Let a tomb be made for me in the eastern mountain [of Akhenaten]. Let my burial be made in it, in the millions of jubilees which the Aten, my father, decreed for me. Let the burial for the King’s Great Wife Nefertiti be made in it, in the millions of years which the Aten, my father, decreed for her. (And) let the burial of the King’s Daughter Meritaten [be made] in it, in these millions of years.1
Amarna Boundary Stelae inscription
Although we have many images of Nefertiti, in both two and three dimensions, few of these are dated. One tomb scene, however, places Nefertiti firmly at the heart of the royal family towards the end of Akhenaten’s reign. On the wall of the tomb decorated for Meryre II we can see the entire royal family – Akhenaten, Nefertiti and all six daughters – enjoying a festival or durbar that Meryre helpfully dates to regnal year 12.2 Our next sighting of the queen is a far sadder scene; the walls of the royal tomb show Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their three eldest surviving daughters mourning the death of Princess Meketaten. As we saw Meketaten apparently alive and well at the regnal year 12 celebrations we can be reasonably confident that she died after the festival. We cannot be entirely sure of this, though; the Amarna artists had been happy to depict Amenhotep III dining with Queen Tiy in Huya’s tomb, even though he was long dead when the tomb was decorated. As Barry Kemp reminds us: ‘Tomb pictures are not photographs. They are compositions intended to reflect, in part, something suited to eternal contemplation.’3
Our final mention of Nefertiti dates to Akhenaten’s sixteenth regnal year. A barely legible graffito carved in the Dayr Abu Hinnis quarry, 10km to the north of Amarna, on the ‘15th day of the 3rd month of inundation, year 16’, specifically mentions the ‘Great King’s Wife, his beloved, mistress of the Two Lands, Neferneferuaten Nefertiti’.4 It seems that Nefertiti was alive and performing her normal consort’s duties shortly before Akhenaten’s death. His last recorded date comes from a wine jar labelled ‘year 17, second month of the inundation’.
On the basis of this evidence, it seems that Nefertiti either survived her husband or predeceased him by a year or less. If she survived Akhenaten, we would expect her to have handed over her role to her successor as queen consort, and to have faded somewhat from our view. Depending on where and when she died, she might then have been interred in the Amarna royal tomb. If she predeceased Akhenaten, we would have expected him to have stuck with his original plan, and to have buried his wife in or very near the royal tomb.5 The first visitors to Amarna had been happy to accept that this is what happened. It was a common enough tragedy; the thin and fragile queen, who looked ill to the point of consumption, had simply succumbed to illness:
Nofre-ti-tai-Aten seems to have ultimately died of decline, for there is a very sad sculpture in which she appears in the last stage of it, her cheeks hollow, her once beautiful face shrunken to nothing, and death obviously not far off. It is to be found in the northern group of tombs.6
Unfortunately the royal tomb is less informative on this subject than we might have hoped. At the very least, it was emptied by Tutankhamen, whom we must assume moved all the important and valuable burials and grave goods to Thebes, and was thoroughly ransacked by locals sometime during the early 1880s, before its rediscovery was reported to the authorities. It is likely to have been looted many times between these two known events. This vandalism makes it difficult for us to assess who was, and who was not, buried there. We can only state that there is no mention of Nefertiti’s death either in the royal tomb or elsewhere, and the only evidence for her interment at Amarna is provided by a broken shabti whose separate pieces are now housed in the Louvre and Brooklyn Museum, and whose inscription has been reconstructed by Christian Loeben to read:
The Heiress, high and mighty in the palace, one trusted of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Neferkheperure Waenre, the Son of Re [Akhenaten], Great in his lifetime, The Chief Wife of the King, Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, Living for ever and ever.7
This shabti, like the regnal year 16 graffito, implies that Nefertiti died a queen consort.
However, the regnal year 16 graffito was only discovered and published in 2012. For many years prior to its publication, Egyptologists had accepted that Nefertiti vanished soon after the death of Meketaten, probably in year 13, leaving a four-year Nefertiti-less gap at the end of Akhenaten’s reign. This should not have been a problem. Egyptian history is riddled with vanishing queens; invariably, this means that they have died. However, there has been a general reluctance to accept that a queen as prominent as Nefertiti could have died without Akhenaten informing us of her demise, and this has led to a lot of speculation about what many have seen as her inexplicable disappearance. These theories linger in the literature to confuse our thinking about the end of the Amarna Period. They may be divided into two categories:
(1) Nefertiti was banished from court during the latter part of her husband’s reign, making it impossible for us to see her.
