A toe belonging to King Tutankhamun’s father has been finally returned to Egypt, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Wednesday.
The bone piece belonged to mummy KV55, which was identified as Akhenaton during a recent major genetic investigation into King Tut's family.
The son of Amenhotep III and also the father of Tutankhamun, Akhenaton, (1353-1336 B.C.) is known as the "heretic" pharaoh who introduced a monotheistic religion by overthrowing the pantheon of the gods to worship the sun god Aton.
The terminal phalanx of his great toe, probably from the left foot, was taken away in 1968, when the Department of Antiquities in Cairo, under the supervision of the then director, handed it over to the late Professor Ronald Harrison of Liverpool University.
“Since then, the specimen has been held securely in my laboratory, but I decided it had to ‘go home,’ particularly since very few people knew where it was,” Robert Connolly senior lecturer in physical anthropology from the University of Liverpool's Department of Human Anatomy and Cell Biology, told Discovery News.
Connolly, who authored several scientific papers with Harrison, used the specimen to determine the blood-group of KV55, then believed to be Smenkharel, an ancient Egyptian pharaoh of the late 18th Dynasty.
“The remains appeared to be A2 with the antigens M and N present. This was identical to the blood group of Tutankhamun,” Connolly said.
The toe has been returned safely to Egypt by Swiss anatomist and paleopathologist Frank Rühli, who personally handed it over to Dr. Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, during a signing ceremony for an agreement with Switzerland over the return of ancient artifacts.
“I felt touched and honored to bring back to Egypt the body piece of a supposed royal mummy. From an ethical point of view, it is an important act. Apart from macroscopic-visual inspection and photographic recording, I have not further examined or sampled the specimen by any invasive method,” Rühli, head of the Swiss Mummy Project at the University of Zurich, told Discovery News.
Switzerland is the 16th country to sign an accord on stolen antiquities.
Hawass said the signature was particularly important as most of the antiquities stolen from Egypt are smuggled through the alpine country.
“The new agreement will enable Egypt to return all of the illegal artefacts that are in Switzerland now,” Hawass said in a statement.
He added that Akhenaton’s toe will be displayed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Picture: Akhenaton’s toe. Courtesy of Frank Rühli | Returning Akhenaton’s toe: Dr. Sabry Abd El Aziz (left), Dr. Rühli (center), Dr. Hawass (right). Courtesy Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Tags: Ancient Civilizations, Ancient Egypt, Archaeology, DNA, Mummies,
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