ARKHAM – For more than a century, the world has told one story about Tutankhamun: the boy-king who ended his father Akhenaten’s religious revolution and restored the old gods. The script is simple—Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh of the sun disk Aten, begets Tut; Tut returns to Amun and the old pantheon; his tomb dazzles the modern world.
The stakes were high and the Amarna years a whirlwind in Egypt’s millennia old history. Akhenaten closed temples and elevated the Aten above all; the court abandoned Thebes for a brand-new capital in the desert; art turned startlingly intimate and strange. Then came the backlash. The old cults returned. Tutankhamun—still a child—took a throne under guardians who steered Egypt back to tradition. His tomb, untouched until Howard Carter’s lamp found the glint of gold, made him immortal.
A new analysis by Dr. Penelope Thorne of Miskatonic University, however, invites us to read the family tree differently.
“The genetics keep pointing to the same structure,” says Dr. Thorne. “Tutankhamun looks like the child of two children of Amenhotep III and Tiye. When you add the age-at-death evidence for the mysterious mummy of Tut’s father, the better fit is Smenkhkare—not Akhenaten.”
A prince in the shadows
Who is Smenkhkare? To the public, he’s the pharaoh no one remembers: a fleeting, enigmatic figure who flickers across the Amarna horizon as short-lived king near the end of Akhenaten’s reign. To specialists, he is a puzzle piece that refuses to lock into place—exactly the kind of character who inspires the imagination of Egyptologists.
Thorne’s team revisited the eight DNA markers available for the Amarna mummies and compared entire family trees rather than picking at one relationship at a time. The surprise: the best-fitting arrangement is the one in which Tut’s father is Smenkhkare and his mother is Baketaten—a younger royal woman known from inscriptions.
“It’s a story of a family turning inward,” Thorne says. “A revolution in religion, and a tightening of bloodlines. Tut’s parents, we find, were both children of Amenhotep III and Tiye—a classic royal ‘sister-bride’ pattern.”
Nefertiti: queen, icon… and mother again?
And what of the elusive mummy named KV21B, which some have hoped is Nefertiti herself? The new paper is cautious. When that figure is placed inside the household of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, the genetics lean slightly toward KV21B being another daughter of the famous couple rather than Nefertiti herself—except under the most conservative assumptions, where the tilt becomes strong.
“Nefertiti’s beauty isn’t the only mystery,” Thorne notes. “Her identity in the DNA remains a riddle. Right now, the better bet is that KV21B is a daughter in that family. We mark that connection as tentative—intriguing, not proven.”
That story hasn’t changed. What has shifted is the casting.
“Egypt’s royals hid their secrets well,” says Thorne. “But careful statistics and old-fashioned bones are starting to tell a different story—one that may be stranger, and more human, than the legend we’ve been repeating for a hundred years.”
Read the preprint: Re-evaluating Amarna: A Likelihood-Based Assessment of 18th-Dynasty Genealogies from STR Evidence (2025)
