Tutankhamen (27 page)

In 2010, a toe from the KV 55 mummy was returned from Liverpool University to Egypt via Switzerland. The toe, borrowed with full permission by the Harrison team in 1968, had been used by Robert Connolly to determine the mummy's blood group (A2 with antigens M and N; the same as Tutankhamen).

If Tutankhamen's father is Akhenaten, the obvious choice for his mother has to be Nefertiti, mother of Ankhesenamen.
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As she was Akhenaten's consort, or chief queen, Nefertiti's son would be first in line to inherit Akhenaten's throne. Only if she failed to produce an heir would Akhenaten be expected to look elsewhere for his successor.

Like Queen Tiy before her, Nefertiti was a woman of non-royal birth. She was not, however, a woman without connections. A younger sister, Mutnodjmet, appears in Amarna court scenes, where she is often accompanied by dwarves. More interesting is the Lady Tiye, whose titles include ‘Favourite of the Good God, Nurse of the King's Great Wife Nefertiti, Nurse of the Goddess, Ornament of the King'.
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In their shared Amarna tomb, Tiye and Ay stand together to receive a reward of golden necklaces from their king and queen. For a wife to be honoured in this way is unprecedented; clearly, Tiye was a lady of the highest importance. Could it be that she is not simply Nefertiti's nurse, but her stepmother? Meanwhile circumstantial evidence suggests that her husband Ay may have been a second son born to Yuya and Thuya; if this is correct, he was brother to Queen Tiy, and Nefertiti was Akhenaten's first cousin. Ay's constant use of Yuya's title ‘God's Father' supports the idea that he, too, was father-in-law to the king.

Nefertiti gave birth to six surviving, well-documented daughters, the eldest three being born at Thebes, and the youngest three at Amarna. We are able to estimate their birth-years by referring to their appearances in their father's art. This is by no means an infallible system – daughters may be missing even when we suspect they are still alive, and there may be a time-lag if daughters are not featured until they have been weaned – but no daughter is likely to appear before she has been born. This evidence suggests the following family timetable:

There is nothing to suggest that Nefertiti bore a son. This does not mean, however, that she did not; she may, indeed, have been the mother of many sons. Nefertiti did not produce a daughter each year, and she could have been married to Akhenaten for several years before Meritaten was born. Could the ‘gaps' be the years that she gave birth to sons? Of course, these could simply be natural gaps (times, perhaps, when Akhenaten was distracted by his harem queens) or years when babies were born and died.

Nefertiti's death is never mentioned, but this is far from unusual: queens' deaths are rarely mentioned. Her mummy has never been discovered, and all we have is a single
shabti
, recovered in two pieces, inscribed for:

There is no means of telling whether this
shabti
was ever used in Nefertiti's burial, but if, as Cyril Aldred suggested, it was inscribed during her embalming period, its wording would indicate that she died and was buried at Amarna during her husband's reign, most probably
in Year 14.
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However, just as Tutankhamen's untimely death has attracted many and varied murder theories, so there has been huge and widespread reluctance to accept that Nefertiti either died a natural death during her husband's reign, or that she simply retired from public life. Indeed, in the alternative Egyptological worlds there has been a reluctance to accept that she died at all.
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As she vanishes from the archaeological record not long after Akhenaten's Year 12, a denial of her death or retirement has to go hand-in-hand with the assumption that she changed her identity: that she is still present in the archaeological record, but that we cannot see her because she is in disguise. This is not as far-fetched as it might at first seem: the Amarna royal court were prone to changing their official names to reflect their beliefs.

The royal names Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare and Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten (or its feminine counterpart, Ankhetkhepherure Neferneferuaten) have been discovered in sound archaeological contexts in association with Akhenaten's name; some of the Neferneferuaten names bear the epithet ‘effective for her husband'.
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These names could refer to one individual or two (or, less likely, three) individuals.
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The Smenkhkare version has been discovered alongside Akhenaten's name on a calcite jar recovered from Tutankhamen's tomb; both names were erased in antiquity. The Neferneferuaten version is found alongside Akhenaten's name on a fragment of an Amarna stela, and on a box in Tutankhamen's tomb, which also gives Meritaten's name as a ‘Great Queen'.

In the 1970s John Harris used this philological evidence to suggest that Nefertiti did not die during her husband's reign but remained at Amarna where, under an evolving succession of names, she ruled first as co-regent to, then as successor to, Akhenaten.
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He demonstrates quite convincingly that during the earlier part of Akhenaten's reign, Nefertiti's name evolved from the simple Nefertiti, the name used at the time of her marriage, to Neferneferuaten Nefertiti (adopted at the end of Year 5). At the same time, she started to use the double cartouche
(the prerogative of kings) and an enhanced form of the consort's title ‘King's Great Wife', which emphasised her unique status. Far more speculative is the subsequent evolution, towards the end of Akhenaten's reign when Neferneferuaten Nefertiti has disappeared, to the use of a king's prenomen and nomen that allows Neferneferuaten Nefertiti to become Akhenaten's co-ruler Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten (or the feminine Ankhetkhepherure Neferneferuaten). Following the death of Akhenaten, Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten then rules alone as Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare, promoting her eldest daughter Meritaten (already married to Smenkhkare) to the necessary role of queen consort. When she dies, she is succeeded by Tutankhamen. In a variant of this theory, Neferneferuaten Nefertiti serves as Akhenaten's female co-regent Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten; the couple are then succeeded by the male king Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare and his consort Meketaten.

