I’ve been listening to Dr. Campbell Price talk about what we know and don’t know about Tutankhamun. I realize this must be old news for you, but as a layperson, I had no idea that Tutankhamun had been erased from records or pharaohs quickly after his death. Like, I knew his reign was short and therefore likely not impactful, but I didn’t know he’d been erased from the record. Just had to share because I was very surprised by this.
Ah Campbell! I'm very familiar with him! And yeah, it's what I'd call the basic information about Tutankhamun. That information has been known for quite a long time. But we all start somewhere! You're one of today's lucky 10,000!
He was a child king, who barely made it into adulthood, and happened to come at the end of a terrible period in Egypt's history. He was the relative** of a king his advisors despised, a king whose reign ripped up the foundation of how Egyptian political culture functioned (I think this is more relevant than the change in religion ever was, yet people always say 'well it's because Akhenaten changed the religion'), and then, despite being controlled by viziers from a young age, and following the religion of Egypt as it had been before, upon his untimely death, they took the chance to bury the legacy of Akhenaten once and for all.
The Egyptians did this a lot, especially when something was aberrant to the balance of Ma'at. Akhenaten uprooted so many things about Egyptian life. This would have pissed off a good many people who were suddenly removed from power, and they bade their time until he died, until the 2(?) kings between him and Tutankhamun failed (we don't know what happened to them), and then started regrouping as Tutankhamun reigned. They used Tutankhamun to reset a lot of things, the Restoration stele resetting the religion to being under Amun as one of them, but when he died, they used it as an excuse to reset everything in accordance with Ma'at. Ma'at was cosmic balance and the king was supposed to keep cosmic balance for Egypt to be prosperous. Balance had to be achieved in all things and this didn't mean 'things could only be good' there had to be both good and bad in balance. The issue was, reigns like Akhenaten's disrupted this 'balance'; they were aberant, and so, to keep Ma'at, those aberrations had to be erased. Culturally, the way to do this was to remove the name of that person, denying them an afterlife, and essentially destroy all images of them. Akhenaten was all but obliterated from the historical record by the Egyptians, even his coffin didn't bear his name, but Tutankhamun was different. While his name was removed publicly, it was still on his tomb goods, which tells you how they viewed him.
Had he lived much longer, it's possible Tutankhamun wouldn't have suffered the fate he did. After all, a 40 year reign would be much harder to hide than a 9 year reign. But because he was young, because he came from the family he did, and because of the legacy that it would leave on Egypt, they simply erased them and pretended it never happened.
** I say 'male relative' because the DNA Hawass announced as 'definitively' saying Akhenaten was Tutankhamun's father doesn't say that. It says they're close male relatives, but the DNA is too old and too corrupted to say for sure. We know they're family, and close family, but this could be a nephew or even a brother, so I tend to hold off saying 'father' when that's not fully supported by the record. If an ostracon, stele, tomb scene pops up saying 'Tutankhamun son of Akhenaten' or analysis of very old DNA gets way better, then I'll believe it.
I’ve been learning a lot! I had to go look up your reference to the two kings between Akhenaten and Tutankhamun (is that taking into account the possible regencies, or am I off the mark there?). I also learned from listening to Campbell the degree to which the version of Tutenkhamun’s medical history I learned early on (possible club foot, possible injury to the head, possible scoliosis) is all in doubt today. So yeah, it’s been a lot of learning 😂
There are two possible reigns between Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, Neferneferuaten and Smenkhkare. We have next to no information on these two. We don't know how long they reigned (not very long), nor who they even were. We're not sure whether there were any regencies, because that all depends on who these two are, and how close they were to Akhenaten. They certainly had no regency with Tutankhamun. Anything else I can say here is pure speculation.
