Akhenaten, Tut and the scan

Tut's story begins with his family. Amenhotep III, his father or grandfather, ruled Egypt for almost four decades. His son, Amenhotep IV, made a startling change: he promoted the worship of the Aten, the sun disk, as the god, and renamed himself Akhenaten.

Akhenaten moved the religious capital from Thebes to a new city, Amarna. He attacked the old god Amun, smashing his images and closing his temples. The Egyptologist Ray Johnson calls it a 'wacky' time.

After Akhenaten, the young Tutankhaten came to the throne. He changed his name to Tutankhamun, meaning 'living image of Amun', and restored the old religion. But after ruling for about nine years, he died suddenly.

CT scanning (computed tomography) takes hundreds of X-ray images in cross-section, like slices of bread, and combines them on a computer into a three-dimensional picture. Tut's scan created 1,700 images. During the scan, the machine briefly stopped working, because sand had clogged a cooler fan. Some joked about the 'curse of the mummy', but the problem was soon fixed.

Egypt has many mummies, but Tut was one of the first to be scanned. In a way, the boy king was still leading his people.