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It has long been thought that King Tutankhamun, the boy king and the world's most famous pharaoh, was the son of the pharaoh Akhenaten and his sister. However, new genetic analysis reveals that King Tut may have a different maternal lineage. His mother may, in fact, be the queen Nefertiti.

Nefertiti was King Akhenaten's wife, io9 points out, and the pair did have six daughters together. However, while genetic analysis found that King Tut was Akhenaten's son, a genetic analysis conducted in 2005 led to the belief that he was not the product of a coupling between the pharaoh and any of his known wives. The theory that the pharaoh was the product of an incestuous lineage was spurred along by the boy king's many congenital abnormalities - a slight cleft palate, mild scoliosis and a deformed foot. That King Tut was the product of incest would not have been unheard of, because many royal families have incestuous backgrounds.

However, Marc Gabolde, the director of the Université Paul Valery-Montpellier III's archaeological expedition in the Royal Necropolis at el-Armana, believes that King Tutankhamun's ancestry is different than the prominent theory. He believes that the genetic similarity is a result of three generations of first cousins marrying one another. After so many generations of such a coupling, the DNA of first cousins resembles that of brothers and sisters.

"The consequence of that is that the DNA of the third generation between cousins looks like the DNA between a brother and sister," Gabolde said when speaking at the Harvard Science Center recently.  "I believe that Tutankhamun is the son of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, but that Akhenaten and Nefertiti were cousins."

As the Harvard Gazette explains, King Tut was a pharaoh who inherited the throne at the age of eight. He ruled for ten years and was believed to have died of an infection from a leg injury. In fact, his famous tomb, Gabolde said, was not intended to be his final resting place, as no one would have expected the king to have died so early. The real tomb was under construction at the time of his death and is likely located in the Valley of the Kings.

Nefertiti was one-half of the power couple that created a religious revolution in Egypt when she and her husband, the pharaoh Akhenaten, enforced the henotheistic worship of Aten, the Sun Disc.