King Tut: The Nearly-Forgotten Boy Pharaoh

Welcome to Sleepytime History — true stories from the pages of history for a full night's rest.

Tonight we drift back to ancient Egypt and into the remarkable true story of King Tut — the nearly-forgotten boy pharaoh whose successors tried to erase him from history, never imagining that his modest tomb would one day yield the greatest treasure hoard the world has ever known. Tutankhamun came to the throne as a child, ruled briefly, and was hidden beneath the sands of the Valley of the Kings for more than three thousand years, until the English archaeologist Howard Carter broke through a sealed doorway in 1922 and changed our understanding of ancient civilizations forever.

Inside the Tutankhamun tomb lay four small chambers packed to the ceiling with thousands of gleaming treasures — gilded chariots, alabaster jars, jewelled collars, a solid gold coffin, and a slender dagger forged from a meteorite that had fallen from the sky. And yet the boy who lay at the heart of all that splendour was, in truth, a fragile thing — frail of foot and curved of spine, the unhappy inheritance of a royal bloodline turned in upon itself. Some at the time, perhaps, whispered of a darker explanation — divine retribution for his father's blasphemy, for the heretic king who had overthrown Egypt's ancient pantheon in favour of a single sun.

But the deepest mysteries of Egyptian history did not surface for another three thousand years. Why was the young pharaoh's heart missing from his body? Whose face truly lies beneath the famous golden mask? And what of the rumoured curse of the pharaohs — said to have struck down the man who funded the dig?

Let this quiet story of fragility and forgotten glory guide you into a restful night's sleep.

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Chapters:

00:00:00 King Tut: The Nearly-Forgotten Boy Pharaoh

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