Nefertiti and Smenkhkare

What happened

Egypt in the mid-fourteenth century BC was the richest power in the Near East. Its king Amenhotep III had reigned for nearly forty years when his son came to the throne, about 1353 BC, as Amenhotep IV. Within a few years the new king had renamed himself Akhenaten, set aside the old gods in favour of one, the disc of the sun, called the Aten, and built a new capital for it on empty desert in Middle Egypt, at the place now called Amarna. His chief wife Nefertiti stood beside him in every scene, sometimes in a king's crown, once striking an enemy in the pose reserved for kings, and from his fifth year she wrote her name as Neferneferuaten Nefertiti. They had six daughters. In his twelfth year the court staged a great reception of foreign tribute, the last dated event that the tombs of his officials record.

After year 12 the dated records become few. A lesser wife, Kiya, disappears after year 11, and her monuments were recut for the daughters. The eldest daughter, Meritaten, took the chief queen's title, King's Great Wife. New royal names appear. An Egyptian king had two main names, each written inside an oval ring called a cartouche: a throne name, taken on accession, and a personal name. Two new pairs of names turn up that share one throne name, Ankhkheperure. One pair belongs to a king with the personal name Smenkhkare, who appears in a single carved scene at Amarna with Meritaten at his side as his queen. The other belongs to a king with the personal name Neferneferuaten, Nefertiti's own name, and some writings of this second pair add the endings that the Egyptian language gives to a woman. Akhenaten died in his seventeenth year, about 1336 BC. Ink labels on wine and oil jars at Amarna, dated by the year of the reigning king, show that someone counted a first, a second and a third year there after his seventeenth. An ink inscription in a tomb at Thebes, the old religious capital in the south (modern Luxor), dates year 3 of King Neferneferuaten and praises Amun, the god Akhenaten had suppressed. There the dated record of the two rulers stops. A boy of about nine, Tutankhaten, was king; the court left Amarna; he renamed himself Tutankhamun and restored the old gods; he died at about nineteen and was buried in the Valley of the Kings, the royal cemetery at Thebes, with a set of gold burial equipment that had been made for Neferneferuaten and re-inscribed for him.

Two modern discoveries added to the evidence. In January 1907 Edward Ayrton, digging in the Valley of the Kings for the American lawyer Theodore Davis, broke into a small undecorated tomb, now numbered KV55. It held a jumble of things from Amarna: a gilded shrine made for Akhenaten's mother Tiye, a coffin made for Kiya and altered for a king, its gold face torn away and its names cut out, and in the coffin a skeleton. Davis announced it as Queen Tiye; the anatomists who examined the bones found a young man. The dispute about him since then has been about his age at death. And in the ruins of the Hittite capital in central Turkey, excavated from 1906, the tablets of a royal chronicle came to light, published in full by Hans Güterbock in 1956. The Hittites were the other great power of the day. Their chronicle records that after the death of an Egyptian king, whose name it spells Nibhururiya, his widow wrote to the Hittite king Suppiluliuma: her husband was dead, she had no son, would he send one of his to marry her and become king of Egypt. He did, after sending an envoy to check that the offer was real. The prince was murdered on the way, and the Hittites answered with a raid into Egyptian territory.

Why it is a mystery, and who says what

The evidence is thin because the Amarna years were deliberately erased. Later kings dismantled the city, hacked the names out of monuments, and left the period out of the official king-lists. What survives is a handful of inscriptions, mostly damaged, and objects that were re-used and re-inscribed. No surviving text states who Neferneferuaten was, whether Smenkhkare came before or after, whether the two pairs of names belonged to one ruler or two, whose body lies in KV55, or which king's widow wrote to the Hittites. Every answer has to be inferred, and Egyptologists have disagreed about the inferences since the 1970s.

The first dispute is the identity of the female king. John Harris, a British Egyptologist, argued in 1973 that Nefertiti had become a king, and Julia Samson, who worked on the Amarna finds of the excavator Flinders Petrie at University College London, found her throne name written with a feminine ending on cheap glazed finger rings. Both held that Nefertiti had borne both pairs of names in turn, and Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist best known for proposing in 2015 that Nefertiti's burial lies behind a wall of Tutankhamun's tomb, still holds that view. James Allen, an American Egyptologist, showed in 1988 that the two pairs of names never appear together and concluded that they belonged to two people. Aidan Dodson, of the University of Bristol, in books of 2009 and 2020 made the case that the second person, the female king, was Nefertiti and the first a younger brother of Akhenaten; Allen accepted the identification in 2016, after a paper of 2009 in which he had proposed a young daughter, and Kawai, in a paper of 2023, argued it again. Marc Gabolde, of the University of Montpellier, who in 1998 read a phrase in her name as "effective for her husband", argues instead that the female king was the eldest daughter Meritaten, a view shared by Dimitri Laboury of the University of Liège. Rolf Krauss, of the Berlin museum, who wrote the first monograph on the period's end in 1978, and Erik Hornung, of Basel, who with Krauss edited the standard handbook of Egyptian chronology in 2006, hold that a single man bore both pairs of names and that the feminine writings belong to his widow. Barry Kemp, who has directed the excavation of Amarna since 1977, argued in 2016 that there was one male king and that the feminine phrase is his queen's name absorbed into his cartouche, and Joachim Willeitner, a German Egyptologist, published in 2022 a small ivory plaque in Munich which he took as a record of a male Smenkhkare. Charlotte Dietrich's survey of 2024, the most recent map of the debate, accepts that Akhenaten and Neferneferuaten reigned together for a time and leaves her identity open.

