3. The candidate successions

The reconstructions in the literature differ on four things: who Neferneferuaten was, where Smenkhkare stands, whether she was made coregent by a living Akhenaten, and how the KV55 body and the Hittite king fit in. The model treats these as separate questions and lets each combination compete. Thirteen successions are defined: four identities for Neferneferuaten (Nefertiti, Meritaten, the child Neferneferuaten-tasherit, or a man, meaning Smenkhkare renamed) crossed with four placements of Smenkhkare (the same person; a separate king who was Akhenaten's coregent and died first; a separate king who reigned after Akhenaten and before her; a separate king who reigned after her), with the male identity allowed only as the same person. Combinations that no scholar defends are kept in at the same starting weight as the rest, so that the scholars' preferences do not enter through the starting weights.

Table 2. The thirteen candidate reconstructions and who defends each. Compiled for this report from the works cited in sections 7 and 10.

Laboury's 2019 narrative for the Liège exhibition is the current wording of the Meritaten school: Nefertiti dies before Akhenaten, Meritaten is crowned "à l'instar de son aïeule Hatshepsout" (after the example of her ancestor Hatshepsut, the woman who had ruled Egypt as king more than a century earlier) and reigns under three years, then Tutankhaten; Smenkhkare is not mentioned at all (Bayer and Laboury 2019 pp. 125-126). Krauss's 2007 sequence, known here only through Miller, Belmonte and Dietrich, is a regent Nefertiti after Akhenaten's death, a male king Smenkhkare who renamed himself Neferneferuaten and reigned into year 3, and then his widow Meritaten as the feminine Ankhetkheperure. Kemp's 2016 version is simpler: one male king Smenkhkare, also written Neferneferuaten, whose queen Meritaten's name "Devoted to her husband" was absorbed into his second cartouche.

4. The weighing

4.1 Method

Each attestation in section 2, and each of the KV55 and Hittite items in sections 5 and 6, is scored against every candidate reconstruction on a coarse scale: 1 when the reconstruction expects it, 0.6 to 0.8 when the item is mildly unexpected, 0.3 to 0.5 when it is surprising, 0.1 to 0.2 when it is very surprising, and 0 when the reconstruction rules it out. Every score is given three times. The base score is this report's judgement. The sceptical score is, for every item, the reading least favourable to a female Neferneferuaten and to Nefertiti that a named scholar defends. The generous score is the most favourable. For each reconstruction the scores are multiplied together, the products are scaled to add up to 100, and the figure for any single question (was she Nefertiti?) is the sum over the reconstructions that answer it that way. Every one of the 234 allowed combinations starts with the same weight; four other starting weightings are run as well. Two hard rules apply: a female Smenkhkare cannot be the KV55 man, and the Hittite king Nibhururiya can be Smenkhkare only if Smenkhkare died as a reigning king with a widow, which rules out the one-person reconstructions and Dodson's coregent. A few items are scored across two questions at once, for example the widow's plea "a son I have not" against the parentage of Tutankhaten.

Every percentage in this report is a judgement, and depends on three choices: which reconstructions were allowed to compete (13 successions, three identities for the KV55 body, three for the Hittite king, coregency or not), which 30 items were scored, and what score each item was given under each reconstruction. A different scholar would make different choices and get different numbers. The sceptical and generous columns and the table in 4.4 show how much the answers move when the choices change; they test the scoring against alternatives and do not compare it with anything outside the scoring. The scoring is not validated by the fact that its result agrees with a view many specialists hold. The whole score table is therefore printed below, and the code and the score file accompany this report (section 11), so that any line can be changed and the model re-run. Care was taken not to count one observation twice under two names: the oddity of a female king who has a "Great Royal Wife" is scored once (E07) and not again on the box (E06), and Smenkhkare's Aten-only record is scored once (E07) and only faintly again through the order argument (E10).

4.2 The scores

Each row gives the item, the states it bears on, and the base / sceptical / generous scores. Bars show the base score.

Table 3. The full score table: every item, every reconstruction it bears on, and its base, sceptical and generous scores. Made for this report; the last column names the evidence behind each score.

4.3 Results

Table 4. Results of the scoring under five settings. Made for this report from the scoring described in 4.1 and 4.2.

