The boy king of Egypt, King Tut reigned for nine years, dying at age 19. Writers have seen foul play at work in his early death. But the new analysis found traces of malaria genes and showed a family plagued by bone necrosis.”They were human. They suffered illness even if they were royal,” says study team geneticist Carsten Pusch of Germany’s University of Tubingen. “The DNA analysis puts names on some of these mummies and in a way brings them to life again.”
From 2007 to 2009, the royal mummies underwent extensive examination, including X-rays and gene analysis. The results confirm that Pharaoh Akhenaten, who died in 1331 B.C. after attempting to turn Egyptian religion to monotheism, indeed fathered King Tut after marrying his sister. And they confirm a family line from Tut’s great-grandfather, Yuya, through two fetuses buried in Tut’s tomb that he fathered.
“You have to know that these mummies were hidden away at night by later priests, and they made some mistakes,” switching names among mummies, Hawass says by e-mail. “So it is fascinating for us to try to use science to trace the truth.”One theory suggested the family suffered from Marfan’s syndrome, based on the feminized appearance of the era’s depiction of rulers. But the new study disproves that, showing the Pharoahs possessed standard male features and genes. Tut had a club foot and other bone loss, revealed by X-rays, and likely died of a broken leg added to the ravages of a malaria infection, the study concludes.
“A lot of Egyptologists are interested in these detective stories,” says the University of Pennsylvania’s David Silverman, curator of the Penn Museum’s Egyptian section. “They can tell us a lot about the lives of these long-gone people.”The study relied on a $5 million genetic analysis lab built under the Cairo museum housing many of King Tut’s artifacts. Several of the mummies, including Tut, were sampled from their tombs inside Egypt’s storied Valley of the Kings.
Silverman, who is the curator of a King Tut exhibit at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, says the findings will allow him to remove the word “probable” from descriptions of King Tut’s lineage, when the exhibit moves to New York in April. “We know they are real, not just probable, now.”