The second dispute is the body in KV55. Zahi Hawass, then head of Egypt's antiquities service, led a CT-scan and DNA study of the royal mummies in 2010 which made the KV55 man a son of Amenhotep III and the father of Tutankhamun, put his age at 35 to 45, and called him Akhenaten; Reeves and Gabolde agree. Every examiner who has handled the bones, from the anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith in 1910 to the Czech physician and anthropologist Eugen Strouhal in 1998, has put the age under 27, which would make him a brother of Akhenaten, most likely Smenkhkare; Corinne Duhig, a British specialist in human remains, re-scored Strouhal's observations in 2010 and agreed. Dodson, the astronomer and chronologist Juan Antonio Belmonte, and the Egyptologist Martin Bommas take that side.

The third dispute is the widow. Güterbock identified the dead king with Tutankhamun, whose throne name Nebkheperure matches the Hittite spelling best, and most handbooks follow him; that makes the widow Tutankhamun's queen Ankhesenamun, a third daughter of Akhenaten. Jared Miller, a specialist in Hittite texts at the University of Munich, argued in 2007 from the timing of the Hittite campaigns and from a letter in the diplomatic archive found at Amarna in 1887 that the dead king was Akhenaten, which makes the widow Nefertiti or Meritaten; Gabolde holds the same identification, and Krauss had proposed it in the 1970s before giving it up. Two German scholars of the ancient Near East, Gernot Wilhelm and Johannes Boese, proposed Smenkhkare in 1987; neither Miller, who argues for Akhenaten, nor the handbooks that keep Tutankhamun adopt it.

How the case was judged

The report treats the question as a matter of weighing. First it collected every piece of evidence that bears on the succession and quoted each from its original publication: 30 items in all, 18 from Egypt (inscriptions, objects, carved scenes and the ancient king-list), four on the KV55 body (the age estimates, the inscriptions in the tomb, the DNA, and a title on a carved block) and eight on the Hittite texts. Where a modern study could be read in full it was; where it could be had only in part, or only through other authors' citations, the report says so with a code beside the source. Then it listed every reconstruction that any scholar has proposed, thirteen in all, and added the combinations that no one defends, so that the starting weights did not favour the views scholars have argued for. Each piece of evidence was scored for how well each reconstruction accounts for it, on a scale from 1 (expected) to 0 (impossible), and the scores were multiplied together. Because such scores are judgements, each was set three times: once as the report's own reading, once as the reading least favourable to a female king that a named scholar defends, and once as the most favourable. The whole score table is printed in section 4, and the code that produces the numbers accompanies the report.

The results were these. Neferneferuaten was Nefertiti at about 89% on the report's readings, 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%). The Hittite king is Akhenaten at 68% on the report's readings but Tutankhamun at 80% on the sceptical ones, so that question is unsettled. Removing any single piece of evidence leaves Nefertiti as the most probable identity. The percentages are the report's judgements expressed as numbers; they depend on the reconstructions admitted and on the scores given, and a different Egyptologist would set the scores differently. The verdict agrees with the position of Dodson, Allen and Kawai. The verdict is labelled probable: the evidence clearly favours Nefertiti over the other answers but does not prove it, and the other positions listed above are still defended.

What the report covers

Section 1 sets out the two pairs of names and the history of the argument in three steps. Section 2 goes through the twelve groups of evidence that any reconstruction has to fit, quoting the sources. Section 3 lists the thirteen reconstructions that compete, with the scholars who defend each. Section 4 scores the evidence and gives the results, with every score printed and the answers re-run under sceptical and generous readings and with each item removed in turn. Section 5 takes the KV55 skeleton and the DNA. Section 6 takes the Hittite chronicle. Section 7 states the strongest cases against the verdict, in their authors' words. Section 8 lists what would overturn it. Section 9 says what the report adds to the published scholarship, and section 10 lists what was read and what could not be checked. Section 11 lists the files that reproduce every number.

1. The question and the names

The highest year of Akhenaten's reign found on any monument is 17 (Egyptian dates count the years of each king from his accession). Tutankhaten, a boy of about nine, was king by the time the court left Amarna. Between them the monuments show two sets of royal names that share one throne name, Ankhkheperure. The first set is AnkhkheperureSmenkhkare Djeserkheperu, always written without any added phrase (an epithet) in the throne-name cartouche and always with masculine forms. The second set is Ankhkheperure mery-WaenreNeferneferuaten mery-Akhenaten in several variants: the throne name carries an epithet naming Akhenaten by one half or the other of his own throne name Neferkheperure-Waenre (beloved of Waenre, beloved of Neferkheperure) or naming the Aten (beloved of the Aten), and the personal name Neferneferuaten carries beloved of Waenre, beloved of Akhenaten, ruler, or the phrase that Marc Gabolde re-read in 1998 as ꜣḫt n hj.s, "effective for her husband". On a minority of these objects the throne name is written ꜥnḫt-ḫprw-rꜥ with the -t ending that marks a feminine word in Egyptian, the epithet "beloved" as mryt, and the closing formulas with feminine endings. No object joins the epithet-bearing throne name with the name Smenkhkare, and no object joins the plain throne name with the name Neferneferuaten (Allen 1988, restated by Dietrich 2024 p. 101; no exception is known to any source read for this report).

