An 80/20 riddle got solved

A 20-year-old mystery has finally been solved. Some would say that it is an 80-year-old mystery. For me, however, it was a 20-year-old one. One night, my parents and sisters woke up to screams of “Tutenkamun, Tutenkamun”, coming from an eight year old boy. No one had a clue to what this whole nightmare was about.

The cause of this hullabaloo at night was a little snippet about Tutenkamun’s excavation that came in a Malayalam children’s fortnightly called “Poombatta” (translated as Butterfly). Does any kid read anything other than Tinkle these days, I ask?

The sands of time in the valley of kings in Egypt revealed the hidden treasure and mummy of the boy king Tutenkamun who died an untimely death, barely in his 20s. The snippet mentioned that whoever was associated with this excavation, met with an untimely death. Fascinated that any kid would be by anything that had a ring of mystery to it, this particular story had the “twist” that the cause of the death of the boy king also remained unexplained.

It finally took National Geographic to clear the mystery. Last week was “Pharaoh’s Week” on Nat Geo. One of the episodes, rather a docu-feature ran to more than 2 hours, wherein the investigation was on 2 points – “King Tut’s curse” and “How did King Tut meet with his untimely death”. The fascinating story would amaze anyone interested in history or archaeology, especially Egyptology. Ultimately, the conclusion reached was that the man behind the excavation (Lord Carnarvon) apparently died of natural causes. And in typical Nat Geo fashion, although no conclusion could be reached about the cause of the boy king’s death, by a process of elimination, it was narrowed down to a combination of factors – a fall from chariot resulting in multiple fractures, and probable battle wounds getting aggravated over a period of time.

Thus, with new age technology including CAT scan unravelling an age old mystery was attempted, painstakingly.

Fortunately, my sister too had read the little snippet, and her faint recollection of the name made the elders in the house heave a sigh of relief, for they could at least solve the mystery of where the name of “Tutenkamun” came from, that night!