The Rise & Fall Of Tutankhamun's Extraordinary Dynasty | Private Lives Of The Pharaohs | Timeline

For nearly 3,000 years, ancient Egypt was the greatest civilization on earth. In their temples, tombs and artifacts, they left behind a beautiful and detailed record of their lives. But many mysteries remain. Now, however, it's becoming possible to decipher yet another vast store of information which the Egyptians left about themselves. They're dead. New scientific techniques are allowing Egyptian mummies to reveal secrets of their lost world. Scientists are now able to study the DNA of the pharaohs, and are unraveling the truth about the rise and fall of one of Egypt's greatest families, the 18th dynasty, family of Tutankhamun. It's a very hard thing to get ancient DNA out. And when we actually see that on the gel, and we see the sequence and we can show that this is something that has come from 3,500 years ago, that's a very exciting time. This is working. That's what's exciting. It is working. We are getting results. The DNA readouts are showing that we can take cutting-edge scientific skills and apply them to a very interesting question. Who are these people? What are their diseases? I think this is a remarkable project. Might this great family have been affected by a genetic disease? And did that bring about its sudden end? And was that the real tragedy of the young king, Tutankhamun? The search for answers began with the extraordinary discovery that occurred in Luxor in 1922, and which changed forever the way the ancient civilization of Egypt was perceived. The discovery took place in the so-called Valley of the Kings. Beneath a pyramid-shaped mountain, this valley was where the pharaohs of the New Kingdom had been buried. For five lonely years, an English archaeologist, Howard Carter, had been searching here for the tomb of a minor pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, Tutankhamun. Carter's hope was that Tutankhamun was so unimportant that his tomb might have escaped the robbers who, over the millennia, had stripped many of the tombs in the valley of their contents. His backer, Lord Carnarvon, agreed to fund one last season for Carter to search in a triangular area of ground which so far remained unexplored. Carter had only been digging for two days in early November, when an unusual find was made. A step down into the sand. It might have been nothing, but that step became a flight of 16 steps. The flight of steps led to a corridor. And the corridor led Howard Carter to the most astonishing find in the history of archaeology. A hoard of treasure unlike anything which had ever been seen before. This amazing discovery focused attention for the first time on the little-known pharaoh who'd been buried here, and on the fate of the dynasty that died out with him. To this day, Tutankhamun and the end of his family remain mysterious. But amongst the treasures, Howard Carter made a discovery which could now give scientists a critical new piece in the puzzle of the 18th dynasty. An unremarkable box contained two miniature coffins. And when Carter opened the coffins, he discovered two tiny mummies. The mummies of two unborn children. But who these children were, why they died, and whether their death might be linked to the end of the dynasty, are questions which have never been answered. Today, Tutankhamun's treasure takes up almost a quarter of the total space in the Egyptian museum in Cairo. Many of the exquisite pieces show tantalizing glimpses of the life of the boy king who came to the throne before he was 10 and died at the age of 18. But who exactly was he? And why did his whole family die out with him? The 18th dynasty is probably the most remarkable of all the Egyptian royal families. Ruling 1,500 years before Christ, in what's known as the New Kingdom, they carved out much of the Egyptian empire. Over a period of some 200 years, they used their growing wealth to leave some of the most splendid monuments ever built. What's known about them has been pieced together from engravings on tomb and temple walls proclaiming their achievements. From the great female pharaoh Hatshepsut to the warrior pharaoh Thutmose III, these rulers were at the head of a state at the peak of its power. But with Tutankhamun, the family came abruptly to an end. No one knows why the dynasty died out. But the dynasty may have begun with a brother-sister marriage, and there has been speculation that the family had become dangerously inbred as successive pharaohs also married their sisters. Now the rulers themselves could provide the answer. The Cairo Museum is home to more than 30 of the Egyptian royal family, including many from the 18th dynasty. Nazri Iskander, who's in charge of the mummies, has been moving them from their old boxes into new climate-controlled cases. It's provided a unique opportunity to examine the mummies and, for the first time, attempt to obtain their DNA. To have a tissue from more than 3,000 years is not available any day. Once we are putting this in the new showcases, we're not going to touch it before 10 or 20 years. Dr. Iskander hoped that the DNA of the 18th dynasty pharaohs might help resolve some of the questions which