February 17, 2010(USA TODAY) -- King Tut died of malaria and family bone disease, not murder, suggests a comprehensive new genetic and medical study of royal mummies.
The Journal of the American Medical Association analysis, out Tuesday, was led by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities head Zahi Hawass and looks at five generations of pharaohs. The 11 mummies, including King Tutankhamun, date from 1410 B.C. to 1324 B.C.
The boy king of Egypt, King Tut reigned for nine years. He died at age 19. Writers have suggested foul play at work in the ruler's early death, but the new analysis found malaria genes and indicated a family plagued by bone necrosis.
"They were human. They suffered illness even if they were royal," says study team geneticist Carsten Pusch of Germany's University of Tubingen. "The DNA analysis puts names on some of these mummies and in a way brings them to life again."
From 2007 to 2009, the royal mummies had extensive examination, including X-rays and gene analysis. The results confirm that Pharaoh Akhenaten, who died in 1331 B.C., indeed fathered King Tut after marrying his sister. And they confirm a family line from Tut's great-grandfather, Yuya, through two fetuses buried in Tut's tomb that he fathered.
"You have to know that these mummies were hidden away at night by later priests, and they made some mistakes," switching names among mummies, Hawass says by e-mail. "So it is fascinating for us to try to use science to trace the truth."
One theory suggested the family had Marfan's syndrome, based on the feminized depictions of the era's rulers. But the new study shows the Pharoahs had standard male features and genes, that Tut had a club foot and other bone loss, and that he probably died of a broken leg and the ravages of a malaria infection.
"A lot of Egyptologists are interested in these detective stories," says the University of Pennsylvania's David Silverman, curator of the Penn Museum's Egyptian section. "They can tell us a lot about the lives of these long-gone people."
The study relied on a $5 million genetic analysis lab built under the Cairo museum housing many of King Tut's artifacts, with funding from cable television's Discovery Channel. Several of the mummies, including Tut, were sampled from their tombs inside Egypt's Valley of the Kings.
Silverman, curator of a King Tut exhibit at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, says the findings will allow him to remove the word "probable" from descriptions of King Tut's lineage when the exhibit moves to New York in April: "We know they are real, not just probable, now."
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