King Tutankhamun, aka King Tut, wasn’t the first boy king to rule ancient Egypt, but he is the most famous, thanks to the discovery of his tomb and its trove of treasures in 1922. The most valuable artifact was Tut’s mummy, nested inside the many coffins and boxlike shrines to protect his spirit for eternity. Unfortunately, Egyptologists a century ago weren’t as gentle with mummies as they are today. They cut Tut into pieces to pry his body from the sticky sacred oils that coated the inside of his coffin. Such rough handling inflicted injuries on the 3,300-year-old mummy that made it tough to tell what caused Tut’s demise.

Some suspected he was murdered. But modern technologies like 3-D scanning revealed that the all-powerful king was actually in poor health. He suffered from a bone disease that made walking a chore. Bouts of malaria left him shaky and weak. None of the tests pointed to foul play as the cause of Tut’s death. Instead, the likely culprit is a broken leg revealed by x-rays. Perhaps the frail pharaoh tumbled from one of the chariots found in his tomb. With his immune system already weakened by malaria, Tut could have easily died from an infection in the busted bone.

 

Picture Credit : Google