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Tutankhamen’s Dynasty in the Valley of Kings | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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The press conference held at the Egyptian Museum last week is still being discussed not only among scientists and Egyptologists but also among lovers of ancient Egyptian civilization, especially as the conference highlighted new scientific discoveries that revealed a great deal about the golden pharaoh Tutankhamen and his dynasty.

We all know that several unknown mummies are believed to have belonged to the royal dynasty. Last week, we wrote about King Akhenaten’s mummy which was proven to have not suffered the deformities shown by his statues. The other significant discovery was Queen Tiye’s mummy, a powerful and dominating figure who married King Amenhotep III or the “Pasha of all pharaohs.” She made the king have sculptures of her made equal in size to those of the king, and he even constructed a luxurious palace dedicated to her in a district called Malqata in western Luxor with an artificial lake for her to walk along with its own boat made especially for her.

It is well known that by using her power and influence, Queen Tiye managed to obtain a royal decree to have her father, Yuya, and mother, Thuya, buried in the Valley of Kings, a place designated to kings alone. The tomb was discovered almost untouched and we managed to obtain DNA samples from the mummies of Yuya and Thuya. We then carried out studies and DNA tests on some unknown royal mummies from the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom. We studied seven mummies, two of which were discovered in the Mummies Cache in KV35, the tomb of King Amenhotep II. One of the mummies is called the Elder Lady and it became evident that this is the mummy of Queen Tiye. As for the other mummy known as the Younger Lady, analyses have revealed a maternal relationship between this mummy and that of Queen Tiye, and this proved that she was the daughter of King Amenhotep III and the mother of King Tutankhamen, therefore the wife of King Akhenaten. Even though the Younger Lady and her family were identified, her name remains a mystery that requires new evidence.

From these results, it is evident that King Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye were both the maternal and paternal grandparents of King Tutankhamen, [and that the mother is] the Younger Lady in KV35 and [the father is] King Akhenaten in KV55. The discovery proves that both Queens Nefertiti and Kiya, the wives of King Akhenaten, are not related to Tut. I say that the mother of the golden pharaoh cannot be Nefertiti or Kiya (the foreign wife of Amenhotep III and then Akhenaten) but is one of Amenhotep III’s five daughters [i.e. the Younger Lady]. Therefore, it is most likely that Akhenaten married his [full] sister in order to have a son to succeed him.

Studies are still underway, and there is a possibility of finding more discoveries such as the mummies of the two female fetuses found buried in the tomb [of Tutankhamen]. Analyses have proven that they are the daughters of King Tutankhamen, and hopefully this will lead to the discovery of the mummy of their mother, Ankhesenamen, as well as other mummies, one of which could prove to be Queen Nefertiti.

These scientific discoveries were documented and published in JAMA [Journal of the American Medical Association], an American medical journal that accepts scientific studies only after they have been approved and revised by specialists who are assigned with revising scientific research before it is published.

We now know a great deal about the dynasty of the golden pharaoh Tutankhamen who captured the world’s attention twice; once when the treasures of his tomb were discovered and once again when the members of his family were identified.