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3. The King Tut Controversy
King Tut or King Tutankhamun, mostly famous because of his golden mask which is the most iconic image of the Ancient Egypt since it was discovered in 1922. It isn’t the mask that is controversial but how in 2015, there was a full body reconstruction or depiction of how he would look like made.
There were surprising claims about how Tutankhamun looked like by a BBC documentary, called “Tutankhamun: The Truth Uncovered”. According to the documentary, he had womanly hips, enlarged breasts, club-footed, buck toothed and weak boned due to congenital problems brought on by generations of inbreeding. Which of course shattered the beautiful image presented by his tomb and the mask.
Apparently from their research they have also found that Tut’s father, grandfather and presumed great-grandfather also had similar traits of enlarged breasts and broad “feminized” hips from ancient depictions of them. But I still believe those are just man boobs rather than enlarged breasts if anything, but I digress.
So these claims from the documentary were what sparked a small controversy in Egypt. Egyptian experts disagreed the most with the claims of enlarged breasts and wide hips, saying there have been no evidence of them from any previous studies made and those artistic depictions of pharaohs with such traits are only for symbolic reasons. Slander is what they showed rather than truth was what they said about the documentary.
Even one of the most prominent Egyptian archaeologist, named Zahi Hawass spoke out against the documentary saying that all it revealed were lies not the truth with no real evidence nor facts were used in their research. He acknowledged that King Tut had a large collection of walking sticks and used to shoot arrows while he was sitting but there were not enough evidence to say that he has a clubfoot at all.
Of course the people behind the documentary debated that they used all the technology they have today such as DNA testing as well as the CT scans that were conducted by Zahi Hawass’ team back in 2010. So which one do you believe in?