Not many people know about King Tut Day, an annual day to celebrate the famous pharaoh who ruled from 1332 BC to 1323 BC. “It celebrates the finding of King Tut’s tomb,” said Mrs. Schwab, World Cultures teacher. “I would encourage everyone to maybe read up on Egyptian history because it is very interesting.”

On November 4th in 1922, the entrance to the tomb that contained King Tut, or Tutankhamen, was discovered by a British archaeologist named Howard Carter and his helpers. This day was from then on known as King Tut Day. Later in November 26, Carter and another archaeologist named Lord Carnarvon was able to enter the interior of the 4-room tomb and found that everything inside was completely intact.

King Tut was a pharaoh in Egypt for 10 years, ruling until he died at about age 19. Nowadays, he is known as the Boy King, but didn’t become famous until 1922 when his tomb and mummy was discovered by Carter. There are several misconceptions on how this important figure really died, but many researchers and scans show that there were two main factors that contributed to his death.

First was his leg. According to History, CT scans were performed in 1995 and scientists noticed that he had an infected and damaged left leg. It is likely that he broke it while riding or doing some activity. Since there were no big ways to take care of injuries at that time period, nothing was done about the injury. After a while, his leg started to get infected, and it is possible that his leg developed gangrene, a medical condition where there is dead tissue in a part of the body due to infection or lack of blood flow.

The other thing that could’ve happened was bites. DNA scans from scientists showed that King Tut had several bites all over his body, which received malaria, a very rare disease spread by infected mosquitoes that causes a parasite to invade red blood cells. This could’ve also contributed a lot to killing this important figure in the history of ancient Egypt.

King Tut Day is not a very well known holiday, but several people around the world do celebrate it with activities such as making mummy masks, going to festivals, and more.