10. Misreported Fact: The Importance of King Tut in His Lifetime
After a tumultuous seventeen-year-reign that plunged Egypt into chaos and bankrupted the kingdom, Akhenaten died in 1334 BC. Nefertiti tried to continue her late husband-brother’s religious revolution, and stepped up to act as regent for Akhenaten’s successor, a seven-year-old born him by another sister. However, Nefertiti lost a power struggle at court, and the reins were taken by a chief minister, Ay, who became the child pharaoh’s key adviser. The kid’s birth name had been Tutankhaten birth, which means “Living Image of Aten”, after the god worshipped by his father. Soon as he ascended the throne, the child ruler’s advisers had him change his name to Tutankhamen, or “Living Image of Amen”, the traditional Egyptian god ditched by Akhenaten. That heralded a rejection of his father’s religious revolution, and a counter-revolution that restored the old Egyptian gods and traditional ways of worship.
Tutankhamen was relatively insignificant. He was a child king for most of his life, which lasted for only another ten years before he died at age seventeen. In that time, actual power was wielded by his advisers. The young pharaoh was also physically disabled and sickly. A product of generations of royal inbreeding, he suffered many deformities caused by incest. He had scoliosis (a deformation of the spine), a clubbed foot that necessitated a cane to walk, and a cleft palate. Tutankhamen also caught frequent bouts of malaria, which ultimately killed him. When he died, courtiers raided the tombs of his father and Nefertiti, and ransacked them for items to toss into his tomb. Indeed, the most famous ancient Egyptian artifact, Tutankhamen’s Mask, had actually been Nefertiti’s. Even his sarcophagus had been made for somebody else: masons simply carved over its original inscriptions, and repurposed them for King Tut.
