Reimagining Tutankhamun as a Warrior

Recent research contradicts the image of the Egyptian boy-king as a frail, sickly pharaoh

Popular lore suggests that Tutankhamun, the boy-king whose immaculate tomb opened a window into the riches of ancient Egypt, was a frail pharaoh. Much of the evidence for this assertion comes from CT scans of his mummy. As archaeologists Zahi Hawass and Sahar Saleem wrote in 2016, “The CT image also revealed a left club foot deformity. … With such a deformity in his left foot, the king would have walked on his ankle or on the side of his foot.”

Hawass and Saleem’s assessment came as a surprise to some in the field. After all, Douglas Derry, a skilled anatomist, had examined Tutankhamun’s feet in the 1920s and didn’t notice anything unusual. Neither did R.G. Harrison, who X-rayed Tutankhamun’s mummy in the 1960s. In a 2010 letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, James Gamble, an orthopedic surgeon at Stanford University, stated that he didn’t see a clubfoot in the CT scans.

If Tutankhamun’s condition were as severe as the archaeologists argued, he would likely have had asymmetry in the bones of the lower legs and perhaps even the pelvis. But the pharaoh’s legs appear to be symmetrical; no signs of asymmetrical wear appear on the dozens of pairs of shoes and sandals buried alongside him.

Some supporters of the sickly pharaoh theory point to the more than 130 walking sticks found in Tut’s tomb. It’s worth noting, however, that ancient Egyptian officials were often depicted with walking sticks as a sign of their authority. If Tutankhamun was, in fact, relatively healthy, it’s possible he played another role, too: that of a warrior. For evidence of this, look to the boy-king’s lost monuments.

Tutankhamun’s first major building project in Thebes was the completion of a monument begun by his paternal grandfather, Amenhotep III, who built a 150-foot-long colonnaded hall at Luxor Temple but died before it was decorated. When Amenhotep’s son Akhenaten became king, he banished the gods of Egypt and moved to Amarna, leaving the Luxor columns and walls bare for more than a decade. When Tutankhamun succeeded Akhenaten, the boy-king returned to Thebes and was advised to complete the decoration of the hall to show he was like his grandfather, not his father, and would give the people back their religion.

Tutankhamun decorated the Colonnade Hall with scenes of the most glorious of Thebes’ festivals—the Opet Festival. Opet was the ancient name for Karnak, home of the traditional Theban trinity of Amun (the father), Mut (the mother) and Khonsu (their son). At the opening of the festival, statues of the three gods were taken from their shrines in Karnak Temple, placed in divine ships known as barques and sent one and a half miles along the Nile to Luxor Temple, where they remained for a week of celebrations.

The decorations show marvelous details of the joyous procession from Karnak to Luxor and back at the end of the festival. Tutankhamun is prominently featured in the reliefs on the west wall of the colonnade, where he makes offerings to the godly trinity. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get credit for his devotions: Instead, his name has been erased and replaced by that of the later pharaoh Horemheb.

For many years, the Egyptian Antiquities Organization (now the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities) had planned to uncover the ancient pathway of sphinxes that led from Karnak to Luxor. While removing later structures built atop the avenue, experts discovered that the foundations of these medieval-era buildings contained inscribed blocks taken from the ancient temples in the area.

As the blocks accumulated, Egyptologists from the University of Chicago’s Epigraphic Survey of the Oriental Institute (based at Chicago House in Luxor) decided to see if any were from the Tutankhamun colonnade, which was missing the top few feet of its walls. Ultimately, the team found more than 1,500 repurposed blocks.

Egyptologist Ray Johnson was among the researchers who studied the temple stones. He noticed that the collection included some 200 additional blocks, including ones that featured Tutankhamun’s name, but they didn’t belong to the Luxor colonnade. Inscriptions indicated they came from the Mansion of Nebkheperure at Thebes, a previously unknown mortuary temple started by Tutankhamun and finished by his successor, Aye, as a memorial to the young king after his untimely death.

During the New Kingdom, every pharaoh built a mortuary temple where priests made offerings for the soul of their deceased king. Constructed on the west bank of the Nile, not far from the Valley of the Kings—the realm of the dead—these temples are some of Egypt’s most famous monuments. On their walls, the pharaohs carved the deeds of which they were most proud. Hatshepsut’s temple recorded the expedition she sent to the land of Punt, in the south, to bring frankincense and myrrh trees back to Egypt. On the walls of the Ramesseum, we can see and read about Ramses the Great’s heroic efforts at the Battle of Kadesh. And at Medinet Habu, we see Ramses III repelling the attack of the Sea People.

The mortuary temples are important historical documents, providing information about the reigns of the pharaohs who built them. They are primary sources that enable us to reconstruct the lives of the rulers of ancient Egypt. With only a couple hundred blocks from Tutankhamun’s temple, Johnson wondered whether he had enough to reconstruct anything about the boy-king’s shadowy life. The answer was yes—but only because of the unchanging nature of Egyptian art.

Ancient Egyptian artists were often told to copy traditional scenes from previous generations. If you look at the Ramesseum or Medinet Habu, you will see the pharaoh, alone in his chariot, horses’ reins tied around his waist, shooting arrows at the enemy. On one wall, it might be the Nubians, Egypt’s enemies to the south; on another, it’s the Asiatics in basically the same scene. Because the artists used grids to plan these boilerplate wall scenes, even the proportions are the same.

So, if you have only a few blocks but know what the rest of the scene should be, you can pretty much fill in what is missing. If you have a block that shows reins tied to a waist, for instance, you know it is a pharaoh’s waist and that there will be a pharaoh above the waist shooting a bow, a chariot beneath the waist and a pair of horses to the left. And if you have one block with a Nubian with an arrow in him, you know there will be lots more Nubians with arrows in them. The static nature of Egyptian art permits such a reconstruction.