Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (11 page)

As Smenkhkare's name is often found accompanied by the title Nefernefruaten, a designation that Nefertiti used and the name given to one of her daughters, it would seem that he was related to Nefertiti in some way – perhaps the son of her sister, Mutnodjme. Reliefs from the early tombs of Akhenaten's reign often show Mutnodjme among the royal entourage acting as
Nefertiti's lady-in-waiting. She is described as: 'The sister of the Chief Queen Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, living for ever and ever, Mutnodjme.'

On a number of occasions, for example in reliefs in Ay's tomb, she appears with two small figures, whom some have taken to be attendant dwarfs, but could equally be two young sons, one perhaps being Smenkhkare. Some scholars have dismissed her as Smenkhkare's mother as she is pictured wearing a sidelock normally associated with children, which would seemingly make her too young to have a son who was around seventeen by the fifteenth year of Akhenaten's reign. However, there are examples of older women wearing such a sidelock in the immediate pre-Amarna period, which may indicate that it was an adult fashion for a while. Mutnodjme disappears from view as the reign wears on but reappears again about fourteen years after Akhenaten's reign, married to the general Horemheb to legitimate his claim to the throne. Here she bears the titles of 'Heiress' and 'Great Queen', so it would seem that through her the line of succession was deemed to have descended.

Within a couple of years of the co-regency with Smenkhkare, Akhenaten himself disappears from the scene. Of all the scraps of pottery and inscriptions found at Amarna, nothing bears a date later than year 17 of Akhenaten's reign. We know that this must be the last year of his reign as a docket from a honey jar found at Amarna bears the date 'Year 17', which has been partly expunged and 'Year l' written below it. This clearly demonstrates that Akhenaten has died and another pharaoh has taken over. However, this pharaoh is almost certainly Tutankhamun, as a docket from a wine jar from the same source reads, 'Year 1, wine from the estate of Smenkhkare, deceased'. The 'Year l' therefore has to refer to Tutankhamun. The question is, did Smenkhkare and Meritaten enjoy an independent reign? The
probability is that they did. In the tomb of the harem overseer Meryre, Smenkhkare and Meritaten are shown in the accoutrements of reigning royalty rewarding the owner, while Akhenaten is nowhere to be seen. Likewise, a painted slab in the Berlin Museum, found at Amarna in the early 1900s, shows them alone as king and queen.

It would appear that in the brief period of their reign, Meritaten took drastic steps against her rival Kiya, from which she had been restrained while her father was still alive. Not only did she excise Kiya's name from inscriptions, but defaced her representations in the most spiteful way. On illustrations on blocks found at Hermopolis, and on fragments of the Great Temple reliefs, we see that the eyes have been gouged from Kiya's image. Akhenaten's second wife had clearly been disgraced, and possibly killed. As the last we hear of her is in the year 16, she may not have survived long after Akhenaten's death.

Significantly, Kiya is a crucial figure in the mystery of Tomb 55, for it seems to have been for her that the burial effects in the tomb were initially made. From the feminine gender of the inscriptions, the characteristic court lady's wig on the coffin, and the female heads on the Canopic jars, we know that the original owner was a woman. Furthermore, from the inscription on the footboard of the coffin we can tell she was of exalted rank. It is an intimate address that, by its context, can only have been to Akhenaten:

Utterance by [cartouche cut out], deceased: 'May I breathe the sweet breath that comes forth from thy mouth, may I behold thy beauty daily; my prayer is that I might hear thy sweet, breezelike voice, and my limbs be rejuvenated in life through love of thee! Mayest thou extend me thine arms bearing thy spirit, that I may receive it and live by it.
Mayest thou call on my name for eternity, and it shall never cease from thy mouth, O my father [cartouche cut out] thou being [excised text] for ever and ever, living like the sun disc [excised text] the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, living on Truth, Lord of the Two Lands [cartouche cut out], thou beautiful child of the sun disc, who shall be here, living, living, for ever and ever [cut out; replaced with cartouche also cut out].

Although, at first glance, this inscription would seem to be made for a child of Akhenaten, as he is addressed as 'father', this was a common form of address used by Akhenaten's subjects, signifying that the king was their 'heavenly father'. All the same, the woman for whom the inscription was made is certainly close to the pharaoh, to have addressed him so intimately.

She was not, however, a 'Chief Queen'. The figures on both the coffin and Canopic jars show evidence of having had a
uraeus
added to the brow to make it suitable for the king for whom they were being adapted. The original female owner, therefore, had not been entitled to wear such a device, which rules out a 'Chief Queen' like Nefertiti or Meritaten who would have worn the royal serpent. Neither had the name of the original owner been contained in a cartouche, which again excludes a 'Chief Queen'. It all fits with a secondary queen like Kiya, however, who although not entitled to the
uraeus
or a cartouche, was close enough to the king to address him in an intimate manner.

When the German scholar Rolf Krauss succeeded in showing that the inscribed panels on the Canopic jars had been adapted to apply specifically to Akhenaten (see Chapter One), he also discovered that they had once contained Kiya's personal title. High-ranking Egyptians favoured the use of long titles, uniquely
associating them with their king. Such a title had been on the Canopic jars and had been altered so that it applied only to Akhenaten. There had originally been a 'landscape' panel containing the early names of the Aten, together with the appellations of Akhenaten, followed by a 'portrait' panel to the right containing the name and epithets of the owner. The 'portrait' panel had been removed, but the surviving inscription in the 'landscape' panel formed a part of Kiya's unique title found elsewhere.

