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There are two quintessential discoveries that every good archaeologist strokes themselves off to every night: the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Tomb of Tutankhamun. And I guess… the discovery of Troy if you're into that sort of thing. I won't judge. Because of British archaeologist Howard Carter's 1922 discovery, Tutankhamun is perhaps the single most famous Pharaoh to ever rule Egypt, except maybe for Cleopatra. Considering the boy king only lived for 18 years and pretty much just did whatever his advisors told him, that's a pretty sweet deal. King Tut's tomb in the Valley of the Kings is among the most well-preserved in all of Egypt, and as such is one of the most important sites in the development of our understanding of ancient Egyptian culture. That and they say it's cursed, because of course they do. Curses, sadly, are not real though, so let's put a pin in this whole tomb debacle for now. It seems unfair to amount a kid's entire life to just its end, so what do we know about the boy Pharaoh himself?

For one, he was not born Tutankhamun, he was born Tutankhaten, because you see he was the son of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Akhenaten reigned from 1353 to 1336 BCE, and was by all accounts was a certified wackadoodle. Of course, all the accounts we have left are the ones that avoided getting scrubbed from the record after Akhenaten's death, but I think that probably says something in itself. Akhenaten's primary manifestation of madness was his obsession with his new sun god OC, the Aten, whom he worshiped exclusively at the cost of abolishing the entire Egyptian pantheon. Forcing everyone to shut down their entire religion or be beheaded is incredibly uncool, so when he died, the priests of Amun swooped in to make sure his successor would be more chill. That successor was, of course… uh… Smenkhkare. Who is Smenkhkare? No one really knows. He might've been Akhenaten's son, or his brother, or even his wife. Whoever he was, he only ruled for about three years before dying and passing the throne onto Akhenaten's son, Tutankhaten, which means "Living Image of Aten".

Of course, having a name dedicated to his father's coocoo cult was bad for publicity, so to show that he was totally on board with bringing back all the gods, he changed his name to Tutankhamun, "Living Image of Amun". The boy was only nine years old when he was crowned, so it was a very easy decision for other people to make for him. His primary advisors were Ay, an elderly statesman who would eventually succeed the boy king as Pharaoh, and Horemheb, commander of the army. In King Tut's third regnal year, they "convinced" the boy (presumably with a rubber ducky and maybe a lollipop if he's extra good) to abandon Akhenaten's new economy-crashing capital, in favor of returning the affairs of state back to Memphis. Similarly, King Tut instituted reforms and refurbished the temples to Amun which had been desecrated by his father. This is pretty much entirely what his reign consisted of, and ultimately he would die young at the age of 18 or 19 in 1323 BCE.

How King Tut died has actually been the subject of academic debate for quite a while. Earlier analyses of his skeleton led to a conclusion that the boy king met with some sort of "accident" if you catch my drift. There's a chunk of bone caved in from the back of his skull, which may have indicated that someone just clubbed him over the head like a Tom and Jerry cartoon to clock his lights out. However, further study has shown that this damage could've been caused during the mummification process, so a bonk on the noggin is probably out. His leg meanwhile is fractured in a way that could be consistent with falling off a chariot, and the wound was fresh when he died, but there haven't been any forensic studies to prove that this is definitely what happened. More modern studies look into King Tut's microbiome for answers, and hoo boy it isn't pretty. At the end of his life, Tutankhamun was suffering from a whole assortment of incredibly painful illnesses, including malaria and necrosis of the leg. It didn't help that his immune system was compromised by how inbred he was. While the exact identity of his mother is a little hazy, genetic studies have proven that she was a full sister of Akhenaten, pooling the recessive traits together to cause Tut's clubfoot and degenerative bone disorder. To put it simply, the poor kid was probably in constant suffering for most of his life. If someone did conspire to ax him off, it probably put him out of his misery.

