Egypt · the end of the Amarna period
Who ruled Egypt between Akhenaten and Tutankhamun: was the king Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten a woman, and was she Nefertiti; was Smenkhkare a separate king, and did he reign before or after her; whose body lies in tomb KV55; and which Egyptian king's widow wrote to the Hittites asking for a husband?
What happened. Akhenaten, the king of Egypt who replaced the old gods with the sun disc, the Aten, and built a new capital at Amarna, died in the seventeenth year of his reign, about 1336 BC, and within a few years the boy Tutankhamun was king and the old gods had been restored. An Egyptian king had two main names, a throne name taken on accession and a personal name, each written inside an oval ring called a cartouche, and between the two reigns the monuments show two pairs of royal names (name-sets) sharing one throne name, Ankhkheperure: one pair belongs to a king Smenkhkare, shown once with Akhenaten's eldest daughter Meritaten, who held the chief queen's title of King's Great Wife, as his queen; the other belongs to a king Neferneferuaten, which had been the name of Akhenaten's chief wife Nefertiti, and some of its writings carry feminine endings. Jar labels at Amarna are dated to years 1 to 3 of a reign that followed Akhenaten's, and an ink inscription in a tomb at Thebes, the old religious capital in the south (modern Luxor), is dated to year 3 of Neferneferuaten and praises Amun, the god Akhenaten had suppressed. In 1907 a small tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the royal cemetery at Thebes, numbered KV55, was found to hold a coffin with its names cut out and the skeleton of a man whose age at death has been disputed ever since, and the Deeds of Suppiluliuma, a Hittite chronicle found in the ruins of the Hittite capital in central Turkey (the Hittites were the other great power of the day), records that the widow of an Egyptian king it calls Nibhururiya wrote to the Hittite king Suppiluliuma asking for a son to marry and make king of Egypt.
Why it is a mystery. Later kings erased the Amarna period from their records, so no surviving text says who Neferneferuaten was, whether the two name-sets belonged to one ruler or two, in which order they reigned, whose body lies in KV55, or which king's widow wrote to the Hittites, and Egyptologists have disagreed about the answers since the 1970s. Aidan Dodson of the University of Bristol (2009, 2020), James Allen, an American Egyptologist who showed in 1988 that the two name-sets never appear together on one object (the plain throne name goes only with Smenkhkare, the throne name extended by a phrase naming Akhenaten only with Neferneferuaten) and who accepted the identification in 2016, and Kawai, an Egyptologist, in a paper of 2023, hold that Neferneferuaten was Nefertiti reigning as king and that Smenkhkare was a separate man, whereas John Harris, a British Egyptologist (1973), Julia Samson, who worked on the Amarna finds of the excavator Flinders Petrie, and Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist best known for proposing in 2015 that Nefertiti's burial lies behind a wall of Tutankhamun's tomb, hold that Nefertiti bore both name-sets in turn. Marc Gabolde, of the University of Montpellier, who in 1998 read a phrase in her name as "effective for her husband", and Dimitri Laboury, of the University of Liège, make the female king Meritaten; Rolf Krauss, of the Berlin museum, Erik Hornung, of Basel, who with Krauss edited the standard handbook of Egyptian chronology in 2006, Barry Kemp, who has directed the excavation of Amarna since 1977, and Joachim Willeitner, a German Egyptologist, keep one male king and read the feminine writings as his widow's or as misreadings; Allen's 2009 paper proposed a young daughter, Neferneferuaten-tasherit, a view he gave up in 2016; and Charlotte Dietrich, whose survey of 2024 is the most recent map of the debate, accepts that Akhenaten and Neferneferuaten reigned together and leaves her identity open. On the body in KV55, the 2010 CT-scan and DNA study of the royal mummies led by Zahi Hawass, then head of Egypt's antiquities service, made the man a son of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten's father, and the father of Tutankhamun, put his age at 35 to 45 and called him Akhenaten, and Reeves and Gabolde agree, while every examiner who has handled the bones, from the anatomists of 1910 to Eugen Strouhal, a Czech physician and anthropologist, in 1998 and Corinne Duhig, a British specialist in human remains, in 2010, has put the age under 27, which makes him a younger brother of Akhenaten, and Dodson, the chronologist Juan Antonio Belmonte and the Egyptologist Martin Bommas take that side; on the widow, Hans Güterbock, who published the Hittite chronicle in 1956, identified the dead king with Tutankhamun, which makes the widow his queen Ankhesenamun, a third daughter of Akhenaten, and most handbooks follow him, but Jared Miller, a specialist in Hittite texts at the University of Munich, argued in 2007 that the dead king was Akhenaten, which makes the widow Nefertiti or Meritaten, and Gabolde agrees.
