One famous pharaoh, one you have probably heard of, is Tutankhamun (King Tut). Tut’s father was Akhenaton (Amenhotep iv). Akhenaton tried to move Egyptian religion from polytheism to monotheism. Monotheism means to believe in one god. He wanted people to worship the Aton, the sun god. Ra was another sun god as well. Akhenaton = son of the Aton. He set up another city about 100 miles south of Thebes. This is where his wife, Nefertiti, gave birth to Tutankhamun. When Akhenaton died Tut was 11. He then became pharaoh himself and married his sister Ankhesanamum, who was 9.

One of Tutankhamun’s favorite things to so was play Senet. Senet was a game similar to modern day chess and checkers. We know this because in his tomb were several Senet games in his tomb. He also seemed to like to hunt because there were six gold chariots in his tomb. Tutankhamun’s tomb was one of the greatest finds in history.

In 1822 Howard Carter found a step that led to a tomb. After it was cleared, Howard Carter made a little hole in the wall and everywhere he saw the glint of gold. The tomb was filled with artifacts and several boards of Senet. A few weeks after finding the tomb, Lord Canarvan, Carter’s funder, was bitten by a mosquito. When he shaved it, it opened and got infected. He soon died. People said it was a curse, that Tutankhamun’s tomb was cursed.

This led to movies and other things that said it was cursed and that if you went in side of it you would die. In 1969 a group of scientists took x-rays of Tut and found a dent in the back of his head. They then brought up the theory that he had been murdered. They thought that it was his successor Ay killed him. The scientists also believed that Ay married Ankhesanamum and killed her to. But recent studies show that was not how he died. In 2005 scientists did a CT scan and decided that the injury came after death. Dr. Zahi Hawass (guardian of Egyptian artifacts) says that it was made during the mummification process. Tut really died from a fracture in his knee. Scientists say that it could have been a chariot accident or a war injury. The way scientists know this is because the fracture healed a little before death. Tutankhamun is probably the most famous pharaoh because his tomb was intact and filled with gold when Howard Carter found it in the Valley of the Kings.