Tutankhamon - part 2
Jan 25th, 2007 by Lee (admin)
His wife bore him no sons though and so it is believed that Akhenaton and a lesser wife named Kiya were the parents of Tutankhaten, as Tutankhamon was originally known.
There followed a shadowy part of Egyptian history that saw Smenkhkare rise to power. Little is known of this Pharoah other than he may have been responsible for the murders of Nefertiti (Akhenaton’s wife) and Kiya - both disappeared completely from records around this time.
Soon after the deaths of Akhenaton and Smenkhkare, Tutankhaton became a Boy King around the age of about nine. He married a slightly older Ankhesenpaaten, one of the daughters of Akhenaton and Nefertiti. Such family unions were commonplace at this time.
Soon their names were changed to Tutankhamon and Ankhesenamun to reflect the changing power base that saw the priests reinstall Amon as the head of a multitude of seperate gods.
As a boy it is likely that these type of decisions were handled by officials, specifically by Ay, who may have been the modern equivalent of a prime minister, and Horemheb, commander of the army.
Sometime around the ninth year of Tutankhamun’s reign, possibly 1325 B.C., he died. There is a well-publicised injury to his skull that had partly healed - he may have suffered an accident or was murdered. Ay oversaw Tutankhamon’s burial arrangements which lasted 70 days.
Following the burial, Ay became Pharaoh and took Ankhesenamun as his queen to legitimise his rule. Almost immediately, she too disappeared from history. Ay ruled for only four years and after his death Horemheb grabbed power. He soon obliterated evidence of the reigns of Akhenaten, Tutankhamon and Ay and substituted his own name on many of their monuments.