Tutankhamen

/tooht'ahng kah"meuhn/, n.

14th century B.C., a king of Egypt of the 18th dynasty.

Also, Tutankhamon, Tutankhamun, Tutenkhamon /tooht'eng kah"meuhn/.

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orig. Tutankhaten

flourished 14th century BC

Egyptian pharaoh (r. 1333–23 BC) of the 18th dynasty.

When he took the throne at about age eight, he was advised to move back to Memphis from Akhetaton, the city of his father-in-law and predecessor, Akhenaton. During his reign the traditional religion was restored after the changes made by Akhenaton. Shortly before he died, while still in his teens, he sent troops to Syria to aid an ally against a group connected with the Hittites. Because his name was among those stricken from the royal lists during the 19th dynasty, his tomb's location was forgotten and his burial chamber was not opened until 1922, when it was discovered by Howard Carter (1873–1939). Its treasures made Tutankhamen perhaps the best-known of the pharaohs despite his early death and limited accomplishments.

Tutankhamen, gold funerary mask found in the king's tomb, 14th century BC; in the Egyptian ...

© Lee Boltin

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▪ king of Egypt

also spelled  Tutankhamun , original name  Tutankhaten  

flourished 14th century BCE

 

 king of ancient Egypt (Egypt, ancient) (reigned 1333–23 BCE), known chiefly for his intact tomb, KV 62 (tomb 62), discovered in the Valley of the Kings (Kings, Valley of the) in 1922. During his reign, powerful advisers restored the traditional Egyptian religion and art, both of which had been set aside by his predecessor Akhenaton, who had led the “Amarna revolution.” (See Amarna style.)

      The parentage of Tutankhaten— as he was originally known—remains uncertain, although a single black fragment originating at Akhetaton (Tell el-Amarna (Amarna, Tell el-)), Akhenaton's capital city, names him as a king's son in a context similar to that of the princesses of Akhenaton. Medical analysis of Tutankhaten's mummy shows that he shares very close physical characteristics with the mummy discovered in KV 55 (tomb 55) of the Valley of the Kings. Some scholars identify these remains as those of Smenkhkare, who seems to have been coregent with Akhenaton in the final years of his reign; others have suggested the mummy may be Akhenaton himself.

 With the death of Smenkhkare, the young Tutankhaten became king, and was married to Akhenaton's third daughter, Ankhesenpaaton (later known as Ankhesenamen), probably the eldest surviving princess of the royal family. Because at his accession he was still very young, the elderly official Ay, who had long maintained ties with the royal family, and the general of the armies, Horemheb, served as Tutankhaten's chief advisers.

      By his third regnal year Tutankhaten had abandoned Tell el-Amarna and moved his residence to Memphis, the administrative capital, near modern Cairo. He changed his name to Tutankhamen and issued a decree restoring the temples, images, personnel, and privileges of the old gods. He also began the protracted process of restoring the sacred shrines of Amon, which had been severely damaged during his father's rule. No proscription or persecution of the Aton, Akhenaton's god, was undertaken, and royal vineyards and regiments of the army were still named after the Aton.

      In addition to a palace built at Karnak and a memorial temple in western Thebes, both now largely vanished, the chief extant monument of Tutankhamen is the Colonnade of the Temple of Luxor, which he decorated with reliefs depicting the Opet festival, an annual rite of renewal involving the king, the three chief deities of Karnak (Amon, Mut, and Khons), and the local form of Amon at Luxor.

  Tutankhamen unexpectedly died in his 19th year without designating an heir and was succeeded by Ay. He was buried in a small tomb hastily converted for his use in the Valley of the Kings (his intended sepulchre was probably taken over by Ay). Like other rulers associated with the Amarna period—Akhenaton, Smenkhkare, and Ay—he was to suffer the posthumous fate of having his name stricken from later king lists and his monuments usurped, primarily by his former general, Horemheb, who subsequently became king. Although Tutankhamen's tomb shows evidence of having been entered and briefly plundered, the location of his burial was clearly forgotten by the time of the 20th dynasty (Egypt, ancient) (1190–1075 BCE), when craftsmen assigned to work on the nearby tomb of Ramses VI built temporary stone shelters directly over its entrance. The tomb was preserved until a systematic search of the Valley of the Kings by the English archaeologist Howard Carter (Carter, Howard) revealed its location in 1922.

 Inside his small tomb, the king's mummy lay within a nest of three coffins, the innermost of solid gold, the two outer ones of gold hammered over wooden frames. On the king's head was a magnificent golden portrait mask, and numerous pieces of jewelry and amulets lay upon the mummy and in its wrappings. The coffins and stone sarcophagus were surrounded by four text-covered shrines of hammered gold over wood, which practically filled the burial chamber. The other rooms were crammed with furniture, statuary, clothes, chariots, weapons, staffs, and numerous other objects. But for his tomb, Tutankhamen has little claim to fame; as it is, he is perhaps better known than any of his longer-lived and better-documented predecessors and successors. His renown was secured after the highly popular “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibit traveled the world in the 1960s and '70s. The treasures are housed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Peter F. Dorman

Additional Reading

Useful works on Tutankhamen include Howard Carter and A.C. Mace, The Tomb of TuṭankḥAmen, 3 vol. (1923–33, reissued 1963), also available in an abridged one-volume edition with the same title (1954, reissued 1972); Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamen: Life and Death of a Pharaoh (1963, reprinted 1989); I.E.S. Edwards, Harry Burton, and Lee Boltin, Tutankhamun: His Tomb and Its Treasures (1976); and Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun (1990, reissued 2007). T.G.H. James and Araldo De Luca, Tutankhamun (2000), contains hundreds of photographs cataloguing the wealth of Tutankhamen's funerary regalia.

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