ABSTRACT
Tutankhaten was, as we have seen, a noble of the court at el-Amarna, and was married to Ankh. s. en. pa. aten, the third daughter of Akhenaten. In the inscription on the pedestal of the noble red granite lion of Amenhotep I I I. from Gebel Barkal, now in the British Museum, an inscription which was carved after the court had been removed back to Thebes again, and the king had renounced the Aten heresy, he states that he, Tutankhamen, "restored the buildings of his father Amenhotep II I."; and it is quite possible that he may have been a son of Amenhotep by a secondary wife, in which case he
would probably be a somewhat older man than he has generally been held to be; but it is quite as likely that the word "father" is only used in the sense in which kings frequently refer to their predecessors, and that his only claim to the throne was through his marriage to a princess of the blood royal-a perfectly legitimate claim, according to Egyptian ideas. The preliminary results of the investigation of his mummy, so far made public by Mr. Howard Carter, seem to indicate that his age at death was not more than eighteen; and should fuller examination confirm this view the theory of direct descent from Arpenhotep II I. must be given up as impossible. The prominence of the name of his queen in inscriptions of the reign points in the same direction and suggests that he derived his title through his wife rather than through his own descent from the royal stock.
