In November 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter knelt in the Egyptian dirt, chiseled a hole into a sealed door, and held up a candle. When his wealthy backer, Lord Carnarvon, asked if he could see anything, Carter answered, “Yes, wonderful things. ” Behind that wall sat the most famous tomb ever found, packed with more than 5,000 objects and a solid gold mask that became the face of ancient Egypt itself. Carter had been digging in the Valley of the Kings for years with little to show for it, and Carnarvon had nearly withdrawn funding before that final season.
They found the staircase on essentially the last roll of the dice. Inside were chariots, thrones, jewelry, statues, perfume jars, board games, and the untouched body of a king, the only royal tomb from ancient Egypt ever found so close to complete. Within months, Lord Carnarvon was dead from an infected mosquito bite, and newspapers invented the curse of the pharaohs. The boy king who had commanded little respect in life became a global horror legend in death.
The joke at the center of it all is that the king inside that tomb was a nobody. Tutankhamun took the throne around 1332 BC at roughly nine years old, ruled for about a decade, and died before he could grow into the job. Later pharaohs were so unimpressed that they tried to scrub his name from official king lists entirely. He was so forgotten that grave robbers skipped his tomb for 3,000 years, which is exactly why it survived intact.
A nine-year-old was obviously not running Egypt. Two men were, Ay, an aging court official who had survived every regime change by knowing when to bow, and Horemheb, the general who commanded the army. They had a mess to clean up. Tut’s father was the pharaoh Akhenaten, who decided Egypt’s many gods were canceled and that everyone would worship a single sun disc called the Aten.
The priests and public hated it. The boy was born Tutankhaten, “living image of the Aten,” a walking advertisement for his father’s deeply unpopular religious experiment. Once Akhenaten was dead and a child sat on the throne, the grown-ups pulled a quiet coup. They reopened the old temples, restored the banned gods, and rebranded the kid.
Tutankhaten became Tutankhamun, swapping the failed sun disc for Amun, the old king of the gods. In 2010, a team led by Zahi Hawass ran genetic tests on Tut and his relatives. The results were grim. His parents were almost certainly full brother and sister.
Royal Egyptian inbreeding was meant to keep the bloodline pure, and Tut paid the bill. He had a cleft palate, a club foot, and a bone disease slowly destroying his left foot. Around 130 walking canes were found in his tomb. His burial was strange even by pharaoh standards.
The tomb was tiny, the kind expected for a minor noble rather than a king, suggesting he died suddenly with no royal tomb anywhere near ready. The paint was still drying when they sealed the door. His body was drenched in so much oil and resin that a slow reaction charred the mummy inside its own coffin. He was buried with no heart, which for an Egyptian was close to unthinkable, since the heart was needed to be weighed against a feather in the afterlife.
How he died is still argued. The old theory of murder by a blow to the skull has been thrown out. The leading explanation blends a badly broken leg that never healed with a vicious malaria infection. He was about eighteen.
He left no heir. His wife, also his half-sister, buried two tiny mummified daughters with him, both stillborn. His widow then did something no Egyptian queen had ever done. She wrote a desperate letter to the king of the Hittites, Egypt’s great rival, begging him to send a son to marry her and become pharaoh.
The Hittite king eventually agreed and sent a prince, who was killed before reaching Egypt. Historians still argue over who arranged that, and Horemheb, who conveniently ended up wearing the crown himself, has never shaken the suspicion. Rome, during a stretch of the third century, was governed by teenagers, and the teenagers were a problem. In a 150-year stretch, the empire burned through more than twenty emperors, most of them assassinated.
In that endless scramble for the purple, being young and easy to control quietly became a selling point. Elagabalus became emperor in 218 AD at the age of fourteen. He was a Syrian boy whose actual job before Rome came calling was hereditary priest of a sun god named Elagabal, worshipped in the form of a large black cone-shaped rock. He did not climb to power.
His grandmother, Julia Maesa, shoved him there, spreading a rumor that the boy was the secret son of the popular dead emperor Caracalla, buying off the army to have her fourteen-year-old grandson declared ruler. She and his mother then ran the empire from behind him. His mother even sat in on the Senate. What the boy did with his borrowed power, according to ancient writers, was pure chaos.
