Was King Tut murdered? Did Akhenaten have both a male and female physiology? Did incest and inbreeding lead the Eighteenth Dynasty down a genetic dead end? Last month the Family of Tutankhamun Project attempted to answer these questions—and more—with the publication of a two-year forensic study of sixteen mummies of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
This article is the first of several in which we will attempt to put the research into layperson’s terms. First we will take a look at the what, who, where, why and how of the study itself.
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Tags: Akhenaten, Albert Zink, Carsten Pusch, Eighteenth Dynasty, Family of Tutankhamun Project, Forensic Mummy Studies, Frank Ruhli, Freiberg-Kohlers Disease, Genetic Mapping, Gino Fornaciari, Journal of the American Medical Association, Paul Gostner, Robert Connolly, Stephen Buckley, Tutankhamun, Yehia Zakaria Gad, Zahi Hawass
The Swiss Mummy Project has been reviewing all of the studies performed on mummies in the last three decades and has compiled a wealth of data about how the ancient Egyptians lived and died. They discovered that in addition to bad dental health, the ancients suffered from a wide range of maladies which we normally associate with modern life.
The University of Zurich’s Swiss Mummy Project, headed by anatomist and paleopathologist Dr. Frank Ruhli , has succeeded in mummifying a human leg. Well, two legs, actually. Ok, to be honest, the test subject didn’t go so well, so I guess it was one leg after all. 