(2) Nefertiti changed her name two or three times during the later stages of her life, making it impossible for us to see her.
The suggestion that Nefertiti was banished from court can be immediately dismissed. This was based on the observation that, at the Amarna temple known as Maru-Aten, Meritaten’s name was inscribed over the name of another woman. Under the erroneous impression that Nefertiti had been ruthlessly erased, John Pendlebury suggested that there had been a quarrel that left Nefertiti, the Aten’s most faithful disciple, confined to one of the Amarna palaces.8 Norman de Garis Davies suggested the opposite: that Nefertiti had been happy to deny the Aten, and that she had been banished to allow Akhenaten to marry Meritaten and father a son.9 We now know that the erased name belonged to Kiya, making the various Nefertiti disgrace and banishment theories redundant.
The suggestion that Nefertiti changed her role, and in so doing became invisible to us, deserves more consideration. In the 1970s philologist John Harris wrote a series of articles that led to the development of the theory that Nefertiti transformed herself into a female king to rule alongside Akhenaten as a co-regent.10 After Akhenaten’s death, she may even have ruled Egypt either as a solo king or as a regent, before Tutankhamen came to the throne.11 This theory can be supported by a certain amount of indirect linguistic and artistic evidence but, as is so often the case with the Amarna Period, this is far from conclusive. Much of this evidence comes from Tutankhamen’s tomb, which includes a surprising number of grave goods recycled from Amarna burials. Included amongst these is, to take just one example of the ‘evidence’ that can be read two ways, a gilded statuette which depicts a king dressed in a kilt and white crown, standing on the back of a leopard. The figure shows what have been described as ‘prominent breasts and low hips’.12 Some experts have interpreted this as a statuette originally made for a woman: a piece created for King Nefertiti’s burial, repurposed by Tutankhamen, perhaps? Others have simply seen it as an Amarna-style young Tutankhamen.
The situation is complicated by the introduction of two new characters who appear, seemingly from nowhere, at the heart of the nuclear royal family during the final years of Akhenaten’s reign. There is no doubt that ‘Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten’ and ‘Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare’ existed. Their names are attested in several Amarna contexts, but we cannot be certain who they were, or what role they played in the succession.13 Many believe that these could both be Nefertiti, changing her name as she advanced from co-ruler (Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten) to solo king (Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare). However, this would have been an unprecedented move followed by a highly unusual move. No consort had ever become an official co-ruler alongside her husband and, although two women (the Twelfth Dynasty Sobeknofru and Eighteenth Dynasty Hatshepsut) had ruled Egypt as a female kings, both had royal fathers.
We know that Tutankhamen ultimately succeeded Akhenaten, but we don’t know what happened in the short gap between Akhenaten’s death and Tutankhamen’s coronation. Given the lack of concrete information about Akhenaten’s immediate successor, it would be useful to stop focusing on the minutiae of name development and unlabelled sketches, and to spend a moment looking at the bigger picture. Is there any evidence to support the supposition that Nefertiti was an especially powerful consort allocated a unique role? If we draw a direct comparison between Nefertiti and Tiy, the answer has to be no. Each queen features prominently in her husband’s reign. Each can appear at the same size as her husband; each can also appear unnaturally small. Tiy is worshipped in Nubia; Nefertiti is worshipped at Amarna. Tiy is mentioned in diplomatic correspondence and despatches her enemies as a sphinx; Nefertiti conducts religious rites in Thebes and smites her enemies with a weapon. Both women are living solar goddesses, each wears Tefnut’s distinctive crown, and each is linked to Hathor.
