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| As it happens, the great posthumous renown of Tutankhamun is the only sure thing in all of this, for the period in which he was born, known to Egyptologists as the "Amarna Era", is shrouded with a figurative mist that shifts now and then but never lifts enough for scholars to get a firm grasp of the events of the time. In fact, the Amarna Era is highly vexatious to many scholars because it presents itself as a bundle with "loose ends" of which it is difficult to make a neat parcel. Theories have abounded nevertheless and many of them appear to be earnest efforts to render the events of this particular time as "normal" as possible, even harmonious, with a smooth succession from one king to the next. Yet it is my belief that the Amarna Era and its aftermath was probably more chaotic and unusual than has even been heretofore supposed. Akhenaten apparently died in his Year 17. Now we arrive at the point of considerable confusion and disagreement among the savants: Who succeeded Akhenaten and who was the mysterious co-regent he seems to have appointed in the last years of his reign?British Egyptologists, J. R. Harris and Julia Samson, [4] proposed, some time ago, that the junior-partner of Akhenaten, known as "Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare Djeserkheperu", was not a young man, as was commonly held, but none other than Nefertiti, herself. Certainly, there is some pictorial evidence that supports the idea of Nefertiti as a female "pharaoh". Also, one tends to be made suspicious by the fact that there is no other prince in the funerary scenes of the tragic royal daughter, Meketaten. Had there been an older son of Akhenaten named "Smenkhkare", surely he would have been portrayed even more prominently than the infant who has been mentioned! And were Smenkhkare not a son of Akhenaten but a brother or some other relative, he should not have been able to supersede a true "king's son of his body", as the Egyptians put it. However, not everything in ancient Egypt was done according to "maat", which is the Egyptian word for both "truth" and "the proper way of doing things". A large stumbling block to imagining Smenkhkare Djeserkheperu as a woman is that the former appears, also in the tomb of Meryre II, with the body of a man dressed in pharaonic attire, accompanied by Akhenaten's eldest daughter, Meritaten, at his side as his wife. Nevertheless, a previous "woman-king" of the 18th Dynasty, Maatkare Hatshepsut, was portrayed as a man, as well, and seems also to have taken her own daughter, Neferure, as a symbolic consort. So Nefertiti and Meritaten could arguably have assumed these roles. The question is--why? What is the reason an Egyptian king would bestow so much simultaneous power and responsibility upon his own wife? The most obvious answer would be that Akhenaten was a sick man and trusted only one individual implicitly--Nefertiti. Or, realizing that he was not a popular king, Akhenaten felt beleaguered by troubles at home and abroad and sensed that his days as monarch might be numbered. Therefore, he decided that the best way to safeguard the throne for his small son was to put CONTINUE |