How it was judged. The full report, linked from this page, collected 30 pieces of evidence (items), 18 from Egypt, four on the KV55 body and eight from the Hittite texts, and quoted each from its original publication, with a marker beside each modern study saying whether it was read in full, in part, or only through other authors' citations; it listed the thirteen reconstructions of the succession (the order of reigns) that scholars have proposed, added the combinations that no one defends so that the starting weights did not favour the views scholars have argued for, and scored each item for how well each reconstruction accounts for it. Each score was set three times, once as the report's own reading (the readings adopted), once as the reading least favourable to a female king that a named scholar defends (the sceptical readings) and once as the most favourable (the generous readings); the scores for each reconstruction (each from 1, expected, to 0, impossible) were multiplied together and the products scaled to add up to 100, the results were re-run under five starting weightings (the weight each reconstruction starts with before the evidence is scored) and with each item removed in turn, and the full score table, the code and the score file accompany the report. On the readings adopted, Neferneferuaten was Nefertiti at about 89%, and still 50% on the sceptical readings; Smenkhkare was a separate man (94%) and probably reigned first (80%); Nefertiti was probably made king while Akhenaten still lived (68%); the KV55 body is most probably Smenkhkare (61%); and the Hittite king is Akhenaten at 68% on the readings adopted but Tutankhamun at 80% on the sceptical ones, so that question is left open. Removing any single item leaves Nefertiti as the most probable identity; the percentages are the report's judgements expressed as numbers, which depend on the reconstructions admitted and on the scores given, and a single object joining the extended throne name with the name Smenkhkare, or a feminine form with the plain throne name, would collapse the two-ruler rule (that the two name-sets never share an object) and bring the one-person readings back at once.
King Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten was a woman, and she was Nefertiti: about 89% on the readings adopted. Smenkhkare was a separate, short-lived male king (about 94%), most probably before her.
The identity verdict agrees with a well-supported position inside a live debate. The percentages are judgements written as numbers: every one depends on which reconstructions were allowed to compete, which 30 pieces of evidence were counted and how each was scored, and the range beside the headline shows how far the figure moves under other readings and does not check the scoring against anything outside it. The identity and the order are probable rather than demonstrated, the Hittite king and his widow remain undecided, and no part of the case is treated as settled.
Nefertiti's 89% sits between 50% and 97% when every disputed item is read the way its most sceptical or its most generous specialist reads it, and it survives the removal of any single item: the box from Tutankhamun's tomb (numbered 1k by Howard Carter, who cleared the tomb from 1922) that names Akhenaten, Neferneferuaten and the King's Great Wife Meritaten as three people moves it most, and without it the figure falls to 69%; dropping the argument from her name costs 13 points. Smenkhkare was most probably before her (about 80% before, 14% after), though whether he was a coregent who died before Akhenaten or Akhenaten's immediate successor is not decided by the evidence (48% / 32%), and the 80% for before rests on three thin items (the Aten setting of Smenkhkare's only carved scene, the pairing of his names with Akhenaten's on the jar numbered 405 by Carter, and his absence from the Amun contexts), each of which Allen in 2009 explained the other way. Nefertiti was probably made king while Akhenaten lived, in his last year or so (about 68%), and reigned into a year 3 of her own (the graffito, an ink inscription, in Theban tomb 139, a priest's tomb at Thebes).
The body in tomb KV55 is most probably Smenkhkare, a younger brother of Akhenaten (about 61%); Akhenaten about 21%; another son of Amenhotep III about 17%. Every examiner who has handled the bones puts the age at death under 27, with estimates running from 19 to 26, and that drives the figure; the only higher figures, 30 to 35 and 35 to 45, come from an X-ray survey and from the 2010 CT scans, whose criteria have never been published. Nibhururiya, the dead Egyptian king of the Hittite Deeds of Suppiluliuma, is not identified: Akhenaten about 68% on the readings adopted, Tutankhamun about 80% on the sceptical readings. His widow is therefore Nefertiti 44% / Meritaten 36% / Ankhesenamun 21%, with no winner.
