Akhenaten

Not long after the festivities in year 12, work on the non-royal tombs at Amarna ceased suddenly, leaving large areas of them undecorated. Also c. 1341 bce, some reliefs were carved in Akhenaten's tomb which hint at upheavals. One relief shows a royal birth, where the child survives but the mother dies. This woman is not Nefertiti, but may be one of Akhenaten's daughters or his co-wifc Kiya.²ⁱ Certainly Meketaten, and probably Neferneferure', seem to have pre­deceased their parents. Other members of the family, including Tiye, also fade out. There was a plague epidemic in the Near East about this time, but nothing to suggest that it caused deaths in the royal family. By year 14 of Akhenaten's reign, c.

1339 bce, Nefertiti too has disappeared from the documentation, at least under her familiar name. Definitive cvidcncc remains to be found as to whether she died or went on to rule as Akhenaten's co-pharaoh with the titulary 'Neferneferuaten Ankhkheperure', beloved of Akhenaten'. There is attractive philological evidence for Pharaoh Neferneferuaten being a woman, but it is too circumstantial to convince that it is Nefertiti. The Amarna letters may suggest that Neferneferuaten was the oldest daughter, Meritaten, supplied with a new royal title and perhaps 'married' to her father.²¹ The final certain references to Akhenaten himself are jar labels dated to year 17 of his reign, c. 1335 bce. On one of these, somebody started to date a honey jar to regnal year 17 of Akhen­aten, then realised a mistake, erased it and corrected the date to year 1 of Akhen­aten's successor. Presumably Akhenaten died c.

1335 bce after seventeen years on the throne, and vanished from recorded history in the same kind of humble document as that recording his first appearance - a docket scrawled on ajar.

It is not known for certain whether Akhenaten was buried in the tomb pre­pared for him, where one or two of his daughters had already been interred. Numerous broken pieces of his funeral equipment survive — servant figures with the king's features, scraps of linen, and sarcophagus fragments. The last mortal remains of Akhenaten may be a decayed mummy found in 1907, along with some battered funerary objects inscribed for Tiye, Smenkhkare' and Kiya, in tomb 55 of the Valley of the Kings (usually abbreviated as KV 55) (see Plate 2.4). All kinds of identities have been suggested for the anonymous individual of KV

Plate 2.4

The mutilated face of the coffin from tomb 55 in the Valley of the Kings. Egyp­tian Museum, Cairo.

55 - Akhenaten, Tiye, Smenkhkarc', Kiya, various daughters - and a host of medical and scientific tests enlisted to prove one theory or another. There is no consensus on the central question of the individual's age at death. For the mummy to be Akhenaten, I would expect a man of 40 or more. With all this uncertainty, the minimum explanation of KV 55 may be that it is a cache of debris from the robbed royal tombs at Amarna, including a mummy who was believed to be somebody important enough to lie in the pharaohs' ancestral burial ground.

The identity of Akhenaten's immediate successor is obscure and contentious. Scholars have often changed their minds about the identity of Akhenaten's successors, showing how plastic the facts are. Whoever 'Neferncfcruaten Ankhkheperurc', beloved of Akhenaten' may have been, she or he seems to have reigned for at least three years. Akhenaten's religious experiments seem to have lost their impetus and foundered after his death - apparent proof of just how much they had been a personal project of the king. Neferneferuaten may have made attempts to improve relations with the Thcban religious establishment (suggesting that it was something which still wielded power?). A petition to Amun written on the wall of a Theban tomb in year 3 of Neferneferuaten certainly suggests this:

My wish is to look at you, so that my heart may rejoice, O Amun, protector of the humble man; you arc the father of the one who has no

mother and the husband of the widow. Pleasant is the utterance of your name; it is like the taste of life.² '

But this does not necessarily suggest an immediate return to the worship of Amun as the foremost of the gods, as is often said.'⁶