still surround the dynasty. He invited two American scientists to Cairo to help. Microbiologist Scott Woodward and archaeologist Wilfred Griggs are two of the world's leading experts in the new science of ancient DNA. They come from Brigham Young University in Utah, which specializes in understanding genealogy. Working with other Egyptian mummies, the two had already shown that it's possible to extract DNA and obtain valuable information about individuals who lived thousands of years ago. There's been a lot of speculation about the genetics of the 18th dynasty. What was the level of inbreeding? How much brother-sister marriage did we really have? And did that cause a problem with the health of these individuals? Is that a reason why the 18th dynasty died out? Those are some questions that may be approachable using the DNA. Much of the family, spread over some 12 generations, was stacked in Nasri Iskander's laboratory, awaiting their new cases. But little has been known for certain about their exact relationships. And in this, there is two ladies, two queens, Ahmus Nefertari and Seth Camus, two wives of Ahmus I. And also here... Scott and Wilfred were hoping that if as well as the royal family, they could obtain the DNA of the fetuses found with Tutankhamun, then they could build up a complete family tree of the 18th dynasty. Could this be Tutankhamun's grandfather? And who was this unidentified relative? The team were hoping that this mystery skull could provide an important clue about the end of the dynasty. This shadowy figure was thought to be closely related to Tutankhamun. Some had suggested it might actually be his father. If so, it was possible that he could provide a direct glimpse of the genetic defect which might ultimately have brought down the dynasty. In a project which would last several years, Scott and Wilfred planned to recover the DNA from the mummies one by one as the recasing work proceeded. But they also wanted to track down the fetuses which they'd been told were in the care of the museum. There are only a few key points in the dynasty where we feel relatively certain on the identification of a body with a name. But possibly one of those points lies with the fetuses that were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. The fetuses, photographed when they were first found, could well have been the very last members of the family and the key to understanding its fate. However, they're not listed in the catalogues and first they had to find them amongst the thousand objects in the museum. The miniature coffins in which the fetuses had originally been discovered were traced to a storeroom where they were awaiting restoration. These were the nested coffins as Carter had found them nearly 80 years ago, except that now both were empty. The fetuses themselves were elsewhere. Many of the people we've talked to, even in key positions, have not entirely been sure where the fetuses are, so it's very important for us to be able to determine certainly where they are. Discover the past with exclusive ancient history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Download the app now to explore everything from the wonders of Pompeii to the rebellion of Boudicca and the mysteries of prehistoric Scotland. Immerse yourself in the captivating stories of this remarkable era by signing up via the link in the description. Whilst the authorities tried to work out where the fetuses had got to, Wilfred and Scott returned to the main task of building up a genetic profile of the 18th Dynasty pharaohs. Today it was the turn of the warrior pharaoh Thutmose III. Known as the Egyptian Napoleon, he pushed back the borders of the Egyptian Empire when the dynasty was at its height. Now his sphinx stands guard over the Cairo Museum. Thutmose III is from the middle of the dynasty and is one of the few royal mummies whose identity is certain, so his DNA would provide an important point of reference. If we can obtain a DNA sample from Thutmose III, it then ties the bottom part of the dynasty with the top part of the dynasty to use him for an anchor right in the middle of the dynasty. What we'd like to do is obtain a small tissue sample that has a high likelihood of not having been touched so that it wouldn't be contaminated from any modern DNA. Probably the most important thing here is not to cause any damage and so we'd like to look and see if there are any natural openings that will allow us to get to the inside to recover any tissue without causing any further damage. Once Scott can establish DNA patterns in the 18th dynasty, he can start determining whether there is as much of the inbreeding coefficients as people have argued. Thutmose will be a very significant piece of that puzzle because everybody can tie to Thutmose. We know who he is. Incredibly, in Egypt it's possible to look at the faces of the pharaohs almost side by side with the monuments they constructed. Large sections of the enormous temple at Karnak in Luxor were built by Thutmose III more than 3,000 years ago. This gateway celebrated his conquests as he expanded the Egyptian empire from the Black Sea to the Sudan. Look at these fingerprints. This is such fine material. The