He hauled his black rock to Rome and declared it outranked Jupiter. He married a Vestal Virgin, a priestess sworn to lifelong chastity, technically a death penalty crime. He staged a public wedding between his sun god and a Roman goddess. Roman historians went further, claiming he wore makeup and offered a fortune to any doctor who could surgically make him a woman.
A fair warning on all of that: the main sources for Elagabalus despised him, and one of them, the Historia Augusta, sits closer to a supermarket tabloid than a history book. What is solid is grim enough. When the boy became a liability, his own grandmother switched her support to his cousin. In 222 AD, the Praetorian Guard murdered Elagabalus and his mother together, cut off their heads, dragged the bodies through the streets of Rome, and threw them in the Tiber.
He was eighteen. Just sixteen years later, Rome handed the empire to Gordian III, who was thirteen. His grandfather and uncle launched a brief revolt and were killed within weeks, and the panicking Senate scraped the bottom of the family barrel. He was the youngest person ever to rule Rome alone.
Gordian died at about nineteen on a campaign against Persia, and even his death is disputed. Roman sources say his own soldiers murdered him. The Persian king carved an inscription bragging that he killed Gordian in open battle. The grimmest punchline waited for the very end of Western Rome.
In 475 AD, a general named Orestes made his own son emperor. The boy was around fifteen, and his name was almost too perfect: Romulus Augustus. One nickname stuck, Augustulus, “little Augustus. ” A year later, a Germanic general named Odoacer deposed the boy and declined to appoint anyone to replace him.
The Western Roman Empire ended not with a final glorious battle, but with a sixteen-year-old being told to go home. Ancient China looked at Rome’s child rulers and went further. The Eastern Han Dynasty crowned a baby who was, give or take, 100 days old. Emperor Shang, in 106 AD, became the youngest emperor in all of Chinese history.
He died before his first birthday. The actual ruler was the Empress Dowager Deng Sui, and she was excellent. She steered the empire through floods, famine, and rebellion for 16 years, slashed wasteful court spending, founded a school that educated women alongside men, and championed the new technology of paper inside the palace. Most of the other child emperors were a nightmare because the Eastern Han had built a machine that ran on child emperors.
When an emperor died young, his widow became Empress Dowager and chose the next ruler, always a baby, because a baby cannot govern. Her own family ran the country in his name. Then the boy grew up, resented being a puppet, and turned to the eunuchs to wipe out his mother’s relatives. The eunuchs then seized power for themselves.
The wheel first started spinning in 88 AD with a nine-year-old called Emperor He. One spin produced Emperor Zhi, crowned at seven. The empire was really run by a warlord named Liang Ji, and one day the child looked at him and called him an arrogant general to his face. Liang Ji had the eight-year-old’s food poisoned.
As the boy lay dying, he begged for water, and Liang Ji, standing right there, ordered that he be given none. A later boy emperor named Ling, crowned at twelve, grew so captured by the palace eunuchs that he openly announced, “Zhang Rang is my father, and Zhao Zhong is my mother. ” He sold government offices for cash with a posted price list. When the next boy emperor died, soldiers stormed the palace at Luoyang and slaughtered roughly 2,000 eunuchs in a single afternoon.
Some reportedly were killed just for having no beards. Into that smoking power vacuum marched a warlord who installed the very last Han emperor, a boy named Xian, crowned at eight and passed from strongman to strongman his entire life until a general’s son forced him to sign the 400-year-old dynasty out of existence in 220 AD. An empire of 50 million people was fought over above the head of a child who never once got to play with it. In the rainforests of southern Mexico, the Maya were playing the same dangerous game.
The city of Palenque put a twelve-year-old on the throne in 615 AD, and the reason is a horror story. Palenque had just been sacked twice by the armies of the Snake Kingdom, a superpower locked in a cold war with the great city of Tikal. The royal male line collapsed. One inscription simply mourns, “Lost is the divine lady.
Lost is the king. ”
Into that smoking ruin stepped a woman, Lady Sak K’uk, who took power and declared herself the living embodiment of the Maya mother goddess, the divine being who had given birth to the gods themselves. Her own husband had never been made king, so her son’s only real claim to the throne ran through her. That is precisely why she had to become a goddess to make it stick.
