Nefertiti
Page 20
Now, as so many female members of the royal family disappear, Meritaten attains new importance, until eventually she is recognized as a royal wife. But wife to whom? For a long time egyptologists toyed with the idea that Meritaten may have married her father. But now we have Smenkhkare as a living, flesh-and-blood heir to the throne, it makes far more sense to suggest that she married Smenkhkare, co-regent to Akhenaten. We might go further. We know that Ankhesenpaaten was later to marry Tutankhamen her half-brother and full brother to Smenkhkare. Could the middle sister, Meketaten, have married a third half-brother, perhaps even the ephemeral Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten?
Although Meketaten died at a time when plague was sweeping across the Near East, she did not necessarily die from plague. Within the Amarna royal tomb the scene of Nefertiti and Akhenaten mourning over their daughter’s bier is depicted on Room Gamma wall A, while Room Alpha wall F shows the death of Kiya in childbirth. In Room Gamma we are presented with a tableau highly reminiscent of that in Room Alpha, although here there has been extensive damage to the wall so that the body and most of the grieving parents are missing (Fig. 7.3). An inscription carved above the dead princess is now largely obscured but, as it was recorded by Bouriant at the turn of the century, we know that it originally read ‘King’s Daughter of his body, his beloved, Meketaten, born of the Great Royal Wife Nefertiti, may she live for ever and eternally’. The identity of the deceased is therefore not in doubt.
Once again the royal couple are facing a bier and, although only their feet remain, we can imagine Akhenaten again reaching out to comfort his wife in her distress as she views her dead daughter. Outside the chamber there are three registers of figures. The bottom row is taken up by a row of tables prepared for a feast. Above this we see a nurse, standing before a group of mourners and holding a child in her arms. The nurse is followed by two female attendants who carry the fans customarily used to signal royalty. The upper register shows a distressed female figure being restrained and groups of frenzied mourners including a dignitary who may have been summoned to witness an imminent royal birth. It is the greatest misfortune that the inscription which would have named the baby is now lost. Although some have sought to identify
Fig. 7.3 The death of Meketaten
the infant as either Setepenre or a subsequent child of Nefertiti, or even a baby born to Kiya, the otherwise unexplained presence of an infant at a death scene leads to the inevitable conclusion that twelve-year-old Meketaten has died in labour.
A subsequent scene in the royal tomb, recorded on Room Gamma wall B (Fig. 7.4), shows the dead Meketaten, or perhaps her statue, standing within a garden bower or pavilion whose papyrus columns are entwined with convolvulus and lotus blossom. Meketaten, again specifically named, wears a long transparent robe, a short wig and a perfume cone. She stands to face her grieving parents and three of her sisters who raise their arms to their heads in an attitude of extreme mourning. Neferneferure and Setepenre are missing from the family group, and may already be dead. Beneath the mourners are shown tables laden with food, drink and flowers. Meketaten’s bower is strongly reminiscent of the birth bowers used by pregnant women in labour, and adds weight to the suggestion that she has died giving birth. However, bowers or temporary booths holding food and drink were a part of the Memphite, but not Theban, funeral ritual, and so the connection with childbirth may be a more subtle one, with Meketaten’s symbolic bower intended to signify the wish for her re-birth rather than the cause of her own death.31
There is no record of any Meketaten-the-Younger at Amarna, although it is of course possible that the baby was male, died in infancy, or was given a more original name. But there are two unexplained princesses. Meritaten-the-Younger and Ankhesenpaaten-the-Younger, who may well be children born to Meritaten and/or Meketaten and/or Ankhesenpaaten.32 Their titles rank them as the daughters of an unnamed king, who for a long time was assumed to be Akhenaten, but who might more realistically be his co-regent Smenkhkare and/or his lost brother. Alternatively, the two princesses may be the daughters of Kiya and Akhenaten, who may well have chosen to name their daughters after their illustrious half-sisters. The ultimate fate of these two princesses is as unclear as their origins. Like so many Amarna characters they are ephemeral, appearing for a brief time only to fade into obscurity.
