King Tutankhamun was a ‘battle-hardened warrior’ and NOT a sickly boy-king, experts claim

Tutankhamun was a warrior and not the sickly boy-king of myth, experts say.

It is a historical legend that Egypt’s most famous king was weak and deformed, with a club foot.

He was buried with about 130 complete and fragmented sticks of various shapes and designs, which have been suggested to be walking sticks to aid in his mobility.

But in fact, this could be dead wrong, according to three independent experts on ancient Egypt who appeared at this week’s Cheltenham Science Festival.

Sofia Aziz, a biomedical Egyptologist, told the audience, “When I studied Tutankhamun, I personally don’t think there was any evidence that he was disabled, because I’ve seen mummies where it looks like there’s a club foot.

“We call these pseudo-pathological changes. The walking sticks were only a sign of kingship.’

The expert argues that the ‘club foot’ may have originated during the mummification process, where the application of resin and tight bandages can distort the shape of the foot.

A much-discussed missing middle bone in the second toe of his left foot, she says, could have gone missing after his remains were transferred to a sandbox, or simply taken as a souvenir by someone.

After the lecture, the Egyptologist, who has studied more than 50 mummies in depth, said: ‘His legs were so well aligned – if he had a deformity, and if he had a club foot, he would have had difficulty walking. but the long bones just don’t show evidence of that.’

The leg bones would show signs of stress if someone had been hobbling for years.

Tutankhamun is so famous because his body lay undisturbed for nearly 3,000 years after his death, without the tomb being completely plundered by tomb robbers like the tombs of many other pharaohs.

Discovered by notorious archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, the tomb revealed tantalizing clues about a child who became pharaoh in 1336 BCE, at just nine years old, before suddenly dying at age 19.

The view of Tutankhamun as a weak king has been challenged by a minority of experts, but the idea that he was much more warrior-like is supported by items found in his tomb, such as armor made of leather and various weapons.

Dr. Campbell Price, curator of Egypt at the Manchester Museum, who also spoke about Tutankhamun at the science festival, supports the idea that the sickly boy-king idea is most likely a myth.

After the conversation he said: ‘We have sympathy for Tutankhamen, he is not what you would expect from the golden mask.

“And I completely agree that everything in Pharaonic art is not what humans looked like, because it’s the world of the gods and humans look like.

“But it’s gone the other way where we see him as this poor creature.”

Dr Price added: ‘You have to remember that when Tutankhamun was found it was the immediate aftermath of the First World War and people had lost young men in the trenches, so there was this collective pathos for young men who had died, maybe in battle, playing on this fantasy, this myth of this supposedly weak boy.’

The curator argues that Tutankhamun’s “walking sticks” were signs of status, as they were decorated with images of his enemies, such as the neighboring Nubians.

Raksha Dave, honorary president of the Council for British Archaeology, who chaired the lecture at the science festival on the boy-king, described the exposure of a sickly Tutankhamun as “amazing”, adding: “It’s definitely a more rigorous, scientific and also refreshingly modern method. look at a story that is 100 years old, and how you can actually approach it in a different way.’