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'Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten' is believed to have been a female pharaoh who reigned toward the end of the Amarna era during the Eighteenth Dynasty. The royal succession of this period is very unclear. Manetho's Epitome mentions a certain Akenkeres who was a 'king's daughter' and ruled Egypt for 12 years and 1 month.^[1] This information is important because it establishes that a female king--who was the daughter of a king--assumed power towards the end of the Amarna era. Akenkeres or Achencheres is probably the Greek form of her prenomen, Ankh[et]kheperure, as Rolf Krauss and Marc Gabolde have previously argued.^[2] Manetho places her immediately before Rathothis who ruled Egypt for 9 years. The latter king is presumably Tutankhamun who is attested by several Year 10 hieratic wine jar dockets from his tomb and, hence, enjoyed a minimum reign of 9 full years.^[3][4] With the removal of a spurious decade from the original 12 year figure, Neferneferuaten would have ruled Egypt for 2 years and 1 month which conforms well with a long Year 3 graffito attested for her in the Theban Tomb of Pere (TT139).^[5] The first section of this graffito reads as:
: "Year 3, 3rd month of the Inundation, day 10. The king of Upper and Lower Egypt, lord of the Two Lands, Ankhkheprure--beloved of Aten, son of Re Nefereneferuaten beloved of Waenre (ie: Akhenaten)...Giving praise to Amun, kissing the ground before Onnophris by the ''wab''-priest and scribe of divine offerings of Amun in the temple of Ankhkheprure in Thebes, Pawah, born to Itefseneb."^[6]
Since Neferneferuaten is attested in her third regnal year by Pawah who served as a minor priest of the god Amun whose establishment had been persecuted during Akhenaten's reign, this implies she had already reached an accommodation with the Amun priesthood in her short reign even prior to the start of Tutankhamun's reign.

Contents

Gender and Identity

A problematic succession

References

Gender and Identity

The precise identity of this female Pharaoh whose praenomen is Ankhkheprure remains a mystery. The set of royal names associated with Neferneferuaten is Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten, a queen who rose to the throne of Egypt. She was likely either Meritaten, Smenkhkare's widow^[7] or Neferneferuaten Tasherit, the fourth daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti as James P. Allen suggests in 'The Amarna Succession'^[8] rather than Nefertiti herself. A funerary shabti of Nefertiti was found at Amarna in the 1980s and showed that Nefertiti died and was buried as only a Queen or 'King's Wife' rather than as a pharaoh in her own right.^[9] If Neferneferuaten was Meritaten, the latter may have succeeded her short-lived husband Smenkhkare on the throne for 2 years. Various Egyptologists today agree that this ruler was a woman who was different from the male king Ankheperure Smenkhkare due to the feminine royal epithet's attached to her name. The epithet 'desired of Waenre' (ie: Akhenaten) in Neferneferuaten's nomen is occasionally replaced with the feminine term "Effective for her husband."^[10] This proves that Neferneferuaten was a woman--and not the male king Smenkhkare whose mummy is believed to have been found in KV55. Her throne name Ankhkheperure is occasionally written in the feminine form Ankhetkheperure, with the feminine form "t". This may suggest that Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten was Meritaten--the spouse and immediate predecessor of her husband Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare although this remains to be proven.^[11] Another candidate for this female ruler is princess Neferneferuaten Tasherit, Akhenaten and Nefertiti's fourth daughter who shared the same birth name as this king. The British Egyptologist Aidan Dodson--in the Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt--writes that "the latest evidence seems to point to a male king Smenkhkare, [being] succeeded by a woman named Neferneferuaten" who was probably Meritaten.^[11] In a footnote to his comments, Dodson writes that the new conclusive evidence concerning the female gender of Neferneferuaten "makes impossible" his previous published 18th dynasty geneaological reconstruction which
"viewed Smenkhkare and Neferneferuaten as one and the same."^[13]
A fragmentary stela from Amarna, now known as the Coregency Stela, adds more evidence as well as more confusion on the situation. The stela originally portrayed three figures, identified as Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and Meritaten. However, at some point in time after the stela was made, Nefertiti's name had been chiselled out and replaced with the royal name Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten, and Meritaten's name had been replaced with that of Akhenaten and Nefertiti's third daughter, Ankhesenpaaten. Why Nefertiti's clearly feminine figure would be renamed with a throne name is still debated to this day, as is the reason for Meritaten's usurpation by Ankhesenpaaten. Some suggest the fact that a man named Smenkhkare appears in the public record about the same time that Nefertiti disappeared, but was still portrayed as having performed the rites reserved for the heir to the throne at Akhenaten's funeral, indicates that Smenkhkare and Nefertiti were the same person. However, the body of the KV55 Amarna king has been consistently proven to be that of a young male who was between 18 to 22 years old when he died; this ruler here can only be Smenkhkare who is attested as king in the tomb of Meryre II alongside his Queen Meritaten.^[14] Since we know that both Akhenaten and later Smenkhkare were Pharaohs when Meritaten held the title of "Great Royal Wife"--the theory that Smenkhkare was actually Nefertiti is untenable since Smenkhkare was a male ruler. Moreover, there would have been no need for Nefertiti to impersonate a man and taken her eldest daughter as a spouse--since everyone at court knew about Nefertiti's foremost status as Akhenaten's chief wife. Significantly, Amarna Letter 11 calls Meritaten the 'mistress' of the royal house; such a designation could only have been accorded to Meritaten if her mother, Nefertiti, had died and she had been selected to be Akhenaten's next chief wife instead.^[15] Finally, it must be emphasised that Manetho's Epitome specifically records that a 'king's daughter' Akenkeres had succeeded her father in the late 18th dynasty. This was evidently a reference to Neferneferuaten's feminine prenomen Ankh(et)kheperure and must be an allusion to the fact that Akhenaten was succeeded by one of his daughters rather than by his wife Nefertiti who likely predeceased him.

