Kemp, who excavated Ranefer's house and the Small Aten Temple, put the sceptical case in "Ranefer's sovereign: who was the last ruler at Amarna?". His points, in his words: the door jamb's cartouches are "immediately followed by a masculine definite article"; the faience bezels "provide a weak basis on which to found a theory that Ankh-kheperura was a female ruler"; the coincidence of the throne name and the queen "creates a case for accepting that Smenkhkara was another name for Nefernefruaten"; "Akhetenhiyes … is her name, the name of a queen", absorbed into her husband's cartouche; the .ti endings on the shrines are second person; and "I am an Occamist by nature". He concludes for "a husband-and-wife very close to Akhenaten (the new queen being Akhenaten's eldest daughter) becoming king and queen immediately following Akhenaten's death", with the female-king reconstruction "possible … but seems to me not very plausible" (Kemp 2016 pp. 13-31).
The report accepts his stratigraphic correction, his caution about bezel spellings, and his reading of the shrine endings, and it scores the masculine article against the female identities. It does not accept the absorption theory, for three reasons. The feminine markers are not confined to bezels: the pectoral carries a feminine "true of voice" after the throne name, and the coffinette and the bracelets carry "her husband" in the personal name, which Kemp himself takes as a woman's phrase. A king's personal-name cartouche that contains his wife's name would be without parallel in Egyptian titulary, whereas a woman ruling under a full male titulary with masculine pronouns has the parallel of Hatshepsut, whose officials wrote "his majesty" of her for years. And the Hermopolis join published after Kemp wrote shows a woman in the blue crown at full royal scale beside a king, in a scene whose caption block names Neferneferuaten. Under the sceptical readings his model still keeps {{P_MALE_SCEP}}%.
Gabolde's reconstruction (1998, unchanged in 2009, 2013 and 2015) is that Nefertiti died before Akhenaten, that Meritaten as the widow wrote to Suppiluliuma, that the Hittite prince Zannanza reached Egypt and reigned briefly as Smenkhkare with Meritaten as his queen, and that after his murder Meritaten reigned as Ankhetkheperure Neferneferuaten "effective for her husband" for up to three years. The case has strengths: Meritaten was King's Great Wife, she was a king's daughter as Manetho's Acencheres is, the epithet "her husband" fits a widow, and Gabolde is the scholar who read the epithet correctly in the first place. Its costs are the box Carter 1k, which names Meritaten as Great Wife beside King Neferneferuaten, so that Gabolde must read the two cartouches as one person, a reading rejected by Murnane, Eaton-Krauss and Krauss, Allen, Dodson and Kemp; the choice of her mother's cartouche name for the new king; the recut of Nefertiti's own cartouche into the king's on UC 410; and the Zannanza equation, which Hornung, Krauss and Warburton call "not probable" and which Laboury's 2019 narrative has silently dropped. Laboury (2002) also rejects the coregency element of Gabolde's model on the principle that "lorsque l'on devient pharaon, on meurt pharaon". The year-16 graffito removed the older argument that Nefertiti had disappeared; the school now has her die between year 16 and year 17 without evidence of the death. The model gives Meritaten {{P_MER}}% on the base readings and {{P_MER_SCEP}}% on the sceptical ones.
Reeves has held since 2001 that Nefertiti became coregent as Neferneferuaten and sole ruler as Smenkhkare, that KV55 is Akhenaten, and that Nefertiti was the widow who wrote to Suppiluliuma; in 2015 he moved her elevation to after year 16 because of the graffito, and in 2023 he re-read the Theban temple name against Dodson. The one-person view has the strongest single argument in the whole debate: two successive kings with one throne name has no parallel, and the model scores that in its favour (E18). Against it stand the clean separation of the two name-sets, the female king shown with a "King's Great Wife" of her own in the Meryre II scene, and the order problem that the Smenkhkare name-set, which he makes the later one, is attested only under the Aten while her Neferneferuaten years include the Amun cult. On KV55 his position needs the osteology to be wrong. The model gives the one-person Nefertiti model {{P_NSI}}% on the base readings and about {{P_NSI_ONE}}% when one-person models are given half the prior.
