For a young man of 18 to die was unexpected and the haste with which the burial assemblage was put together makes it clear that his courtiers and the priesthood were taken by surprise.

When Professor Douglas Derry and Dr Saleh Bey Hamdi carried out the autopsy in the tomb, the corpse was not in the best condition. Fungal infestation had reduced the inner wrappings to the consistency of soot and the skin was greyish and poorly preserved. The intestines had been removed through an unusually placed cut running from navel to hip and much of the front of the ribcage had been removed.

Later X-rays showed that Tutahkhamun had not died from tuberculosis, as some speculated, but a small part of the skull had been pushed inwards, sugesting that he might have died from a blow to the head. Dr Nicholas Reeves, of the British Museum, concluded in 1990 that it seemed “increasingly likely” that the king was murdered.

An American doctor has now come up with a new idea that the death was the result of a tragic accident. Dr W. Benson Harer, a retired obstetrician in Los Angeles, emphasises that the anomalies in the treatment of the body indicate that it was proabably not in a normally embalmable state.

He notes that the ribs had been sawn through to remove the entire front of the chest, including the skin, and suggests that this was due to a crushing injury. Since the lungs could have been removed easily, there was no point in making the usual left flank incision to get at the viscera, hence the frontal cut.

“A corpse with a caved-in chest may also have presented problems with the usual procedure for extracting the brain through the nose,” Harer says. He suggests that instead the skull was prised loose from the top vertebra and resin to liquefy the brain poured in through the foramen magnum, the large hole through which the spinal cord passes: this has been confirmed by a CT scan.

Harer suggests that the injuries were caused by an accident but discounts the theory that the King fell from a speeding chariot. That, he says, would have caused multiple fractures, whereas Tutankhamun had only a broken leg. He believes that the cause of death was a kick in the chest from a horse. Tutankhamun was 1.7m tall, so could easily have been hit by a flailing hoof, which would tear the skin, fracture the ribs and make breathing difficult. “The impact to the heart could also have caused instant death.”

Egypt Travel

• Discover the Nile on a voyage into the past
• The pharaohs get a face-lift
• Bringing Egypt's history to life for the kids