There's been a lot of talk in recent years about how forensic tests suggested that King Tutankhamen was murdered. Some have speculated that brain fragments in his skull were a sign of a deadly blow to the head; TV viewers have seen the X-rays in at least one documentary.
But now, CT scans -- reportedly the first ever performed on a royal Egyptian mummy -- suggest that the boy king didn't die violently after all. In fact, he probably suffered a broken leg and fell victim to an ensuing infection.
"I think this lays to rest the notion that the bone fragments in thehead were caused pre-mortem, before his death," a radiologist told HealthDay News. "It's pretty clear, looking at the imagesfrom this study, that they almost certainly came from the removal ofthe mask from the head. It definitely didn't occur either pre-mortem oreven during the embalming period."
