Tutankhamun: The Truth Uncovered

It's one of the most famous and mysterious faces in history.

A teenage Pharaoh who ruled over Ancient Egypt.

Tutankhamun.

But who was Tutankhamun?

How did he live?

And, most intriguingly, how did he die?

For decades, there have been many competing theories

about how Tut died.

A chariot accident,

a mysterious illness,

even murder.

Now we're getting closer to solving this mystery.

To find out how he died, we're going back in time.

Oh, look at the eyes! The eyes have all been painted.

Using 21st-century science,

we'll be carrying out a virtual postmortem on the Pharaoh's body.

It's just mind-blowing, the views that you get.

And looking at conclusive DNA evidence

to expose a shocking family secret.

It fits together. I said, "Oh, my God.

"This cannot be true. We've found it, we've got it, finally!"

For the first time,

we'll reconstruct the entire body of the boy king

and reveal a revolutionary new theory

of what really killed Tutankhamun.

The investigation begins here, on the edge of the blistering Sahara,

in one of Ancient Egypt's most sacred places.

Here we are. This is it, and I've got to say

it's actually quite ordinary and anonymous-looking.

If you didn't actually know where you are,

you'd probably just drive straight past it.

It's not like pulling up next to the Pyramids.

It could be any valley in Egypt, really,

but this particular valley just happens to be

one of the most important sites in all of Egyptian history.

It's the final resting place of the great Pharaohs.

Today, we know it simply as the Valley of the Kings.

Up here, you get a wonderful sense of the valley,

so you look down it and you can see how all the different tombs

are laid out, but you also get a terrific sense of

the physical geography of the valley,

so behind me you've got these wonderful cliffs

that form a natural barrier.

Looking down the valley, there's a small opening -

it would have been very small back in the day - down there.

So the whole place would be like a giant cul-de-sac -

very protected.

The Egyptians started to bury their rulers here around 1500 BC.

Before that, they'd been buried in pyramids,

and they chose this protected valley

because they assumed it would safe from the tomb-raiders

who had broken into the pyramids.

And just over there, above the cliffs,

there's a natural pyramid,

which would have been worshipped by the Ancient Egyptians.

That pyramid was a goddess called Meretseger,

which means "she who loves silence".

She would have liked it here.

Over the centuries,

thieves managed to raid all of the tombs in this valley...

except one.

This one.

In 1922, the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered here

by archaeologist Howard Carter.

Inside was a breathtaking treasure trove

that made the name Tutankhamun known across the world.

Given that he's so globally famous now,

we actually know remarkably little about Tut's life,

and that's partly because his reign was cut short

when he was around about the age of 19.

But it's his cause of death that's become one of Egypt's

most enduring mysteries.

To see why his death is such a mystery,

I'm heading for his tomb with Egyptologist Gayle Gibson.

-They would've had to dig all this out?

-Every bit of it.

Wondering every minute what was at the end.

'From the moment Howard Carter entered this place,

'there were signs that there was

'something strange about Tut's death.'

Why give him this?

'For a start, when compared to the other tombs in the valley,

'this one was a lot smaller.'

It is surprisingly small.

-It's not at all what you'd expect for a royal tomb.

-No.

It is very strange, this very bare and small tomb.

This was the room with the chariots and beds and boxes

and all kinds of stuff.

'This modest tomb was jammed full of all the royal possessions

'that were usually buried with a king.'

It can't have been meant to be all jumbled up like that.

People are just trying to cram as much stuff as possible

into this small space.

-Shall we go down?

-Yeah. I can't believe we're going to do this.

'Another unusual thing is the decoration...

'or rather, lack of it.

'Other royal tombs are adorned in hundreds of intricate

'portraits of the Pharaohs and the gods.

'By comparison, this one just doesn't look very royal.'

The paintings here are interesting.

Everything is on a very large scale.

Very mysterious. These are odd paintings for a king.

'And lastly, on top of the paintings,

'something that has only recently been identified...

'..3,000-year-old mould.'

It looks like these paintings were done on wet plaster,

very fast, painted on and then, bang, bring in everything,

close up the tomb very quickly.

But this is still wet and so the mould has a chance to grow,

even though there's nobody here for the next 3,000 years.

So it kind of does suggest a hurried burial, perhaps?

You know, "Caution, wet paint.