Yeah, the documentary that made him out to be a man with a severe overbite, cleft palette, club foot, and severely disabled is one of the worst documentaries that has ever been produced. They never had any access to the body, they never ran any tests, they simply ran off old photographs and gave out pure conjecture, labelling it as fact. Overbite/buck teeth? He was mummified poorly, so his jaw has slipped backwards. When in a normal position, this issue isn't present. The claim relies on the jaw being in the post-mortem, unnatural position for its evidence. Club foot and Scoliosis? Archaeologists specialising in Osteology have examined this body time and time again and even again after this documentary. They have found no evidence of severity that would be visible/cause him pain. The clubfoot is so slight that the whole 'ankle fully rotated' image of him makes me angry. He does have a cleft palate but it's in the hard palate and would not have been an issue for him. Wide hips? The documentary makers simply took the cue from Amarna art and just slapped wide hips on him. His skeleton shows width in the average parameters.
I distinctly remember the anger amongst Egyptologists when that documentary came out, and I remember discussing it with Campbell and others at a pub one night after a seminar. People were pissed because it threw out a bunch of easily disproven fallacies about a dead man who can't speak for himself, turned him into a caricature of himself, and because it was so widely spread by the media it's become the thing people think about when he's mentioned. They turned him from 'man who died in a chariot accident' into 'hey guys look this! he's a cripple! Doesn't he look funny and gross now?!' and it's sickening. None of it is true! It's done so much damage we're still trying to undo over a decade later!
It's why when people say 'what's the harm in just making stuff up for fun about historical figures? I should be allowed to have fun!' I want to scream. If you're putting that out in the public sphere, you have a duty to make it clear it's not real or we'll end up with another 'hatshepsut is trans' scenario.
Yeah and the twist on that whole "reconstruction" with the narrative of the perceived disabilities were due to the Amarna kings doing incest is sickening to another level (for me personally).
Also we have the most popcorn worthy gossip case ever with his widow Ankhesenamun asking for a foreign prince from Hatti to marry because "she will not marry a servant" (it's been a while since I heard that, might not be exact quote) then disappearing from the record after the prince dies on the way - we have reality to speculate on if we want to, no need to invent bullshit.
Tutankhamun's parents were cousins at best, and at least one set of grandparents weren't related to each other because his grandmother was from Nubia. The 'Egyptian Kings are incestuous' is a myth I'd love to die in a ditch.
The quote, from her letter to the Hittite king, Suppiluliuma I, is as follows: 'My husband has died and I have no son. They say about you that you have many sons. You might give me one of your sons to become my husband. I would not wish to take one of my subjects** as a husband…' then she ends the letter with 'I am afraid.'
**some scholars translate this as 'servants' but, given that rulers in this time period often use terms like 'servant' to refer to anyone under them, it is better to render it as 'subjects' and treat it as the court around Ankhesenamun, all of whom would have been vying for power.
I'm not sure you could say it's popcorn worthy though. This is a 21 year old woman, the daughter of a hated king, widow of the last in that line, and mother to two daughters who died at birth.** She was under threat and terrified. The Hittite prince does die on the way. Early researchers, more focused on spectacle than fact, speculated that he'd been murdered along the way, and the Hittite records do show them accusing the Egyptians of his murder. However, this doesn't mean it actually happened. All we know is that he never made it to Egypt. He could have been murdered, or he could have died in an ambush by some other group, or simply died of dysentery (it's a long way to travel) and his father flew off the handle and accused the Egyptians of murder instead. We simply don't know. What we do know is that based on an engraved ring bezel, we know Ankhesenamun married Ay. Ay only reigned for about 4 years, and Ankhesenamun died very soon after his reign began as there is no mention of her in his tomb and she disappears from the record entirely, as is the case with many from the Amanra period.
So her dad, the king, dies, her husband dies, her children are dead, she tries to reach out to a foreign land for help and it fails, she's forced to marry her much older uncle, and then she abruptly disappears. Odds are she either died in childbirth (considering she'd already had two difficult pregnancies this is a possibility), she died of an illness and because she's no one of note they just didn't mention her, or she was murdered. Either way, that's a terrible fate for someone so young.
**there's an ivory box found in Tutankhamun's tomb that depicts him and Ankhesenamun standing together, but beneath them are a boy and a girl hiding in the rushes. No one knows who they are. They could be unknown children (doubtful) or childhood depictions of the pair.