swirls and the circles on the fingerprints are just remarkably detailed. I see the left shoulder is loose. When I've been doing the restoration... That's not going to be noticeable at all. It's going to be on the inside, away from any place that anyone has ever touched. I don't know if I can reach them with this or not. You can see what else is there. Once they've found some loose pieces of tissue, the process of extracting any DNA back at the laboratory could take months or even years. But these samples should begin to answer the questions about how the family members were related. Would their genes indicate that inbreeding led to the demise of this Egyptian royal dynasty? Certainly at the end of the dynasty, marriages within the family seemed to have been common. Tutankhamun is thought to have married his half-sister, Ankinson Ba'atan. They were both little more than children, and much in love to judge from the gifts she gave him, which were far in his turn. But they were destined never to have any thriving children of their own. So was the family by then afflicted with some inherited disease? Many people have suggested that a disease was already apparent in the pharaoh thought to be their father, Akhenaten. If that's true, could he provide the key to understanding what may have sealed the fate of the 18th dynasty? In Cairo, the quest for the DNA of Tutankhamun's family continued in the hunt for a disease which may have brought about the end of the dynasty. And at the heart of the mystery was the pharaoh thought to be Tutankhamun's father, Akhenaten. Akhenaten was perhaps the most extraordinary pharaoh in Egyptian history. He's known as the heretic pharaoh. At a stroke, he abandoned more than a thousand years of established religion and all the well-known traditional gods like Amun-Ra and Osiris. And in an unprecedented move, he and his wife Nefertiti shifted their capital away from Thebes, modern Xhor, building a new city in the desert, 200 miles to the north. At the same time, he threw away a thousand years of tradition in the way Egyptians represent themselves, transforming the style of Egyptian art. The scenes and figures became far more intimate, also strangely stylized, especially Akhenaten himself. Akhenaten is always seen as a deformed individual, with an elongated head with a long chin and a misshapen cranium. He has flared hips that are very feminine. It has been thought by many people that this is a result of inbreeding and genetic mutation that has caused these kinds of changes to take place. Others think that this is really just a revolutionary art style. Is this just an artistic style? Or did Akhenaten have a disease? This looks a bit like an inherited syndrome known as MADS, which may cause narrow jowls and elongated limbs. Abraham Lincoln may have had the same disease. But did Akhenaten really look like this? Egyptologists today are not convinced. Akhenaten certainly looks strange. He is certainly not a normal-looking chap, at least in his more extreme sculptures, which were intended to be seen from down below. Nowadays they are almost invariably photographed from the front. So you've got this extraordinary distortion of the chin, and the face and the lengthening. If you look at that same sculpture from below, then the distortion is far less. It's still a pretty weird-looking thing. But the impression is more one of power than of peculiarity. I think Akhenaten was making a point. The king is different. However, others think the way Akhenaten is portrayed may well be how he actually looked. Dr. James Harris has over many years been studying the skulls of the royal mummies, hoping any similarities will help to sort out their relationships. The mummy of Akhenaten is not thought to survive, but that of his father Amenhotep III does. There's great similarity between the skull of Amenhotep III and the portraiture of his son, Akhenaten. Both have pointed chins, large globular skulls. The face is somewhat bizarre. Of great interest was the fact that the skull was very, very large. In fact, for the individual, it was very short. Amenhotep III, or the mummy identified as Amenhotep III, is extremely short, less than five foot. Yet his skull is two standard deviations too large for his body. So this was a rather bizarre-looking individual. If Akhenaten's father looked bizarre, then perhaps Akhenaten did too, and really did inherit a disease such as Marfan's. Over the years, geneticists have speculated that some unidentified inherited disorder might also be responsible for his erratic behaviour. Akhenaten's new capital, at Amarna, in Middle Egypt, was built on a deserted stretch of sand beside the Nile. He defined the city boundaries with a series of declarations carved into the rock, celebrating his new capital and a new religion. Egyptologists, like Joanne Fletcher, think there were probably many factors influencing his behaviour. We have to understand the context behind Akhenaten before we can then leap to any conclusions. The significance of Akhenaten's move here to the new site of Amarna has been interpreted in many different ways by many different Egyptologists and historians. What seems to be happening is a desire to break with