-"Never mind, we'll just seal it up anyway."

-Yeah.

I think that's one of the best bits of evidence that it's a rushed burial.

And in another corner, still resting in his tomb,

is the mummified body of Tutankhamun himself.

Poor Tut's mummy's in pretty bad shape.

It was sawn in half, the head's come off and bits are missing

and it's not great, really.

The reality is this.

It's actually just a young man...

..cut down in his prime.

We know that Tut was around 19 when he died.

A surprisingly young age.

That, together with the unusual burial,

suggests it was not a natural death.

So, we've got a small tomb, an apparent hurried burial,

his age, the type of art that you see here.

They're all factors that seem to point to a sudden

and unexpected death, and for many years, for many people,

the most tantalising explanation was foul play.

Had the young Pharaoh been murdered?

HORNS TOOT

Hi, there! How are you?

'If he was murdered, then there must have been a motive.

'To try and find one, I'm leaving the bustling city behind.'

Come on, let me see you do a dive.

-Hi.

-OK.

'I'm heading 200 miles down the sacred River Nile

'to a remarkable place.

'Amarna.

'The murder theory gathered pace in 1968

'when, for the very first time, scientists X-rayed Tut's mummy.'

I've got an actual X-ray of Tut's head, which got people excited.

And here, you can see these intracranial bone fragments,

just there, that white spot.

Little bits of broken bone inside the head.

These things were interpreted as possible evidence

for a blow to the head.

But why would anyone assassinate a Pharaoh?

They were the ultimate political and religious leaders of the country,

but much more than that.

Pharaohs were seen as living gods,

so the idea of murdering one is even more extreme than

killing a mere mortal,

and actually, throughout Egyptian history,

we see very, very few examples of Pharaohs being bumped off.

So, to murder Tutankhamun, someone must have had a very strong motive.

I've arrived at Amarna.

This city was built by Tut's predecessor,

the rebel Pharaoh Akhenaten.

The clues to the murder plot lie hidden in these remains.

And it all hinges on Akhenaten's obsession with one god,

the sun disc,

the Aten.

Akhenaten worshipped the Aten as the supreme god,

the giver and creator of life, and he did it right here.

Records show that Akhenaten even had religious visions

so powerful that he built this entire city in the desert

and made it the new capital.

It ran for about six miles along the Nile.

There were rich palaces and lavish homes,

and, at its heart, a vast temple to the sun god, the Aten.

But what the Pharaoh had done here was more than build a new city.

He had created a new religion with the Aten as the supreme god.

And this radical change made him enemies.

When Akhenaten died,

the young Tutankhamun inherited a country in chaos

and many powerful enemies.

CHILDREN CHATTER

He would only have been round about nine years old.

This nine-year-old kid in charge of the whole show

in one of Egypt's most turbulent periods.

The murder theory suggests that when Tut reached maturity,

his advisors, fearing for a loss of their own power,

or perhaps wary of a return to the previous regime, had him killed.

It does seem to fit with the evidence.

A sudden death...

..a blow to the head...

..and a convincing political motive for murder.

But now, new scientific evidence is challenging this.

I'm about to attend an autopsy, a virtual autopsy,

on Tut's 3,000-year-old body.

-Shall we bring up our subject?

-OK.

-Shall we have a little look?

-Our great king. Yes. Sure.

-Here he is.

Here he is.

This state-of-the-art technology

creates detailed 3-D images of Tut's mummified remains.

It's just mind-blowing, the views that you get.

You can get three-dimensional image. Bones and soft tissues.

This is unique.

It's almost like we're looking through the body.

Yes. You're going, like, sections and sections...

Radiologist Professor Ashraf Selim is about to conduct

a virtual postmortem of King Tutankhamun.

Just to start with the beginning here,

that we can see that the mummy is in a very bad state.

The whole body is cut into pieces.

Hundreds of fractures,

probably when they tried to remove the heavy golden mask

that was stuck to the chest and the abdomen of the King Tut.

And was stuck with...like a glue.

'As we begin, there's a key question I want answered.

'Was Tut murdered by a blow to the back of the head?'

So much of the discussion has been about this skull,

that somehow Tut was killed or murdered

by a blow to the back of the head.

Yeah, because of these bone fragments.

If you can see with me now...

This is the skull we're going into.