Until the 1970s everything under the name Ankhkheperure was assigned to one young man, Smenkhkare, the supposed brother or son-in-law of Akhenaten. The view tested here, a female king Neferneferuaten beside a separate male king Smenkhkare, was built in three steps by different scholars, and each step was contested when it was made. Harris, who first argued for a female ruler, identified her with Nefertiti but kept Smenkhkare and Neferneferuaten as one person; a female Neferneferuaten beside a separate male Smenkhkare is a later and different proposition.

Step one: a female ruler in the titulary, the set of royal names. Harris argued in 1973, from the royal regalia on colossal statues from Akhenaten's temple at Karnak, the great temple precinct of Thebes, and on two unfinished small stone slabs (stelae) now in Berlin, and from the fact that Nefertiti's name was sometimes written in two cartouches like a king's, that the queen had "attained to the status of kingship" (Harris 1973 p. 13; he had made the suggestion in a short note the same year, GM 4). That paper does not cite the feminine t. The flat faces (bezels) of glazed finger rings reading ꜥnḫt-ḫprw-rꜥ, Ankhetkheperure with the feminine ending, were noticed by Samson among the finds Petrie had brought back from his excavation of Amarna in 1891 and 1892, according to Reeves (2001 p. 171; 2015 n. 31); Dodson credits the first published observation of the feminine ending to Harris's 1974 paper (Dodson 2009 p. 34). Harris 1974 and Samson 1977 could not be obtained for this report. Krauss collected the feminine writings in 1978 and read them as a queen Ankhetkheperure distinct from the king, whom he took to be Meritaten ruling briefly between Akhenaten's death and her husband's accession (Krauss 1978 pp. 29-35, 90, as reported by Dietrich 2024 nn. 14-15 and Dodson 2009 p. 35). Gabolde's re-reading of the epithet in 1998 as "effective for her husband", confirmed in 2004 when Allen and Gabolde each checked the four miniature gold coffins from Tutankhamun's tomb against the originals and read the earlier inscriptions beneath the later ones (a palimpsest), is the reading that settled the sex of the epithet-bearing king for Murnane, Eaton-Krauss and Krauss, Allen, Dodson and Dietrich; in Dodson's words, "the femininity of Neferneferuaten was thus proven beyond doubt" (Dodson 2009 p. 35).

Step two: two rulers under one throne name. Harris, Samson and Krauss all held one king Ankhkheperure who changed name. For Harris the name Smenkhkare was Nefertiti's latest personal name, taken, in Dodson's paraphrase of the 1974 paper, "to mark her status as an independent ruler" (Harris 1973 n. 5; Dodson 2009 p. 35). For Krauss, Smenkhkare was the earlier personal name of a male king who later called himself Neferneferuaten, with the feminine writings belonging to a third ruler. Allen proposed in 1988 that the plain and the extended throne name "could actually belong to different kings", on the observation that the extended throne name never occurs with the personal name Smenkhkare and the plain throne name never with Neferneferuaten (Allen 1988, known here through Allen 2009 and through Dodson 2009 p. 35, who adds that "there was by no means universal acceptance of this theory, with various scholars continuing to argue for a single male or a single female king"). William Murnane, an American Egyptologist, in a review of 2001, Marianne Eaton-Krauss and Krauss in another review of 2001, Gabolde (1998 onwards), Dodson (2009 onwards) and Dietrich (2024) work with two rulers. Reeves (2001, 2015, 2023), Kemp (2016) and Willeitner (2022) still hold one. Krauss (2007) and Hornung (2006) keep a middle position: one male king who bore both personal names, and a separate queen ruling in her own right as Ankhetkheperure.

Step three: the separate female king as Nefertiti. Harris's Nefertiti was a one-person Nefertiti who was also Smenkhkare. Once the two name-sets were separated, the question became which woman bore the second set. Dodson writes that Nefertiti "had been the general assumption since the idea that Neferneferuaten might have been a female was first mooted" (Dodson 2009 pp. 35-36), and within the two-ruler framework the rival candidates were Meritaten (Krauss 1978 for the queen; Gabolde 1998; Laboury 2002, 2010) and, briefly, the young daughter Neferneferuaten-tasherit, "the younger", the fourth of the six (Allen 2009). The case for Nefertiti as the separate female king in its present form is Dodson's (2009, restated 2020). It gained the year-16 quarry inscription found by the Belgian Egyptologist Athena Van der Perre (published 2012, 2014), which shows Nefertiti alive and still queen late in the reign. Allen accepted the identification in 2016 (as reported by Dodson 2020 n. 102 and Dietrich 2024 n. 18), and Kawai argued it again in 2023. That is the position this report's verdict agrees with. The position is contested: Gabolde and Laboury keep Meritaten, Krauss, Hornung, Kemp and Willeitner keep a single male king, Reeves keeps the one-person Nefertiti, and Dietrich leaves the identity open.

Any reconstruction has to answer, at the same time, who she was, in which order the two rulers reigned, whose body lies in tomb KV55, and which king's widow asked the Hittite king for a son. Miller's remark of 2007 still stands: there is at present no reconstruction of the period that fits all the available evidence at once (quoted by Belmonte 2013 p. 423). This report states how well each reconstruction fits and what each fails to explain.

