Instructions

Read the following passage and answer the questions given after it.
Passage:

Tutankhamun was an Egyptian pharaoh who was buried in a lavish tomb filled with gold artifacts in the Valley of the Kings. His tomb was discovered in 1922 by an archaeological team led by British Egyptologist Howard Carter.

The tomb was mostly intact, an extraordinary find given that most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been looted in ancient times. But while Tutankhamun's tomb was lavish, historical and archaeological evidence indicates that the young pharaoh was sickly and spent his short rule trying to undo a religious revolution that his father had started.

Tutankhaten (as he was called at birth) was born around the year 1341 B.C. His father was the pharaoh Akhenaten, a revolutionary pharaoh who tried to focus Egypt's polytheistic religion around the worship of the sun disc, the Aten. In his fervor, Akhenaten ordered the names and images of other Egyptian deities to be destroyed or defaced.

Tutankhamun ascended to the throne around 1332 B.C., when he was about 9 years old. Given his young age he would have relied heavily on his advisers. At some point his name was changed to Tutankhamun, removing the word "aten" — a reminder of his father's religious revolution — from his name.

Tutankhamun also condemned his father's actions in a stela (a stone with inscription) found at Karnak, saying that Akhenaten's religious revolution caused the gods to ignore Egypt. Part of the stela reads "the temples and the cities of the gods and the goddesses, starting from Elephantine as far as the Delta marshes ... were fallen into decay and their shrines were fallen into ruin, having become mere mounds overgrown with grass ... The gods were ignoring this land..."

Archaeological evidence indicates that Tutankhamun suffered from ill health. A study of his remains published in 2010 found that he suffered from a variety of maladies, including malaria and Kohler disease (a rare bone disorder of the foot). A number of canes have been found in Tutankhamun's tomb, finds that support the idea that the pharaoh had difficulty walking at times.

It's not known what killed Tutankhamun. There have been numerous hypotheses put forward over the years. It's been suggested that he died from an infection caused by a broken leg or from injuries suffered in a chariot accident.

The boy king died in 1323 B.C. around the age of 18. His death was unexpected, and his tomb appears to have been finished quickly. Microbes found on the wall of the tomb indicate that the paint on the wall wasn't even dry when the tomb was sealed.

Howard Carter's team discovered the tomb's entranceway on November 4, 1922, and on November 26 they got inside.

While the treasures were incredible, the tomb was unusually small for a pharaoh's burial, containing only 110 square meters (1,184 square feet) of floor space. The tomb's small size may have been because the pharaoh died young and unexpectedly and there wasn't time to carve out a larger tomb.

Question 162

Tutankhainun's father was a revolutionary. What was his revolution?


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