These bone fragments lying loose within the skull cavity.

'It's a crucial finding.

'If the fragments had come from a fatal blow to Tut's head,

'they would have been stuck in the embalming resin

'poured into his skull when he was mummified.

'The fact that they're not stuck in the resin means one thing.'

Meaning what?

Meaning that these bone fragments got inside after mummification,

that's why they're loose.

So, we can say, without a shadow of a doubt,

that Tut wasn't murdered by a blow to the back of the head

-as has been suggested?

-Sure. 100%.

-We've killed that...

-That should close this issue for good.

That solved the mystery.

-Completely?

-Completely, with no doubts.

-He was not murdered by a blow to the head.

-OK.

'So if it wasn't murder... then what killed him?'

This is the whole mummy in front of us on the big screen.

'Our virtual autopsy has further clues.'

All the bones are fractured.

Most, if not all, 99% of the fractures were induced postmortem.

'The virtual autopsy shows the clear evidence

'that these bones were broken after Tut died.

'A huge amount of damage was done

'when the mummy was moved by Howard Carter.'

Are there any breaks that we can categorically say,

"This happened before he died"?

There's only one site that we could say that.

It's the knee.

This is the fracture.

-So, this is the fracture here? This black area?

-This black area.

It's a big trauma.

-It is.

-Your femur, it's the biggest bone in your body.

It is. It's a big trauma. Not just fell down on it. It's a big trauma.

-You see these dense white lines there?

-Mm-hm.

This is the resin that coated the fracture edges.

This fracture happened shortly before he died

AND before embalming.

'This fracture happened so close to the time of death,

'it's almost certainly linked to what killed him.

And, fortunately for us,

we have a unique window into the life of this Pharaoh...

..the thousands of belongings, big and small, he was buried with.

These are exact replicas of the objects found in Tut's tomb.

They've been painstakingly recreated from the originals and they've all

been laid out exactly as they would have been when Carter found them.

'Because, like all Pharaohs, Tut was considered a god,

'he was buried with the things he would need in the afterlife.

'These objects give us

'a picture of what really mattered to this young man.'

This is interesting. This is a dismantled chariot,

or rather six chariots that were found in the tomb all together

and obviously they had to dismantle them to be able to get them inside.

Down here would have been leather webbing that he would have stood on.

And you can see along here, that's the shaft that would have

attached to a pair of horses to drag you across the desert at high speed.

In Ancient Egypt, chariots were used for hunting or battle.

And in Tut's tomb, there wasn't just one, there were six.

So we know that there is only one injury that could be

connected with Tut's demise.

And it's this one -

it's the fracture just above the left knee.

But could a fall from a chariot whilst out hunting

or in battle have caused that accident that led to his death?

Knowing the exact nature of the injury,

we can now try and find out what might have happened.

'Helping me is Professor Albert Zink,

'a world authority on ancient mummies,

'and Dr Richard Frampton, a crash injuries expert.'

It looks quite royal.

I'm coming at this from the point of view of car crashes

in the modern world.

I mean, after all, this is the Egyptian sports car of the day.

-Yeah.

-Looking at this now,

there's a great big chance here of being thrown from the chariot.

It's very difficult. It looks very unstable.

-I think you need some good balance.

-Yeah.

Certainly, it doesn't have a crash-worthiness structure at all.

No. How much force would you need to fracture just above the knee?

The force to fracture a human femur is

somewhere around about ten kilonewtons.

About the weight of a small European car.

It's the strongest bone in the body.

So what do you say to make the horse go fast?

-She!

-She?

-She'alla!

She'alla! So I just...

'So can the chariot generate the same impact force as a modern car?'

This, here, like this?

I think the first thing we need to really establish

is how fast these things can go.

She! She!

Whoa! Come on!

She!

She!

Richard is measuring my top speed.

She! She!

'And, after a little bit of practice,

'and some gentle horse whispering...'

All right. Yeah, this is good.

10, 21, 21 ,21...

-Great. You did it.

-You were absolutely flying.

-How was that? 21mph! 21?

-Yeah.

-That's not bad!

If I'd come off... And I didn't, thankfully.

At that kind of speed, coming off onto a hard surface,

any type of bone fracture is possible, really.

Among Egyptologists, a chariot accident is one of the more

accepted theories of what killed Tutankhamun.

