King Tut is back in the news. In the fall of 2014, a “virtual autopsy” that used more than 2,000 computer scans of the mummy of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, along with a genetic analysis of his entire family, provided new evidence that the boy king had a club foot, broad hips, and suffered from malaria and bone necrosis.
This new information also questions previous theories surrounding Tut’s cause of death, once thought to involve injures from a chariot accident, and also suggests he was the product of inbreeding (the genetic analysis showed that his parents were brother and sister, a not uncommon practice among ancient Egyptian royalty).
And early this year, the blue and gold braided beard on the elaborate golden burial mask of the pharaoh was hastily glued back on with epoxy, damaging the relic after it was knocked during cleaning at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. All this attention provides an opportunity to revisit King Tut and the mysteries surrounding his life and death.
There’s no better expert to lead that exploration than David P. Silverman, one of the leading authorities on the civilization of ancient Egypt, who discusses the latest findings on Tutankhamun and how they add to our fascination with an ancient monarch whose afterlife is one that he never could have imagined.
Silverman is the Eckley Brinton Coxe, Jr., professor of Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania and curator of Penn Museum's Egyptian section. The author of books and articles on the boy king, he served as curator for several major exhibitions seen nationally and internationally, including Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs; Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs; and the blockbuster Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition, which produced renewed interest in Tut in the 1970s.
Smithsonian & Other Connections
The mud house in the Valley of the Kings where Egyptologist Howard Carter lived when he led the 1922 expedition that opened King Tut’s tomb is now part a museum devoted to that momentous discovery. Smithsonian magazine’s Matthew Shaer visited, finding the experience brought him closer to the boy king and his legend—and in some ways, more tantalizingly distant.
Tut-mania didn’t start with Steve Martin’s classic number on Saturday Night Live. A 2014 exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum investigated how the discovery of the boy king's tomb in 1922 had a huge impact on popular culture across the globe.
