Was King Tut Murdered?

The legendary 18th dynasty pharaoh Tutankhamun died tragically young – at around just 19 years of age. The period of Egyptian history in which he lived was brutal indeed, and life expectancy was woefully low. Yet he passed well before his time nonetheless, especially for a royal living in the relative lap of luxury.

Speculating as to the cause of his early demise has been a popular pursuit among scholars ever since Tut’s tomb – in which lay his perfectly undisturbed mummified corpse – was famously discovered by Howard Carter in the 1920s. Theories range from him becoming infected with a fatal pandemic said to be sweeping the region at the time, to a rare bone disorder to complications from a simple accident which primitive medical practices at the time were unable to deal with.

Another hypothesis – once popular, these days relegated to the margins – is that he was murdered, possible by a close family member or associate. What evidence is this belief based on, and why do so many scholars now disagree with it?

X Marks the Spot

For all the fame the boy king brought him, Howard Carter was recklessly careless in his treatment of Tutankhamun’s corpse. The British archaeologist and his team have been accused of being much less concerned with the body itself than with the various precious jewels and amulets and beautiful golden death mask stuck fast to the remains with resin. They were going to get their prizes whatever it took, so Tut was mercilessly pulled apart, chopped into bits, scraped with hot knives and even decapitated.

Because of all of this damage, it initially proved very difficult for experts examining the corpse to draw any definitive conclusions about which, if any, of the various breaks, knocks and fractures inflicted on Tut killed him. It simply wasn’t certain which were ancient injuries, and which had been caused by the haphazard techniques of Dr Carter and co.

That changed in 1968, when Dr RG Harrison and his team from the University of Liverpool became the first researchers to hit on the bright idea of X-raying the pharaoh. Their results revealed a key detail – a small dense spot at the back of Tut's head, concurrent with a subdural hematoma brain trauma, a potentially fatal injury. Some specialists said it could have easily been caused by accident. Another expert – from Long Island University – disagreed, insisting that the wound was in a protected area that would much more likely have had to be damaged by design. The file was open on the world’s oldest homicide case.

Whodunit?

You don’t need to have seen many TV detective shows to know that key components of a murder case are suspects and motivation. Who would have wanted the king dead so young, and why?

Ay is the short answer. As Tutankhamun’s vizier, and his eventual successor to the throne, nobody stood to profit more – and, indeed, did profit more – from the boy king’s passing than Ay. There is even some evidence that Ay married Tutankhamun’s widow Ankhesenamen shortly after the king’s death, possibly against her will. Talk about jumping into a man’s bed while it’s still warm.

Ankhesenamen comes up as a possible suspect herself: it is believed that she had borne two stillborn children by Tutankhamun before his death – perhaps the king was ready to get rid of her, so she struck first, maybe even in cahoots with Ay? Some voices even speculate that Tut’s chariot driver might have been in on the conspiracy – Tut’s injury is concurrent with a hard, awkward backwards fall, of a sort that could have been suffered after a tumble from a fast moving chariot. Perhaps Tut’s chauffeur was paid to give the king a sly shove?

Another Scan

It’s possible to come up with any number of feasible reasons for why a person (or persons) might have wanted to bump off a figure as high-profile and obviously envied as Tutankhamun. Yet they all seem to have been quite firmly undermined by more recent research on his corpse.

In 2005, a team led by Zahi Hawass of the Egyptian Supreme Council of the Antiquities carried out a CT-scan (a more advanced form of X-ray) on the boy king’s body, and came away with 1,700 highly-revealing images. They appeared to conclusively prove that the trauma to the back of Tut’s head was an after-death injury, likely the fault of Carter. Another crack found in the skull was most likely inflicted by his ancient embalmers.

Not only did the scans appear to extinguish the theory of death by violent murder (non-violent murder – by poisoning or similar – can never be ruled out) they also put a score through many of the suggested accidental or natural causes of his passing. All evidence suggests Tut was a relatively fit and healthy young man when he went – certainly he hadn’t endured a long, slow demise from illness or malnutrition. The idea that he suffered from scoliosis – a painful twisting of the spine – was able to be ruled out too (even if Tut’s tomb was found to contain a number of walking sticks).

Case Closed?

Perhaps the single most important thing the 2005 scans did was to shed new light on a hitherto overlooked injury to Tut’s body – a fracture in his left thighbone. Carter spotted the wound, but wrote it off as having been caused by the pharaoh’s embalmers. Evidence from the CT-scans showed that the wound in fact occurred just days before Tut’s death. It wasn’t serious enough to be fatal itself, yet it’s very likely that if gangrene had set in, doctors would have been helpless to stop it ravishing the boy king and killing him in a very short space of time. The theory holds water with many specialists, and is as close a thing to a surefire explanation for Tut’s demise as has yet been reached.

The violent murder theory was dealt a death blow by this new information, then, although to be fair it had been on its last legs for a while anyway. Earlier calcification tests carried out on wound to the back of Tut’s head had shown that, even it was a period-injury caused by foulplay, he lived on for a long while after suffering it – possibly for months – before finally succumbing. It seems hard to believe that if the wound was the consequence of an assault by Ay or Ankhesenamun or someone else, and Tut knew it, he would have let his assailants go unpunished.

One individual refuses to let go of the idea that Tut was murdered however – Michael R. King, a retired top policeman turned author in the American state of Utah, who in 2004 penned the book Who Killed King Tut: Using Modern Forensics to Solve a 3300 Year Old Mystery. He firmly fingers Ay for the crime of masterminding Tut’s untimely death, and refuses to let the king’s vizier be let off the hook by the CT-scan evidence.

The embalming resin on his mummy was much more heavily applied than was normal, because – King claims – Tut was murdered away from his home, and the smell of decay had to be concealed once the corpse was transported back some time later. Additionally, he speculates that flowers found around the neck of Tut's mummified corpse only bloomed in spring in Egypt, suggesting an earlier time of death than otherwise stated – sometime during the hunting season perhaps, when the king would have been wide open to attack.

For one cop at least, the idea that Egypt’s most famous pharaoh was the victim of a bloody assault will never die.

King Tut statue picture (top) by Steve Grundy; Ay picture (bottom) by Neil (The Bearded One). All rights reserved.

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About The Author

Malcolm Jack

Malcolm Jack is a freelance arts and entertainment journalist based in Glasgow, Scotland. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2004 with an MA Honours Degree in History.

Last three pieces by this author: Grand Egyptian Museum Opening Brought Forward to 2012 as Contractors Sign New Deal, Iran Cuts All Relations with British Museum Over Cyrus Cylinder, Doctor Who on Call at Stonehenge

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Interesting Publications

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by Zahi Hawass, Sandro Vannini

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs - Zahi Hawass

National Geographic (2005)

by Zahi Hawass