the past, certainly. But the move is also a development of his religious beliefs. He basically swept away the traditional pantheon of Egyptian gods and instituted the one god, the Aten, represented by a disc. Akhenaten's new and only god was the disc of the sun, which he called the Aten. At Amarna, the image of the Aten was everywhere. Yet other scenes in the tombs emphasise that he was no benevolent religious recluse, as has been suggested in the past. There are repeated images of the soldiers who were clearly part of life in the new city. There is a definite strong religious presence in Amarna, which can be seen in the artistic representations and also in the military patrol tracks which still to this day circle the site of the former city. Far from being this kind of great benefactor of his people, he might be seen by some kind of dictator almost. But speaking personally, I'd just be very wary of suggestions that Akhenaten was suffering from one of several physical conditions. It may be only through the family's genes that the question of Akhenaten's possible disease can be settled. Records indicate that Akhenaten and his chief wife Nefertiti had six daughters. It was the third daughter, Ankensenpa'aten, who was destined to become the wife of Tutankhamun. She was a year or so older than him, and there's evidence that Tutankhamun was also born in Amarna, the son of Akhenaten and a favourite secondary wife. We hope that getting the DNA of these ancient people will be one way of getting at the issue of whether or not the Amarna period is really the result of excessive inbreeding or genetic mutation that would have been passed on in the family. What made Akhenaten so different? Was it a genetic problem? Was it something that we could look at, that he may have been carrying a gene for, that we could examine and see whether or not he had that gene? Likewise, what about Tutankhamun? What about the fetuses? Did that gene continue on through the next two or three generations? Those are specific questions that we can look at with the DNA. But obtaining the DNA of Akhenaten or his immediate family is easier said than done. Later dynasties attempted to remove all traces of the heresy. One of the few bodies known to have survived, undetected in his tomb, is Tutankhamun, and of course the two fetuses found with him. But for now, the authorities considered Tutankhamun, still in his sarcophagus, too precious to disturb, which gave the fetuses a key importance. The team suspected that some inherited metabolic disorder might have caused the stillbirths, and even explained some aspects of Akhenaten's strange behaviour. So the fetal DNA could establish if the family was affected, and if that might have led to the end of the dynasty. But in the years since the discovery of the tomb, the whereabouts of the fetuses has often been uncertain. It took Howard Carter ten years to clear the tomb of its contents. Every one of hundreds of items was meticulously catalogued and cleaned. All the artefacts were carefully packed on site, and then everything was dispatched to Cairo. Box 317, with its two miniature coffins, was duly noted and examined. But whilst the coffins were properly catalogued, the fetuses were removed from the coffins. When they came out of the tomb, they began to move, and finding those fetuses hasn't been a terribly easy task. We have been in the museum, we knew of some mummies being moved up to the citadel, we've checked out catalogues with the directors of conservation. So one of the things we have to do is simply go around looking to see if, in fact, these things are available. Some mummies had been sent in the past for examination at the Cairo Medical School, and Wilfred Griggs decided to look there next. The professor of anatomy is Fawzi Gabala. In a locked room, Dr Gabala stores the remains of the many bodies which archaeologists have sent there. This is most of the collection in the anatomy department. These are ancient bones. It includes the period from pre-dynastic times till Greek-Roman and Coptic times. And these are the two boxes. My goodness. Oh, these are the boxes here. This is incredible. And amongst these boxes were the fetuses, still stored as Howard Carter packed them 80 years ago. This is a box with the small fetus. Wilfred Griggs' search was over. It's about five months age. And as you see, this is the original cotton. One can see the condition is remarkable. The hands are in remarkably fine condition still. Yes, and even this hand is seen. You can still see the hand and part of the fingers. And you can see also the material, the embalming material, and this skin of the abdomen. Let us move to see the next fetus, which is a bigger one. The same from the tomb of Tutankhamen. And now the fetus, as you see, is a bigger one. Much more developed, isn't it? Yes, it's a bigger one. This is a female baby. It is about seven months. You can see even here the vertebrae. And you see the clavicle here. This is a clavicle. And here is the chin and the mouth is completely all right. The nose is okay. You see the nose? Neither fetus showed any sign of a skeletal abnormality. But there was a strong clue as to who they were. You can see the