Tutankhamun why famous

The tomb of King Tutankhamen is one of the most famous because of its well-known discovery by Howard Carter, a British archaeologist. Carter excavated in the Valley of the Kings for eleven years before he discovered Tut's tomb in Tutankhamen wasn't an especially important king, but his tomb was the only royal burial found intact in modern times.

The tomb was important because it let archaeologists record what an Egyptian king's tomb looked like and learn more about ancient Egypt. This relief depicts Maya, an important official during the reign of three pharaohs: Tutankhamen, Ay, and Horemhab.

He supervised the preparation of the tombs of these pharaohs, collected taxes for them, and performed other tasks to serve the king. Cemeteries carried their own potent magic, and dead kings were thought to have powerful spirits that might benefit others. Burial amongst his ancestors would have helped Tutankhamun to achieve his own afterlife. It therefore seems likely that Tutankhamun would have wished to be buried in a splendid tomb in either the main valley or in an offshoot, the Western Valley, where his grandfather, Amenhotep III, was buried.

But, whatever he may have intended, we know that Tutankhamun was actually buried in a cramped tomb cut into the floor of the main valley. It may be that Tutankhamun simply died too young to complete his ambitious plans.

His own tomb was unfinished, and so he had to be buried in a substitute, non-royal tomb. However, this seems unlikely, as other kings managed to build suitable tombs in just two or three years. Currently Egyptologists are investigating the possibility that there may be secret chambers hidden behind the plastered wall of his burial chamber. During the funeral ritual the combined coffins were placed in a rectangular stone sarcophagus.

Unfortunately, the outer coffin proved to be slightly too big, and its toes peeked over the edge of the sarcophagus, preventing the lid from closing. More than 3, years later Howard Carter would find the fragments lying in the base of the sarcophagus. But the middle coffin had a slightly different style and its face did not look like the faces on other two coffins. We do not know what happened to Neferneferuaten, nor how Tutankhamun came to be buried in his or her coffin.

These feathers crumbled away long ago, but their story is preserved in writing on the fan handle. This tells us that that the feathers were taken from ostriches captured by the king himself while hunting in the desert to the east of Heliopolis near modern-day Cairo. Did Tutankhamun have a queen? Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamon were the only known surviving children from the royal family of Akhenaton. Although little is known of the daily life of the young royal couple, they did live mainly in Memphis south of Cairo , and they had two daughters, who died at birth and were buried with their father in the Valley of the Kings.

Queen Ankhesenamon survived her husband, but her fate thereafter is unknown: hence, the date of her death remains a mystery, as does her burial site. There is currently an excavation underway in the Valley of the Monkeys, near the Valley of the Kings, to try to find her burial site. Apart from his tomb, what do we know of his reign?

Apart from anecdotal events such as the ostrich hunt he took part in in the region of Heliopolis, and from which he returned with feathers used to make a fan found in his tomb , his reign was primarily distinguished by the restoration of polytheistic worship, which had been weakened after the reign of his father Akhenaton, and restored the god Amon and his great temple at Karnak to pre-eminence.

How did he die? The hypothesis of murder has been eliminated. During an x-ray of the mummy in , scientists found bone fragments in Tut's skull, prompting a sensational theory that the boy king had been bludgeoned to death.

Another recent theory is that King Tutankhamun wasn't murdered after all, but died from a broken leg. According to National Geographic December a new CT scan of King Tutankhamun's mummy "showed a thin coating of embalming resin around the leg break, suggesting that Tut broke his leg just before he died and that his death may have resulted from an infection or other complications. Follow me on Twitter mbarrow. I teach computers at The Granville School and St. John's Primary School in Sevenoaks Kent.

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Ancient Egypt by Mandy Barrow. Homework Help. The picture on the right show Tutankhamun's death mask Note: There are different variations of the spelling of Tutankhamun. On this page will answer the following questions about Tutankhamun: When and where was Tutankhamun born? At what age did Tutankhamun become a Pharaoh?