King Tut Killed by a Knee Infection?

adminsr writes to tell us the Discovery Channel is reporting that an Egyptian-led research team claims to have found compelling new evidence relating to the cause of death of King Tutankhamen From the article: "According to the Italian doctors, it was likely that King Tut suffered a violent blow, most likely by a sword. The blow would have lodged gold fragments from the decorations of the Pharaoh's armour or dress into the knee."

19?

[daivdg]

...1333 B.C., at the age of nine, and reigned until his death in 1325 B.C., aged 19...

Wouldn't he have been 17 or 18?

Re:We're privileged

[yogikoudou]

Indeed we are.
More information about this:
I saw a documentary a few weeks ago on the death of Tutankhamun, and they were coming to this conclusion as well. The first hypothesis were that he had been killed, as a piece of bone was missing at the back of his skull; blood was also present around this hole. It turned out that it might have been made during embalming.
They were also speculating on the many fractures the mummy presented. They were annoyed by the really bad general state of the body, mainly because the first people to discover it cut it into pieces to move it easily (it was stuck by dried body and embalming fluids in the golden coffin). This didn't help them in thei search for lethal wounds, until they found this piece of bone near the knee.
The king broke his leg near the knee, and died about a week later (they know it by looking at the amount of cartilage that started to grow on the broken bone).
Their conclusion was that this wound wouldn't have been lethal in our days, thanks to antibiotics.
It was a really interesting documentary, and quite a fascinating search (determining the cause of death 3300 years after it happened).

Re:Hmm...

[belg4mit]

Silver is. Gold is largely inert; this is the reason it's used for
teeth, electrical contacts, etc. Of course it's possible the body
could still simply recognize it as being foreign and try to fight
it but it'd just make a lot of puss I think. Undoubtedly something
else could've entered at the same time.

Re:How many ways can the guy die?

[stonecypher]

No no, the gold dust didn't cause the infection. Gold is a noble metal, and is non-toxic. It's just that we found little gold bits embedded in his knee that look like pieces of armor, and that means he got stabbed or slashed, and back in those days, that pretty much always meant infection anyway. With that context, what is known about how he died makes much more sense, and so now a knee infection - the gold is just evidence of the wound - is the most likely cause of death.

Is there a reason that they didn't publish their findings in a regular journal like Nature or Science or whatever journal Egyptologists use?

Er, they did. Slashdot just doesn't cover those. Thing is, we *do* cover physics journals, and the method they used to detect the gold in the first place is of interest to physicists. This also got into medical journals and traveller's journals (national geographic being the only traveller's journal most people recognize.)

Re:19?

[britneys 9th husband]

Looks like an editor typo. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] says his reign began in 1334 BC not 1333 BC.

Re:How about the 130 walking sticks???

[Skjellifetti]

The Nat'l Geographic story [nationalgeographic.com] on the CT scans debunks the head injury. IIRC, the Nat'l Geo TV special described the knee injury as bad enough that it ripped a knee cap off. There was some question about whether the knee injury was caused near time of death or was a result of Carter's butchery at time of discovery. Carter's team did a lot of damage to Tut, but the Nat'l Geo team found the presence of structures that demonstrated that the knee was trying to heal. From the size of the structures, which have a known rate of change, the team estimated that he died 3 days after the blow.

Not that minor

[vlad_petric]

His rule marked the transition from the "heretic" Atenism (worshiping of the Sun god as the only true god) of his father back to the old ways of the Egyptian religion. For example, his name was originally Tutankhaten (Living Image of Aten) but he changed it to Tutankhammun (Living Image of Ammun), to show that he abandoned the religion of his father [thanks wiki]. Those were really troubled times, so it's quite interesting to know why exactly he died.

There's many things we don't know, starting with the origin of hommo sapiens. I personally consider historical non-determinism to make the subject much more interesting.

Answer

[ColdWetDog]

Getting an infection in a joint like the knee is a Bad Thing, even in today's antibiotic infested world. The nasty little bacteria that were hanging around on the sword suddenly got stuck in a rich, tasty nutrient soup (blood and bone) and started to multiply like gangbusters. Unless the Egyptians knew to open the wound up and clean it out thorougly, the topical "antiseptics" that they had would be of little use. Just like putting an antibiotic cream on a deep wound.

If Mr. Tut had wandered into a modern ER after some serious sword play he would have had the wound irrigated thoroughly, perhaps in the operating room where it could be opened up and inspected. He then would have been given IV antibiotics. And a large bill.

So it's not too surprising that a little bit of honey or whatever didn't work out too well for him.

Re:Armor?

[stonecypher]

Your memory does serve you wrong. They had pit steel at the time. The bulk of armor in the day was bronze, due largely to availability. And no, it was lack of iron, not lack of iron technology. Doesn't matter if you know how to work it if you don't have much to speak of.

A bit of background

[kbahey]

Yes, Tut was a minor figure in Egyptian history, despite his modern fame.

This fame is due largely to the discovery of his tomb in the early 20th century by Howard Carter. What was unique is that it was about the only tomb of a pharoah to be found intact, i.e. unplundered.

Tut's era was the New Kingdom last 4 centuries of the second millenium BC), one of three "peaks" in Egypt's ancient history. This same era saw more famous kings such as Ahmose (uniter of Egypt, expelling the foreign Hyksos), Hatshepsut (the female pharoah, who sent ships in the Red Sea and beyond, recording the discoveries on her temple), Thutmosis (the ancient Napoleon, who conquered as far as Mesopotamia, hunting elephants on the Euphrates), Amenhotep (great builder and diplomat), Akhnaten (the Heretic monotheist pharoah), Thutmosis IV (dream stele by the sphinx), Ramses II (2nd longest reign in Egyptian history), Merenptah (his son), and Seti.

This was the golden age of Egypt, more than a millenium after the pyramids were build. Egypt expanded as never before.

This was followed by an age of decline when the priests took over, and could not keep the invaders out (Libyans, Nubians, ...etc.).

During this age, the priests plundered the tombs of previous pharoahs, "confiscating" the tomb wealth to use for current pharoahs and priests. Most of the mummies of royals from the New Kingdom were re-wrapped, and moved to central "caches". Those caches were discovered in the Kings Valley (KV) near Luxor, and the pharoahs identified, unwrapped, and moved to museums. All the treasures in the tombs was long gone (circa 1000 BC).

This is why a relatively insignificant pharoah like Tut shot to fame. It seems that the priests lost track of where his tomb was, but some robbers have managed to cause minor damage to the external chamber in antiquity. Then Howard Carter came along and discovered the real treasure, and the rest is history.

One could imagine how the likes of Ramses or Amenhotep were buried ...

Read more here:

- New Kingdom on wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

(Oh, yes, I am Egyptian, that is why ...)