The strongest single object against Nefertiti as king is her shabti (a small funerary figurine inscribed for the dead person, to work in their place in the next world) with queenly titles only, in two limestone fragments (Louvre AF 9904 + Brooklyn 33.51), which Allen read as evidence that she died as a queen; Dodson's answer is that burial equipment was made in anticipation of death, so the shabti could predate her elevation, and Bovot (1999), of the Louvre, argued that the pieces belong to two shabtis, one of Nefertiti and one of Meritaten. The strongest single argument in the whole debate belongs to the one-person reading of Harris and Reeves: two successive kings with one throne name has no parallel, so Neferneferuaten and Smenkhkare were one woman. Against it stand the clean separation of the two name-sets, the Meryre II scene (Smenkhkare's single carved scene, in the tomb of Meryre II, steward of Nefertiti's household, at Amarna), which on the one-person reading shows the female king with a King's Great Wife of her own, and the order problem that the Smenkhkare name-set, which Reeves makes the later one, is attested only under the Aten while her Neferneferuaten years include the Amun cult. The one-person Nefertiti keeps about 5% on the readings adopted and 13% when the one-person reconstructions get half the starting weight.
Shares on the readings adopted, from the scoring of 30 pieces of evidence against 13 successions; the bracketed figure is the share under the sceptical readings, or, for the one-person reading, when those reconstructions get half the starting weight. The one-person Nefertiti is counted inside the 89% for Nefertiti, so the rows do not sum to 100. The KV55 body and the Hittite king carry their own figures above.
The report quoted each of its 30 pieces of evidence from its original publication: 18 from Egypt, four on the KV55 body (the skeleton found in 1907 in a small tomb in the Valley of the Kings) and eight on the Hittite texts (the Deeds of Suppiluliuma, a chronicle from the ruins of the Hittite capital). Each modern study is marked as read in full, in part or only through other authors' citations. Harris 1974, Samson 1977, Allen 1988 and 2016, Kawai 2023 and Krauss 1978 and 2007 are known only through other authors; Stempel 2007 and Theis 2011, the two published rebuttals of Miller's argument on the Hittite king, were not read; no object was examined.
The report listed the thirteen reconstructions of the succession (the order of reigns), added the combinations no one defends so that the starting weights did not favour the views argued for, and scored each item for how well each reconstruction accounts for it, from 1 (expected) to 0 (impossible). Each score was set three times: as the report's own reading, as the reading least favourable to a female king that a named scholar defends (sceptical) and as the most favourable (generous). The scores were multiplied together and scaled to add up to 100; the run was repeated under five starting weightings and with each item removed in turn.
Figure 1 shows the Nefertiti figure with each of the 30 scored items removed in turn: each bar runs from the figure with every item counted (89) to the figure with that item left out, and the box from Tutankhamun's tomb moves it most, to 69, while the KV55 and Hittite items leave it almost unchanged. On the Egyptian items alone Nefertiti, Akhenaten's chief wife, stays at 89, the same as the scoring on all 30 items, so the identity does not depend on who the Hittite king was. Figure 2 shows the six main answers under the three readings and under two other starting weightings, one favouring the one-person reconstructions and one the reconstructions that named scholars defend: Nefertiti runs from 50 on the sceptical readings to 97 on the generous, and the figure for Nibhururiya, the dead Egyptian king whose widow wrote to the Hittites, being Akhenaten runs from 17 to 89.
On the readings adopted, King Neferneferuaten, whose names carry feminine endings, was Nefertiti at about 89 in 100, and still 50 on the sceptical readings. Smenkhkare, the other king of the throne name Ankhkheperure, was a separate man (94) who probably reigned first (80). Nefertiti was probably made king while Akhenaten still lived (68). The KV55 body is most probably Smenkhkare (61), because every examiner who has handled the bones puts the age at death under 27. The Hittite question is left open, because the answer flips under the sceptical readings. Removing any single item leaves Nefertiti the most probable identity.