So, what really happened at the end of the Amarna Age? During Year 14 or 15 of her father’s reign, Meritaten married her half-brother and heir to the throne, Smenkhkare. Smenkhkare then assumed the role of
Fig. 7.4 Meketaten in her bower
co-regent alongside his father Akhenaten. The Amarna tomb of Meryre II provides us with a glimpse of changes in the royal family at this time.33 Here, on the south wall of the main chamber, we see the royal family in a conventional scene. Akhenaten and Nefertiti stand at the Window of Appearance to hand golden collars to the miniature Meryre. Only five princesses are present; they are unnamed, but it would appear that it is Setepenre who is missing, possibly because she was too young to take part in the ritual. On the east wall of the same chamber we see the royal family, now with all six princesses, enjoying the international celebrations of Year 12. However, the north wall shows a very different scene. The picture is unfinished and has suffered damage, but it shows a king and queen standing beneath the rays of the Aten to reward their faithful servant. The figures of the royal couple are sketched in typical Amarna style, and could well be Akhenaten and Nefertiti. But the cartouches which accompanied them were, when the tomb was recorded during the late nineteenth century, those of the ‘King of Upper and Lower’ Egypt, Ankhkeprure son of Re, Smenkhkare’ and the ‘King’s Great Wife Meritaten’. The wall has since been attacked by thieves, and only the queen’s cartouche remains. A comparison with the Theban tomb of Ramose would suggest that Akhenaten had died while Meryre’s tomb was being prepared, and the artists had adapted the decoration to incorporate the new monarch and his wife, possibly altering a scene of Akhenaten and Nefertiti and re-writing the cartouches to convert them into Smenkhkare and Meritaten. No official record of Akhenaten’s death has survived, but we know from a wine jar sealing, whose date of Year 17 is crossed out and rewritten as Year 1 (of an unnamed successor), that Akhenaten died during his seventeenth year on the throne. Given that it was Akhenaten’s express wish that he be buried at Amarna, we may assume that the unfinished royal tomb was hastily made ready for its king.
Smenkhkare enjoyed a very brief reign, most, if not all, of which was spent ruling alongside his father. Barely had Smenkhkare interred his predecessor in the royal tomb, when he himself died and was in turn buried, presumably at Amarna. As he left no male heir, Smenkhkare was succeeded by his young brother Tutankhaten and his sister-queen, Ankhesenpaaten. It was now Meritaten’s turn to vanish; her body has never been traced and we know neither when she died or where she was buried.
By this time Nefertiti has completely disappeared. The last delivery of wine from her estate, the ‘House of Neferuaten’ is dated to Year 11 and, although wine from the ‘House of the King’s Wife’ is known to have been delivered to Amarna in Years 14, 15 and 17, it is by no means certain Nefertiti is the king’s wife of the label. We must assume, for the want of any evidence to the contrary, that she too is dead and buried, most probably within the Amarna royal tomb. It is unsatisfying to have to end a biography by admitting that we have no details of the subject’s ultimate fate, but such discomfort can never be an excuse for shirking unwelcome archaeological conclusions.
Tutankhaten and Ankhesenpaaten ruled from Amarna for three or four years. Then, with a seemingly sudden rejection of Akhenaten’s beliefs, they moved the royal court to Thebes. At the same time they altered their given names to remove the reference to the Aten, becoming Tutankhamen and Ankhesenamen. From this point onwards Tutankhamen showed a determined devotion to Amen, and regarded Thebes rather than Amarna or Memphis as his capital.34 Here the old temples were officially re-opened, the old priesthoods re-established, and at Amen’s home, the Karnak Temple, Tu
tankhamen erected a large stela which was to proclaim his devotion to the traditional deities of Egypt. This ‘restoration stela’ explains how it has fallen to the new king to restore the gods to their rightful place:
When his majesty arose as king, the temples of the gods and goddesses, beginning from Elephantine down to the marshes of the Delta, had fallen into decay, their shrines had fallen into desolation and become ruins overgrown with weeds, their chapels as though they had never been and their halls serving as footpaths. The land was topsy-turvy and the gods turned their backs on the land.35
The restoration of the old temples was the best move that a new king could make to appease the old gods who might reasonably have been expected to feel angry over the Amarna heresy. Tutankhamen’s proclamation is intended to restore confidence in the monarchy by appealing to the Egyptians’ innate conservatism; a traditional pharaoh has returned to the throne, chaos will soon be banished and maat will be restored throughout the land. In spite of his youth and his unconventional Amarna upbringing, Tutankhamen (or his advisors) was very aware of the duties expected of a conventional New Kingdom monarch. During his reign we see him performing all the approved kingly deeds. There is a spate of building work at Karnak, extensive restoration of the monuments of his forebears, and even the re-emergence of the huntin’, shootin’ and fighting pharaoh with the king practising his archery and the army employed in military action in Syria.