A warning that Harris gave in 1973 applies to everything below: a reference to "Smenkhkare" in older literature is worthless unless the cartouche has been checked, because the name was for decades used for objects that actually carry Neferneferuaten's names (Harris 1973 n. 6). The record cards of Howard Carter, who cleared Tutankhamun's tomb from 1922, call the trappings on Tutankhamun's mummy "of Smenkh-ka-Ra"; the surviving cartouche on them is the epithet-bearing throne name of the female king. Willeitner's 2022 publication of the Munich ivory plaque is headed "an unusual attestation of the pharaoh Smenkhkare"; the ivory carries the names Ankhkheperure mery-Waenre and Neferneferuaten, and the name Smenkhkare is not on it, as Dietrich (2024 p. 101) pointed out.

2. What the record fixes

This section sets out the attestations that every reconstruction has to accommodate, in the order in which they constrain the story. The notes listed in section 11 give the full catalogue (fourteen numbered entries for the Egyptian material, and a dossier each for KV55 and for the Hittite texts) with the exact wording of every source consulted.

2.1 Nefertiti was still queen in year 16

In 2012 Van der Perre found an inscription written in ink, in the cursive script called hieratic, in a limestone quarry at Dayr Abu Hinnis, ten kilometres north of Amarna. It is dated to year 16 of Akhenaten, day 15 of a month of Akhet, the inundation season with which the Egyptian year began, records the extraction of stone for a temple of the Aten, and gives Akhenaten's full titulary followed by the King's Great Wife Neferneferuaten Nefertiti. Dodson's summary is that "on I Akhet 15 of Akhenaten's Year 16 (a little more than a year before his death), Nefertiti was still only King's Great Wife" (Dodson 2020 p. 72). Other summaries print the third month rather than the first, and Van der Perre's full edition (Journal of Egyptian History 7, 2014, 67-108) could not be obtained, so the month is left open here; the day and the year are not in doubt. The text ends the older theories in which Nefertiti died or was disgraced around year 12, and it forces anyone who makes her the king Neferneferuaten to put her elevation in the last year or so of Akhenaten's reign. It was this find that made Allen abandon his daughter-king thesis for Nefertiti (Allen 2016, reported by Dodson 2020 p. 129 n. 102 and by Dietrich 2024 n. 18), and that made Dodson write that "the emerging data have fundamentally altered the author's own views" (Dodson 2020 p. ix). Status: (b) publisher abstract; (a) Dodson 2020 and Reeves 2015 n. 32.

2.2 A king Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten reached a third year, and Amun was being worshipped

The only date by regnal year attached to either pair of names is an ink inscription (a graffito) written over a doorway in the tomb of a priest named Pairi at Thebes (Theban tomb 139). Alan Gardiner, the leading British philologist of his day, published it in 1928; his translation of the opening runs:

"Year 3, third month of inundation, day 10. The King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands, Ankhkheprure beloved of [Neferkheprure], the Son of Re, Nefernefruaten beloved of Wan[re]. Giving praise to Amun, prostration before Onnophris, by the wab-priest, scribe of the divine offerings of Amun in the House of Ankhkheprure in Thebes, Pawah, born of Iotefsonb." (Gardiner, JEA 14, 1928, p. 10)

Onnophris is a name of the god Osiris, and a wab-priest is a junior grade of priest. The throne name is the epithet-bearing form, so the ruler is Neferneferuaten, not Smenkhkare, and she counted at least three years. The text is a hymn to Amun by a priest of Amun; whatever the Amarna religion still meant, the god's cult was functioning openly at Thebes in her third year. Two readings of the temple name divide the literature. Dodson (2020b) took "the House of Ankhkheperure" with its plain throne name to be a memorial temple of a dead Smenkhkare and so an argument that Smenkhkare preceded her. Reeves (2023) re-read the phrase and called the temple a phantom; Dietrich (2024 n. 18) judges his correction convincing. Neither paper could be obtained, and the report does not use the temple name in either direction. What it does use is the observation, first made by Dietrich, that Neferneferuaten is attested in both the Aten and the Amun contexts while Smenkhkare is known only under the Aten, which fits Smenkhkare being the earlier of the two. Status: (a) Gardiner 1928, Newberry 1928, Krauss 2006; (c) Dodson 2020b, Reeves 2023.

2.3 The Amarna jar dockets

Wine, oil and other jars from Amarna carry ink labels (dockets) in hieratic giving the year of the reigning king. Henry Fairman, who published the labels found by the Egypt Exploration Society's excavations of the 1920s and 1930s, established the sequence of years (City of Akhenaten III, 1951, pp. 143-159). Year 17 is Akhenaten's highest. Docket 279 has "year 1" written over "year 17", so "It records, therefore, the first year of an unnamed king which followed the 17th year of another unnamed king. There cannot be any doubt that the latter was Akhenaten" (p. 159): a successor's first year began within the vintage year of Akhenaten's seventeenth. Dockets of years 1, 2 and 3 of a successor exist in quantity at Amarna, then a final year 1 in which the vintners' title changed back to the pre-Amarna form (Krauss 2006 pp. 207-208). Docket 35 reads "House of Smenkhkare, [justified]" and is dated year 1; if the restored word "justified" is right, Smenkhkare was dead in a year 1 that was not his own. Fairman himself doubted whether any value could be attached to the term. Docket 36 names a "House of Ankhkheperure" as a distinct estate, with the plain throne name. The two dockets suggest, though they do not prove, that the estate names distinguished the two rulers by their personal names, and that the plain throne name on its own is not a mark of Smenkhkare. Petrie's finds of 1891-92 gave the same picture: many oil jars of year 2, a few of year 3, and the remark of Francis Llewellyn Griffith, who read the labels for Petrie's report, that "these dates are the only evidence that we have of the duration" of the successor's reign (Petrie 1894 p. 33). Status: (a) Fairman 1951, Petrie 1894, Krauss 2006; the facsimile plates were not seen.

