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| his queen into an administrative position superior to that of a mere king's wife. Should Akhenaten fall totally incapable of running the country, Nefertiti, with the aid of Meritaten, now a young lady in her teens, would be at the helm and the situation would not dissolve into anarchy. Retrospectively, this "shoring up" of what may have been a collapsing kingship strikes us as pathetic, theatrical and overly fraught with symbolism and, in the face of a coup, would not have amounted to much. The circumstances of Akhenaten's demise are not known. That he was actually interred in the tomb he made for himself is also questionable--even though it was stated in his "Boundary Stele" that, no matter where death overtook him, his body should be brought back to his beloved Akhetaten. There is a chance that, toward the end of his reign, Akhenaten had married Princess Meritaten, himself, in order to insure that no prospective claimant to the kingship could do so. It is thought that Meritaten even gave birth to a daughter by her own father. So Nefertiti was now no longer styled "Hmt nsw wrt" but "Hmt nsw aAt"--but whether this new wording indicated an elevation or lowering of her status cannot be known. Now we come to the idea that, previous to the disappearance of Akhenaten, he had been associated with another individual named "Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten". This person has been surmised by some to be just another name for Smenkhkare Djeserkeperu and others maintain he/she was yet another co-regent and/or successor. Since "Neferneferuaten" had been one of the names of Nefertiti, those Egyptologists who have assumed the ephemeral co-regent was that lady, saw this as more than a coincidence. Additionally, this prenomen is attested in a feminine form of "Ankh(et)kheperure Neferneferuaten" and, I have no doubt, corresponds to a female ruler of Egypt, mentioned by Manetho in his list of the kings of Egypt, named "Akencheres". Manetho, according to Josephus and others, wrote ""then his daughter Akencheres for 12 years 1 month, then her brother Rathotis for 9 years". I think "Rathotis" is probably Tutankhamun from some memory of his reign, because it is not likely that Manetho ever read the pharaoh's names in cartouches, most of his monuments having been usurped by a successor and he was not included in subsequent kinglists. At any rate, the length of rule given (9 years) for "Rathotis" makes sense as far as we can tell. Deducting these regnal years from the accepted age-at-death of Tutankhamun's mummified remains (18) has led to the conclusion that the king was about eight or nine years old at his accession. CONTINUE |