Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (10 page)

Above:
The Nefertiti bust found at the Great Palace at
Amarna in 1911. The fair-skinned woman it depicts is
clearly not of North African origin, but markedly
European. (
Berlin Museum.
)
Right:
Like her husband, Nefertiti is often shown in
the Amarna reliefs with the same exaggerated facial
features. (
Petrie Museum.
)

Courtiers also emulated the ‘royal deformities’ in their representations. In this pair of statuettes the chief sculptor Bek and his wife are both depicted with the bodily peculiarities typical of Akhenaten reliefs. (
Berlin Museum.
)

In most Amarna depictions the king’s physique is distinctly feminine, with heavy breasts, swelling hips and ample thighs. However, Akhenaten’s profile is not only effeminate, it is also deformed. The legs, for instance, are fatty around the thighs but spindly below the knee. (
Cairo Museum.
)

Akhenaten’s daughters are often depicted with enlarged craniums and serpentine necks, such as in this bust thought to be of the Princess Meritaten. (
Berlin Museum.
)

With Nefertiti gone, and the king's apparent withdrawal, the drama now shifts increasingly to Akhenaten's eldest daughter and ultimately to what appears to have been a bitter power struggle. The six princesses were, in descending order of age, Meritaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Neferneferuaten-ta-sherit, Neferneferure, and Sotepenre. Two of them, we know, had already died. A chamber in the royal tomb shows a deathbed scene of a princess lying on a couch. She is mourned by her weeping parents and two distraught attendants, while standing outside the chamber is a nursemaid holding a baby. The inference appears to be that this princess died in childbirth. A companion scene on the opposite wall identifies the deceased as the princess Mekataten, Nefertiti's second eldest daughter. As. there are only four princesses in the funerary procession it appears that one of Mekataten's sisters has also died by this time.

This princess was evidently interred in a separate chamber in the royal tomb, but who she was is unclear. Two long scenes in the chamber show the king and queen accompanied by five daughters making offerings in a temple court. Other scenes show the king grieving for the princess who lies prostrate on a
bier. A similar scene above shows the king and queen mourning at her death-bed. Once more, a nursemaid is seen outside the room holding a baby, suggesting that this princess also died in childbirth. As there are five living daughters illustrated here, then it is presumably not a further representation of Mekataten's funeral, at which only four daughters were present. The name of the deceased has been excised from the walls, but it would seem to have been the princess Neferneferure, as in 1984 a fragment of a funerary vessel bearing her name was discovered among rubble in the area by the Egyptian archaeologist Dr Aly el Kouly.

In order to determine the extent of the influence of the surviving princesses, we must initially try to get some idea of their ages. The first picture to show all six daughters alive is one in the so-called King's House, a series of private chambers which had been joined to the ceremonial palace by a bridge. Here, wall paintings show the king and queen seated on stools with their six daughters before them, the youngest, Sotepenre, is a babe in her mother's lap. Luckily, we can deduce the latest possible date of this scene because the name of the Aten in its earlier form.

The Aten, meaning literally 'sun disc', had originally been considered the day-time aspect, or role, played by the Middle Kingdom god Re-Herakhte. The full hieroglyphic title of the Aten was: 'Re-Herakhte, who rejoices in the horizon in his name of the light which is in the sun disc.'

An abbreviated version of this title was the glyph for Re-Horus, the falcon god, which is how the name of the Aten appears in the early years of Akhenaten's reign. From the year 9, however, Akhenaten decreed that his omnipotent god could no longer be represented in such a form, and instead could only be represented by a radiant disc or by the phonetically written
word Aten – a reed followed by three other symbols one on top of the other.

As the accompanying inscriptions of the King's House illustration uses the earlier form of the god's name – i.e. the falcon glyph for the Aten, rather than the reed glyph – it must have been made before the year 9. In other words, all six daughters were living by the year 8. As she is a baby, Sotepenre cannot have been born much before the King's House was built around the year 7. This youngest daughter was therefore about eight by the time Nefertiti died around the year 15. Little Sotepenre also helps us work out the approximate age of the others.

In tombs of the high steward Huya and the harem overseer Meryre, reliefs show the royal family attending an event which is dated as the year 12. As Sotepenre is shown for the first time at an official occasion, we know that the princesses could participate in ceremonial events once they reach the age of five. Accordingly, as Ankhesenpaaten does not appear on the boundary stelae until in the year 6, but does in the year 8, she must have been around twelve or thirteen when her mother dies, and her younger sister Neferneferuaten-ta-sherit was around ten. The elder sister Meritaten already appears around the year 3 of Akhenaten's reign, officially accompanying her mother in reliefs at the Aten Temple at Karnak, so she must have been around seventeen or eighteen when Nefertiti died. Her three sisters being so young, all immediate influence must therefore have fallen to Meritaten.

