Akhenaten's Androgyny: New Thesis
Yale University Physician Studied Artworks for Diagnosis
Based on a study of artworks, Dr. Irwin Braverman has concluded that ancient Egypt's visionary pharaoh Akhenaten suffered from Marfan Syndrome and familial gynecomastia.
As reported by the Associated Press on May 2, 2008, a Yale University physician who explores the unsatisfactorily explained deaths of historical figures has concluded that the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten (r. 1353-1336 B.C.) suffered from familial gynecomastia, a condition that left the ruler with a female physique. Dr. Irwin Braverman presented his findings at the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Historical Clinicopathological Conference after having studied numerous statues, relief sculptures and carvings of the enigmatic New Kingdom pharaoh, including those in the current traveling exhibition Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs.
Speculative Diagnoses
Over the years, scholars have offered different explanations for Akhenaten's androgynous appearance, marked by his elongated face, limbs and fingers, wide hips and pronounced breasts. Among them are Froelich's Syndrome (adiposogenital dystrophy), Marfan Syndrome and Klinefelter Syndrome, the disorders sharing a variety of abnormal physical characteristics.
Braverman hypothesizes that Akhenaten's egg-shaped skull was caused by craniosynostosis, a condition in which its bones fused together at an early age. He goes on to say that Akhenaten does not fit the profile of a person afflicted with Froelich's Syndrome, which would have rendered him sterile, because he was the father of at least six daughters and perhaps the boy king Tutankhamun (r. 1332-1322 B.C.).
Egyptologist Donald B. Redford concurs with Dr. Braverman's diagnosis of Marfan Syndrome, a genetic condition responsible for Akhenaten's exaggerated features. But Braverman also suspects familial gynecomastia, a hereditary disorder that would have involved the religiously revolutionary pharaoh's oversecretion of the female hormone estrogen and resulted in his feminine appearance.
