This is an easy question to ask but a very difficult question to answer. To understand why it is so difficult to answer we need to know what happened after Tutankhamen died, and to understand what happened after he died we need to know what happened before he was born.
This also helps us to understand why Tutankhamen’s tomb was found almost intact whereas all the other Pharaohs’ tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been robbed of everything of value.
What follows here is a very simple possible reconstruction of the reigns of five Pharaohs.
Amenophis iii (about 1391 - about 1353)
At the time of Amenophis iii the most important God in Egypt was Amun, which means the hidden one. The centre of the worship of Amun was at Thebes (modern Luxor) and the temple of Amun at Thebes was the largest temple in all Egypt. Amenophis (sometimes written Amenhotep) means Amun is content.
Amenophis iii was the richest and most powerful Pharaoh in the whole of Ancient Egypt’s three thousand year history. He became King of Egypt when he was twelve years old, in about 1391. He reigned for thirty eight years and died at, for those days, the old age of fifty in 1353.
Like most Pharaohs before and after him he built or enlarged temples to many of the Egyptian Gods, but he introduced a new style of building and a much more natural style of art, even allowing himself to be shown as fat and middle-aged!
Everything in Egypt was driven by two great natural forces, the Sun and the River Nile. Egypt is much nearer the Equator than England so the Sun is much brighter and hotter, and also there were no clouds in the sky in Ancient Egypt, so the Sun shone all day every day.
When the Sun first rose in the East it gave light but very little heat. But soon it began to give heat, and by mid-day the heat was unbearable. Then in the evening it was cooler, and finally the Sun went into the Earth. During the night the Egyptians believed the Sun passed through the Underworld, and in the morning it was reborn. The Sun God therefore took many forms and many names: Ra, Khepri, Atum, and the Aten, to name but some. Unlike the other forms of the Sun God, the Aten was visible to everybody as the Sun's disk. Amenophis iii did not neglect the temples or the worship of Amun and the other gods, but he personally had great devotion to the Aten, as had his father before him, and he built a new temple to it.
Every Pharaoh had to have a Great Royal Wife. The Great Royal Wife was very important and had lots of Royal duties, so often Pharaoh took a female relative, perhaps even his sister or daughter, to be Great Royal Wife. (When a Pharaoh made a close member of his family Great Royal Wife it did not mean that they lived together as husband and wife in the modern sense of the word. Most Pharaohs would also have had other, ordinary, less important, wives.) Amenophis iii took as his Great Royal Wife a woman called Tiy.
Amenophis iii and Tiy had two sons. The first was named Tuthmosis after his grandfather and the second was was named Amenophis after his father - it was the custom for a man to name his first son after his own father and his second son after himself. The younger son seems to have been affected by a very rare hereditary condition called Marfan’s Syndrome. People with Marfan’s Syndrome may be affected by it in many different ways, but they often have a rather odd appearance and poor sight, and may need to walk with a stick. (Abraham Lincoln was affected by Marfan’s Syndrome.)
Tuthmosis seems to have died before his father. After the death of Tuthmosis Tiy feared that because of his condition Amenophis might not become Pharaoh when his father died, so she arranged for him to be made co-regent while his father was still alive. A Pharaoh often appointed a co-regent to share the throne with him, either because he was getting old and could no longer rule by himself, or to make certain there could be no argument about who was to succeed him as Pharaoh when he died.
Amenophis iv (Akhenaten) (about 1353 - about 1335)
Amenophis iv became Pharaoh while his father was still alive and they ruled together for several years. His father had worshiped the Aten but had not neglected Amun and the other Gods of Egypt. But Amenophis iv worshiped only the Aten. He changed his name to Akhenaten, which means Light of the Aten, and built a completely new city to be his capital. He called this city Akhetaten, which means the Horizon of the Aten. Today the site of this city is called by the Arabic name tell el Amarna, or just Amarna. Once he had moved into his new city he never left it again. This period of Egyptian history is usually called the Amarna period.
