Not long after the festivities in year 12, work on the non-royal tombs at Amarna ceased suddenly, leaving large areas of them undecorated. Also c. 1341 bce, some reliefs were carved in Akhenaten's tomb which hint at upheavals. One relief shows a royal birth, where the child survives but the mother dies. This woman is not Nefertiti, but may be one of Akhenaten's daughters or his co-wifc Kiya.2i Certainly Meketaten, and probably Neferneferure', seem to have predeceased their parents. Other members of the family, including Tiye, also fade out. There was a plague epidemic in the Near East about this time, but nothing to suggest that it caused deaths in the royal family. By year 14 of Akhenaten's reign, c. 1339 bce, Nefertiti too has disappeared from the documentation, at least under her familiar name. Definitive cvidcncc remains to be found as to whether she died or went on to rule as Akhenaten's co-pharaoh with the titulary 'Neferneferuaten Ankhkheperure', beloved of Akhenaten'. There is attractive philological evidence for Pharaoh Neferneferuaten being a woman, but it is too circumstantial to convince that it is Nefertiti. The Amarna letters may suggest that Neferneferuaten was the oldest daughter, Meritaten, supplied with a new royal title and perhaps 'married' to her father.21 The final certain references to Akhenaten himself are jar labels dated to year 17 of his reign, c. 1335 bce. On one of these, somebody started to date a honey jar to regnal year 17 of Akhenaten, then realised a mistake, erased it and corrected the date to year 1 of Akhenaten's successor. Presumably Akhenaten died c. 1335 bce after seventeen years on the throne, and vanished from recorded history in the same kind of humble document as that recording his first appearance - a docket scrawled on ajar.
It is not known for certain whether Akhenaten was buried in the tomb prepared for him, where one or two of his daughters had already been interred. Numerous broken pieces of his funeral equipment survive — servant figures with the king's features, scraps of linen, and sarcophagus fragments. The last mortal remains of Akhenaten may be a decayed mummy found in 1907, along with some battered funerary objects inscribed for Tiye, Smenkhkare' and Kiya, in tomb 55 of the Valley of the Kings (usually abbreviated as KV 55) (see Plate 2.4). All kinds of identities have been suggested for the anonymous individual of KV
Plate 2.4 The mutilated face of the coffin from tomb 55 in the Valley of the Kings. Egyptian Museum, Cairo.
55 - Akhenaten, Tiye, Smenkhkarc', Kiya, various daughters - and a host of medical and scientific tests enlisted to prove one theory or another. There is no consensus on the central question of the individual's age at death. For the mummy to be Akhenaten, I would expect a man of 40 or more. With all this uncertainty, the minimum explanation of KV 55 may be that it is a cache of debris from the robbed royal tombs at Amarna, including a mummy who was believed to be somebody important enough to lie in the pharaohs' ancestral burial ground.
The identity of Akhenaten's immediate successor is obscure and contentious. Scholars have often changed their minds about the identity of Akhenaten's successors, showing how plastic the facts are. Whoever 'Neferncfcruaten Ankhkheperurc', beloved of Akhenaten' may have been, she or he seems to have reigned for at least three years. Akhenaten's religious experiments seem to have lost their impetus and foundered after his death - apparent proof of just how much they had been a personal project of the king. Neferneferuaten may have made attempts to improve relations with the Thcban religious establishment (suggesting that it was something which still wielded power?). A petition to Amun written on the wall of a Theban tomb in year 3 of Neferneferuaten certainly suggests this:
My wish is to look at you, so that my heart may rejoice, O Amun, protector of the humble man; you arc the father of the one who has no
mother and the husband of the widow. Pleasant is the utterance of your name; it is like the taste of life.2 '
But this does not necessarily suggest an immediate return to the worship of Amun as the foremost of the gods, as is often said.'6
After Neferneferuaten, a short-reigned pharaoh called Smenkhkare' Ankhkheperure' is then attested. Because they share the name Ankhkheperure' ('Living-one-of-the-manifestations-of Re''), it was once believed that Smenkhkare' was identical to 'Neferneferuaten Ankhkheperure', beloved of Akhenaten', and the dates perhaps fit in with this person being a renamed Nefertiti ruling alone after Akhenaten's death. Alternatively, Smenkhkare' may have been somehow related to Akhenaten and married to one of his daughters, though the evidence for this is suppositious. At any rate, mass-produced commemorative rings and other items found at Amarna show that some effort was made to mark the accession of this pharaoh in the usual ways. Objects prepared for his tomb were eventually recycled in the burial of his successor Tutankhatcn, a child of unknown relationship to Akhenaten.27 Tutankhaten's ideologically correct name ('Living-image-of-Aten') certainly suggests a connection with Akhenaten's immediate circle, if not a blood relationship. It might also, however, reflect the long-standing Egyptian practice of naming people after the local god, since Akhet-aten was the Aten's home territory.
Tutankhaten and those who ruled in his name extended Neferneferuaten's concessions to the gods Akhenaten had opposed. Eventually the symbols of Atcn- worship were removed. Names were changed back to forms celebrating Amun. The royal residence had relocated to Thebes by year 2 of the renamed Tutankhamun, c. 1330 bce, although Akhet-aten remained inhabited and was even partially resettled some time later. Efforts to deny Akhenaten's existence by omitting him from some official records begin at this time. An inscription raised by Tutankhamun in the Hypostylc Hall at Karnak Temple gives a rather allusive version of Akhenaten's reign, never mentioning his name, and saying that neglect of the gods had led to disaster abroad:
The gods were ignoring this land: if an army was sent ... to extend the frontiers of Egypt, it met with no success; if one prayed to a god to ask something from him, he did not come at all.'"
Religious upheaval in Egypt and political confusion in the empire were convenient weapons for Akhenaten's opponents. Before or shortly after Tutankha- mun's death in c. 1323 bce, the vandalism and destruction of Akhenaten's monuments began. Efforts were stepped up during the reign of Ramesses II (reg c. 1290-1224 bce) when buildings at Akhet-aten were dismantled and reused. Yet Akhenaten and the upheavals of his reign were not forgotten.Towards the end of Ramesses II's reign, more than a century after Akhenaten's death, euphemisms such as '"the rebel" (sebiu) or "the criminal" (kheru) of Akhet-aten' were used to avoid speaking his name.29 The word kheru usually describes the defeated rulers of Egypt's foreign enemies. Using kheru to execrate Akhenaten dissociates him from the official lineage of approved kings, setting him apart as aberrant though still royal. But Akhenaten was not erased from every kind of record. It seems likely that chronicles or annals in temple archives preserved some record of him and his reign. These chronicles were perhaps still extant in the third ccntury bce when they were consulted by historians writing in Greek, and a rather garbled version of Akhenaten's story was transmitted into the classical tradition.
In the rest of this chapter I look critically at what I regard to be the parts of Akhenaten's history that have spawned the most important aspects of his myth. This is intended to help set the scene for the elaborate sets of appropriations I turn to in the rest of this book. I start off by examining his family background. Akhenaten is often subjected to amateur 'psychoanalysis' via the Readers' Digest redaction of Freud, and his reign is seen as a result of the psychological effects on him of his upbringing. Here I suggest that the evidence is so scrappy and ambiguous, and so frequently misrepresented, that such reconstructions are pointless. I then consider the extent to which Akhenaten's religious policy was innovatory, or whether it is more useful to see it within a larger pattern of religious speculation that started before him and continued after his death. This is followed by a discussion of the ideological role of Amarna art (usually misrepresented in terms of naturalism and verismo), and I finally consider the erasure of Akhenaten's name and destruction of his city.