Krauss first collected the feminine forms in 1978 and argued that they belong to a different person from the male Ankhkheperure who changed his personal name from Smenkhkare to Neferneferuaten; Hornung's chapter in the 2006 chronology handbook states the same: "not only a man Ankhkheprure, but also a woman Ankhetkheprure ruled between Akhenaten and Tutankhamun … The 'funerary' epitheton akhet-en-hies (beneficial for her husband) is hers alone and indicates that she succeeded her husband Ankhkheprure" (Hornung 2006 p. 207). Krauss's 2007 version adds Nefertiti as a regent, not a king, in the months after Akhenaten's death. The model treats this as the second form of the male hypothesis. Its cost is that it needs three bearers of the name Neferneferuaten in a row (Belmonte's objection), a man who took the queen's cartouche name "in honour of Nefertiti", and a widow who took over his exact names with a t added; and it has to read the female co-ruler in the scenes as Queen Nefertiti beside Akhenaten while the caption block names Neferneferuaten. The 2007 article could not be obtained and is known here only through four summaries.
Allen's 2009 candidate was Neferneferuaten-tasherit, coregent then sole ruler, with Smenkhkare after her. The paper remains the best statement of the evidence for a coregency and for the two-ruler rule, and Allen's dating arguments are used throughout this report. The identity failed on the daughter's age, on the adult co-ruler of the scenes, and on the year-16 graffito, which showed that his reason for excluding Nefertiti had gone; he withdrew it in 2016 in favour of Nefertiti, with Smenkhkare before her.
Almost every argument above was made first by someone else. The verdict agrees with Dodson (2009, 2020), Allen (2016) and Kawai (2023), whose position is one side of a live argument, as section 1 shows. The three steps behind that position have separate authors: the recognition of a female ruler in the titulary (Harris 1973 and 1974; Samson's bezels; Krauss 1978 for the collection of the feminine writings; Gabolde 1998 for the epithet, confirmed by Allen and Gabolde in 2004); the separation of the two name-sets into two rulers (Allen 1988); and the identification of the separate female king with Nefertiti (Dodson 2009, with Van der Perre's year-16 graffito; Allen 2016; Kawai 2023). Harris's own Nefertiti was one person who was also Smenkhkare, a different proposition, which this report scores at about {{P_NSI}}%. The coregency case is Allen's (2009), refined by Dietrich (2024) with Johnson's join (2020). The critique of the KV55 age rests on Strouhal and Duhig (2010) and Allen's arithmetic (2009); the cousin model is Gabolde's (2013). The case for Akhenaten as Nibhururiya is Miller's (2007), with the burial-season argument as Belmonte (2013) uses it. Kemp's stratigraphic correction and his caution on bezels are taken from his 2016 article.
This report brings no new evidence. No object was examined and no inscription was checked against the original; every text used is already in print. The newest evidence used here is other people's: Van der Perre's year-16 graffito (2012, 2014), Johnson's 2020 join of the Hermopolis blocks, Willeitner's 2022 edition of the Munich ivory, Kemp's 2016 stratigraphic correction, the 2020 Y-chromosome and mitochondrial results of Gad and colleagues, and Reeves's 2023 re-reading of the TT139 graffito as Dietrich reports it.
What it adds is a way of weighing that evidence. This is the first time all of these items have been scored together, with the scores printed, three readings per item, and the sensitivity beside the headline. The scoring was not validated against anything outside itself (section 4.1), and every percentage above carries the condition stated there. Under that condition the scoring shows two things that the literature read here does not state. The identity question and the Hittite question are nearly independent in the evidence: the Egyptian items alone give the same identity figures as the full set. And the identity verdict survives the removal of any single item, while the Hittite verdict flips under the sceptical readings. The report also records that the jar dockets name a "House of Smenkhkare, [justified]" and a "House of Ankhkheperure" as two estates, which, if the restoration holds, means the plain throne name on its own did not stand for Smenkhkare in the administrative record; this observation was not found in any of the literature read, and it is offered as a suggestion. And it sets side by side, from full readings, the three current defences of a male king (Krauss and Hornung, Kemp, Willeitner) and notes that the newest of them, the Munich ivory, carries only Neferneferuaten's names.