'But there's one thing that really struck me about riding that chariot.'

She!

'You're not just a passenger.

'This is a really physically demanding activity.'

It was great. It's a bit hairy at first

but then all your weight and all your balance is on your legs

and you have to use both your legs as if you were snowboarding

or skateboarding, so it's not an easy thing.

'And, knowing that,

'I now want to have a closer look at Tut's physical abilities.'

And that means a closer look at the virtual autopsy.

You see here?

Now look at this.

When you really examine his feet,

you can see that the left foot is bent and twisted.

Now, these bones, they're crowded, especially at the bases.

So it's basically these bits, if you like,

-they're being sort of squished together.

-Yes, exactly.

The toes appear more or less divergent.

They're sort of sticking out at a bit of an angle?

Exactly.

I mean, what would we call this in sort of layman's terms?

Layman terms, we call it the club foot.

The club foot, we can see it here.

Let me have a look.

A club foot is a bone deformity that would have caused Tut's foot

to twist under his body.

And what would that have meant for him?

-He would have had difficulty walking?

-Yes.

-Would he have walked with a limp?

-Definitely he was limping

at that time, heavily.

Right.

But there are even more problems with his foot.

Next he developed a new disease while in the adolescent age,

let's say starting from the age of 13, 14.

What we call it, Kohler's disease.

Kohler's disease?

Yes. And that's what's meaning... It's necrosis of the bones.

And necrosis means, well, it means death, I suppose.

Death. Death of a small part of the bone.

That's the area.

Kohler's disease is a painful, disabling condition.

The bones gradually collapse and can't support any weight.

The end of this long bone, the metatarsus, is frayed

and separated and becomes dense.

And that is what we have in here - separated, fragmented,

unlike the other, sound foot.

You can see the joints intact.

And this would have been incredibly painful?

Yes, it is painful.

-OK, so we've got a congenital condition.

-Yes.

-This club foot.

We've got this Kohler's disease on top of that.

I mean, it completely changes our whole picture of Tutankhamun.

Of course.

This evidence, taken together,

means that Tut would have struggled to walk.

Pharaohs, of course, liked to portray themselves as great warriors

and heroic leaders.

But when you look closely at some of the smaller objects that were

found in Tut's tomb, there are clues to the real Pharaoh.

Around about 130 canes, like this,

all different shapes and sizes,

and some of them showed evidence of wear and tear.

It all adds to the evidence that here was somebody who

was in pain, who struggled.

It's a very, very different image to the boy king we're familiar with.

It casts a rather different light on the chariot accident theory

as the cause of Tut's death.

She!

'I've experienced how physically demanding it is

'to balance and steer a chariot.

'So how could Tut do it with his acutely painful condition?'

I can't do it with two legs, let alone one leg.

Yeah. I think it's almost impossible.

OK, so this condition on the foot,

you reckon he would have been in a lot of pain

and wouldn't actually have been able to put any pressure on it?

Yeah, so the CT scans show that he had so-called Kohler's syndrome.

It's an acute inflammation of the foot bones.

For me, it's very difficult to imagine that somebody with

such a disease, the acute form of the disease, steps on a chariot

and even riding the chariot.

So, in my opinion, it's almost impossible that King Tut did

ride the chariot and have an accident.

So whatever caused Tut's injury,

it seems unlikely it was done riding a chariot.

The evidence shown in the virtual autopsy has cast serious doubt

on some of the more popular theories of Tut's death.

But more than that, they've actually enabled us to meet him in person.

Using forensic reconstruction techniques,

we've recreated Tut's face

and his entire body.

This is the first ever accurate full-size image of him.

This is the real Pharaoh,

the boy behind the golden mask.

And the problem with his foot

is the most important clue

as to what might have killed him.

The revelation of Tut's foot has opened up a new line of inquiry.

It's a defect that can be genetic

and could have been passed down by his family.

I need to investigate Tut's family background.

Until recently, all we had to go on

were statues and written records and monuments

but, actually, the Egyptians left something even more valuable.

They left themselves.

'I'm travelling seven hours south of Cairo,

'deep into the Sahara desert...

'..to the Valley of the Golden Mummies.'

This is one of the places in Egypt

where mummies still lie where they were buried.

Oh, my God! Look at these mummies.

There's just mummies just stacked up!