A problematic succession

While the identity of Akenkheres as a female king appears to be more or less accepted in the Egyptological community, the Amarna succession is problematic. Some Egyptologists including Aidan Dodson (in the above cited example) view her as Meritaten, the spouse of Smenkhkare. In this scenario, Meritaten would have succeeded to the throne as Neferneferuaten--using part of her mother Neferitaten's titles--after the shortlived reign of her husband Smenkhkare. This would account for her position before Rathothis (ie: Tutankhamun) in Manetho's Epitome. In contrast, other scholars maintain that the ruler Neferneferuaten is strongly linked with Akhenaten--in which case, she would have been Akhenaten's wife and coregent before ruling Egypt for 2 years--part of which is subsumed in the coregency with the former--before dying or marrying Smenkhkare. In this situation (which Allen) supports, Neferneferuaten would merely have intervened between the rule of Akhenaten and Smenkhkare.^[16] The implications here is that Smenkhkare was the direct predecessor of Tutankhamun instead. It should be noted that a third regnal year is attested at Amarna on vessels for certain goods which cannot belong to Akhenaten who only established his new capital city of Akhetaten in his fifth regnal year as the earliest dated boundary stela of this city reveals.^[17] As Erik Hornung writes:
: A regnal year 3 is...attested at Amarna in the labels on vessels for various commodities. Year 3 continues year 1 and 2 of King 'Ankhkheprure' as labels of year 2 and 3 belonging to a single delivery of olive oil prove (Helck, Untersuchungen, 88-89). There are only 3 wine jar labels of year 3 which cannot represent a complete vintage, because the yearly mean of wine jar labels is 50 to 60. The disproportion is explicable if the change in regnal year 2 to 3 occurred during the sealing of the wine jars. Thus King 'Ankhkheprure' would have counted his reign from a day in ca. II Akhet (Krauss, MDOG, 129, 1997), which may have coincided with the occurrence of Akhenaten's death.^[18]
It is uncertain if the Ankhkheprure mentioned here was Smenkhkare or Neferneferuaten; Hornung selects the former option based on the traditional view that Smenkhkare directly succeeded Akhenaten. (something which is disputed by other scholars) However, the Year 3 dates for this pharaoh establish that one of these two kings enjoyed a full 2 year reign at Akhetaten.

References

1. [1]
2. The Amarna Succession see p.14, footnote 60
3. P. Tallet, "Une jarre de l'an 31 et une jarre de l'an 10 dans la cave de Toutânkhamon", BIFAO 96 (1996), pp.375-382
4. K.A. Kitchen, Book Review of Rolf Krauss' ''Das Ende der Amarnazeit'' in JEA 71 (1985) Review Supplement, p.43 Kitchen equates Rathothis with Tutankhamun here
5. Erik Hornung, Rolf Krauss and David Warburton (editors), ''Handbook of Ancient Egyptian Chronology'' (Handbook of Oriental Studies), Brill: 2006, pp.207 & 493
6. Nicholas Reeves, ''Akhenaten: Egypt's Heretic King'', Thames & Hudson, p.163
7. Aidan Dodson & Dyan Hilton, ''The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt: A Genealogical Sourcebook of the Pharaohs'', Thames & Hudson, 2004. p.155
8. The Amarna Succession, pp.14-15
9. C.E. Loeben, "Eine Bestattung der großen königlichen Gemachlin Nofretete in Amarna? Die Totenfigur der Nofretete", MDAIK 42 (1986), pp.99-107
10. J.P. Allen, "Nefertiti and Smenkh-ka-re", GM 141 (1994), pp.7-17
11. Dodson & Hilton, op. cit., p.150
12. Dodson & Hilton, op. cit., p.150
13. Dodson & Hilton, op. cit., p.285, footnote 111
14. William Murnane, OLZ 96 (2001), p.22
15. The Amarna Succession p.15 n.64
16. The Amarna Succession p.5 & 16
17. William Murnane & C.C. Van Sicclen,'' The Boundary Stelae of Akhenaten'', Kegan Paul, 1993, pp.73-86
18. Hornung, Krauss and Warburton, op. cit., p.208