incision, which was done in the left flank, so that they can go and fill the abdomen with the embalming material. Now, when you observe this kind of mummification process in fetuses so small as this, surely this would argue for this being a very important, even a royal burial, you would think, wouldn't you? Sure. To embalm such small fetuses. It is a sure sign that these were very important fetuses, royal fetuses, to Uncle Moon and his family. I guess the question is, could we look at it more carefully, you and I, and see if a sample would be appropriate to take? Finding these two fetuses, after looking around and wondering where they were, finally we will be able to determine genetically where these fit in the 18th Dynasty. That is going to be a remarkable opportunity. Very, very remarkable. Unbelievable. After weeks of searching, Wilfred Griggs had found what did appear to be the children of Tutankhamun. He was allowed to take the minute bone samples needed to test their DNA. Small fetus. Back in America, at their university in Provo, Utah, the process of extracting the DNA from the fetus samples would take several months. By amplifying any DNA in the samples many millions of times, Scott Woodward would be looking for their DNA fingerprints, for DNA sequences which may match those he'd seen in other royals to confirm that the fetuses were indeed Tutankhamun's children. And he'd be looking closely for the genes which might indicate syndromes like Marfan's or an inherited metabolic disorder. But whilst the search for the fetal DNA was underway, there was another strong lead they could follow in their attempts to understand what may have brought about the end of the dynasty. The mystery body in the Cairo Museum. The body was found a few years before Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings in a tomb known as KV 55. Amongst the wreckage in a tomb which later generations had clearly sought to destroy was a solitary coffin. The appearance of the coffin showed it belonged to a member of the Amarna royal family and when it was found it was thought to be Akhenaten's mother, Queen Ti. But on the coffin all means of identification had been removed. The face of the owner, the cartouches with the name, had all been hacked away. And after examining the completely decayed mummy inside, anatomists suggested that the body was not that of a woman at all, but a man. So who was it? If he could be identified, it might provide some direct evidence about the end of the dynasty. Some people had suggested it might be Smenkhari, a little known pharaoh who apparently ruled for a few years alongside Akhenaten and before Tutankhamun. But whoever the shadowy figure was, he must have been a close relation of Tutankhamun's. Jim Harris had found that the skull from the body in KV55 was almost identical to Tutankhamun's skull. There's a number of different ways you can show this. One is you can show them using computerized tracings or overlays showing how very similar the maxilla, the mandible, and the cranial base are. In fact, of all the 18th dynasties, they are perhaps most similar. The morphological contours, the shape of the skull and face, are very, very similar between that of Tutankhamun and the skull from KV55. So my conclusion is that they are first-degree relatives. Therefore, they would be possibly a father or a son or a brother. We have no reason to believe historically that Tutankhamun had a son, so the assumption must be then a father or a brother. So was the mystery pharaoh Smenkhare an older brother of Tutankhamun? Many people doubt Smenkhare existed or that Tutankhamun had an older brother. But if the pharaoh found in tomb KV55 was either Tutankhamun's brother or father, then could the body in fact be his father, Akhenaten himself? 18th dynasty specialist Nicholas Reeves thinks the evidence that it is Akhenaten is compelling. If you look at the layout of the tomb to begin with, this layout is exactly paralleled in the royal tomb at Amarna. Queen Tiye was buried on this side. Akhenaten himself was buried on that side. We look more closely at the inscriptions on the coffin. And although the cartouches have been cut out, the epithets which survive describing the king are epithets used only by Akhenaten himself, not, so far as we know, by any other king. So two possible pieces of evidence which might link the body with Akhenaten. However, we've got more evidence than that, because scattered around the body were four clay bricks, at least two of which were inscribed with the name, the Osiris King Nefekepurehwile, the prenom of Akhenaten himself. From an archaeologist's point of view, this body can belong only to one person, and that is Akhenaten himself. Was the body from tomb KV 55 none other than the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten? Or was it, after all, an older brother of Tutankhamun, who ruled briefly as the pharaoh Smenkhari? If this was Akhenaten, then questions about appearance and heritage pieces could be answered directly. The museum found that for the first time in many years, the body could be examined to try to identify who it was, and help resolve the puzzle of the end of the 18th dynasty. In Cairo, the authorities