Tutankhamun has emerged from the mists of history to become a significant figure in the modern world
Tutankhamun reigned in Egypt in the late 14th century BC. As a child at his accession, and dead before the end of his teens, he probably had little input into what was done in his name. However, his tenure of the pharaonic throne was significant, seeing the dismantling of the short-lived eclipse of the traditional gods of Egypt by the sun-god promoted by Tutankhamun’s predecessor – and probable father – Akhenaten. Although thus a patron of orthodoxy, Tutankhamun shared the posthumous fate of Akhenaten, and his own successor, Ay, in being written out of history, and omitted from official lists of the kings of Egypt.
Yet today he is the best-known of all the pharaohs of Egypt – wholly owing to the accident that meant that his was the only tomb in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings to survive almost untouched until modern times. As revealed by archaeologists in 1922, the almost unbelievable richness of its contents – including a solid gold innermost coffin – catapulted Tutankhamun from an obscure figure known only to a few professional Egyptologists to a global megastar. In particular, the solid gold, glass-inlaid, mask found over the head of his mummified body has become an almost-universally recognised emblem of ancient Egypt.
As a result, today there are essentially two Tutankhamuns (and subsets thereof). One is the actual king of Egypt, the subject of scholarly research that aims to widen and deepen our understanding of the young man and his times. This is by no means an uncontroversial Tutankhamun, as there are probably as many perspectives on him, and theories on many of the details of his ancestry, life, death and burial, as there are deep-specialist Egyptologists who study him. Indeed, the range of views is such that there are a number of mutually exclusive versions of this ‘acade
