Monday, November 12, 2007

Daily Photo - Tutankhamun

As nearly all of today's posts feature Tutankhamun, I felt obliged to make today's Daily Photograph relevant to the boy king. However, when I last took photographs at the Cairo museum I didn't have a good enough camera for the job, so I decided not to mangle my memories of the collection with third rate photographs and bought the book instead, with excellent photographs by Araldo De Luca. Instead, I took third rate photographs of just about everything else in the museum. These are the closest that I could get to Tutankhamun from my photographic collection - the burial of Yuya and Tuya.

Yuya and Tuya were the parents of Queen Tiy, Great Royal Wife of Amenhotep III - same Dynasty as Tutankhamun, different generation. I am sure that everyone has the various possibilities of Tutankhamun's family tree sorted out by now, but just in case any visitors don't have the story, here's a VERY rough summary. Amenhotep III married Queen Tiy, whose parents were non-royal personages Yuya and Tuya, but who were buried in the Valley of the Kings (an extraordinary honour). An offspring of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III was Amenhotep IV who later changed his name to Akhenaten, married Nefertiti, and had several female children with her. Tutankhamun is thought to have been a son of Akhenaten, but it is not clear who his mother was - although a popular theory is that his mother was Kiya, a secondary wife of Akhenaten. So Yuya and Tuya would have been the great grandparents of Tutankhamun.

These are pretty poor. Never mind - the thought was there!










Apologies that the photos are so furry!

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