had agreed the body from tomb KV 55 could be re-examined in the attempt to determine who it was, and perhaps identify a disease which may have brought the 18th dynasty to an end. Joyce Feiler, one of the UK's leading physical anthropologists, was invited to take another look at the body. Who was this pharaoh from the 18th dynasty, whose skull bore such a strong resemblance to Tutankhamun's, that he was likely to be either his father or his brother? Between these two skulls here, and one like this, they were very close, within maybe 15%. Very elegant, a long sort of shape, isn't it, in both skulls. The man who pointed out the two were closely related, Jim Harris, had taken part in the last detailed study of the mystery body ten years before. Everything depended on his age at death. If he was Tutankhamun's father, Akhenaten, he would have been about 35 when he died, having completed Egypt's greatest revolution. If he died before his early twenties, he was young enough to be Tutankhamun's brother. And our conclusion was, after doing quite a robust study of the entire skeleton, using a number of different indexes, that he was approximately between the ages of 30 and 35 when he died. Jim Harris's conclusion had supported the belief of a growing number of people that this was the body of Tutankhamun's brother. The heretic Akhenaten. Ten years since then, the sense of forensic pathology has moved on. Josphila's main task was now to redetermine that all-important age at death. If Jim Harris's group were right, and this was a man in his thirties, then the evidence that it was Akhenaten would become overwhelming. But first she wanted to check if it really was a man, and if there were any of the tell-tale signs of Marfan's, or some other disease. As you can see, it's quite a small area. This is a very male angle. It's clearly male. Would you agree? I agree with it. There is no sign of disease as such. And it's quite clear that this skull is actually normal. It fits into the normal place. Josphila is an acknowledged expert in bodies from different parts of North Africa. And whilst she concluded this was a man, and that he appeared completely normal, she very soon had doubts about the age. This has only fairly recently erupted. If this had been erupted for quite a few years, you would expect an awful lot of hair on that tooth, a medium amount on that tooth, and very little on that. But there is absolutely no wear, and it is pointing to a younger person. I would say even early twenties, at the moment. But as you know, Nasri, we have to look at the whole skeleton, at all the different biological features. So, shall we look at some more aging? Now, it's interesting that we can see here, on the end of the bone, can you see this line here? Yes, where your thumb is, absolutely. Again, this is a suggestion of the end of the bone, fusing on to the main shaft of the bone. Again, I'm veering towards between 20 and 25. Possibly, certainly by the teeth, I would even go younger than that. As people age, some of their cartilage hardens and fuses to the bone. The external and internal signs of this fusion are critical to determining the age at death. And it does tend to confirm what I suspected before. On the outside of the pelvis, here, there was a suggestion on the external, or outside part of the bone, that the bone was just fusing. And the X-ray shows quite clearly, on the internal structure here, you can actually see a slight line. And it seems to match with the fusion that we have on the long bones. They fuse between 18 and 25. So, this is fused, but it hasn't quite obliterated. You can see internally. So, again, I think it points to somebody perhaps no more than mid-20s, in my opinion. Joyce Filer's unambiguous conclusion that this was a young man meant that it couldn't be Akhenaten. Combined with the other evidence, it suggested that Tutankhamun did, after all, have an older brother, and that ruling alongside his father Akhenaten, he was briefly the pharaoh Smenkhare. The suggestion is that Smenkhare died before his father, and it was his early death which made Tutankhamun the heir to the Egyptian throne. Akhenaten himself remained an enigma. But now it had been shown that his son Smenkhare was apparently normal, and that he in turn was just like his brother Tutankhamun, it became less likely that Akhenaten had a dominant genetic abnormality like Marfan's. But other recessive genetic syndromes, such as metabolic disorders, remained a possibility, and conclusions about the end of the dynasty would have to come from the genes. And in Utah they were beginning to get answers. The foetuses from Tutankhamun's tomb had started to yield their secrets. So far there were only glimpses of DNA from the small foetus, but the older one had yielded a whole sequence, not yet nucleic DNA, which might identify the father, but mitochondrial DNA passed down through the maternal line. The DNA that we have from the foetus should be the DNA sequence of Akhenaten, who is the mother of the foetus, if in fact this is the child of Tutankhamun and Akhenaten. That DNA sequence would have derived then from Nefertiti. So by having the DNA sequence from the foetus, we've now also been able