While absence of evidence can never be considered evidence of absence, we don’t have a single image or fragment of text to prove that Nefertiti was ever considered to be Akhenaten’s equal, or co-regent. In any scene shared by the two, it is Nefertiti who is the minor, supporting figure. It is true that the Berlin Museum scene of the royal family sitting beneath the Aten shows Nefertiti sitting on a more highly decorated seat than her husband, but if we look again at the scene in the tomb of Kheruef which shows Tiy depicted as a sphinx, we see exactly the same thing. Tiy’s seat is more decorated than Amenhotep’s, leading us to assume that this should not be read as an unusual sign of authority.14 Nefertiti helps and encourages her husband’s actions, but she is a cipher who will not disturb maat by contributing any unexpected individuality. It is only when her husband is absent that she is able to perform actions and express individuality appropriate to her role. This visual evidence confirms what we might have expected from the complete absence of textual references to Nefertiti as co-regent. Her occasional regal regalia, her prominent religious duties and her appearance in the smiting scenes, are very much a continuation of the elevation of the queenship that was started during the reign of Amenhotep III. Yet, many sources include Nefertiti amongst the list of Egypt’s kings without any qualification or hint that it is a far from a proven theory.15
If Nefertiti is not Neferneferuaten and Smenkhkare, who are they? There are no named depictions of ‘Neferneferuaten’, but a graffito scribbled in the Theban tomb of Pere refers to regnal year 3 of ‘Ankhkheperure beloved of the Aten, the son of Re: Neferneferuaten beloved of Waenre [Akhenaten]’.16 In 1998 a close examination of Neferneferuaten’s cartouche led linguist Marc Gabolde to recognise that it occasionally includes the epithet ‘effective for her husband’.17 Neferneferuaten then was female. If we are looking for a powerful female operating at the end of the Amarna Period, we should probably be paying more attention to Nefertiti’s eldest daughter Meritaten, a woman of royal birth with a far greater claim to the throne than her mother.18 It would make perfect sense for Meritaten to serve first as King’s Daughter (to Akhenaten) then as king’s wife (to the short-lived Smenkhkare) then finally as act as regent to the young Tutankhamen, who inherited this throne at just eight years of age and who would have needed guidance.
To find evidence for the elusive Smenkhkare, we need to return to the tomb of Meryre II. We have already seen the royal family enjoying the regnal year 12 festival on the east wall. On the damaged north wall we see an incomplete, unpainted scene.19 A typical Amarna-style king and queen stand beneath the rays of the Aten to reward the faithful Meryre. They could well be Akhenaten and Nefertiti, but the names recorded in the cartouches are those of the ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Ankhkheperure son of Re, Smenkhkare-djeserkheperu’ and the ‘King’s Great Wife Meritaten’. Unfortunately, the king’s cartouche was removed by thieves before Davies recorded the tomb; fortunately, it had been copied by Lepsius and preserved in the form of a squeeze (an impression made by pressing damp, mouldable paper or plaster into the relief) by Egyptologist Nestor L’Hôte, and Davies was happy to accept his copies. The scene is undated; it is likely that it was started after the year 12 scene, but just how long after we do not know. If we are to interpret this evidence literally, and there seems to be no reason not to, we can deduce that Akhenaten died while Meryre’s tomb was being decorated, forcing the artists to adapt a scene of Akhenaten and Nefertiti so that it became the new king Smenkhkare and his wife Meritaten. This suggests that Smenkhkare was in the direct line of succession; a son born to Akhenaten and one of his many wives, married to his sister or half sister.
Smenkhkare seems to have enjoyed a very brief reign at Amarna, leaving few traces in the archaeological record. His highest regnal year date is a wine label dated to year 1. We may, however, have his remains. On 6 January 1907 a mission led by British Egyptologist Edward Ayrton and financed by American lawyer-turned-Egyptologist Theodore Davis discovered an unfinished, single-chambered tomb (KV 55) not far from Tutankhamen’s own as yet undiscovered tomb in the Valley of the Kings.20 KV 55 had been a cache or workshop tomb, used during Tutankhamen’s reign as temporary accommodation for the bodies and grave goods rescued from the Amarna royal burials. Here the royal burials had been restored, and in many cases their grave goods reworked and reassigned, before being allocated to more appropriate tombs in the valley. As a result, KV 55 has yielded the remains of many Amarna burials, jumbled together. Amongst these was an elaborate anthropoid coffin which had been created for an elite woman then modified for use by an unknown royal man. The coffin held a rotting mummy which survives today as a skeleton in the Cairo Museum.
