“King Tut” And Other Parts Of Egyptian History We Got Wrong.

Rani Baker
11 min readApr 24, 2022
“I find it hard to believe King Tutankhamen was born in Arizona or moved to Babylonia!”

There was a bit of a kerfuffle recently online regarding Steve Martin’s 1978 Saturday Night Live sketch “King Tut” and how the humor didn’t translate to modern audiences. And honestly yeah, it kind of straddles a line of being too niche and topical with little modern analog. John Belushi playing a Kurosawa samurai hotel manager walks a similar line, but unlike the King Tut Sketch it doesn’t need a deadpan monologue about a fifty year old museum exhibit explaining what it’s making fun of.

But it does remind me that despite a lot of pop culture fascination with Egyptian culture, most of our common knowledge is outdated and inaccurate. The enormous monuments and structures still standing, elaborate pictorial language and meticulously-preserved remains of their leaders and other figures hint at a highly advanced society that astonishes us to this day. Yet over the years wild sparks of historical imagination and inspiration have led to a great deal of misinformation about this culture being spread that have been later debunked by new findings. Let’s dig through and separate the fact from fiction.

ASSUMPTION: The Most Important Egyptology Discoveries Were Made Decades Ago

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