Why King Tut has an Identity Crisis

You might imagine that life as the king of a massive ancient civilization would be pretty cool (maybe even awesome? I would argue for awesome), but I think poor King Tut, the massively famous "Boy King" of 18th Dynasty Egypt, had quite a few personal problems to deal with.

First off, his dad was a crazed religious zealot who as pharaoh tried to force all Egyptians to abandon their pantheon of Gods and just worship a minor sun deity, Aten (Amun is the big-name Egyptian sun God; why Akhenaten -Tut's dad- felt the need to pick a third-string sun god to obsess over, I really am not sure). Now, as I'm sure you can imagine, this created a lot of political problems (people don't like being told that they have to change their religious beliefs) for Akhenaten. So when Akhenaten died and Tut took over, he left quite a mess for the 9 year old king to clean up (and a lot of people angry and a weakened monarchy). Anyways, to make problems worse for little Tut, his dad originally named him after his favorite sun god, Aten (seriously...Akhenaten names everything after Aten: his children, every town and city he runs into, etc...) So, before he even hit puberty, Tutankhaten had to change his name to Tutankhamen. Incidentally, the "Tutankh-" part of the name mean "Living Image of -", so I think this makes for a particularly awkward name change.

While on the topic of awkward and identity crises, I'd like to talk about Tut's wife, Ankesenamun (unsurprisingly, she also has several names). First off, she is probably the third daughter of Akhenaten. Also probably at some point his wife (the Egyptians were into consanguineous marriage, so it was common for brothers and sisters to marry). She may have had a daughter with Akhenaten (ew ew ew), but this hasn't been proven yet. When dad/hubby passed away, she was probably married off to Smenkhkare who had a super brief reign before Tut took over. Then she was married to Tut, who was her half-brother (it just gets more convoluted) and had two kids with him. Their family must have been absurdly hard to keep track of.

Modern Egyptologists/historians/geneticists have been keeping themselves busy trying to use science to figure out the twisted family relations of the Egyptian throne. Using DNA testing (I don't really want to think about people extracting DNA from ancient mummies), they determined conclusively that Amenhotep III was the grandfather of Tutankhamen. They also decided that Akhenaten (one of Amenhotep's sons) was definitely Tut's father. As for Tut's mom, she was not one of Akhenaten's recognized wives, but was definitely also a child of Amenhotep (ie Akhenaten's sister). If all this isn't enough for an identity crisis, I don't know what is. How on earth did they manage succession in ancient Egypt? Is it your first son, who might also technically be your brother, or your wife, who could be your mom's first son? Heck, half the time the wife/sister/co-regent just became Queen, so you can't rule them out either.