Every time I’ve seen this thread in the list, my thought is, “His health? Tut is still dead.” - SNL style.
I think there’s very few dead people who are in good health.
SNL?!? That joke was old when* Mark Twain* was making it.
I believe Malthus’ quote has it right - inbreeding was a deliberate ploy to prevent dilution of the royal family estates, and hence a common technique from the ancient Egyptians through to almost modern times. It also involved the limited pool of options for marriage - when you consider all the minor rulers of Germany, there were plenty of draft picks for European royals but Egypt did not have a lot of local and fairly unrelated nobility to pick from.
From what I recall reading, Tut had some health problems. There was some debate whether he had a medical skull deformity (and all that implied) as the back of his skull bulged quite a bit - but IIRC latest consensus was that the shape was just an outlier normal shape. (There was a bronze recreation of his skull shape, for example, in the touring exhibit that was in NYC a few years ago.) He also definitely had a club foot - not necessarily due to inbreeding. I thought I read somewhere that the thought was he died from being thrown from a hunting chariot.
Regardless, his death was early and unexpected and he was hastily buried in a significantly smaller tomb than most pharaohs of the era.
There was a speculation going around a few months ago that the previous and poorly documented pharaoh that ruled between Tut and his notorious father Ankhaten was in fact Nefertiti - speculation was that she had herself made an honorary “man” (like Hapshetsut also did), so she could rule as pharaoh. She then would have ruled until her death (2 or 3 years?) and the thought was they were still building her tomb when Tut died after 10 years; so they buried her in one chamber, walled it over, and buried him in the next one… Hence the speculation there’s a hidden chamber in Tut’s tomb.
This is not something that cropped up a few months ago. The Amarna succession has been a topic of controversy for many years. There are actually two shadowy personages from the period between Akhenaten and Ay, an apparent male figure named Smenkhare and an apparent female figure named Neferneferuaten (this figure is often thought to have been Nefertiti but could have been someone else, like Meritaten, another of Akhenaten’s daughters). Some believe these figures were also the same person.
There’s more to this as well. Much of Tut’s funerary equipment was reused equipment which initially belonged to someone else, perhaps Neferneferuaten. I’ve been in Tut’s tomb and it is quite different in quality from other tombs in the Valley of the Kings. It looks like paint & simple decorations were quickly slapped on the wall of an anteroom (and you expect more to it) whereas other tombs are much more extensive in both size (# of rooms) and decoration.