Ancient EgyptianHistoricalPharaoh's name
Meaning: living image of Amun.
Tutankhamun
The most famous name from ancient Egypt was not the one its owner was given. He was born Tutankhaten, and the name was rewritten around a different god while he was still a boy.
| Origin | Ancient Egyptian — twt-ꜥnḫ-jmn, an Eighteenth Dynasty king who reigned about 1332 to 1323 BC |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Living image of Amun, from twt (image, likeness) + ankh (living, life) + the god Amun |
| Pronunciation | too-tan-KAH-mun by convention. Egyptian script recorded consonants and left the vowels out, so this respelling is a modern scholarly convention, not a recovered pronunciation. |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100; not a name given to boys in Egypt |
| Variants | Tutankhamen, Tutankhamon, Tutankhamun; Tutankhaten, his birth name |
| Nicknames | King Tut, which is a twentieth-century newspaper invention and nothing older |
| Tomb | KV62 in the Valley of the Kings, found by Howard Carter in November 1922 |
History & meaning
The name is a sentence about a god, and the god was swapped. Under his father — see Akhenaten, whose own name was likewise adopted rather than given — Egypt's worship was reorganised around the Aten, the visible sun disc, and the boy was Tutankhaten, living image of the Aten. When the experiment collapsed and the old temples reopened during his short reign, the name was rebuilt around Amun of Thebes. So the most recognised personal name in the ancient world is, strictly speaking, a piece of religious policy. The ankh in the middle of it is the same word written with the looped cross that everyone recognises, and the vowels around all three elements are supplied by convention: Egyptian wrote consonants, and the spelling wobbles between Tutankhamun and Tutankhamen for exactly that reason.
He came to the throne at about nine and died at around eighteen, and by the standards of Egyptian kingship he did almost nothing. His fame is an accident of survival. Howard Carter, funded by Lord Carnarvon, found the top of a staircase on 4 November 1922 and broke into the burial chamber three weeks later; the tomb held more than five thousand objects and took ten years to clear. The curse was a press invention. Later science has been more interesting than the folklore: CT and DNA work published in 2010 pointed to malaria and a bone disorder, and analysis of the iron dagger buried with him showed the blade was made from meteoric iron.
Not a name for a child in Egypt
Tutankhamun is a museum label. No Egyptian family uses it, and no Egyptian ever has since the Bronze Age. The names on a Cairo class register are Arabic and Coptic: Ahmed, Youssef, Seif, Sherif, and in Christian families Mina and Boutros. If the pull is Egypt rather than the pharaohs, those are the names that carry it.
Middle names for Tutankhamun
Five syllables leave room for exactly one more, and it should be short: Tutankhamun James, Tutankhamun Cole, Tutankhamun Reid, Tutankhamun Grant. Our middle names guide explains why long first names take single-syllable partners.
Famous Tutankhamuns
There is one, and an industry around him. The 1972 exhibition at the British Museum drew about 1.7 million visitors and set the template for the modern blockbuster show; the mask, the nested coffins and the throne have been touring in one form or another ever since, and the full collection now has a permanent home at the Grand Egyptian Museum beside the Giza plateau. Carter's excavation notes and Harry Burton's photographs remain the most thoroughly documented dig in Egyptology.
Consider instead
Akhenaten is his father and the reason his name changed. Ramses carries far more history and is marginally usable as a modern name. Youssef is what Egypt actually names its sons.