At last, that brings us to his most famous asset: his tomb. Formally known as KV62, the Tomb of Tutankhamun consists of four rooms, the largest of which is 29 square meters in floorspace. Contrary to popular belief, Tut's tomb was not actually 100% untouched. In fact, we can discern that the tomb was looted at least twice over the centuries, ya know if you don't count Howard Carter's expedition as an episode of looting too. The doors to the tomb had been replastered, and there is a noticeable absence of metal artifacts remaining inside. These ancient robbers are also why the treasures left behind are so scattered and thrown about, the thieves having frantically dug around for anything shiny before needing to bail out. Still, many treasures which are invaluable to archaeologists were left behind. Howard Carter found the tomb littered with precious jewelry, golden idols, chariots, fabulous outfits, a solid gold death mask, and a dagger forged out of a goddamn meteorite, hell yeah my dude. Kid had some bling. Even more rare, Tutankhamun himself was still resting in his tomb after 3000 years. His mummy was encased in not just one, but three coffins nestled inside one another. These, in turn, were housed inside four consecutive gilded shrines. Clearly, there's some sort of video game puzzle going on here that requires a set of collectibles to unlock each layer and obtain the special King Tut gear inside. Sadly, the fandom hasn't quite cracked the developer's code yet, so we may never know.

Design notes, this was simultaneously one of the easiest and most difficult Pharaohs to design. On the one hand, Tutankhamun was buried with all his shit, so I could just draw directly based on real articles of clothing from his wardrobe. On the other hand, his wardrobe was quite extensive, and many of the textiles have rotted away over time, so I primarily had to rely on reconstructions. Nonetheless, everything you see in this depiction is based on something found in his tomb. I couldn't include everything, that would just be too much, but I did my best to select the items which I think cut the most dashing figure when combined. It is worth noting that many of the clothes found in the tomb are clearly uniforms he would've worn for different occasions at different ages, so I did my best to narrow it down to a generic get up. He also had multiple bows and multiple shields, and I'll be real with y'all, I just went with the ones I thought looked the coolest. Hey, I bet the kid would've had the same standards.

Description
There are two quintessential discoveries that every good archaeologist strokes themselves off to every night: the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Tomb of Tutankhamun. And I guess… the discovery of Troy if you're into that sort of thing. I won't judge. Because of British archaeologist Howard Carter's 1922 discovery, Tutankhamun is perhaps the single most famous Pharaoh to ever rule Egypt, except maybe for Cleopatra. Considering the boy king only lived for 18 years and pretty much just did whatever his advisors told him, that's a pretty sweet deal. King Tut's tomb in the Valley of the Kings is among the most well-preserved in all of Egypt, and as such is one of the most important sites in the development of our understanding of ancient Egyptian culture. That and they say it's cursed, because of course they do. Curses, sadly, are not real though, so let's put a pin in this whole tomb debacle for now. It seems unfair to amount a kid's entire life to just its end, so what do we know about the boy Pharaoh himself?

For one, he was not born Tutankhamun, he was born Tutankhaten, because you see he was the son of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Akhenaten reigned from 1353 to 1336 BCE, and was by all accounts was a certified wackadoodle. Of course, all the accounts we have left are the ones that avoided getting scrubbed from the record after Akhenaten's death, but I think that probably says something in itself. Akhenaten's primary manifestation of madness was his obsession with his new sun god OC, the Aten, whom he worshiped exclusively at the cost of abolishing the entire Egyptian pantheon. Forcing everyone to shut down their entire religion or be beheaded is incredibly uncool, so when he died, the priests of Amun swooped in to make sure his successor would be more chill. That successor was, of course… uh… Smenkhkare. Who is Smenkhkare? No one really knows. He might've been Akhenaten's son, or his brother, or even his wife. Whoever he was, he only ruled for about three years before dying and passing the throne onto Akhenaten's son, Tutankhaten, which means "Living Image of Aten".