Jeepers creepers! This is the stuff of nightmares, right here.

You can make out their expressions...

-Ah, look at the eyes!

-HE GASPS

The eyes have all been painted.

God, look at this. You can see they've been gilded.

They're gold.

You can just see on the nose. There, look.

They've all been painted.

The Egyptian technique of mummification

aimed to preserve the entire body - hair, skin, teeth, and bones -

for eternity.

And recently, a new science has opened a door

to the time of the Pharaohs.

I think we'll make 40 minutes enough...

It's now possible to extract and accurately analyse

traces of ancient mummy DNA.

But what makes it so difficult is that, after 3,000 years,

little DNA survives

and it's easily contaminated.

So Professor Zink had to go deep into the bones to get his samples.

And he extracted DNA from the most famous mummy of all.

MAN SHOUTS

I'm meeting up with him in the desert to hear about his results.

The DNA has given us, for the first time,

the chance to find out for certain who Tut's mum and dad were.

Getting DNA out of ancient Egyptian mummies is almost impossible.

In the beginning, it was a mess.

But when we managed to get this way to clean out the samples,

we got really pure DNA to manage to tell something about him

and especially about his ancestry.

To untangle Tut's complex family tree, Albert analysed DNA

from ten royal mummies suspected of being related to Tut.

One was Akhenaten, the Rebel Pharaoh and Tut's predecessor.

Of course, sons often succeed their father

but it certainly wasn't always the case.

There was one idea that maybe the skeleton of Akhenaten was the father,

but nobody had the proof for this,

and the only way to find this out was to analyse the DNA.

He began by analysing the Y-chromosome,

which is only found in males,

comparing Tut's with Akhenaten's,

also known as KV55.

We got, from both mummies, good results and we could compare them.

-You can see here, you get this peak here. This is for King Tut.

-Yeah.

And you get the same peak here for Akhenaten.

The match of the Y-chromosome

established there was a blood relationship

between Tutankhamun and Akhenaten.

But this only shows you whether they are paternally related.

This means they could be also father and grandson,

they could be father and cousin, father and brother,

so we need to go to the next step and

make a complete generic profile, a so-called genetic fingerprinting.

So it's not just the Y-chromosome,

it's a whole battery of different things?

-Exactly.

-OK.

We compared the genetic fingerprint of King Tut and KV55.

And, in every one of these, we have the same marker in King Tut and KV55.

And these results clearly show that they are father and son.

Professor Zink had proved who Tut's dad was.

It fits together.

I said, "Oh, my God! This cannot be true!

"We've found it. We've got it finally!"

So there's no doubt, there's no debate any more?

There's no debate any more.

TRADITIONAL MUSIC

The 3,000-year-old paternity test has identified Tut's dad...

..Akhenaten.

But that's only one half of the puzzle.

The real mystery is who his mum was.

CHEERING

No-one's been able to identify her from records.

'But a clue to who she was lies deep inside a place

'that not many people get to see.'

Shocking.

A real royal tomb. Watch your head.

'It's one of the most lavish tombs in Egypt.'

-Carry on down?

-Yeah, we keep going down and down and down.

There it is.

There's the room.

This is what a king is supposed to have.

That's wild.

The tomb belonged to Amenhotep II

and it's a world away from the basic adornments found in Tut's tomb.

When it was discovered, did they actually find the king himself?

Yes. He was in his own sarcophagus, right there.

-Which is pretty wonderful.

-That's amazing, isn't it? Look at that.

But the real find here was the discovery

of an extraordinary group of royal mummies,

all thought to be linked to Tut's father, Akhenaten.

There were three bodies on the floor -

a person they call the elder lady, a young boy

and a very mysterious Younger Lady.

And have we any idea who the Younger Lady is?

For a long time, we had no idea

but now the suspicion is that she's King Tut's mum.

This Younger Lady is a truly mysterious person.

There are no hieroglyphs to explain who she was...

but we do have her DNA.

OK, I leave you with this...

This time, as well as genetic fingerprinting,

Albert is testing mitochondrial DNA.

I just put the jelly in the fridge...

It's only inherited from the mother.

-Oh, very good.

-The sequence is very good, it's very clear.

Together they can prove conclusively and for the first time

who Tut's mum was.