2.4 Smenkhkare with his queen Meritaten

The only carved scene of Smenkhkare is in the tomb of Meryre II, steward of Nefertiti's household, at Amarna (tomb 2), on a wall next to the great tribute scene dated year 12. Karl Richard Lepsius, leading a Prussian expedition, copied the cartouches in the 1840s; they had been smashed by the time Norman de Garis Davies recorded the wall for his publication of the Amarna tombs in 1905. They gave the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Ankhkheperure, the Son of Re Smenkhkare Djeserkheperu, and his King's Great Wife Meritaten, the couple standing under the rays of the Aten. Davies wrote that "it is somewhat difficult to decide whether the design as well as the cartouches belong to" the new reign (Davies 1905 p. 44). A pair of blocks from Memphis, the old administrative capital near modern Cairo, seen there in 1854 by the engineer Joseph Hekekyan and now lost, gave the same three names, as the Egyptologist Percy Newberry recorded (Newberry 1928 pp. 5-6). Kemp's point is right: the year-12 date belongs to the event, not the carving, and "there is no compelling reason on the basis of Meryra II's tomb for doubting that Ankh-kheperura Smenkhkara, married to Meretaten, ruled for a time after Akhenaten's death" (Kemp 2016 p. 15). The scene does not date Smenkhkare; it shows that he was king, that his queen was Akhenaten's eldest daughter, and that his only scene is an Aten scene at Amarna. Status: (a) Davies 1905, Petrie 1894, Newberry 1928, Kemp 2016; (c) Lepsius.

2.5 Akhenaten, Neferneferuaten and Meritaten on one box

A wooden box from the entrance corridor of Tutankhamun's tomb, numbered 1k by Carter (Cairo JE 61500, now Grand Egyptian Museum 354), carries on the strip along its lid a single line of names and titles (a protocol), given here letter by letter in Dietrich's transliteration (2024 p. 100, after Newberry 1928 and Gabolde 1998):

nswt-bjt ꜥnḫ-m-mꜣꜥt nb-tꜣwj (Nfr-ḫprw-rꜥ Wꜥ-n-rꜥ)| zꜣ-rꜥ ꜥnḫ-m-mꜣꜥt nb-ḫꜥw (Ꜣḫ-n-jtn)| ꜥꜣ-m-ꜥḥꜥw.f · nswt-bjt (Ꜥnḫ-ḫprw-rꜥ mry-Nfr-ḫprw-rꜥ)| zꜣ-rꜥ nb-ḫꜥw (Nfr-nfrw-jtn mry-Wꜥ-n-rꜥ)| · ḥmt-nswt wrt (Mryt-jtn)| ꜥnḫ.tj ḏt

"King of Upper and Lower Egypt, living in truth, Lord of the Two Lands Neferkheperure Waenre; Son of Re, living in truth, Lord of Appearances Akhenaten, great in his lifetime. King of Upper and Lower Egypt Ankhkheperure beloved of Neferkheperure; Son of Re, Lord of Appearances Neferneferuaten beloved of Waenre. King's Great Wife Meritaten, may she live for ever."

Two knobs carry the two Neferneferuaten cartouches on their own. The protocol names three people in descending rank. "Great in his lifetime" is an epithet of a living king. Gabolde reads the last cartouche as a further name of the same person as the two before it, so that Meritaten and Neferneferuaten are one person; Murnane (2001), Eaton-Krauss and Krauss (2001), Allen (2009 n. 6: "a reference to two individuals remains the simplest and most transparent interpretation"), Dodson (2020 p. 128: "the apparently insurmountable problem") and Kemp (2016 p. 15: the box "makes it as clear as one could wish that he was married to Akhenaten's eldest daughter") all read three. This report reads three. Status: (a) Carter cards 001k-1 to 4, Newberry 1928, Dietrich 2024, Kemp 2016.

2.6 Akhenaten and Neferneferuaten side by side, twice more, and a female co-ruler in the scenes

A small stone slab, stela UC 410 in the Petrie Museum in London, with a fragment found by the Egypt Exploration Society in 1934 in the Great Palace at Amarna (Cairo JE 64959), has in its top corner two pairs of cartouches, Akhenaten's and Neferneferuaten's, carved on a surface that was scraped down. Under them Gabolde read the traces of an earlier text: the queenly cartouche of Nefertiti and a caption naming a king's daughter (Gabolde 1990; the tracing is reproduced by Kemp 2016 p. 25). Allen had already argued in 1988 that Neferneferuaten's double cartouche was cut over Nefertiti's single one. A second object, the ivory plaque in the Munich museum (ÄS 7342) first published by Willeitner in 2022, gives the later form of the Aten's name, then Lord of the Two Lands Neferkheperure Waenre, Lord of Appearances Akhenaten, then Lord of the Two Lands Ankhkheperure mery-Waenre, Lord of Appearances Neferneferuaten with an epithet that Willeitner reads "beloved of Akhenaten" and Dietrich reads "effective for her husband". The sign group is the one Gabolde re-read in 1998; the two editions have not been collated and the report does not rest on either reading. A third, a carved block reused in the ruins of Hermopolis, the city across the river from Amarna where many blocks from Akhenaten's dismantled buildings ended up (block 826/VIIIA), preserves the Neferneferuaten personal-name cartouche and, in the next column, "[King's] Daughter of his body … Ankhes]enpaaten".

