Akhenaten’s Mummy..Op-ed

By: Dr. Zahi Hawass

During his 17-year rule, Akhenaten sought to overturn more than a millennium of Egyptian religion and art to establish the worship of a single sun god. In the end, his bold experiment failed and he was eventually succeeded by his son- the young Tutankhamun, who rolled back his reforms and restored the old religion.

No one ever knew what became of the heretic pharaoh, whose tomb in the capital he built at Amarna was unfinished and whose name was stricken from the official list of kings.

Two years of DNA testing and CAT scans on 16 royal mummies conducted by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, however, gave the firmest evidence to date that an unidentified mummy - known as KV55. This was after discovering a number of tombs in 1907 in Egypt's Valley of the Kings – among them was Akhenaten's.

The testing, whose results were announced last month, established that KV55 was the father of King Tut and the son of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III, a lineage that matches Akhenaten's, according to inscriptions.

KV55 had long been assumed to be too young to be Akhenaten, who was estimated to be in his 40s at the time of his death - but the testing also established the mummy's correct age, matching the estimates for Akhenaten.

"In the end there was just one solution for this genetic data fitting into the family tree and this showed us this must really be Akhenaten and could not be any other.

Now experts are planning more tests to uncover further details about Akhenaten's royal family. The new attention could also give a push to a planned new Akhenaten museum that will showcase his mummy near Amarna, his capital midway down the Nile in what is now the province of Minya, 135 miles (220 kilometers) south of Cairo.

In one tantalizing discovery, the testing established that another unidentified mummy was Akhenaten's sister; she appears to have died from violence with blows to her face and head.

Akhenaten used art as a way of emphasising his intention of doing things very differently.

Colossi and wall-reliefs from the Karnak Aten Temple are highly exaggerated and almost grotesque when viewed in the context of the formality and restraint, which had characterised Egyptian royal and elite art for the millennium preceding Akhenaten's birth.

Although these seem striking and strangely beautiful today, it is hard for us to appreciate the profoundly shocking effect that such representations must have had on the senses of those who first viewed them and who would never have been exposed to anything other than traditional Egyptian art.

Contributed by: Ali Abu Dashish