'To reveal the results,

'we're going to the famous Egyptian Museum in Cairo,

'to meet the Younger Lady face-to-face.'

-So, here we are.

-Here we are.

Gosh, she's in pretty bad shape.

But maybe it's because she had a big injury in the face here.

The pattern of the injury is typical for a horse kick.

Gosh, so that damage was actually done when she was still alive?

Yeah, yeah. I think it's actually the cause of death

because there's no sign of healing.

So what do we know about this mummy

and what work have you been able to do on it?

We did some CT scans of this mummy.

We found out that she had a little extra single bone

on the back of her skull in the sutures, which is quite uncommon.

But the same little bone, we found in King Tut also.

This was really surprising and this made us believe

maybe there's a link between these.

And then you do the DNA work.

Now, what did you find with the DNA work?

We took samples from this mummy and did the DNA analysis.

'I was sitting in front of my computer late at night

'in the laboratory, looking at the data, a lot of numbers.

'Slowly the picture comes together'

and I aligned all the different numbers and I thought,

"They all look the same - King Tut, Younger Lady. Wow.

"Oh, my God, that's it.

"This is the mother of King Tut, I can't believe it."

It was like I was shocked.

I cannot believe that this is true,

we've really found out who is the mother of King Tut.

I mean, that's a huge discovery.

This is really more than a dream come true.

I think it's the most important findings I've made in my life.

Albert's identified the Younger Lady definitively

as Tut's genetic mother.

We're finally getting closer to Tutankhamun and his relatives -

catching glimpses of them, not as great rulers or gods,

but as a family.

This is the tomb that was probably meant for the Younger Lady.

Have a look at this - this is an image that's really intrigued people

since this tomb was discovered.

You can see it's not very clear but it's a woman in profile.

You can just see it's her feet there up to her head,

and she seems to be holding an umbrella or a parasol of some kind.

And there's perhaps a nurse behind her looking after her

and she seems to be holding a figure, a baby.

Could that be the very first baby picture of Tut?

The DNA results identified the members of Tut's family...

..but they also uncovered something completely unexpected

about his parents.

When he compared the DNA of Tut's father Akhenaten...

..with the DNA of Tut's mother...

..Albert made a remarkable discovery.

And you know there's some more I can tell you about these two mummies -

not only that this is the father and this is the mother of King Tut,

they...it turned out that they are brother and sister,

which was a big surprise for us.

So Tut's mother and father,

so they're mother and father,

they were also brother and sister,

so Tut was a product of incest?

That's right. It turned out - wow - they're brother and sister.

A lot of incest happened.

They didn't like to get royal and non-royal blood mixed,

so they tried to keep it within the royal family.

The Ancient Egyptians believed incest kept the bloodline pure.

In reality, of course, it did the opposite.

They would have had no idea about

the health implications of incest?

We know that this can have a negative impact on your health

and it caused a lot of troubles in the health of the offspring.

The DNA tests proved that Tut's parents were brother and sister.

Tutankhamun was a product of incest.

So, meet the parents. This is Tutankhamun's dad, Akhenaten.

And if we come this way, next to Dad, we've got

Tutankhamun's granny...

..who looks the best out of all of them, actually.

And here we've got Tutankhamun's mum, who's also his aunt,

which makes Dad also his uncle

because they were brother and sister as well.

A fascinating picture is starting to develop...

..a sudden death and burial...

..an unusual and life-threatening fracture to his knee...

..a disabled foot, from a disease which may have run in the family...

..and incest, which dramatically increases

the chance of inheriting certain diseases.

'And now there's one man who thinks he's pieced together

'all of these clues.'

OK, so we've got to be really careful coming in here.

There's a big hole.

Ah, the light.

'Dr Hutan Ashrafian is a leading surgeon

'who specialises in cold cases from the ancient past.'

Ah, this is great.

There you go, this is the best view of Karnak.

From this vantage point, we can see the whole of Karnak beneath us.

It's the biggest temple in Ancient Egypt,

built by generations of Pharaohs, including Tut and his ancestors.

By studying the entire family history, Hutan's noticed

three distinct medical patterns that could help explain how Tut died.

The family are very interesting in that they all died relatively young.

We know that Akhenaten died early,

we know that Tutankhamun, his son, died early,

we know that the great-grandfather died relatively early.

They've died at a sequentially younger age.

