great beyond, King Tut was lavished with glittering goods: precious collars, inlaid necklaces and bracelets, rings, amulets, a ceremonial apron, sandals, sheaths for his fingers and toes, and the now iconic inner coffin and mask — all of pure gold. To separate Tut from his adornments, Carter’s men removed the mummy’s head and severed nearly every major joint. Once they had finished, they reassembled the remains on a layer of sand in a wooden box with padding that concealed the damage, the bed where Tut now rests. Archaeology has changed substantially in the intervening decades, focusing less on treasure and more on the fascinating details of life and intriguing mysteries of death.
It also uses more sophisticated tools, including medical technology. In , more than years after Carter’s discovery, an anatomy professor X-rayed the mummy and revealed a startling fact: beneath the resin that cakes his chest, his breast-bone and front ribs are missing. Today diagnostic imaging can be done with computed tomography , or CT, by which hundreds of X-rays in cross section are put together like slices of bread to create a three-dimensional virtual body. What more would a CT scan reveal of Tut than the X-ray?
And could it answer two of the biggest questions still lingering about him — how did he die, and how old was he at the time of his death? King Tut’s demise was a big event, even by royal standards. He was the last of his family’s line, and his funeral was the death rattle of a dynasty. But the particulars of his passing away and its aftermath are unclear.
Amenhotep III — Tut’s father or grandfather — was a powerful pharaoh who ruled for almost four decades at the height of the eighteenth dynasty’s golden age. His son Amenhotep IV succeeded him and initiated one of the strangest periods in the history of ancient Egypt. The new pharaoh promoted the worship of the Aten, the sun disk, changed his name to Akhenaten, or ‘servant of the Aten,’ and moved the religious capital from the old city of Thebes