Tutankhamen 'may have been killed by disease that gave him man-boobs'

London, September 13 (ANI): Tutankhamen, who was revered as a living god of a glittering dynasty and ruled over one of the world's greatest civilisations, suffered from an all common affliction - the dreaded man-boobs, a new theory has suggested. According to the new theory, the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen and many of his immediate predecessors suffered from the man-boobs. Since his lavishly furnished, nearly intact tomb was discovered in 1922, the cause of the Egyptian pharaoh's death has been at the centre of intense debate. A number of theories including murder, leprosy, tuberculosis, malaria, sickle-cell anaemia, a snake bite or a fall from his chariot, have been suggested as possible causes of his early death. However, according to Hutan Ashrafian, a surgeon with an interest in medical history at Imperial College London, all these theories have missed one vital point - Tutankhamun died young with a feminised physique and so did his immediate predecessors. Paintings and sculptures show that Smenkhkare, an enigmatic pharaoh who may have been Tutankhamun's uncle or older brother, and Akhenaten, thought to have been the boy king's father, both had feminised figures, with unusually large breasts and wide hips. Two pharaohs who came before Akhenaten - Amenhotep III and Tuthmosis IV - seem to have had similar physiques. Ashrafian said that all these kings died young and mysteriously. "There are so many theories, but they've focused on each pharaoh individually," the Daily Mail quoted him as saying. Ashrafian found that each pharaoh died at a slightly younger age than his predecessor, which suggests an inherited disorder. Historical accounts associated with the individuals hint at what that disorder may have been. "It's significant that two [of the five related pharaohs] had stories of religious visions associated with them," Ashrafian said. People with a form of epilepsy in which seizures begin in the brain's temporal lobe are known to experience hallucinations and religious visions, particularly after exposure to sunlight. Ashrafian said that it is likely the family of pharaohs had a heritable form of temporal lobe epilepsy. This diagnosis would also account for the feminine features. The temporal lobe is connected to parts of the brain involved in the release of hormones, and epileptic seizures are known to alter the levels of hormones involved in sexual development. This might explain the development of the pharaohs' large breasts. A seizure might also be to blame for Tutankhamun's fractured leg, Ashrafian said. Tuthmosis IV had a religious experience in the middle of a sunny day, recorded in the Dream Stele - an inscription near the Great Sphinx in Giza. But his visions were nothing compared with those experienced by Akhenaten. They encouraged Akhenaten to raise the status of a minor deity called the "sun-disk", or Aten, into a supreme god - abandoning the ancient Egyptian polytheistic traditions to start what is thought to be the earliest recorded monotheistic religion. If Ashrafian's theory is correct, Akhenaten's religious experiment and Tutankhamun's premature death may both have been a consequence of a medical condition. "People with temporal lobe epilepsy who are exposed to sunlight get the same sort of stimulation to the mind and religious zeal," Ashrafian added. (ANI)