The Mother History Forgot
The woman who gave birth to Tutankhamun, yet vanished from history.
Welcome to the very first edition of History & Tales.
I created this publication to take you behind the scenes of my work: the research, the archaeological discoveries, the academic debates, and the unsolved mysteries that bring my books to life.
And to inaugurate this journey, I’d like to begin with a story that has fascinated historians for decades, perhaps one of the greatest mysteries of Ancient Egypt. Everyone knows the name Tutankhamun. The treasures of his tomb have fascinated the world for a century. And yet, for decades, a shadow hung over his origins: who was the woman who brought him into the world?
It is precisely from this gap in the historical record, and from an even darker mystery tied to her death, that the backstory of my novel The Eye of Bastet begins. But where does archaeological reality end, and where does narrative fiction begin?
The Collapse of the Old Theories: The Kiya Hypothesis
For a long time, Egyptologists believed that Tutankhamun’s mother was Kiya, a secondary wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten, perhaps of Mitannian origin. Kiya held the special title of “Greatly Beloved Wife of the King,” which made her an ideal candidate to bear the heir to the throne.
However, the archaeological evidence never fully supported this theory. The inscriptions available to us suggest instead that Kiya gave birth to a daughter (probably the princess Baketaten), not a son. The mystery seemed destined to remain unsolved, until modern science entered the tombs of the Valley of the Kings.
The 2010 Breakthrough: DNA Takes the Stage
In 1898, archaeologist Victor Loret discovered a cachette (a hiding place) in the tomb of Pharaoh Amenhotep II (KV35). Inside lay several royal mummies, moved there by the priests of the Twenty-first Dynasty to protect them from looters. Among them was the body of an unidentified woman, dubbed by scholars KV35YL (where “YL” stands for Younger Lady, to distinguish her from an older mummy found beside her, later identified as Queen Tiye).
In 2010, a multidisciplinary team conducted an in-depth analysis of autosomal and mitochondrial DNA on several royal mummies. The results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), were revolutionary:
The Younger Lady is, beyond any doubt, Tutankhamun’s biological mother. Tutankhamun’s father (the mummy KV55, almost certainly Akhenaten) and the Younger Lady were full brother and sister, both children of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and the Great Royal Wife Tiye.
Giving a Name to a Shadow: Why Nebetah?
Genetics gave us a family tree, but not a name. Which of Amenhotep III’s daughters was this mysterious Younger Lady?
This is where the work of a historical novelist intertwines with logical deduction. We know that Amenhotep III’s elder daughters (Sitamun, Isis, and Henuttaneb) were elevated to the rank of Great Royal Wives by their own father during his jubilees. For reasons of age and status, it was highly unlikely that any of them was Tutankhamun’s mother.
The most historically plausible candidate must have been one of the younger daughters. For this reason, in The Eye of Bastet, I chose to give the Younger Lady the identity of Nebetah, a princess about whom very little is known, which makes her a perfect canvas for fiction.
The Mystery of the Wound: Accident or Murder?
As fascinating as the identity of the Younger Lady is, her death is a true ancient cold case.
The mummy KV35YL bears a devastating wound on the left side of the face, which destroyed part of the cheek, the mouth, and the jaw. For more than a century, Egyptologists believed that this mutilation was the work of ancient tomb robbers, who often damaged mummies to tear away the amulets hidden among the wrappings.
But recent CT scans have overturned this belief. Radiologists (among them Dr. Ashraf Selim) have shown that the wound is perimortem: it occurred before death and before the mummification process, and it was almost certainly the cause of death.
How did Tutankhamun’s mother die? The academic debate is still open:
The accident hypothesis: Scholars such as Zahi Hawass and Hermann Schlögl suggest that the wound was the result of a tragic accident, such as a kick from a horse or a violent crash involving a war chariot.
The murder hypothesis: Other experts, including Julian Heath and the radiology team itself, point out that the wound is almost too targeted and too brutal. Such a devastating blow is consistent with a heavy blunt object, suggesting an act of deliberate violence.
The Shadow of a Conspiracy
History hands us an ambiguous medical report, but for a novelist, the murder hypothesis is impossible to resist. At the court of Akhenaten, in an age marked by religious upheaval, fanaticism, and power struggles, the violent death of the pharaoh’s sister-wife could not have been a simple accident.
In The Eye of Bastet, the brutal end of Tutankhamun’s mother is not a detail from the past, but the trigger for a deadly conspiracy whose tentacles reach into the protagonists’ present. Did someone want to eliminate the royal bloodline?
History gives us the fragments; fiction allows us to piece them together in search of the truth among the shadows.
What do you think? Was Tutankhamun’s mother the victim of a tragic accident or of a ruthless political conspiracy? Let me know in the comments!
And if you love mysteries buried beneath the sands of time, subscribe to History & Tales so you don’t miss the next journey into ancient Egypt.
If this story fascinated you, you'll find its world brought to life in The Eye of Bastet.
Academic Sources and Further Reading
Hawass, Z., et al. (2010). Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun’s Family. JAMA, 303(7), 638–647. (The foundational study on the DNA of the Amarna mummies).
Selim, A. (2010). Radiological evaluations of the Amarna mummies. (Forensic analysis of the injuries on the mummy KV35YL).
Heath, J. (2015). The Archaeology of Hotep: A Study of the Amarna Period. (For the debate on the cause of death and the murder hypothesis).
I was absolutely fascinated when I was learning about ancient Egypt in middle school (and frankly, kind of devastated when we moved on to another topic). Ancient Egypt feels so rich with dread and ambiguity that I don't personally feel in other historical topics. It's almost like there's a sense of a rich narrative behind all that history, a narrative we may or may never perfectly uncover, but you can still FEEL the undercurrents. I can't wait to read more of your work!