Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [113]
As my little chart indicated, her exact antecendents are uncertain. She was not a king’s daughter. One popular theory makes her the daughter of Ay, one of Akhenaton’s councilors. Like Yuya before him, he was called “Father of the God”; but this title was held by officials who were not the king’s father-in-law, and it has always seemed to me that this is a rather indirect way of describing such a relationship. His wife, another Tiye, has the title of wet nurse to the queen, which makes it unlikely that Nefertiti was Tiye’s child. The child of a first wife, raised by the second? Maybe so, though in that case “wet nurse” is surely not to be taken literally. (Figure it out; wives one and two giving birth at approximately the same time, and wife number two passing her own infant on to some other female?) In fact, the position of royal wet nurse was probably honorific, and a high honor it was. Tutankhamon’s nurse had a very nice tomb of her own, and so did Hatshepsut’s.
Nefertiti shared her husband’s beliefs and worshiped Aton at his side. The reliefs of the Aton temple at Thebes show her prominence in the cult. These reliefs come from very early in the reign, and Nefertiti appears without her husband in many of them, worshipping on her own account. What happened, then, to explain Nefertiti’s disappearance from the records? Did she die, or did she fall from grace? The so-called evidence is found at Amarna, where, in certain places, Nefertiti’s name and titles were cut out and replaced by those of a king named Smenkhkare and his wife Meritaton, who was the eldest of Akhenaton’s daughter. Akhenaton showered attentions on his young coregent, giving him the name which had been Nefertiti’s—Neferneferuaton.
Or did he? Sometimes I really become irritated with Egyptologists. The narrative I have repeated was a perfectly reasonable, interesting interpretation, accepted by the majority of scholars. In recent years it’s been challenged, not by one alternative theory but by several. The most provocative is that there never was a male king named Smenkhkare. Neferneferuaton was always Nefertiti, who became coregent with her husband and, in an infuriating fashion, kept changing her names: Ankhkheperure, Smenkhkare. Her disappearance from the scene was not caused by death or a fall from favor, but by her transformation from queen to king and coruler.
That there was a female king named Ankhkheperure seems indicated by a few examples of the name with a female ending—Ankhetkheperure. An alternative theory (you might have known there would be an alternative theory) agrees that Nefertiti did rule alongside her husband for a while, but that she was succeeded by the male king Smenkhkare. Another one (you might have known there would be another one) claims that Ankhetkheperure was Meritaton, who reigned briefly after the death of her husband.
I may as well give you my opinion, since, at the rate of sounding conceited, it is as good as that of most other people. I am willing to concede the possible existence of a female pharaoh, but I won’t give up Mr. Smenkhkare.
In 1907 Theodore Davis, a wealthy American archaeological amateur, came upon a burial in the Valley of the Kings. Within a small unadorned chamber in the rock was a mummiform coffin and a scanty, hastily assembled collection of funerary objects. The coffin was in sad condition; moisture within the chamber had rotted the wooden bier which had supported it, and its fall, as well as the damp, had greatly damaged the mummy, which seems to have been wrapped in grave clothes rather than bandaged in the conventional fashion. Thieves had ripped the gold mask from the face of the coffin, and the name of the dead person had been cut away from the coffin and from the golden bands that wrapped the body.
The battered coffin wasn’t the only object in the chamber. A set of canopic jars with beautiful portrait heads, and the pieces of a gilded shrine inscribed