The unfinished stela of the soldier Pase (Berlin ÄM 17813) shows two seated figures of equal size, one in the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt turning to cup the chin of the other, who wears the blue crown, the tall helmet-shaped crown of kings of this period; three empty cartouches stand beside them. Harris counted the cartouches and read the pair as king and queen, and observed that the blue-crowned figure "has rather more obvious breasts, and extends an arm in what is conventionally a woman's embrace", with the concave neckline that Amarna art gives to women (Harris 1973 pp. 7-8). Allen read two kings, one male and one female (Allen 2009 p. 10). Berlin ÄM 20716 shows a figure in the blue crown pouring for a seated ruler in a headcloth; a lump of clay stamped with a seal (a sealing) from the house of Ranefer, an officer at Amarna, shows two crowned figures with sceptres under the Aten. In 2020 Ray Johnson, of the University of Chicago's mission at Luxor, joined block 777/VIII to the Hermopolis pillar block 406/VII; the join adds the torso and head of the second tall figure in the offering scene: "a female with a concave neck wearing a tall, most likely blue, crown with a streamer and a dress knotted underneath her breast", walking beside a king, with a small king's daughter shaking a sistrum, a rattle used in worship, behind them (Dietrich 2024 p. 103, describing Johnson's join). Dietrich, who applies the criteria Murnane laid down for recognising two kings reigning together in a scene, concludes that "the coregency of Akhenaten and Neferneferuaten [is] currently the only Amarnian coregency with substantial and convincing evidence" (Dietrich 2024 p. 105). The block naming Neferneferuaten and Ankhesenpaaten is assigned to the same monument by Allen (1991), Johnson and Kawai (2023); the join itself is a reconstruction. Status: (a) Harris 1973, Allen 2009, Dietrich 2024, Kemp 2016, Willeitner 2022a-b; (c) Johnson 2020, Kawai 2023, Gabolde 1990, Roeder's plates.

2.7 The feminine forms

The clearest small objects are from Tutankhamun's tomb. On the chest ornament (pectoral) numbered 261p(1) by Carter, the enlargement published in 2000 "allows a reading of the praenomen as ꜥnḫ(.t)-ḫpr.w-Rꜥ mr(y.t)-wꜥ(w)-n-Rꜥ. The feminine ending is confirmed by the feminine epithet Mꜣꜥ.t-ḫrw following the cartouche. The nomen itself reads Nfr-nfr.w-Jtn Ꜣḫ.t-n-h(j)=s 'Neferneferuaten, Beneficial for her husband'" (Gabolde 2009 pp. 116-117); Eaton-Krauss reported that the traces under Tutankhamun's cartouche "confirm for sceptics" this reading (OLZ 98, 2003, 47, quoted by Gabolde). On the miniature gold coffin (coffinette) that held one of Tutankhamun's embalmed organs, the one guarded by the goddess Selkis, the same personal name with the same epithet survives in line 7 under Tutankhamun's, and on the Neith coffinette the closing formula reads "may she live for ever" (Gabolde 2009 p. 117 and n. 71). Samson had recognised the feminine throne name Ankhetkheperure on the bezel of a glazed (faience) ring in the 1970s (Petrie Museum UC 1927). Two blue faience bracelets carry "Neferneferuaten who is beneficial for her husband" (Sousa, Pieke and Bagh 2024). Kemp's objection (2016 pp. 18-20) is that the tiny t under the "beloved" sign on bezels can as easily be an r or an n, and that the .ti endings on the gilded shrines that enclosed Tutankhamun's sarcophagus are second-person forms ("you") rather than feminine ones; the objection does not reach the pectoral's mꜣꜥt-ḫrw, the coffinette's "her husband", or the bracelets. Kemp himself accepts the name "Akhetenhiyes" as a woman's name and explains it as the queen's name absorbed into her husband's cartouche. Status: (a) Gabolde 2009, Kemp 2016, Reeves 1990 and 2015; (b) Sousa et al. 2024; the objects were not examined.

2.8 A king's burial outfit made for Neferneferuaten and reused for Tutankhamun

The four gold coffinettes, the pectoral, the gold bands and straps on Tutankhamun's mummy, and in most readings the middle coffin and the second shrine were made for Neferneferuaten and re-inscribed for Tutankhamun; Reeves (2015) reads the erased throne name Ankhkheperure under Tutankhamun's on the gold mask as well. Carter's card for the mummy trappings says that "in some cases cartouches have been deliberately cut out, plain gold inserted in their place, but in one instance the original cartouche … remains" (card 256b-05). Whatever the fate of the female king, a full kingly burial set had been prepared for her and was available at Thebes some years later. Status: (a) Carter cards, Gabolde 2009, Reeves 2015 JAEI; (b) Sousa et al. 2024; (c) Engelbach 1940, Eaton-Krauss 2016.