Between the years 14 and 15 Meritaten is referred to in the Amarna Letters sent to Akhenaten by various correspondents, such as Burnaburiash II of Babylon and Abi-milki of Tyre. They call her by the affectionate nickname 'Mayati', and refer to her
as 'the mistress of your house', implying that she assumed the duties of the 'Great Royal Wife' or 'Chief Queen'.

There is evidence that Meritaten may have been opposed in taking over from Nefertiti by Akhenaten's second wife Kiya, who seems to have enjoyed considerable influence. A toilet vessel from Amarna in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and a calcite vase in the British Museum are inscribed with Kiya's full title. The text includes a rectangular panel containing the early names of the Aten, and the names and titles of Akhenaten, followed by three columns of glyphs reading: 'The wife and greatly beloved of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Living in Truth, Lord of the Two Lands, Neferkheperure Wa'enre [Akhenaten's titles], the Goodly Child of the Living Aten, who shall be living for ever, Kiya.'

This formula, with one or two minor adjustments, is found whenever Kiya is referred to on her monuments, showing that she was far more than simply a member of Akhenaten's harem. Akhenaten had other wives, but they bear no such distinguishing titles. For example, a certain Ipy is simply called the 'Royal Ornament'. In fact, so important was Kiya that she had her own
Maru,
or 'viewing temple', discovered in the southern area of Amarna by the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley in 1921. Such temples, with their pools and gardens where the owner could sit and be rejuvenated in the sun's rays, were an exceptional privilege usually reserved for senior royalty like Nefertiti and the Queen Mother. Kiya even had a personal chapel near the entrance to the Great Temple.

There is also evidence that Kiya not only enjoyed far greater privileges than most pharaohs' secondary wives, but that her standing continued to grow. It comes from a series of decorated stone slabs found during a German excavation in 1939 at Hermopolis, near modern Ashmunein, a few kilometres down
the Nile from Amarna. Called the Hermopolis Talatat (from an Arabic word), they are made from limestone which was finer and more compact than local stone. It was soon clear that they had originally come from buildings at Amarna and, about fifty years after the city was abandoned, had been ferried downstream to be used as foundation rubble in a temple built by Ramesses II. Dating from the later part of Akhenaten's reign, the talatat show Kiya functioning in an important capacity in the Great Temple itself and refer to her as the king's 'favourite'.

Meritaten clearly saw Kiya as a power rival. Kiya had obviously enjoyed Nefertiti's favour, but once the queen was gone, Meritaten had Kiya evicted from her
Maru
temple and appropriated it for herself. Inscriptions from the temple are found to have been changed to Meritaten's name, and Kiya's portraits are replaced with those of the princess. Kiya was still alive after Nefertiti's death but remained very much inferior to the princesses. One of the Hermopolis Talatat shows the royal family at a religious service, at which Akhenaten officiates at an altar. Nefertiti is absent, so it must be after her death, but the surviving daughters and Kiya are present. Kiya, however, is both behind, and on a lower level than the princesses, who are clearly of superior status.

From around the year 15, for the first time we find Meritaten accompanied by a husband – the enigmatic Smenkhkare. Various statues and reliefs, together with a scene on a box and a damaged box lid found in Tutankhamun's tomb, show them together late in Akhenaten's reign. Almost immediately Smenkhkare is elevated to co-regent, and bricks found stamped with his name at the royal apartments have suggested that a great hall was built especially for his coronation to the south of the palace.

No giant reliefs survive to commemorate the co-regency, but a number of smaller finds attest to it having occurred. In
the early excavations of Amarna, Flinders Petrie found a small stone stela inscribed with two cartouches bearing Akhenaten and Smenkhkare's names, placed beside one another as coregents are shown in other reigns. During excavations of the Great Temple of Amarna in 1933, a sculptor's model of the two kings also came to light. Carved in sunk relief, the limestone tablet shows Akhenaten and an unnamed co-regent both wearing a pharaonic
uraeus
on their foreheads. Additional evidence of the co-regency are other minor artifacts, such as the Stela of Pase from Amarna, which appear to show Akhenaten and another king sitting side by side, although the pieces lack text identifying the pair.

From the mummy in Tomb 55 we can gather that Smenkhkare was about the same age as Meritaten, but where he came from is a complete mystery as he appears nowhere before this time. The customary line of succession from early in the New Kingdom was via the eldest daughter of the king's 'Chief Wife', which had often meant an incestuous marriage to secure the throne for the king's eldest son, although, as we have seen, this seems to have been abandoned for at least three generations. Akhenaten and Tuthmosis IV seem to have married foreigners, and Amonhotep III married the daughter of a courtier. As Akhenaten apparently had no legitimate son, whoever married Meritaten would thus become successor. It stands to reason, therefore, that Smenkhkare would have been her closest legitimate male relative.