But couldn't that just be due to other causes, that, you know,

by chance they all died at a particularly young age

for a whole host of reasons?

Of course, certainly it could be, but there is a pattern there

and it would be unfair for us to discount that.

'The fact that each generation died younger than the previous one

'could be an indication that there's an inherited disease

'running through the family...

'..but what was it?

'There are clues in some of the artwork of the period.'

So this is Tut's dad, we think?

So this is the statue of Akhenaten.

Let's have a look at him,

and, you know, clearly this isn't... not a male form.

It does look very feminine, wider hips?

This is meant to be a Pharaoh

but he doesn't look like a normal man.

'Looked through a medical doctor's eyes,

'this is not just a statue, it's a symptom.'

But aren't we just seeing an exaggerated, stylistic,

symbolic art style?

It could be, but actually we know that Akhenaten himself during

his lifetime asked for things to be depicted according to real life

and so if we take that on board, then clearly this figure is abnormal.

'These feminised features like wider hips

'and enhanced breasts suggest some kind of hormone imbalance

'and they appear throughout the generations, including Tut himself.'

It's a hormonal condition, which can be passed down through

the genes that would cause them to look like a woman.

Again, this unusual condition seems to run in the family -

but what might cause it?

To narrow it down, Hutan's identified another pattern...

..and evidence of what it is can be found here

in one of the most famous sites in Ancient Egypt.

I wonder how many photos have been taken of that view?

Tourists have been coming here for millennia

just to marvel at the scale of it all.

Empires have come, empires have gone -

and the Sphinx has witnessed it all.

'The final clue to this family condition

'lies in an unlikely place -

'between the giant paws of the Sphinx.

'With me is Egyptologist Yasmin El Shazly.'

-Gosh, I've never been this close to it.

-Yes.

-It's beautiful.

-Isn't it?! It's amazing.

'This stone tablet is known as the Dream Stele of Thutmosis IV,

'who was Tut's great-grandfather...

'and it tells the story of a strange hallucination.'

It says Thutmosis IV was on a hunting trip and then

he decided to take a rest and he fell asleep and he had a vision.

Back then, the Sphinx was covered in sand up to its neck.

The Sphinx was telling him, "Please, if you remove the sand from my body,

-"I will make you king."

-Right.

Thutmosis IV removed the sand from the body of the Sphinx

and cleaned the Sphinx and became king.

It could simply be a symbolic political statement

but if literally true, it suggests

that Tut's great-grandfather had a powerful vision.

Akhenaten, Tutankhamun's father,

is also recorded as having similar religious visions.

This family pattern is the final clue.

Hutan now believes he knows what killed Tutankhamun.

It's an illness that can be inherited...

..that causes early death, affects hormone levels...

..and crucially, triggers visions.

It can even explain the fracture in Tut's knee.

Adding together everything that happened in his life

and his whole family line -

if we add all that together and we say,

"What could describe this condition?"

And we have now the tangible evidence from the body with a fracture...

..the only thing that adds all those things at the moment

is that he might have had temporal lobe epilepsy.

It is a controversial diagnosis

but it does seem to make sense of a lot of the symptoms.

Epilepsy affects the brain, causing hallucinations,

it can interfere with hormone production,

and the seizures themselves can lead to unexpected fractures.

We have to think about Tutankhamun as someone who is epileptic

but without treatment

and without treatment, you have a much higher risk of having

unexpected falls, unexpected accidents

and unexpected fractures as a result.

So let me be clear.

It's not the epilepsy itself that would have killed him.

It's the epilepsy that could have led to a fracture,

-which would then have killed him?

-Absolutely.

So the epilepsy would lead to the fracture

and the fracture would have all sorts of complications like bleeding

and infection and that's probably what killed Tutankhamun.

It is a radical new solution to this 3,000-year-old mystery...

..an illness passed on to him from earlier generations

and made worse by being the product of incest.

At the age of 19,

the body of Tutankhamun was put into a tomb in the Valley of the Kings...

..where he remained undiscovered for 3,000 years,

forgotten by history.

But in death, he achieved the goal of every Pharaoh...

..to cross the vast ocean of time

and keep his name alive...

..to achieve immortality.

This is much more than just the most famous treasure ever discovered.

It's more than just a mask - the mask IS Tutankhamun.

When people look at it, they say his name.