Ankhesenamen, following the precedent set by her mother and paternal grandmother, retains a high queenly profile. With her once egg-shaped head restored to normal proportions she appears on many of Tutankhamen’s public monuments and on more private items recovered from his tomb. Here, on the king’s golden shrine which is decorated in the Amarna style, we are treated to what Howard Carter identified as simple domestic scenes:
… depicting, in delightfully naive fashion a number of episodes in the daily life of king and queen. In all these scenes the dominant note is that of friendly relationship between the husband and wife, the unselfconscious friendliness that marks the Tell el Amarna school.36
In fact the queen is now assuming a priestly role before her husband. Ankhesenamen pours liquid into a ceremonial goblet held by her seated husband just as, years before, her mother had poured wine for Akhenaten. In other images she mirrors the traditional postures of Maat, companion to the king, as she squats at her husband’s feet to receive the water which Tutankhamen pours into her cupped hands, or hands him an arrow to shoot in the marshes, while in the more formal scenes on Tutankhamen’s shrine she takes the role of Weret Hekau, Mistress of the Palace.37
The collapse of Akhenaten’s religion seems to have been greeted with a general feeling of quiet relief, and those who had formerly expressed their public devotion to the Aten were quickly re-converted back to the old ways. The changeover appears to have been relatively low-key and painless. There was no sudden attack on the memories of Nefertiti and Akhenaten, and no attempt was made to remove the Aten from the pantheon. However, the cult of the Aten now became a very minor part of the pantheistic state religion. With the re-opening of the temple of Amen, and the restoration of its offerings, the Aten temples at Karnak quickly fell into decay.
No real reason is given for Tutankhamen’s return to the old gods. But Akhenaten’s insistence on centring the cult of the Aten on his own immediate family can have done little to ensure its long-term survival. Aten worship had always been Akhenaten’s austere and demanding individual dream, offering little to others, even to members of his own family. The death of its only prophet naturally brought the experiment to a close. Beyond the isolation of Amarna twenty centuries of tradition had not been wiped out by a mere seventeen years of idiosyncratic monotheism. The relative ease with which the country was able to return to pre-Amarna theology following the death of the king must serve as proof that the religious ‘revolution’ was due very much to the efforts of Akhenaten alone. We may hazard a guess that outside Amarna the old ways had never been fully abandoned. Once the decision had been taken to discontinue Akhenaten’s religious programme it became possible, and indeed sensible, to leave Amarna in favour of a more convenient bureaucratic base.
Amarna was not abandoned immediately. The wealthier members of society merely boarded up their houses and waited to see what would happen. Eventually, however, as it became clear that the court would not be returning, some of the more valuable parts of the houses, the wooden and stone elements, were salvaged, while the mud-brick walls were left to decay. There was still a significant population at Amarna during the reign of Tutankhamen, but slowly the numbers dwindled until the town was deserted. In contrast, the workmen’s village, which had been abandoned as the court moved away, was reoccupied and even underwent a phase of expansion during Tutankhamen’s reign, before being finally abandoned during the reign of Horemheb.