The identity verdict comes entirely from the Egyptian material: a run on the Egyptian items alone gives Nefertiti {{P_NEF_EG}}%, the same as the full model, and a run on the Hittite items alone leaves the identities at their prior. So the answer on Nefertiti does not depend on who Nibhururiya was; rejecting Miller's reading of the Hittite texts leaves the identity figures unchanged. The one-person models survive only when several independent items are read in their favour at once (the sceptical column gives them {{P_SAME_SCEP}}%), because they must explain the feminine forms, the name, the "her husband" epithet, the recut of a queen's cartouche into the king's, and the female co-ruler in the scenes. The {{P_BEFORE}}% for "before" rests on three thin items (the Aten setting of Smenkhkare's only scene, the pairing of his names with Akhenaten's on the jar Carter 405, and his absence from the Amun contexts), each of which Allen in 2009 explained the other way.

4.4 What each item does

The figure and the table below re-run the scoring with one item removed at a time. The figure draws the Nefertiti column as bars; the table gives every column.

Table 5. The same scoring with one item removed at a time. Made for this report from the leave-one-out run of the scoring.

The eight most probable complete combinations, one per line:

5. KV55 and the DNA in 2026

Tomb 55 in the Valley of the Kings, opened by Ayrton for Theodore Davis in January 1907, held a gilded shrine of Queen Tiye, a coffin of the feathered (rishi) type made for Kiya and re-worked for a king with the cartouches cut out, four canopic jars made for Kiya, four inscribed clay bricks of the kind placed in a burial for its protection (magic bricks) naming Akhenaten, clay sealings stamped with Tutankhamun's name, and a male skeleton. The identification of the body depends on the age at death. The table lists every published estimate with its basis.

Table 6. Published estimates of the age at death of the KV55 skeleton. Compiled for this report from the examiners' publications named in the first column; the editions are listed in section 10.

Akhenaten had a daughter by about his second year and reigned seventeen years, so he was at least thirty at death on any normal reckoning; Gabolde's 26-27, which assumes accession as a boy of ten, is the lowest figure anyone defends (Gabolde 2009 p. 12). Only the two indirect estimates reach that. The inscribed material points the other way: the bricks are Akhenaten's, the coffin's foot text was altered so that Akhenaten speaks, and no object in the tomb names Smenkhkare. Dodson's solution is that a king who died young was buried with his elder brother's prepared equipment, later disturbed and re-sealed under Tutankhamun (Dodson 2020 pp. 47-48).

The 2010 study by Hawass, Gad and colleagues typed eight short repeated segments of DNA (microsatellites, the markers used in paternity tests) in eleven mummies and published a family tree in which KV55 and the "Younger Lady", an unnamed woman found in tomb KV35 in 1898, are both children of Amenhotep III and Tiye, and are the parents of Tutankhamun (JAMA 303, 2010, 638-647). The study's own identification of KV55 as Akhenaten rests on the CT age. Three things about the genetics have not changed since 2010. No laboratory outside Hawass's team has typed any of these mummies; the "replication" the study reports was a second laboratory in Cairo working for the same team. The raw instrument traces (electropherograms) have never been released, and the method, fragment-length fingerprinting rather than sequencing, was criticised at the time by the geneticists Eline Lorenzen and Eske Willerslev because it cannot rule out contamination by sequence (JAMA 303, 2010, 2471; Marchant, Nature 472, 2011). Gad and colleagues added in 2020 the lineage markers of the Y chromosome (passed from father to son) and of mitochondrial DNA (from mother to child), again from the same team. If the microsatellite readings are authentic, they show that KV55 is a son of Amenhotep III and Tiye and the father of Tutankhamun; they cannot tell Akhenaten from a brother, and the choice between the two rests on the age estimates. Gabolde (2013) showed that the same eight-locus profile fits a double first cousin of Akhenaten as well as a sister, and on that basis keeps Nefertiti as Tutankhamun's mother. Belmonte, Bommas (2025) and others take the Younger Lady as a daughter of Amenhotep III and KV55 as Smenkhkare. The promised results on two unidentified female mummies from tomb KV21, announced by Hawass every year since 2022, had not appeared by January 2026. The model scores the age heavily, the inscriptions moderately, and the DNA only as a bar to KV55 being an outsider to the family.