Of course, having a name dedicated to his father's coocoo cult was bad for publicity, so to show that he was totally on board with bringing back all the gods, he changed his name to Tutankhamun, "Living Image of Amun". The boy was only nine years old when he was crowned, so it was a very easy decision for other people to make for him. His primary advisors were Ay, an elderly statesman who would eventually succeed the boy king as Pharaoh, and Horemheb, commander of the army. In King Tut's third regnal year, they "convinced" the boy (presumably with a rubber ducky and maybe a lollipop if he's extra good) to abandon Akhenaten's new economy-crashing capital, in favor of returning the affairs of state back to Memphis. Similarly, King Tut instituted reforms and refurbished the temples to Amun which had been desecrated by his father. This is pretty much entirely what his reign consisted of, and ultimately he would die young at the age of 18 or 19 in 1323 BCE.

How King Tut died has actually been the subject of academic debate for quite a while. Earlier analyses of his skeleton led to a conclusion that the boy king met with some sort of "accident" if you catch my drift. There's a chunk of bone caved in from the back of his skull, which may have indicated that someone just clubbed him over the head like a Tom and Jerry cartoon to clock his lights out. However, further study has shown that this damage could've been caused during the mummification process, so a bonk on the noggin is probably out. His leg meanwhile is fractured in a way that could be consistent with falling off a chariot, and the wound was fresh when he died, but there haven't been any forensic studies to prove that this is definitely what happened. More modern studies look into King Tut's microbiome for answers, and hoo boy it isn't pretty. At the end of his life, Tutankhamun was suffering from a whole assortment of incredibly painful illnesses, including malaria and necrosis of the leg. It didn't help that his immune system was compromised by how inbred he was. While the exact identity of his mother is a little hazy, genetic studies have proven that she was a full sister of Akhenaten, pooling the recessive traits together to cause Tut's clubfoot and degenerative bone disorder. To put it simply, the poor kid was probably in constant suffering for most of his life. If someone did conspire to ax him off, it probably put him out of his misery.

At last, that brings us to his most famous asset: his tomb. Formally known as KV62, the Tomb of Tutankhamun consists of four rooms, the largest of which is 29 square meters in floorspace. Contrary to popular belief, Tut's tomb was not actually 100% untouched. In fact, we can discern that the tomb was looted at least twice over the centuries, ya know if you don't count Howard Carter's expedition as an episode of looting too. The doors to the tomb had been replastered, and there is a noticeable absence of metal artifacts remaining inside. These ancient robbers are also why the treasures left behind are so scattered and thrown about, the thieves having frantically dug around for anything shiny before needing to bail out. Still, many treasures which are invaluable to archaeologists were left behind. Howard Carter found the tomb littered with precious jewelry, golden idols, chariots, fabulous outfits, a solid gold death mask, and a dagger forged out of a goddamn meteorite, hell yeah my dude. Kid had some bling. Even more rare, Tutankhamun himself was still resting in his tomb after 3000 years. His mummy was encased in not just one, but three coffins nestled inside one another. These, in turn, were housed inside four consecutive gilded shrines. Clearly, there's some sort of video game puzzle going on here that requires a set of collectibles to unlock each layer and obtain the special King Tut gear inside. Sadly, the fandom hasn't quite cracked the developer's code yet, so we may never know.

Design notes, this was simultaneously one of the easiest and most difficult Pharaohs to design. On the one hand, Tutankhamun was buried with all his shit, so I could just draw directly based on real articles of clothing from his wardrobe. On the other hand, his wardrobe was quite extensive, and many of the textiles have rotted away over time, so I primarily had to rely on reconstructions. Nonetheless, everything you see in this depiction is based on something found in his tomb. I couldn't include everything, that would just be too much, but I did my best to select the items which I think cut the most dashing figure when combined. It is worth noting that many of the clothes found in the tomb are clearly uniforms he would've worn for different occasions at different ages, so I did my best to narrow it down to a generic get up. He also had multiple bows and multiple shields, and I'll be real with y'all, I just went with the ones I thought looked the coolest. Hey, I bet the kid would've had the same standards.