In 2010, a team of scientists published DNA analysis of Egyptian royal mummies including Tutankhamun revealing that the young pharaoh had been infected with multiple strains of Plasmodium falciparum malaria at the time of his death. Tutankhamun also suffered from a clubfoot, bone disease, and various other conditions that would have made malaria even more dangerous. The discovery that one of the most famous rulers of the ancient world — his tomb discovered by Howard Carter in 1922 — died partly from mosquito-borne disease captured global media attention.

The revelation that Tutankhamun died of mosquito-borne malaria connected the ancient Egyptian poetic and artistic tradition — one of the richest in the world — directly to the history of insect parasitism. The discovery reignited public and literary interest in the relationship between ancient Egyptian civilisation and the natural world that sustained and threatened it. For poets engaged with ancient Egypt as a cultural touchstone — from Shelley's 'Ozymandias' to contemporary verse — the mosquito-killed pharaoh offers a further irony: even the god-kings of Egypt were subject to the bite of the Anopheles.