2.9 Neferneferuaten's names on buildings at Amarna

The chariotry officer Ranefer rebuilt his house (N49.18) on a larger plan and put the cartouches Ankhkheperure beloved of Neferkheperure and Neferneferuaten beloved of Waenre at the head of his door jambs, followed by "my lord" with the masculine article (Kemp 2016 p. 13). Painted plaster from the gateway of the North Riverside Palace carries the same throne name, written with the r under "beloved" that marks a masculine spelling, beside the personal name with "effective for her husband" (Kemp 2016 pp. 20-22, from watercolours made at the excavation in the 1930s by Hilda Pendlebury). Bricks stamped "Ankhkheperure" in the last-built pillared hall of the Great Palace give only the plain throne name. A faience ring of Ankhkheperure found under the stone threshold of the Small Aten Temple was long linked to a year-13 docket found nearby; Kemp shows from the excavation's section drawing that the two finds lay in unconnected layers (2016 pp. 17-18). The ring bezels from the Workmen's Village, the walled settlement of the tomb-builders outside the city, name Neferneferuaten in numbers, Smenkhkare a few more, and Tutankhaten most (Dodson 2020 p. 78). Status: (a) Kemp 2016, Dodson 2020, Fairman 1951; (c) Kemp and Stevens 2010.

2.10 Manetho's daughter-king

Manetho, an Egyptian priest of the third century BC, wrote a history of Egypt in Greek that survives only in quotations. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the first century AD, quotes his list of kings for this period; after Orus, usually taken as Amenhotep III, it gives:

τοῦ δὲ θυγάτηρ Ἀκεγχερὴς δώδεκα καὶ μῆνα ἕνα. τῆς δὲ Ῥάθωτις ἀδελφὸς ἐννέα. τοῦ δὲ Ἀκεγχήρης δώδεκα καὶ μῆνας πέντε. τοῦ δὲ Ἀκεγχήρης ἕτερος δώδεκα καὶ μῆνας τρεῖς.

"then his daughter Acencheres for 12 years 1 month; then her brother Rathotis for 9 years; then his son Acencheres for 12 years 5 months, his son Acencheres II for 12 years 3 months." (Contra Apionem 1.96-97, Niese; Waddell 1940 fr. 50)

The later Christian chronographers Africanus and Eusebius, who abridged Manetho, lose the gender and the parentage. Acencheres is a passable Greek form of Ankh(et)kheperure, and Rathotis with nine years is Tutankhamun. The tradition therefore preserves a female king of that name who was a king's daughter, and more than one bearer of the name. Krauss and the Gabolde school use "daughter" for Meritaten; Dodson calls the list "a garbled, misordered remembrance of the Amarna kings"; Kemp holds that "nothing is gained by citing him in support of one theory or another" (Kemp 2016 p. 30). The report gives the item small weight. Status: (a) Greek text and Waddell.

2.11 Nefertiti's queenly shabti

Two limestone fragments (Louvre AF 9904, Brooklyn 33.51), which the Egyptologist Christian Loeben showed in 1986 to belong to one piece, give a shabti (a small funerary figurine inscribed for the dead person, to work in their place in the next world) of the King's Great Wife Neferneferuaten Nefertiti, with a queen's titles only. Allen wrote that "Nefertiti's candidacy was in the ascendant for a time until the publication of a shawabti of hers, evidence that she died as a queen, not a pharaoh" (Allen 2009 p. 16); Jean-Luc Bovot of the Louvre (1999) argued that the pieces belong to two shabtis, one of Nefertiti and one of Meritaten. Dodson's answer is that burial equipment was made in anticipation of death and that the shabti could predate her elevation (Dodson 2020 p. 89). It is the strongest single object against Nefertiti as king, and the scoring in section 4 treats it as such. Status: (a) Allen 2009, Dodson 2020, Reeves 2015 n. 35; (c) Loeben 1986, Bovot 1999; the text was not verified against an edition.

2.12 The younger daughters, and Kiya

Six daughters stand with Akhenaten and Nefertiti at the year-12 reception of tribute (Davies 1905 pl. XXXVIII). The fourth, Neferneferuaten-tasherit, "the younger", was born after year 8 and was at most about ten in year 17; Allen's 2009 candidate for the female king was this child, and he withdrew the proposal in 2016. Kiya, the "greatly beloved wife" of Akhenaten, disappears after a year-11 docket, and her monuments, including the coffin and the four jars for the embalmed organs (canopic jars) later found in KV55, were re-cut for Meritaten and Ankhesenpaaten while those daughters were still princesses (Dodson 2014 pp. 129-131). Meritaten became King's Great Wife at some point after that. Status: (a) Davies 1905, Allen 2009, Dodson 2014.