Davies believed that he had discovered the remains of Queen Tiy, but all who have since examined the bones have agreed that they belong to a man closely related to Tutankhamen. We know that Tutankhamen sealed KV 55, and we know that he died at approximately eighteen years of age. As he could not have buried an adult son, the KV 55 skeleton is likely to be either his father or his brother. The older the remains, the more likely they are to be his father (Akhenaten?); the younger they are, the more likely they are to be his brother (Smenkhkare?). Unfortunately, as so often happens in Egyptology, the experts are divided on this matter. Grafton Elliot Smith, anatomist at the Cairo Medical School, initially estimated an age at death of twenty-five or twenty-six years, then extended it to allow for the possibility that this could be Akhenaten.21 Douglas Derry, Professor of Anatomy at the Cairo Medical School, felt that the skeleton could have been no more than twenty-five years old.22 Ronald Harrison, Professor of Anatomy at Liverpool University, and independent anatomist Joyce Filer are in close agreement: the KV 55 male died at less than twenty-five years of age, probably in his twentieth year.23 However, James Harris, Chairman of the Department of Orthodontics at the University of Michigan, has suggested an age of thirty to thirty-five,24 while the most recent analysis, conducted by the Supreme Council of Antiquities, gave estimates ranging from between thirty-five and forty-five years to a more improbable sixty.25 Citing DNA evidence, the Egyptian team have identified the KV 55 male as both the father of Tutankhamen and a son of Amenhotep III and Tiy: they conclude that he is ‘most probably Akhenaten’. This identification has provoked widespread debate. Mummy DNA analysis is still in its infancy, and poses many problems for the Egyptologist, with both contamination and heat damage being significant limiting factors. Many, the present author included, would still identify the KV 55 mummy as the relatively young Smenkhkare, an older brother of Tutankhamen.
The Eighteenth Dynasty has provided us with many missing queens and many unidentified female mummies. Egyptologists have been struggling for years to match the two. The quest to find Nefertiti has been a particularly compelling one, which has attracted the attention of the world’s press.
Wherever she was originally buried, there is a strong possibility that Nefertiti was eventually interred on the Theban west bank. It therefore makes good sense to search for her body there. Independent scholar Marianne Luban was the first to propose, on the grounds of skull shape, bone structure, the shaven head and evidence of ear piercing, that a mummy known as the ‘Younger Lady’, discovered as part of a secondary burial in a side chamber in the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV 35), may be Nefertiti.26 But when a team from York University carried out a non-invasive examination of this mummy, and came to the same conclusion, the situation was complicated by the publication of a report from the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, which stated that DNA testing had revealed the Younger Lady to be male.27 More recent testing has confirmed that the mummy is, indeed, female, while DNA analysis performed by the Supreme Council of Antiquities research team has suggested, confusingly, that the Younger Lady was both Tutankhamen’s mother and a previously unknown sister of the KV 55 male.28 Mummy DNA evidence is, however, as we have already noted, notoriously unreliable. If we look at her teeth, the Younger Lady would seem to be too young to be Nefertiti as the incomplete root formation of the wisdom teeth suggests an age of fifteen to sixteen years.29 Could we have Meritaten, or even the relocated Meketaten, here?
As I write, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities is still assessing the suggestion made by British Egyptologist Nicolas Reeves, that the plaster walls of Tutankhamen’s burial chamber conceal two doorways, one leading to a storage room and one to the undisturbed burial of Nefertiti.30 Reeves’s theory is based on the identification of irregularities beneath the painted plaster, spotted when the art-replication specialists Factum Arte took a detailed series of photographs and scans as a preliminary to creating an exact replica of the tomb for tourists to visit. The problem is that any direct investigation of the surface below the plaster is likely to cause irreparable damage to the tomb.
Tutankhamen’s tomb (KV 62) is certainly a curious one, being unexpectedly small and inconveniently placed in the valley floor. The accepted explanation for this cramped burial is that Tutankhamen died before his own tomb was complete, forcing his successor, the elderly courtier Ay, to bury him in the tomb that he had been preparing for himself. However, Tutankhamen’s builders would have had at least six years to construct a suitably regal tomb, and that should have been plenty of time. It seems far more likely that Ay, inheriting the throne as an elderly man, made a strategic swap. Four years after Tutankhamen was buried in his unsuitable tomb, Ay himself was buried in a spacious yet unfinished tomb (KV 23), close by the tomb of Tutankhamen’s illustrious ancestor, Amenhotep III (KV 22).
Reeves has put forward the intriguing alternative suggestion that the tomb is small because it is, in fact, only the entrance area of a far larger tomb, built to house the burial of Nefertiti following her reign as the female pharaoh known as Ankhkheperure Smenkhkaredjeserkheperu. This would be an extraordinary development. While it is not unlikely that Tutankhamen’s private tomb was incomplete when it was hastily converted into a royal tomb – the neighbouring, contemporary tomb KV 55 was incomplete when it was pressed into service as a workshop, and its ‘burial chamber’ shows the evidence of an unfinished doorway – it would be completely without precedent to find an intact royal burial hidden behind its walls. Does Nefertiti still have the power to surprise us?