrines, food and wine. The king's body lay inside three nested coffins, the innermost of solid gold, wearing the gold funerary mask that has since become the best-known image of ancient Egypt. Clearing and recording the tomb took Carter's team about ten years.

The find made headlines across the world and set off a wave of fashion for Egyptian styles in design and architecture. When Carnarvon died in Cairo in April 1923 from an infected mosquito bite, newspapers spread the story of a "curse of the pharaohs". Studies of the people present at the opening have found no unusual pattern of early deaths.

Because almost every other pharaoh's tomb was emptied in antiquity, Tutankhamun's burial gives a uniquely full picture of how a New Kingdom king was sent into the afterlife, and its objects remain central to the study of the period's art, craft and religion. Exhibitions of the treasures toured the world from the 1960s onward, drawing record crowds. Most of the collection was long held in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and has now been moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum near the Giza pyramids, which opened fully in 2025, while the mummy remains in the tomb at Luxor. The modern fame of "King Tut" stands in sharp contrast to the short, largely obscure reign of a boy who ruled at the end of the New Kingdom's greatest dynasty, a period covered on the History of Egypt page.