Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [114]
Davis’s publication, defiantly entitled The Tomb of Queen Tiyi, maintains his belief, but from the first Egyptologists doubted the identification. Who but Akhenaton himself, they asked themselves, would be so persecuted even in death that his name would be obliterated and his body hastily hidden in a grave that even a courtier would have considered inadequate? So word spread, among interested Egyptologists, that the mummy of the heretic king had been found.
Sober consideration, and a good deal of careful scholarly work, cast doubt upon both identifications. Physical anthropologists performed their detective work on the bones and pronounced them to be those of a young man, younger than Akhenaton must have been at his death. Smenkhkare, the first of Akhenaton’s sons-in-law, fits the age requirements, and for many years this burial was believed to be his.
Recently the whole question of the mummy and the burial arose again, and it may be worthwhile to treat the arguments in some detail, since they illustrate the specialized knowledge and the close attention to minutiae that modern archaeology requires. (They also demonstrates how archaeologists, like other individuals, get stuck on their own theories.)
The inscriptions on the coffin, which are the obvious means of identifying the mummy, are unhappily defaced. They consist of two main sections: a prayer on the footboard, and a series of titles on bands that run down and around the coffin. They are the titles of a king, but in all cases the name has been completely cut away. Certain epithets remain, and they are epithets associated with Akhenaton: “living in truth, the beautiful child of the living Aton,” and so on. Originally the names in the missing cartouches must have been his, but they could have stood as genitives after another name, as for example: “The king’s daughter, Meritaton, daughter of Akhenaton, living in truth,” etc.
Most authorities agree that the coffin was first made for a woman. Later it was altered in order to serve for the burial of a man; the original, presumably female, names have been eliminated. But which man? One would suppose that definitive evidence could be found in the bones themselves. The detective talents of physical anthropologists, some of whom have worked with the police forces of various countries, are well known. It is now possible to tell sex, age, medical history, and other facts from a skeleton. Archaeology calls upon the talents of many specialists; why, then, does not a physician or anthropologist examine these bones and resolve the problem?
Such examinations have been carried out. But the first of them was performed fifty years ago, when techniques were less advanced, and the experts, as often happens, did not agree on all points. They did agree on two basic matters: the bones are those of a man; he was not more than twenty-eight years of age at the time of his death.
This would seem to eliminate Akhenaton, who had fathered at least one child before he mounted the throne, and who ruled for seventeen years. But here we have another example of how preconceptions (dare we call them prejudices?) corrupt scholarly conclusions. Judging from his statues, Akhenaton may have suffered from some sort of disease. The archaeologists who wanted these bones to be his asked: Could the king have been the victim of an ailment that would alter the parts of the bone structure that determine age?
One of the major criteria used in aging bones (determining the age of their owner, that is) is the evidence of epiphy-seal union. The chief center of bone formation in the shaft of a bone is called the diaphysis. The epiphyses are secondary bone masses at the head of the shaft, connected with the diaphysis by intermediate links of cartilage.