to reconstruct the DNA sequence of Nefertiti. So in this first glimpse of the DNA from Tutankhamun's immediate family, they were probably looking at the genes of Nefertiti herself, and seen no sign of any genetic disease. But they'll keep searching, and they're confident that in time, the foetuses will yield a lot more information. We're not finished. With enough tweaking of the reagents, enough working with the samples, I'm confident that the answers are still there for us. I don't think we have to say we didn't get them and give up. I think we have to say we have some answers, and the chances are pretty good we're going to get more. And as the results came in from the dynasty as a whole, they revealed a series of definite answers about relationships in the family, about their inbreeding, and about the likelihood of disease. The dynasty, they confirmed, began as it ended, with a brother and sister marriage. But as the team worked their way through the royal family, they were able to chart a family tree, and it became clear that this was not a pattern that continued throughout. Probably some of the biggest information that we have from the ancient DNA analysis is the confirmation of a brother-sister marriage at the beginning of the dynasty, and then a break between the genetic information at the beginning of the dynasty and the middle of the dynasty, there around Amenhotep I and Thutmose I, which may imply a different set of genetics, possibly a different family. Scott's first conclusion was that far from being inbred throughout, the 18th dynasty was in fact two different families, and it emerged from minute changes in the DNA. This is an example of a difference in the DNA sequence that allows us to make the statement that we have a break between the beginning of the 18th dynasty and the middle part of the 18th dynasty. Here we have in Amenhotep I a C, and a C that follows right on top of it. Now as we look at Thutmose I, over here, we'll see a C, and there's nothing on top of it. But in fact it moves over, and it's a T. So we have a C-T in Thutmose I, whereas in Amenhotep I we had a C followed by another C. That's all that it takes to demonstrate that these do not belong to the same maternal line. And as Scott looked more closely at the DNA sequences, clarifying exactly who was who, he was able to give other specific answers about the differences between brothers and sisters. So there is inbreeding at the top of the dynasty, but as we move down to the next generation, it seems to be essentially erased because we have new genetics coming in through the mother. Then we have other places in the dynasty, down near the end of the dynasty, near Tutankhamun, where it looks like there is inbreeding again. And so it goes from an inbreeding situation, to a resetting of the clock, to another inbreeding situation as we move through the dynasty. And so we don't have an absolute inbreeding situation going on all the way down through the dynasty. At specific times in the dynasty, brothers had married their sisters, including that final pairing of Tutankhamun and his half-sister. But there was always fresh blood coming into the family, and with such low levels of inbreeding, recessive conditions like metabolic disorders would be unlikely to lead to the premature death of both their children. With the first results now coming in, Nasri Iskander had followed the samples from the royal mummies and come to Utah to see and hear for himself about conclusions which are providing a completely novel view of the 18th dynasty. Second Henry Tao II is often considered to be the end of the 17th dynasty. He's often the first, the beginning of the 18th dynasty. I think DNA shows these are probably father and son, therefore I would argue that they belong in the same dynasty. Now we can only complete this part of the family. When you see all the signs coming out, and you see these points may be very useful to give us ideas about the humanity from three thousands of years. To me, the world will be remarkable. We now have the beginnings of some DNA evidence from the 18th dynasty. Combined with all of the historical information that's come to light in the last 100 years, and all of the other reconstructions of what went on in the 18th dynasty, I think the DNA adds a whole new perspective, a whole new angle to being able to understand who these people were, how they were related to each other, and how they interacted from day to day. Why the children of Tutankhamun and his young wife were still born remains a mystery. For the young royals and for the dynasty it was a tragedy, but it was probably not caused by a genetic disorder. But the fact that they had no surviving offspring changed the course of history. When Tutankhamun died, still it seems with no other wives, the dynasty effectively came to an end. Had the children of Tutankhamun lived, the common soldier Ramses I and the triumphalist military dynasties he founded might never have ruled. Artistically, it was the end of a golden age. Now, after three and a half thousand years, the story of the 18th dynasty is re-emerging from the sand. Through their DNA, this extraordinary family is in a sense being brought back to life.