All About Size, Isn't It, Tut?

Jo Marchant, contributor to "New Scientist" has written yet another article about the demise of the famous Egyptian boy-king. Through the years, theories attempting to explain Tut's death at the age of 19 have abounded. I have seen TV "documentaries" that detailed how it was a case of murder by poison or resultant from an accident that took place while the king was out in his chariot. Both made convincing presentations. The theories continue, however, and now Christian Timmann and Christian Meyer of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany, have written a June 2010 submission to the Journal of the American Medical Association, contending that it must have been a case of sickle cell disease. SCD, apparently, is the most common cause of bone damage like that observed in Tutankhamen's mummy observed during a battery of tests run by a team led by Egypt's chief archaeologist Zahi Hawass.
The size problem has arisen because another team, this one American, has also written a letter to the JAMA. In this letter, they posit their theory that King Tut might have had Antley-Bixler syndrome, a genetic mutation that can cause such effects as elongated skulls, breasts on male sufferers, and under-developed male genitalia. Who hasn't seen pictures of artwork dating from ancient Egypt that depicts Tut's father with a face a mile long? I guess, maybe, it's nature's way of compensating for something else lacking in the expected length.
The hilarious part of all this is Marchant's note that Tut's penis seems to have gone missing. It was noted as still there when Carter dug up the mummy in 1922, but declared in 1968 to have somehow gone missing. Assuming that Tut himself did not make a midnight raid to retrieve his pride and joy, the disappearance does raise a question of where the little item went. Supposedly, a CT scan turned it up somehow disconnected from Tut and lying in the sand around the mummified monarch. You do have to wonder how it got there, and if it even is the real thing.
Marchant theorizes that the current penis is actually one swapped in as a replacement because Tut did indeed have Antley-Bixler syndrome, and the modern world was about to discover that the royal member wasn't quite up to snuff. Zahi Hawass has got his shorts in a knot because of such suggestions. He stoutly declares that the king was well-endowed.
So, you see? Size does matter. Hawass will not allow anyone to think any the less of his famous countryman, for the sake of an errant inch or two.