Tutankhamun wasn’t a terribly important pharaoh, comparatively. He only ruled for nine years and he started that rule when he was just ten years old. But King Tut has ruled the world’s imagination far longer than he ruled his country. His treasure filled tomb was discovered in 1922 to great public fanfare and he’s been a symbol of the mystique of Egyptian antiquity ever since.
Tut’s fame has always been, in part, due to his mysterious death. How the boy king died has been one of the great historical mysteries of all time. The frail boy pharaoh, who had a cleft palate and a club foot, died at age nineteen. He was often assumed to have been murdered because of a hole in his skull. That theory was ruled out in 2005 by a CT scan that showed that the hole was more likely to be a by product of the mummification process. The same scan revealed that he had a broken leg at the time he died. Apparently, that broken leg killed him.
Two years of further DNA testing have allowed researchers to finally decide on complications from his injury as a relatively conclusive cause of death for Tut. The traumatic injury became deadly when paired with a severe case of malaria. The infection is a new discovery made by a new study published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The team found DNA of the malaria parasite in several of the mummies, some of the oldest ever found.
The study also provided the firmest family tree yet for Tut. Pharaoh Akhenaten, who attempted to revolutionize ancient Egyptian religion to worship one god, appears to have been Tut’s father. Many of Tut’s health problems can be attributed to the fact that his mother was one of Akhenaten’s sisters.
