Who was King Tut's daddy?

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer Updated 10:03 AM Monday, March 1, 2010

In the world of Egyptologists, King Tut is Entertainment Tonight, Inside Editon and People magazine news: bejeweled, fascinating and glitzy.

Tut’s popularity is the reason recent reports of a Journal of the American Medical Association article about DNA tests and CT Scans on Tut’s mummy and others focused on the boy king’s physical problems: a possible club foot, fractured leg, evidence of malaria, and the conclusion that a hole in his skull was the result of embalming, not murder.

Although removal of Tut from the cold case files was a significant finding, Darlene Brooks Hedstrom, associate professor of history at Wittenberg University, says the article’s real revelation was its answer to the question many have asked Tut’s golden mask over the years: Who’s your daddy?

“The more astounding claim is that we have the body of Akhentaten,” Brooks Hedstrom said.

A pivotal and controversial figure in Egyptian history, “His mummy’s been missing for all these years,” she said.

While pharoh at the height of his nation’s power, Akhentaten “radically changes everything Egypt has known,” she said. Perhaps most significantly, “he puts forth a form of monotheism” never seen before his time and rejected afterwards.

The notion that Tut was his son may heighten the importance of the rejection of Akhenaten seen in Tut’s name.

Earlier called Tutankhaten — the Aten taken from the name of the one god his father elevated — the boy king later changes his name to Tutankhamun, a reference to a god of the earlier order.

All of this has given a course Brooks Hedstrom is teaching this term the feel of a current events class. And for a woman who traveled Egypt in 2007-8 as a Fulbright Scholar and is head of a Yale University excavation project there, there’s something special about bringing mummies to life before her students’ eyes.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.

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