The two tiny female fetuses, five to seven months in gestational age, were found in Tut's tomb in Luxor when it was discovered in 1922.

DNA samples from the fetuses "will be compared to each other, along with those of the mummy of King Tutankhamun," the head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, said in a statement.

The testing is part of a wider program to check the DNA of hundreds of mummies to determine their identities and family relations. Hawass said the program could help determine Tut's family lineage, long a source of mystery among Egyptologists.

Many experts believe that Tut is the son of Akhenaten, the 18th Dynasty pharaoh who tried to introduce monotheism to ancient Egypt, and Kiya, one of Akhenaten's queens. Others have suggested he was the son of a lesser-known pharaoh who followed Akhenaten.

Scholars believe that at age 12, Tut married Ankhesenamun - a daughter of Akhenaten by his better-known wife, Nefertiti - but that the couple had no surviving children. There has been no archaeological evidence that Tut, who died around age 19 under mysterious circumstances more than 3,000 years ago, left any offspring.

Tut was one of the last kings of Egypt's 18th Dynasty and ruled during a turmoil-filled period when Akhenaten's monotheism was ended and powers were returned to the priests of ancient Egypt's multiple deities.

The council said that if the tiny mummies were unrelated to Tut, they may have been placed in his tomb to allow him to "live as a newborn in the afterlife."

Ashraf Selim, a radiologist and member of the Egyptian team, said the tests could take several months. So far, the team has carried out CT scans on the two fetuses and taken samples for DNA tests.

Since they were found in Tut's tomb, the mummified fetuses were kept in storage at the Cairo School of Medicine and were never publicly displayed or studied, Selim said.

Hawass, who earned his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, has announced ambitious plans for DNA tests on Egyptian mummies, including tests on all royal mummies and the nearly two dozen unidentified ones stored at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

He has said the tests may show that some royal mummies on display are not who archaeologists thought them to be.

Last year, Egypt said archaeologists had identified the mummy of Hatshepsut, Egypt's most powerful queen and the only female pharaoh. But scientists later said they were still analyzing DNA from the 3,500-year-old mummy to try to back up the claim.

Hawass has long rejected DNA testing on Egyptian mummies by foreign experts, and only recently allowed such projects on the condition that they be conducted exclusively by Egyptians. A $5 million DNA lab was created at the Egyptian Museum, with funding from the Discovery Channel.

Some experts have warned that Hawass is making claims like that on Hatshepsut too quickly, without submitting samples to a second lab to corroborate DNA tests or publishing the results in peer-reviewed journals.

The council said yesterday that the government had agreed with Cairo University's Faculty of Medicine to open a second DNA lab.

Abdel-Halim Nour el-Deen, a former head of the council and a leading Egyptologist, said DNA testing on mummies thousands of years old was very difficult.

"It is doubtful," he said, "that it could produce a scientific result to determine such important issues such as the lineage of pharaohs."