*rolls up late to the party and wheels out soap box*
You know who did practice incest almost exclusively but cops zero shit for it in the public consciousness? The Ptolemies. There's so many of them and almost all of them did it. The Old Kingdom was doing it more than say your average New Kingdom pharaoh but no one was doing it like the Ptolemies
Even if Tutankhamun's parents were closely related such as *spins wheel* full siblings *throws dart* cousins, Amenhotep and Tiye were sooooo unrelated. Tiyes dad Yuya is some random minor nobleman and they are from Akhmim of all places. (We have the most attestations of them from their burial which calls them iry-pat hereditary noble among other things which is a rank you can just be elevated to btw despite what the translation implies ergo at their highest status at the end of their lives because their daughter is the king's chief wife and has been for some time). Some researchers try to suggest weeeeelll maybe Yuyas sister was Amenhotep's mother Mutemwiya to try and explain how they were connected to the royal family but literally we do not know we have no filiation for any of these people we do not know who their parents are so how can we know if they are related! Amenhotep III was the son of a minor wife who we know nothing about because she wasn't important and we only know about her because her son became king and elevated her status and erected statues of her and included her on his
You get actual confirmed incest marriages every generation or so but in the 18th Dynasty they rarely result in the heir who inherits the throne. For example, Amenhotep III's dad, Thutmose IV married his sister Iaret (full or half is unknown, we don't know who her mother is). She may be the mother of some of his attested children but their mothers are not specified in the surviving inscriptions so, dunno
Thutmose IV's dad Amenhotep II just, refused to name any of his wives on monuments (presumably nuked in response to the threat any royal women might conceivably pose a la Hatshepsut), so his only know wife is Tiaa, mother of TIV and a minor wife, unrelated, before her son elevated her to chief wife status when he took the throne
Amenhotep II's dad Thutmose III didn't marry a sister as far as we can tell. He was also a son of Iset, an unrelated minor wife of his father, Thutmose II. It's sometimes suggested he married his half sister/cousin Neferure to explain the parentage of a prince called Amenemhat but she's never called Kings Wife anywhere so, dubious. Neferure WAS a product of incest, her parents being half-siblings. Her father Thutmose II was a half brother by, you guessed it, a minor wife, Mutneferet, and her mother Hatshepsut was herself a child of Thutmose I by his chief wife Ahmose
Now, here, finally, with Thutmose II, we hit some incest that results in the heir to the throne. Thutmose II's mother was Mutneferet, a minor wife, possibly a cousin of her husband Thutmose I (we're unsure exactly who her dad is, maybe Ahmose I. She's a Kings Mother, Kings Wife, Kings Sister, Kings Daughter). Ahmose, mother of Hatshepsut, was probably Thutmose I's sister.
Going back beyond this to the first couple of kings of the 18th Dynasty is more incesty, as are the last few of the 17th Dynasty. Maybe 3 generations of brother-sister marriage going on but that's the longest span you get for the entire 18th Dynasty. Thutmose I's parents are siblings, and maaaaybe Amenhotep I's are cousins but he comes kind of out of nowhere and doesn't leave a male heir. Seqenenre Tao married his sister, but his parents Tao I and Tetisheri are unrelated
So like, if Inbreeding For One (1) Generation Made Tutankhamun Die Young, uhhhh why don't we think that about the early Thutmosids who by all accounts Did Shit and Lived A Bit Longer. Caveat, Thutmose II died kind of young, but it's Ancient Egypt anything could be fatal, kings aren't immune. Thutmose IV died youngish too but it's not The Incest
I think we see a few Uncle/Niece marriages or brother/sister (half or not) ceremonial marriages (i.e. not for sex or romance) too. But like, it’s not as common as people think it is and honestly guys you’ve been conditioned to think that this is a purely ancient world thing and it’s not. You can look at the history of any monarchy in any country (especially Europe) and see cousins, uncle/niece, even half siblings marrying each other all the time.
Like you can’t trade on the fact that Ancient Egypt had a few close relation marriages therefore they’re tainted by incest and that’s what killed them all when you have the Habsburgs right fucking there doing it so much worse with lasting impact.
