The Curious Case of King Tut and the Illusion of Murder
Mental shortcuts lead us to see homicide where none exists, as with King Tut.
Updated June 3, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
At first glance, there was practically nobody in the history of the world who seemed more likely to be murdered than Tutankhamun (King Tut), Pharaoh of Egypt from 1333-1323 BCE. Most authorities today agree that Tut was the son of Akhenaten, perhaps the most unpopular Pharaoh in history, who tried to start a new religion and, in so doing, usurped the power of the entire Egyptian priesthood and of many other powerful people. When Akhenaten’s poor, ill-starred kid Tutankhaten inherited the kingship on Dad’s death (nobody seems to know how Akhenaten died), the priests changed the boy’s name to Tutankhamun, rejecting his dad’s god Aten in favor of reference to the god Amon (Amun).
Despite this PR gesture, things didn’t go too well for the boy Pharaoh. He had to subsidize new priests and his own palace staff out of his own pocket, and he mysteriously died after 10 shaky adolescent years on the throne. During that time, he was under the sway of the regent Horemheb, commander of the Egyptian army, who technically didn’t have much right to the throne but managed to wind up with it anyway. In between the reigns of Tut and Horemheb, there was the reign of a somewhat shadowy official named Ay, who may or may not have been involved in a plot to betray Egypt to the rival Hittites (for example, Van Dijk, 2000). Under Ay’s rule, Tut’s juvenile widow, Ankhesenamun, seems to have written to the King of the neighboring Hittites to send her a new Prince to marry and to save her from unspecified “deceivers.” When the Hittite King did so, the itinerant Prince was evidently murdered en route.
It all sounds like a melodrama, with Ankhesenamun in the role of Little Nell, and with both Ay and Horemheb swanning around in capes and top hats, and both of them named Snidely.
Poor Tutankhamun couldn’t have cut much of a figure as Pharaoh in the first place. He suffered from a major deformity in one foot and minor congenital damage in the other one, plus necrosis, a cleft palate, and minor scoliosis, together with a frail physique and minor dental deformities. Living in a world in which the Pharaoh’s personal physical strength legitimized practically every aspect of government, and in which one of the Pharaoh’s jobs was literally to wrestle a bull from time to time, it’s easy to see why some form of lethal power-grabbing conspiracy, perhaps involving eventual successor Horemheb and or immediate successor Ay, might have been in the cards for the poor young Tut.
These are good reasons why several established scholars (whose names will not be dragged through the Ancient Egyptian mud here) decided that Tut must have been murdered. In view of the political circumstances of his reign, his assassination seemed practically inevitable. Besides, analysis of his mummy found bone fragments in the skull which could have resulted from a lethal blow. It wasn’t just the scholars, either; I personally recall that some years ago, when the Pharaoh’s treasures were exhibited in the United States, a major topic of conversation among fellow tourists was the obvious murder of the poor Boy King.
But did that really happen?
When Tutankhamun’s mummy was excavated, it was stuck to the inside of the inner sarcophagus by an amazing amount of recalcitrant ancient goop. In removing the body, the original archaeologists, especially in their attempt to remove the gold mask covering the face, used chisels and God knows what else to whack the body loose. Although it's possible that the original mummification process could have been involved in the production of the bone fragments, it's a good bet that whanging away with a cold chisel at a mummy thousands of years old might very well have dislodged a few bits of cervical vertebrae, which is what the “skull” fragments turned out to be.
What actually killed King Tut? Modern analysis points to a severe leg fracture suffered by the Pharaoh shortly before his death, accompanied by a severe subsequent infection. Nobody knows how the Pharaoh broke his leg; however, in view of Tut’s physical frailty and of the athletic lifestyle expected of a Pharaoh, it's not too difficult to imagine how such an accident could have occurred.
What caused the public to believe the boy king was taken out by the mafia—Ay or Horemheb?
Tversky and Kahneman (Kahneman, 2011) discussed the representativeness heuristic , the idea that we make judgments based on how representative an event seems to be of a given category. They also discussed (2011) the availability heuristic, the idea that we make judgments based on how available relevant examples are in our current context. These psychological processes may well have contributed to the widespread, if fallacious, belief in Tut’s assassination.
Everything about Tut’s accession in the wake of the hated pharaoh Akhenaten, in his adolescent reign, in the context of his unscrupulous Pharaonic “advisers,” and in his adolescent widow’s pathetic plea to the Hittites to save her from the “deceivers” is representative of a murder plot, in practically every Western idiom, ranging from Shakespeare to Colombo. The rather fabulous availability of such concepts may well have influenced the judgment of interested parties, ranging from professional archaeologists to antiquarian tourists.
The belief in the murder of King Tut may have arisen far more in the principles of human psychology (Sharps, 2024; Sharps and Price-Sharps, 2026) than in the actual evidence.
Genuine murders do happen, of course, and perhaps more frequently than we would like to think. However, it is important to acknowledge that psychological processes may also incline us to infer homicide when the reality, for example, lies in a much more pedestrian explanation—the complications of a severely broken leg. Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s death may serve as a valuable lesson in this regard.
Kahneman, D. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.
Sharps, M.J. 2024. The Forensic View: Investigative Psychology, Law Enforcement, Space Aliens, Exploration, and the Nature of Madness. Amazon.
Sharps, M.J., & Price-Sharps, J.L. (2026). Dissociation and Belief: The Psychology of Why Things Go Horribly Wrong, and What To Do About It. Amazon.
Van Dijk, J. 2000. The Amarna Period and the Later New Kingdom. In Shaw, I. (Ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Matthew Sharps, Ph.D., professor of psychology at California State University, Fresno. He researches forensic cognitive science among other related areas.
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