Blame Pharaoh Akhenaten's Feminine Appearance on Odd Genes
Monday May 26, 2008
In Joyce Tyldesley's Neferiti [my review], much is made of the fact that it would be easy to mistake the famously beautiful queen, Nefertiti, for her husband, the Amarna pharaoh Akhenaten. This is because the pharaoh sometimes appears with large buttocks, breasts, and a belly suggesting pregnancy. These traits didn't make him sterile. He had 6 children, and they, too, appear abnormally developed.
Nefertiti - Sean Gallup/Getty Image
The Rogue Classicist posted an article, in his May 25, 2008 Explorator, on a recent medical theory on the strange appearance of Akhenaten:
Pharaoh’s Unusual Feminine Appearance Suggests Two Gene Defects, which begins:
Nefertiti - Sean Gallup/Getty Image
The feminine features and elongated head of ancient Egypt’s King Akhenaten may be attributed to two genetic defects called aromatose excess syndrome and craniosynostosis, said Yale School of Medicine dermatology professor Irwin Braverman, M.D.To test the theory, DNA could be extracted from the bone marrow of relatives of Akhenaten.
Comments
He just looks like a standard binge drinker to me. The Egyptians did brew beer, after all.
I don’t think an elongated head is a sign of binge-drinking. I expected people to suggest that genetic mutations from inbreeding might account for it.
I glanced at an article related to that topic that might be of interest although it deals with a later period, Roman Egypt: “‘Brother-Sister’ marriage, by Sabine R. Huebner, JRS 97, pp. 21-49.
AKHENATEN did in reality NOT look the way he had himself portrayed.
For political/religious reasons he wanted to look both masculine and feminine.
It all had to do with that short period of monotheism in Egypt during his reign
That Huebner woman aka ancienthistory is really pushing her article. Genetic mutations from inbreeding cause an altogether different set of features (see the portraits of royal families of Spain for instance), I would have to agree with chardet on this one.
I think Chardet may have the right idea. The picture of Akhenaten from the Wikipedia does not show him looking like an oddity. If he really looked as odd as his statues, wouldn’t there have some comments on that fact in ancient historian’s writings?