Tutankhamun has fascinated the world ever since Howard Carter's spectacular discovery of his treasure-filled tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1922. Egypt's leading Egyptologist, Zahi Hawass, here tells the story of this golden king, a short-lived pharaoh who came to the throne of Egypt as a child and died before the age of twenty, and of the royal dynasty that bred him. The reader meets Tutankhamun's grandparents, the Sun King Amenhotep III and his beautiful wife Tiye, as well as the boy-king's 'heretic' father, Akhenaten, his stepmother Nefertiti, and his half-sisters, the sun-kissed princesses of Amarna. Tutankhamun lived and died during one of the most fascinating periods in Egyptian history; this book provides a window into this extraordinary time of turmoil and treasure. The Golden Age of Tutankhamun is beautifully illustrated, primarily with photographs of objects from the traveling exhibit, "Tutankhamun and the Golden Beyond: Treasures from the Valley of the Kings," which takes objects from Cairo's Egyptian Museum collections to Switzerland and Japan. Many of these photographs were taken by National Geographic photographer Kenneth Garrett, supplemented by archival photographs from the era of the tomb's discovery, a fascinating period of transition -- in archaeology as much as politics -- between the age of colonialism and the dawn of Egyptian nationalism. Book jacket.