Isolating himself in this way from the rest of Egypt would have been fine if he had not been Pharaoh. But as Pharaoh he controlled all the wealth of the country, he was the head of the army and the navy, of all the priests, the temples, the farmers, the police, the schools, the foreign office, everything. While he was shut up in his city the rest of Egypt came almost to a standstill, the temples of the other Gods fell into disrepair, and the people were brought to the brink of starvation.
Like his father before him he had several wives. His Great Royal Spouse was a very beautiful woman called Nefertiti, and she bore Akhenaten several daughters. He also had a son by another wife, called Kiya, and he called this son Tutankhaten which means the living image of the Aten. Tutankhaten (who later changed his name to Tutankhamen) almost certainly inherited his father’s Marfan’s Syndrome
Towards the end of his reign Akhenhaten made Nefertiti co-regent. (References to a person called Smenkhare appear at this time; probably these should refer to Nefertiti in her new role as co-regent.)
Tutankhamen (about 1333 - about 1323)
Tutankhaten came to the throne on the death of Akhenaten when he was about nine years old. The whole country was in chaos after the reign of his father, and he very quickly started to put things right. He changed his name to Tutankhamen, which means the living image of Amun, and moved the capital back to Memphis. He rebuilt and extended the temple of Amun at Thebes, and restored the worship of all the other gods. He had two very able advisers, Ay and Horemheb, who had also served under Amenophis iii and Akhenaten. Ay was Nefertiti’s father.
When he became Pharaoh Tutankhamen took Ankhesenpaaten, one of the daughters of Nefertiti, as his Great Royal Wife, and she changed her name to Ankhesenamun at the same time that Tutankhamen changed his.
Tutankhamen died suddenly and very unexpectedly when he was about eighteen years old, after only about nine years on the throne. At the time of his death he and Ay were at Thebes and Horemheb was at Memphis. As Tutankhamen had no children, Ay, as the father of Nefertiti and therefore the only person with even the slightest legitimate claim to the throne, decided to make himself Pharaoh, but under Egyptian law the new Pharaoh could not actually be made Pharaoh until the old Pharaoh had been buried. Memphis was several hundred kilometres north of Thebes, and Ay buried Tutankhamen very secretly and quickly, so that by the time Horemheb heard about Tutankhamen’s death Ay had already buried him and had had made himself Pharaoh.
Because of the speed and secrecy with which Tutankhamen was buried many of the things in his tomb were intended for other people - even the second of his coffins had someone else’s face on it!
His sudden and unexpected death and the speed and secrecy of his burial has given rise to speculation that he was murdered, but there is no forensic or other evidence to support this viewpoint. From the large number of walking sticks found in his tomb it is likely that his Marfan’s Syndrome was a major factor in his early death.
The murder theory was originated at the time it was believed that, because of his youth, for the first few years of his reign Tutankhamen was just a figurehead, and that the real power was wielded by Ay and Horemheb. When Tutankhamen was old enough to start wanting real power Horemheb and Ay saw him as a threat to their position, and one or the other of them disposed of him. In fact however it was by no means unusual for a young Pharaoh to take full power from the very start of his reign, and all the evidence suggests that this is exactly what Tutankhamen did do.
Usually the tomb of a Pharaoh, or even a commoner, would contain a lot of things, including papyri, which would tell us something about its owner. But because of the way in which Tutankhamen was buried the things found in his tomb tell us almost nothing about him. In particular no papyri were found.
To read more about Tutankhamen’s tomb please click here 
Ay was already an old man when he became Pharaoh, and reigned for only four years. He continued the work of restoration started by Tutankhamen. After his death there was no one at all with any legitimate claim to the throne and so Horemheb seized it.
He even tried to destroy Tutankhamen’s tomb, but the Overseer in the Place of Truth (the man responsible for keeping the records of the location of all the tombs in the Valley of the Kings) told him he did not know where it was. Horemheb did however find and wreck Ay’s tomb; the mummies and final tombs of Akhenaten and Nefertiti have never been positively identified, possibly because Horemheb wrecked them so thoroughly.