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 89%, 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 28%), 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 80% 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:

1. 16% Neferneferuaten = Nefertiti; Smenkhkare a coregent who died first; coregency yes; KV55 = Smenkhkare; Nibhururiya = Akhenaten.
2. 10% Neferneferuaten = Nefertiti; Smenkhkare a coregent who died first; coregency no; KV55 = Smenkhkare; Nibhururiya = Akhenaten.
3. 6% Neferneferuaten = Nefertiti; Smenkhkare between Akhenaten and her; coregency yes; KV55 = Smenkhkare; Nibhururiya = Akhenaten.
4. 4% Neferneferuaten = Nefertiti; Smenkhkare between Akhenaten and her; coregency no; KV55 = Smenkhkare; Nibhururiya = Akhenaten.
5. 4% Neferneferuaten = Nefertiti; Smenkhkare after her; coregency yes; KV55 = Smenkhkare; Nibhururiya = Akhenaten.
6. 4% Neferneferuaten = Nefertiti; Smenkhkare a coregent who died first; coregency yes; KV55 = Smenkhkare; Nibhururiya = Tutankhamun.
7. 3% Neferneferuaten = Nefertiti; Smenkhkare between Akhenaten and her; coregency yes; KV55 = Smenkhkare; Nibhururiya = Tutankhamun.
8. 3% Neferneferuaten = Nefertiti; Smenkhkare a coregent who died first; coregency yes; KV55 = another son of Amenhotep III; Nibhururiya = Akhenaten.

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 68% on the base readings and Tutankhamun 80% 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).

7. The strongest counter-cases

7.1 Kemp (2016): one man, and the feminine forms are a queen's name in his cartouche

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 21%.

7.2 Gabolde and Laboury: Meritaten

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 10% on the base readings and 26% on the sceptical ones.

7.3 Reeves: one woman, two pairs of names

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 5% on the base readings and about 13% when one-person models are given half the prior.

7.4 Krauss and Hornung: a king, then his widow

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.

7.5 Allen (2009): the fourth daughter

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.

8. What would overturn this

• A single securely read object joining the epithet-bearing throne name with the personal name Smenkhkare, or a feminine form with the plain throne name, would remove the rule on which the two-ruler reconstructions rest.
• A dated text of Nefertiti as King's Great Wife after Akhenaten's death, or a burial of Nefertiti as a queen, would move the identity to Meritaten. Bovot's two-shabti reading, if confirmed on the stones, would weaken the one object that already points that way.
• Publication of Van der Perre's full edition of the year-16 graffito with a month later than the third of Akhet would shorten the possible coregency further; a year-17 attestation of Nefertiti as queen would end it.
• A fresh check of the Munich ivory against the original that confirms Willeitner's "beloved of Akhenaten" would remove one of the two objects with "her husband" beside Akhenaten's names, but not the coffinettes, the pectoral or the bracelets.
• Publication of the CT criteria behind the 35-45 age, or an independent re-examination of the KV55 bones giving an age over thirty, would move KV55 to Akhenaten. An independent, sequence-based re-typing of the mummies would settle whether the 2010 pedigree can be used at all.
• A convincing rebuttal of Miller's Armaa synchronism, together with a Hittite text placing the king's death in winter, would return Nibhururiya to Tutankhamun and the widow to Ankhesenamun.
• A year-dated attestation of Smenkhkare after a year 3 of Neferneferuaten would reverse the order.

9. What this report adds

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 5%. 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.

10. Sources, and what could not be checked

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).

Read in full (a)

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.

Read in part or abstract only (b)

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.

Known only through citation (c)

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.

What could not be checked

• Allen's 2016 reversal is asserted here on two independent witnesses (Dodson 2020 p. 129 n. 102; Dietrich 2024 n. 18) and not on the paper itself.
• Reeves's 2023 re-reading of the Theban temple name and Dodson's 2020 paper that it answers were both unobtainable; the report uses neither.
• Van der Perre's full edition was not obtained, and the month of the year-16 date is left open between the first and the third month of Akhet.
• Johnson's 2020 join is known through Dietrich's description and figures, not the original; the same for Kawai 2023.
• Krauss 2007 is known through four summaries; Gabolde's 1998 monograph through its many reviewers and his own later papers.
• No object was examined; every reading of a cartouche is taken from a published edition, and the plates of Roeder, Petrie and the City of Akhenaten volumes were not seen.
• The Willeitner and Dietrich readings of the Munich ivory's epithet disagree and could not be collated.
• The CT criteria behind the 35-45 age have never been published; the raw DNA data have never been released; no independent laboratory has typed the mummies. Until the criteria and the data are published, no one outside the team that produced them can check these.
• Stempel 2007 and Theis 2011, the published rebuttals of Miller's Armaa argument, were not read; the sceptical Hittite column was set to allow for their objections, but without reading them.
• The scores in section 4 were set by the author alone and have not been checked by a specialist in the period.

11. Files

These files accompany the report.

• code/succession_model.py: the scoring model; running it reproduces every number above.
• data/results.json, data/results.md, data/likelihood_table.json: the outputs and the full score table.
• notes/A_egyptian_attestations.md: a fourteen-entry catalogue of the Egyptian attestations with the wording of each source.
• notes/B_kv55_dna.md: KV55 and the genetics, with every age estimate and the STR table as transcribed.
• notes/C_hittite.md: the Deeds, the plague prayers, CTH 154 and the synchronisms, with transliterations.
• notes/D_scholarship_allen_dodson_reeves.md and notes/E_scholarship_gabolde_krauss_recent.md: reading logs of the scholarship with read-status codes and a sweep of work published from 2019 to 2026.
• sources/: the texts read, each with its URL and retrieval date.
• report-src/: the source and build script for this page.