He Gave His Life for Tourism

I have to post this here, as it is blowing my mind.

This week, scientists and archaeologists completed a new autopsy on the body of King Tutankhamun, otherwise known as King Tut. Read about it here.


My favorite part of this is that they were able to discover the identities of multiple mummies who ended up being his family members, most notably his father King Akhenaten. Akhenaten is in my category of "People who should be a trillion times more famous than they are" because he is the one who established the first known instance of monotheism in World History. He did away with all of Egypt's paganism and spread the belief in one God, Aten. When his son was born, he was called Tutankhaten, or the "living image of God." The Egyptians were not very pleased with this change, though, and upon Akhenaten's death they reverted to paganism and Tutankhaten changed his name to Tutankhamun (Amun was the creator-god for the Egyptians).

Now that you have had your factoid for the day, you should also take some time to soak in the cultural importance of Steve Martin's history of Tutankhamun's afterlife.