The percentages are the report's judgements expressed as numbers. They depend on which reconstructions were allowed to compete, which 30 items were scored and what score each was given; the sceptical and generous readings test the scoring against alternatives and do not compare it with anything outside the scoring. Any object joining the extended throne name (the throne name lengthened by a phrase naming Akhenaten, which goes only with Neferneferuaten) with the name Smenkhkare, or a feminine form with the plain throne name, would bring the one-person readings back at once.
Already established by others. The identity verdict agrees with the two-ruler Nefertiti position of Aidan Dodson (2009, 2020), accepted by James Allen in 2016 (as footnote 102 of Dodson's 2020 book and footnote 18 of Dietrich's 2024 survey report it) and argued again by Kawai (2023): Nefertiti reigned as King Neferneferuaten, and Smenkhkare was a separate male king, probably earlier. The position was reached in three steps, each disputed at the time. A female ruler in the titulary (the king's formal set of names and titles): Harris 1973, from the regalia (royal insignia) shown with her and the doubling of Nefertiti's cartouche (her name written in two cartouches, like a king's); the feminine t (the -t ending that marks a feminine word in Egyptian) credited to Harris 1974 (by Dodson) or to Julia Samson's ring bezels, the flat faces of glazed finger rings (by Reeves); collected by Krauss 1978, who assigned the feminine writings to a separate queen; settled by Gabolde's 1998 reading of the epithet (the added phrase in her name) "effective for her husband" and the 2004 collations of the coffinettes (the four miniature gold coffins from Tutankhamun's tomb, which Allen and Gabolde each checked against the originals that year). Two rulers: Allen 1988, from the fact that the two name-sets never appear together. The separate female king as Nefertiti: Dodson 2009 and 2020, Allen 2016, Kawai 2023. Harris's own Nefertiti was one person who was also Smenkhkare, a different proposition. On KV55 the verdict sides with the examiners of the bones (Strouhal, Duhig, Ronald Harrison, the Liverpool anatomist who examined them in 1966, and Joyce Filer, who examined them at the British Museum in 2000), Allen's arithmetic on Akhenaten's age at death (a daughter by about his second year and a reign of 17 years put him past the age the bones show), Dodson, Belmonte and Bommas, against the 2010 CT age and Gabolde. On Nibhururiya it leans with Miller 2007 against the Tutankhamun identification that most handbooks print, with low confidence.
What historians have said. Until the 1970s everything under the name Ankhkheperure was assigned to one young man, Smenkhkare. John Harris (1973) argued for a female ruler and identified her with Nefertiti, but kept Smenkhkare and Neferneferuaten as one person. James Allen (1988) separated the two name-sets into two rulers, a theory that Dodson says met "by no means universal acceptance". Aidan Dodson (2009, 2020), Allen (2016) and Kawai (2023) identify the separate female king with Nefertiti; Charlotte Dietrich (2024) accepts that Akhenaten and Neferneferuaten reigned together and leaves the identity open. Against them, Nicholas Reeves (2001, 2015, 2023) makes Neferneferuaten Nefertiti but Smenkhkare her later name; Marc Gabolde (1998 onwards) and Dimitri Laboury (2002, 2010) make her Meritaten; Rolf Krauss (1978, 2007), Erik Hornung (2006), Barry Kemp (2016) and Joachim Willeitner (2022) keep one male king; Allen's 2009 paper made her the daughter Neferneferuaten-tasherit. On the other two questions, the 2010 CT study makes the KV55 body Akhenaten, and most handbooks make the Hittite king Nibhururiya Tutankhamun; both remain disputed.
The verdict takes a side that named scholars already hold. It agrees with Dodson, Allen and Kawai on the identity, and less firmly on the order, against Gabolde and Laboury, against Krauss, Hornung, Kemp and Willeitner, against Reeves's one person and against Allen's 2009 daughter. That agreement does not test the scoring. On KV55 it sides with the examiners of the bones against the 2010 CT age: the body is probably not Akhenaten, who keeps about 21% on the readings adopted and 32% on the sceptical ones. On the Hittite question it leans with Miller 2007 against the Tutankhamun identification that most handbooks print, but the answer flips under the sceptical readings, so no winner is claimed.