A graffito scribbled in a Theban tomb (TT 139) by the draftsman Pawah is of interest here. Pawah is addressing a prayer, not to the Aten, but to the traditional god of Thebes, Amen. He dates his writings to Year 3 of the king ‘Ankhkheperure beloved of the Aten, the son of [the sun god] Re: Neferneferuaten beloved of Waenre [Akhenaten]'.
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Pawah mentions a Theban building known as the ‘Mansion of Ankhkheperure': clearly, Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten is financing construction outside Amarna. This may be contrasted with a wine jar label from the ‘house of Smenkhkare' which bears the regnal date Year 1. Are these two independent solo reigns, or is either a co-regency running alongside Akhenaten's own year dates?

Neat though the theory of Nefertiti as Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten is, there are a couple of obvious stumbling blocks. First, although she was undoubtedly a powerful consort – there are unique scenes of her smiting the enemies of Egypt, for example, an action normally reserved for the king – there is no direct evidence to indicate that Nefertiti ever ruled Egypt either as a co-regent or as a solo king, and
a great deal of precedent to suggest that this would have been considered an impossible move. No king of Egypt had ever promoted a wife, let alone a wife of non-royal birth, to the role of co-ruler. Akhenaten was not famed for his mindless adherence to tradition, but all his innovations had the effect of reinforcing his own position rather than diminishing it.

Secondly – and this is an instinctive, gut reaction – it appears unduly complicated and unnecessary. Why, with Tutankhamen to succeed him (either as a son or grandson), would Akhenaten even consider going down the tortuously difficult route of appointing a female co-ruler? Would this have been accepted? Why, first as co-regent then as king, would Nefertiti need to keep changing her name?

Princess Sitamen was the eldest and most prominent daughter of Amenhotep III and Tiy.
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She has few monuments of her own, however, and is best known from the items of her furniture that were dedicated to the burial of her grandparents, Yuya and Thuya. Here, on the back of an ornate throne, two images of Sitamen are shown in mirror-image. Sitamen sits on a throne. She wears a tall lotus-blossom crown ornamented with two gazelle heads in place of a uraeus, and she holds
menyt
beads and a
sistrum
; feminine items which link her with the cult of the goddess Hathor.
²⁷

Towards the end of her father's reign Sitamen started to use the title King's Great Wife, although she never took precedence over her mother, Tiy. The obvious implication is that Sitamen must have married Amenhotep III. Father – daughter marriages are very rare, however, even in the incestuous royal family, and there remains the possibility that she married one of her brothers; a brother who, perhaps, served as co-regent alongside Amenhotep III. Could she be
a mother for Tutankhamen? The flaw here is her apparent marriage to Amenhotep III; as we have already seen, he is an unlikely father for Tutankhamen. It is difficult to imagine her marrying Akhenaten after Amenhotep's death, as widowed queens, in the 18th Dynasty, did not re-marry. Sitamen could therefore only be Tutankhamen's mother if, rather than Amenhotep III, she had originally married her brother (Amenhotep's co-regent) Akhenaten. That such a marriage would go unnoticed is unlikely.

Sitamen's mummy has never been identified.

Although Tutankhamen's father must have been a prominent royal, his mother may simply have been an anonymous harem queen. This was a far from unusual situation, as, while Akhenaten himself was the son of a queen consort (Tiy), his father Amenhotep III was the son of a non-royal harem queen (Mutemwia), as was his grandfather, Tuthmosis IV (Tia). If this is the case, we would not expect to learn much about Tutankhamen's mother during her husband's reign, when she would have been just one among many, but we might have expected Tutankhamen to have mentioned her on his own monuments: his unexpected death may well have prevented this.

A parallel may be drawn here with Mutemwia, a woman of non-royal birth, with no public profile prior to her son's accession.
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It is tempting to speculate that Mutemwia was born into the powerful family of Yuya of Akhmim – that Yuya was, perhaps, her brother – and that she engineered her son's marriage to his cousin Tiy, although there is no proof of this. Amenhotep was happy to promote his mother during his own reign, when he featured her as an important (and necessary) element in his own birth legend. In so doing, he re-started
the early 18th Dynasty tradition of respect for strong and supportive women – mothers, wives and daughters – that was to continue until the end of his family line. Amenhotep included his mother's statue in his memorial temple, and she figures at a small scale beside the left leg of the huge seated statues of Amenhotep, known today as the Colossi of Memnon, which still stand in their original position outside his now-vanished memorial temple gateway. Accompanying Mutemwia are Tiy and one of his four daughters; thus Amenhotep stresses his relationship with three generations of royal women – a king's mother, king's wife and king's daughter – only one of whom was actually born royal.

Included among the harem queens were high-ranking foreign brides acquired through diplomatic marriages that cemented the political alliances of the Near East. Brides travelled in one direction only. As Amenhotep III was forced to explain to Kadashman-Enlil I of Babylonia, Egyptian kings did not allow their daughters to marry foreigners. Kadashman-Enlil argued, then pleaded – he even asked for an Egyptian woman whom he could pass off as a princess – but to no avail.
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The all-powerful king of Egypt could impose whatever rules he liked. While we know little of Akhenaten's harem, we know that his father married two princesses from Babylonia (southern Iraq), two from Syria, one from Arzawa (south-western Anatolia) and two from Mitanni (northern Syria/northern Iraq).

Included in Akhenaten's harem was Tadukhepa, daughter of King Tushratta of Mitanni. Tadukhepa had been contracted to marry the elderly Amenhotep III, but her bridegroom had died while she was travelling to Egypt and the marriage remained unconsummated. Rather than return home with her splendid dowry, breaking the
diplomatic link, Tadukhepa married the new king, Akhenaten. She may therefore, in theory, be Tutankhamen's mother. However, it is debatable that a half-Mitannian son, whose foreign relatives might have been tempted to claim his Egyptian inheritance, would ever have been considered a satisfactory candidate for the throne.