6. The Hittite record

The Deeds of Suppiluliuma is a history of the king's reign composed by his son and successor Mursili II and preserved in copies of the thirteenth century BC (the tablets carry publication numbers such as KBo 5.6). Its seventh tablet tells the story, in Güterbock's translation:

"While my father was down in the country of Carchemish, he sent Lupakki and Tarhunta-zalma forth into the country of Amka. So they went to attack Amka and brought deportees, cattle and sheep back before my father. But when the people of Egypt heard of the attack on Amka, they were afraid. And since, in addition, their lord Nibhururiya had died, therefore the queen of Egypt, who was Dahamunzu, sent a messenger to my father and wrote to him thus: 'My husband died. A son I have not. But to thee, they say, the sons are many. If thou wouldst give me one son of thine, he would become my husband. Never shall I pick out a servant of mine and make him my husband! … I am afraid!'" (Güterbock, JCS 10, 1956, p. 94)

Carchemish was a city on the Euphrates that Suppiluliuma was besieging; Amka is the Beqaa valley in what is now Lebanon, then under Egyptian control. Suppiluliuma spent the winter at home and sent his chamberlain to Egypt; "when it became spring" the chamberlain returned with the Egyptian envoy Hani and a second letter: "Had I a son, would I have written about my own and my country's shame to a foreign land? … He who was my husband has died. A son I have not! … To me he will be husband, but in Egypt he will be king." Hani confirms it: "Nibhururiya, who was our lord, died; a son he has not. Our lord's wife is solitary. We are seeking a son of our Lord for the kingship in Egypt" (KBo 14.12 iv 13-25; the name is written Ni-ip-ḫu-ru-ri-ia-aš at iv 18, the only copy of the earlier passage having a faulty Pí-ip-). A prince, Zannanza, was sent and killed on the way; the Hittite reprisal in Amka brought back prisoners and, with them, the plague that killed Suppiluliuma and his heir (a prayer of Mursili known as the Second Plague Prayer, CTH 378.2 §4). "Dahamunzu" is not a name: the orientalist Walter Federn showed in 1960 that it renders the Egyptian title tꜣ ḥmt nsw, "the king's wife".

Güterbock identified Nibhururiya with Nebkheperure Tutankhamun, and most specialists in Hittite history and most handbooks still do (Bryce 1990; Klinger 2006; Freu 2004; Dodson 2020). The case for Akhenaten, Neferkheperure, was made in detail by Miller (2007) and rests on four things. A fragment of Mursili's own year-by-year record, which Miller joined to another (KUB 19.15 + KBo 50.24), has an Egyptian commander Armaa, that is Horemheb, the general who later became king, acting in Syria as a non-king in Mursili's seventh to ninth years, which is hard to fit if Tutankhamun died only a decade or so earlier and Ay, his successor, reigned four years; Stempel (2007) and Theis (2011), cited by Dodson, dispute it, and neither could be read. The Deeds put the king's death in the campaigning season, late summer or autumn, and Hani's return in spring; the floral collars in Tutankhamun's tomb put his burial in March or April and so his death, seventy days earlier, in winter, which Trevor Bryce, the historian of the Hittites, explains by a six-month delay while the widow negotiated. The raid on Amka by Lupakki matches a letter in the archive of diplomatic tablets found at Amarna in 1887, numbered EA for El-Amarna, that reports "troops of Hatti under Lupakku have captured cities of Amqu" (EA 170), and the envoy Hani appears in three other Amarna letters; the archive is Akhenaten's, with at most the first year or two of his successors. The fourth is the name: Nib- is the plain rendering of Neb-, while Nefer- appears in the same archive as Nap-; Miller argues that EA 9, addressed to a Nibhurrereya, is nevertheless a letter to Akhenaten. Smenkhkare, proposed by Wilhelm and Boese in 1987 from their compressed chronology of Suppiluliuma's reign, needs Nib- to be a confusion for Ankh-, and neither Miller nor the handbooks adopt it. The model gives Akhenaten {{P_NB_AKH}}% on the base readings and Tutankhamun {{P_NB_TUT_SCEP}}% on the sceptical ones; the question is unsettled.

Whoever the king was, the widow's identity follows from him and from the Egyptian succession, and the Hittite side cannot separate Nefertiti from Meritaten. If Nibhururiya is Akhenaten and Neferneferuaten was already coregent, the letter is odd, because a woman who was already king asked for a foreign prince to be king; Reeves's answer is that she sought a consort to secure a position she could not hold alone. If Nibhururiya is Tutankhamun, the Hittite texts say nothing about the interval at all, and the widow is Ankhesenamun, who is later paired with Ay, Tutankhamun's successor, on a finger ring. Both sets of difficulties are scored in section 4 (items D01 to D08).