Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [116]
The skeleton can’t be Akhenaton. I stick to that. We can’t prove yet that the remains are those of Smenkhkare, but the circumstantial evidence certainly points to him. No other royal prince of the Amarna house is known. Blood groupings and the unusual shapes of this skull and that of Tutankhamon suggest a close relationship between the two men—full brothers, or father and son. Smenkhkare seems to have died after a reign so short that there may not have been time to prepare his full funerary regalia, hence the necessity of remaking a coffin and a set of canopic jars intended for someone else. The funerary equipment in Tomb 55 is a motley enough collection; it implies a hasty, perhaps secret, burial. And yet there is a contradiction here; some of Smenkhkare’s burial furniture was taken over by Tutankhamon, including the latter’s second coffin. If Smenkhkare had all that good stuff (the second coffin isn’t solid gold, but it is absolutely beautiful), why wasn’t he allowed to use it? It wasn’t very nice of Tutankhamon to steal his presumed brother’s grave goods. Of course he may not have had anything to say about it, being dead when the final arrangements were made.
This brings us to the interesting question: Who precisely was this boy, the most widely known king of ancient Egypt, whose treasures still draw overflowing crowds to the museums where his traveling exhibits are displayed?
Despite the thousands of words that have been written about him, all we really know for sure was that he was Akhenaton’s son-in-law, married to Akhenaton’s third daughter, Ankhesenpaaton. Unlike the girls, he is not described as the offspring of Nefertiti. A recently discovered inscription makes it fairly certain that he was a king’s son; but which king was his father?
The obvious answer would seem to be Akhenaton. However, Tutankhamon was related in some fashion to Amenhotep III, and a vociferous party of Egyptologists want to make that gentleman Tutankhamon’s sire. In order to do this, it is necessary to accept the long coregency theory. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I will explain.
Tutankhamon was nine years old when he became king, which means he was born before, but not too long before, Akhenaton’s year twelve. If Amenhotep had been dead for twelve years by then, he could hardly have fathered a child.
I have, of course, no objection to stating my own opinion; I think Tutankhamon was Akhenaton’s son by a lesser wife. It was always a safe assumption that he had some; we know that he took over certain members of his father’s harem, including the younger Mitannian princess Tadukhepa. But not until the 1950s did we discover the lady named Kiya. She has now become one of the most popular characters in the Amarna drama, and Egyptologists keep finding her all over the place—in certain reliefs that had been formerly identified as those of princesses, and on the canopic jars and coffin found in KV55. It is hard to know precisely what her position was, for her titles are unique. She was never chief wife; Nefertiti held on to that title throughout, and Kiya’s name is not written in a cartouche. Her titulary, if it can be called that, contains no flattering epithets or formal titles. It starts out “greatly beloved wife of” and ends with her name, Kiya; in between is a long string of Akhenaton’s names and titles. I leave it to the reader to deduce what, if anything, this implies about the relationship.
Kiya’s titles make her the leading candidate for the original owner of the coffin in KV55. Was she the mother of Tutankhamon? If so, Akhenaton must have been his father. Was he also the father of Smenkhkare? Was Kiya the latter’s mother? She was for a time high in favor with Akhenaton; the birth of a prince and heir, after all those daughters, might have raised her to prominence