Every source on which an argument depends was sought in full. The lists below give what was actually read. Copies of the texts, and notes recording the page-level findings, accompany this report (section 11).
Primary editions and catalogues: Gardiner, JEA 14 (1928) 10-11 and Newberry, JEA 14, 3-9; Davies, Rock Tombs of El Amarna II (1905), Meryre II chapters; Petrie, Tell el Amarna (1894), Griffith's docket chapter and the bezel chapter; Peet and Woolley, City of Akhenaten I (1923) and Pendlebury, Fairman and Samson, City of Akhenaten III (1951), text volumes; Carter's object cards for 001k, 048h, 254, 256a, 256b, 266g, 405 and the wine jars (Griffith Institute); Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.93-102 (Niese) and Waddell's Manetho, frs 50-53; Güterbock, "The Deeds of Suppiluliuma", JCS 10 (1956), fragments 28 and 31; Federn, JCS 14 (1960); Knudtzon, EA 170 and 155; the Restoration Stela after Helck. Studies: Harris, AcOr 35 (1973) and 38 (1977); Allen, "The Amarna Succession" (2009); Gabolde, "Under a Deep Blue Starry Sky" (2009) and ENiM 6 (2013); Laboury, "Mise au point" (2002), and the two 2019 Liège chapters; Kemp, "Ranefer's sovereign" (2016); Reeves, Akhenaten (2001) chs 8-9, "The Burial of Nefertiti?" (2015), JAEI 7.4 (2015); Dodson, Amarna Sunset (2009) chs 2 and 5, Amarna Sunrise (2014) in part, Nefertiti, Queen and Pharaoh (2020) preface, chs 3-5 and notes; Dietrich, CRE 2023 (2024); Willeitner, MAAT 23 and 24 (2022); Miller, AoF 34 (2007); Devecchi and Miller (2011); Strouhal and Duhig, Anthropologie 48 (2010); Elliot Smith (1912) entry 61075; Davis, The Tomb of Queen Tîyi (1910) in part; Marchant, Nature 472 (2011); Gad et al., HMG 2021; van Dijk (2009); Lightbody (2021); Bartos, ENiM 14 (2021) in part.
Van der Perre, JEgH 7 (2014), publisher abstract; Hawass et al., JAMA 2010, full text but not the figure; Lorenzen and Willerslev and the reply (2010), opening paragraphs; Habicht et al. (2016), abstract; Hornung, Krauss and Warburton (2006), pp. 36, 206-208, 492-493; Belmonte (2013), the sections on Krauss, the eclipse and the DNA; Dorman (2009), conclusions; Sousa, Pieke and Bagh (2024), the Broschat chapter in part; Dodson 2020b, publisher abstract; Tawfik, Thomas and Hegenbarth-Reichardt (2018), abstract.
Allen, JARCE 25 (1988), GM 141 (1994) and GM 249 (2016); Harris, AcOr 36 (1974) and 1992; Samson's papers and book; Reeves 2019, 2022, 2023 and BES 19 (2014); Dodson 2018 revised Amarna Sunset and Fs Kemp (2009); Van der Perre (2012); Johnson KMT 26 (2015) and Fs Hawass (2020); Kawai (2023); Gabolde 1990, 1998, 2005, 2015; Krauss 1978, 1989, 1997, 2007, 2008; Murnane 1995, 2001; Eaton-Krauss and Krauss, BiOr 58 (2001); Eaton-Krauss 2016; Helck 2001; Laboury 2010; Kemp and Stevens 2010; Loeben 1986, 1994, 1999; Bovot 1999; Beinlich and Saleh 1989; Roeder 1969 and its plates; Engelbach 1940; Bryce 1990; van den Hout 1994; Stempel 2007; Theis 2011; Stavi 2015; Gad et al. 2020; Bommas 2025; Belmonte 2022; Tawfik et al. 2018 body; Hawass and Saleem 2016.
These files accompany the report.