For the next three thousand years it was as though Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen and Ay had never existed. It is this destruction of so many of the contemporary records which has made reconstructing the history of this period so difficult.
On the other hand, Horemheb’s destruction of almost all the evidence for the life of Tutankhamen also destroyed almost all the evidence for his death and burial, and this in turn meant that within a few years of his burial the tomb robbers did not know where to find the tomb, or even of its existence, and so it survived almost intact for the next three thousand years.
Whatever some books may say, Horemheb’s vendetta was directed against Akhenaten and his family, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen and Ay, not the worship of the Aten. The temple to the Aten at Akhetaten was destroyed only because it had been built by, and therefore included the names of, Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Other temples to the Aten were not damaged, and the Aten continued to be worshiped alongside Amun throughout the reigns of Horemheb and his successors.
More has been written about Akhenaten than any other Pharaoh, possibly than all other Pharaohs put together. The reconstruction of the events of his reign given above, particularly of his co-regencies with Amenophis iii and with Nefertiti, is widely but not universally accepted by Egyptologists.
If there was a very long co-regency between Amenophis iii and Akhenaten it is possible that Amenophis iii was the father of Tutankhamen (although it is very unlikely that Tiy was his mother). It is also possible that Tutankhamen could have been Akhenaten’s son by a woman other than Kiya - nothing about Tutankhamen’s parents is certain.
But what is now almost universally rejected as untenable is the traditional view of Akhenaten as a visionary and dreamer who tried single-handedly to introduce a totally new monotheistic religion throughout Egypt.
At one time it was considered that Akenhaten might have suffered from Froehlich’s Syndrome but this is no longer believed: his appearance and behaviour are far more consistent with Marfan’s Syndrome. To link to a web site in which this is discussed please click here This site also contains links to some more Armarna period web sites, although much of the information on some of them is not based upon the latest thinking. For a more specialised site about Marfan's Syndrome itself (but not including anything about Akenhaten or Ancient Egypt), you can visit this site, which also contains links to other Marfan sites and also the Marfan's Web Ring .
It has also been suggested that Tutankhamen may have been affected by a condition called Klippel-Feil syndrome, which affects the bones of the neck. Unfortunately most web sites and books which discuss this are mainly concerned with the Tut Was Murdered Theory and are therefore of very little help.
A book on the Armarna period, written by an Egyptologist and archaeologist called John Pendlebury in 1935 contains a passage as true and relevant today as it was then.
(This reconstruction) is highly theoretical (but) it does seem to me to fit the facts as we know them at present. Based as it is mainly on the results of excavation, where even a broken bezel ring may be a piece of evidence of the first order, it may easily be modified or even flatly contradicted by future discoveries.
There are lots of books about Tutankhamen and his time, but many of them, particularly those for young people and others with very little knowledge of Ancient Egypt, are either almost trivially simplistic or present a view no longer held by Egyptologists. Many more are written mainly as platforms for the authors to present their own views. Here are some recent books which present the latest research and are quite suitable for general readers, although they assume some basic knowledge of Ancient Egypt.
Egypt's Sun King - Amenhotep iii by Joann Fletcher (2000)
Akhenaten - Egypt's False Prophet by Nicholas Reeves (2001)
Nefertiti by Joyce Tyldesley (1998)
The cult of Ra - Sun Worship in Ancient Egypt by Stephen Quirke (2001)
Tutankhamen by Christine el Mahdy (1999)
These books are all by highly respected Egyptologists with first-hand experience of Egyptian archaeology, but anyone who reads more than one of them will soon realise the difficulties that Egyptologists have in reaching an agreed consensus of the events of this most fascinating period.
All dates in Ancient Egypt are approximate and BCE. The dates on this page are even more approximate than usual because we are not certain how long the co-regencies between Amenophis iii and Akhenaten, and Akhenaten and Nefertiti, lasted for, or whether Nefertiti outlived Akhenaten or died before him. They are taken from An Atlas of Ancient Egypt by John Baines and Jaromir Malek. For more about dates in Ancient Egypt and why different books may give different dates please click here
