His Half-Sister Wife

The marriage of King Tutankhamun to Ankhesenamun, his sister from a different mother, is the one aspect of his reign that is the most awkward to talk about today. Even though she married the nine-year-old monarch when she was only 13 years old, the record shows that he wasn't her first or even her second husband. Ankhesenamun, the father of King Tut, was one of her former spouses when she was just 11 years old, which only served to make things more unpleasant for a modern person. Even before King Tutankhamun assumed the throne, she had a brief marriage to Smenkhare, a de facto temporary ruler.

According to what we know about the pair, it was reported that their marriage was happy because the two had been close friends since they were young (at least, to the extent they had been able to mature before being compelled to wed.) Tragically, Ankhesenamun twice gave birth to stillborn girls, which ended the lineage of the clan and prevented the king from having an heir.

The newborn daughters of King Tut were laid to rest in his tomb, but his wife was not given the same honor. She requested in a letter to the Hittite king that he send one of his sons for a marriage when Tut passed away in 1324. The attempt was unsuccessful, and she eventually wed the aforementioned Vizier Ay, reportedly reluctantly, making him the next Pharaoh. Her humiliations were not over, and Ay's tomb makes no mention of her. The fact that her burial wasn't supposed to have been discovered until July 2017 was evidence of how poorly she had been handled after passing away.