The transfer of the court away from Amarna forced the abandonment of the royal tomb. Whether this was left sealed, under guard, or whether it was immediately opened and the bodies moved, is not clear. The Egyptians were certainly not shy of transplanting their forebears, and an unpopulated and therefore largely unsupervised Amarna may not have been considered a suitable, or more particularly a secure, resting place. Tutankhamen may well have reasoned that he, rather than the thieves, should rescue the Amarna royal gold. Several of the items included in Tutankhamen’s own burial, including one of his golden coffins, were made for Smenkhkare and other members of the Amarna family. Can we assume that Tutankhamen opened the tomb, took the best for himself, and gave his beloved elder brother a semblance of a royal burial, complete with valueless but still effective funerary artifacts, at Thebes? If we can make this assumption, we have to ask what happened to the other Amarna bodies. Had they already been destroyed by robbers? Or were they, too, taken back to Thebes? Are they still buried at Thebes, or are they included in one of the known royal caches?
The first Amarna queen to have been ‘identified’ at Thebes is Tiy. We know that Tiy lived long into her son’s reign; the shrine that Akhenaten prepared for her bore the later form of the Aten’s name, only used after Year 9, while a single wine docket shows that wine from her estate was still being delivered to Amarna during Year 14. Although it has been suggested that Tiy and Sitamen were interred in the Valley of the Kings tomb of Amenhotep III, it seems highly unlikely that Akhenaten would have buried his mother anywhere other than at Amarna, and indeed fragments of Tiy’s sarcophagus were found inside the Amarna royal tomb. However, the presence of Tiy’s shrine in KV 55 shows that at least part of her burial was transported to Thebes. Are we to imagine that Tiy was first interred at Amarna, then transferred with Smenkhkare to KV 55 during the reign of Tutankhamen, and finally moved again to a mummy cache, possibly via a sojourn in the tomb of Amenhotep III where fragments of Tiy’s shabti figures have been found?
We have several anonymous New Kingdom female mummies recovered from the Valley of the Kings. And there are many missing New Kingdom royal women, including Tiy, Kiya, Nefertiti, and all her daughters. It is natural, but frustrating, to try to match up the two. For a long time Amarna scholars have focused their attention on a trio of mummies recovered from the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV 35). Here, in 1898, Victor Loret discovered seventeen royal mummies of the 18th, 19th and 20th Dynasties, stripped of their riches and stored in the tomb by the Third Intermediate Period necropolis officials. Amenhotep II still lay in his open sarcophagus, and a large walled-up room held nine coffins housing, amongst others, Tuthmosis IV, Seti II, Ramesses IV–VI and ‘Amenhotep III’ who may have been mislabelled. Another mummy was found in the tomb corridor. Meanwhile a small side room held three naked, coffinless and unlabelled mummies, each showing damage to the head and abdomen. Loret first identified these as an older woman, a little prince and a young man. Soon after the ‘man’ was reclassified, and the trio became widely known as the Elder Lady, the Younger Lady (the man) and a prince.
For a long time it was accepted that the Elder Lady might be Tiy.
This mummy, described by Elliot Smith as ‘a middle-aged woman with long, brown wavy, lustrous hair’,38 had been recovered in a quasi-regal pose with her left arm bent in front of her chest and her left hand clenched as if to hold a symbol of rank. Subsequent examination proved her to be a woman in her forties, highly similar in cranio-facial morphology to Thuyu, mother of Tiy.39 This estimate of the lady’s age made her perhaps slightly younger than might have been expected, but when a strand of hair taken from the mummy was matched to a lock of hair found within a miniature coffin labelled with Tiy’s name and included amongst Tutankhamen’s grave goods, the identification seemed complete. However, it sometimes seems that nothing in egyptology is ever simple – how can we know that the hair in the tomb of Tutankhamen actually came from Tiy? Meanwhile, more recent research suggests that the mummy may not be as ‘elderly’ as was first supposed and, unless we are again to accept a long co-regency between Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, Tiy must have been relatively old when she died. Although mummy ages obtained by X-ray analysis need to be treated with some caution, this leaves us with a tantalizing question. If not Tiy, who could this lady be?