Thread: King Tut's wet nurse may have been his sister

An archaeologist said Sunday that Maia, Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun's wet nurse, may have actually been his sister Meritaten, reviving speculation about the identity of the mother of the boy king.

DNA tests have proved that the pharaoh Akhenaten was the father of Tutankhamun, but the identity of his mother has long been a mystery.

On Sunday, Egyptian officials and French archaeologist Alain Zivie unveiled Maia's tomb to journalists ahead of its opening to the public next month.

The tomb was discovered by Egyptologist Zivie in 1996 in Saqqara, a necropolis about 20 kilometres (12 miles) south of Cairo.

Maia was the wet nurse of Tutankhamun, whose mummy was found in 1922 by renowned British Egyptologist Howard Carter in the Valley of Kings in Luxor along with a treasure trove of thousands of objects.

"Maia is none other than princess Meritaten, the sister or half-sister of Tutankhamun and the daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti," Zivie told AFP.

He said his conclusion was based on the carvings of Tutankhamun and Maia on the walls of Maia's tomb.

"The extraordinary thing is that they are very similar. They have the same chin, the eyes, the family traits," he said.

"The carvings show Maia sitting on the royal throne and he is sitting on her" lap, said Zivie, director of the French Archaeological Mission of Bubasteion.

Similar carvings were in Akhenaten's tomb at the Tel el-Amarna archaeological site in modern-day Minya province where the pharaoh had his capital city, he said.

A DNA analysis in 2010 revealed that Tutankhamun was the son of Akhenaten, who temporarily converted ancient Egypt to monotheism by imposing the cult of sun god Aton.

The tomb of Akhenaten has carvings showing the death of princess Maketaten -- the second daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Zivie said.

"In these scenes there is a woman who is breast-feeding a baby, and this woman shown as a wet nurse is princess Meritaten, the eldest daughter of Akhenaten," he said.

The mummy of Meritaten has not been found, but Antiquities Minister Mamduh al-Damati said on Sunday it could be in a secret chamber in Tutankhamun's tomb.

Archaeologists are currently scanning Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of Kings after British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves claimed that it has a secret chamber.

Reeves says the chamber could be the burial site of Nefertiti, whose mummy also has not been found.

"All these possibilities exist. Step by step we will be able to better understand the time of king Tutankhamun," Damati said.

Tutankhamun died more than 3,000 years ago aged 19 in 1324 BC after reigning for nine years.

King Tut's wet nurse may have been his sister: expert

Originally Posted by Hans Mann

King Tut's wet nurse

What's that? It sounds a bit, errm, weird...

..wet nurse...

It's like a mummy, I guess.

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

Originally Posted by Hans Mann

King Tut's wet nurse

What's that? It sounds a bit, errm, weird...

A wet nurse is a surrogate to breast feed a kid when the real mother can't or won't breast feed the kid herself.

Obviously it has to be someone who has recently had a kid herself.

Originally Posted by Hans Mann

Maia is none other than princess Meritaten, the sister or half-sister of Tutankhamun and the daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti

Figures. Tut married his half sister Ankhesenamun.
Just keeping it in the family.

It still sounds weird, but thanks for the explanation (&, why isn't explanation spelt explaination???).

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

It still sounds weird, but thanks for the explanation (&, why isn't explanation spelt explaination???).

Since you asked:


In actual fact this is all to do with prosody in English, ie. the rules according to which syllables in words are stressed (or not), combined with the peculiarities of English spelling.

On the whole a stressed syllable in a word will have a longer vowel sound, and if it's unstressed the vowel sound will tend to revert to something very neutral - depending on the speaker's accent, this might be as neutral as "uh" for all unstressed syllables, no matter what the actual vowel would be if it was in a stressed syllable.

Verbs tend to carry stress on their final syllable. I'm saying final rather than second, because that means the rule works for verbs of any number of syllables. So we get ex-'plain, in-'vite, compli-'cate, author-'ize, accumul-'ate and so on. (the ' indicates that the following syllable is stressed, and I've inserted the - to make it easier to see.)

In these examples (which are straight off the top of my head, and therefore might not be the absolute best ones), the vowels in the final syllables are all longer. In fact, they're all diphthongs, which means they're two individual vowel sounds combined.

However, when we make these verbs into nouns by adding a suffix like -ation to the end of them, the fact that the words are now nouns means that we put the stress on their penultimate syllables. (Again, penultimate rather than second, third, fourth, so that the rule can be applied no matter how many syllables the noun has).

So we get the following:

ex-'plain -> explan-'ation
in-'vite -> invit-'ation
author-'ize -> authoriz-'ation
accumul-'ate -> accumul-'ation




https://www.quora.com/Why-is-there-o...ds-other-forms

Makes sense.

Sensation even

He turned in to Emperor on here.





Amongst other things....