Then she handed the rebuilt throne to her son. That son was K’inich Janaab’ Pakal. The broken city’s desperate gamble on a child paid off in spectacular fashion. He ruled for roughly 68 years and died around the age of 80, one of the longest reigns in the history of the Americas.
He rebuilt Palenque into one of the most beautiful cities the Maya ever raised. Other cities were not so lucky. At Naranjo, a boy took the throne at roughly five while his warrior mother, Lady Six Sky, won battles in his name. Pakal’s coffin lid became one of the most misunderstood objects in human history.
In 1952, Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier found a hidden staircase beneath Palenque’s biggest pyramid and spent four years clearing it. He became the first person in over 1,200 years to lay eyes on Pakal’s tomb. The king lay beneath a death mask built from hundreds of fitted pieces of green jade with staring eyes of shell and obsidian. Above him sat a massive carved stone lid weighing several tons.
In 1968, writer Erich von Däniken announced the carving showed an ancient astronaut, a spaceman seated at the controls of a rocket. To a Maya scholar, the image is obvious. Pakal is shown falling in death down the world tree into the underworld. The “rocket flames” are the tree’s roots and the jaws of the land of the dead.
The “antenna” is a sacred bird perched at the top. It only resembles a spaceship if you have never learned what you are actually looking at. His treasures had one last adventure. On Christmas morning in 1985, two students walked into Mexico City’s National Museum and stole 124 priceless artifacts, Pakal’s jade mask among them.
The pieces were recovered four years later, some found wrapped up in a closet. His bones also kicked off a fifty-year scientific brawl because the skeleton looked about forty while the inscriptions insisted he died at eighty. Modern science finally settled it in the king’s favor. Old bones can look deceptively young, and Maya royals ate food soft enough to barely wear down their teeth.
The ruler who out-childed every other on this list may be the only monarch in history crowned before he was even born. In 309 AD, the Persian king of the mighty Sasanian Empire died leaving a tangle of heirs. The nobles, who badly wanted a ruler they could control, executed one prince, blinded another, and locked up a third. That cleared the way for the one heir who could not possibly argue back: a baby still in the womb of a pregnant queen.
Legend says the nobles brought out the royal crown and laid it directly on her belly, proclaiming the unborn child the king of kings. Historians roll their eyes at the literal version, fairly so, since you cannot crown a specific boy before you know the baby is a boy. But strip away the fairy tale and the real story barely calms down. They crowned him as a newborn infant, and for the next sixteen years a baby technically ruled one of the two superpowers on Earth.
Then the baby grew up, and Shapur II turned out to be an absolute catastrophe for everyone who had underestimated him. He spent his adult reign hunting down the Arab tribes who had raided Persia during his childhood and earned the nickname “the shoulder piercer” for the way he had prisoners’ shoulders pierced and roped together. He waged war on Rome for decades, laying siege to the fortress town of Nisibis three times and getting thrown back every time. When the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, the Christians living inside Persia suddenly looked like spies.
Shapur slapped a double tax on them, and when their leader refused to collect it, the killing began. Ancient writers counted the dead in the tens of thousands. Modern historians put it in the low thousands, but either way, Persian Christians were crushed for sharing a religion with Rome. In 363 AD, the Roman emperor Julian invaded with 65,000 men and marched to the Persian capital expecting a quick triumph.
Julian was killed by a spear. His starving successor signed a humiliating treaty that handed Persia huge stretches of territory, and 65 years of Roman gains evaporated in a single afternoon. Shapur also marched captured Roman soldiers deep into his empire and put them to work raising entire cities, and threw up a long wall across the desert frontier to lock out the raiders who had robbed him as a child. Shapur II ruled for 70 years, one of the longest reigns of any monarch who has ever lived.
By the logic of that crown resting on his mother’s belly, he was king for every single day of his life. Five civilizations, five children handed the keys to the world. Four of them were lucky just to survive it.
The fifth was crowned before his first heartbeat, and then spent the next 70 years making sure nobody ever laughed about it.