Closer analysis reveals that Kiya's remains had already been laid peacefully to rest in the burial effects, before her tomb was plundered to provide the trappings for the sacrilegious interment planned for Akhenaten. Although the coffin could have been prepared for Kiya at any time, the gold-sheathed footboard text would not usually be inscribed until her death. In fact, the inscription actually tells us that she is deceased. This conjecture is further supported by an inscription on the gold bands surrounding the coffin. Here a glyph for the word 'truth' was in a form of the squatting goddess Maat that was avoided after year 8 of Akhenaten's reign in favour of a phonetic spelling. This later spelling, however, was used in the prayer on the footboard and in the columns of inscriptions on the gold lining of the coffin lid. If the inscriptions had been made at the same time as the burial effects they would have been in the earlier form. The conclusion, therefore, is that the coffin was made in the early part of Akhenaten's reign but actually
used
for Kiya in the later years.

Her tomb having been plundered for her burial effects implies that Kiya had been specifically chosen as the person whose funerary items were intended to be used for Akhenaten's bizarre entombment. There must have been dozens of such funerary items lying in storage awaiting use by their owners
upon their deaths. Why not commandeer any of these? Alternatively, why not simply make a coffin and Canopic jars specially for the purpose? For the perpetrators to have gone to such trouble to appropriate Kiya's coffin and Canopic jars means that the king's secondary wife was deliberately chosen to playa part in the macabre procedure. The only person we know of who had both the authority to disinter someone of Kiya's rank, and the apparent resentment of her to have done so, is Meritaten.

Indeed the state of the face mask on the coffin in Tomb 55 is a tell-tale clue which points to Meritaten. Because the addition of the uraeus to the forehead, we know that the face had been the likeness, not of the person it was adapted for, but of the original owner, Kiya. As her face was still on the Canopic jars, the removal of the mask was not intended to obscure Kiya's features, so must have been part of the macabre ritual. However, not all the face was torn away – one eye remained. What this was meant to signify is difficult to tell, but this is exactly the same peculiar manner in which Meritaten desecrated Kiya's statues – by chiselling out one of the eyes. As relief figures were always shown in profile, there was only one eye visible to excise.

If Meritaten had been responsible for planning the profane interment of Akhenaten, then she must at some point have turned against him. The same is true of her husband: a number of small artefacts, such as ring-bezels and furniture-knobs, bearing Smenkhkare's name show that he ultimately dropped the title – 'Beloved of Akhenaten' – presumably to distance himself from the king. It seems unlikely that Meritaten and Smenkhkare actually overthrew Akhenaten; rather they chose to renounce him once he had died. However, it does not seem that the couple abandoned Atenism. On the contrary, they appeared to have embraced it with fanatical zeal, persecuting those who failed to convert.

Although Akhenaten abolished the Amun priesthood and established Atenism as the state religion, there is no evidence that he oppressed those who still revered the old gods. Outside Amarna, life seems to have gone on pretty much as usual, and shrines to the traditional deities continued to be erected privately at Thebes and elsewhere. Sometime before the abandonment of Amarna, however, the Temple of Amun at Karnak suffered frenzied desecration, and monuments to Amun-Re were destroyed throughout Thebes. His obelisks were toppled, his statues were smashed to pieces, and the tallest of buildings were scaled to eradicate inscriptions bearing his name. The god's name was even proscribed from being used in personal names such as
Amon
hotep
,
and it is this particular edict which enables us to date the time of the destruction to the late Amarna period.

A number of inscriptions concerning Amonhotep III still employ the
Amon
(i.e. Amun) element until the very last years of Akhenaten's reign – text on the shrine from Tomb 55, for instance. As Akhenaten himself commissioned the shrine to be made around the time of Tiye's death, it shows that the violent suppression of the Amun cult had not occurred by the year 14 when the queen died. As it occurred so late in his reign it seems highly unlikely that Akhenaten himself was responsible. By this time the king had apparently all but lost interest in the world. As we have seen, artisans were virtually ignoring the official artistic decrees, seemingly without reproach. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that Akhenaten was becoming more of a hardliner. On the contrary, someone who is contemplating extreme acts of repression would hardly have relinquished much of his power to a co-regent.

It is much more feasible that it was the new king and queen who were responsible for the harsher measures, probably after
Akhenaten's death. Specifically, it would seem to have been down to Meritaten. An inscription in the tomb of a certain Pairi at Thebes, dated 'Year 3', tells us that Smenkhkare had a funerary temple in the city. This means that by the third year of his reign Smenkhkare had left Amarna and returned to Thebes, had died and was entombed, probably in the Valley of the Kings. Moreover, as the inscription also refers to divine offerings being made to Amun-Re at Smenkhkare's temple, it means that he had tried to reinstate the old religion. Abandoning Amarna and re-embracing Amun-Re very much implies that the recent anti-Amun desecrations had not been his idea, leaving Meritaten as the most likely culprit.

If this anti-Amun campaign was carried out on Meritaten's orders, then it would go some way to explaining why the peculiar entombment was originally planned for Akhenaten. As Akhenaten had evidently considered it unnecessary to wreak such havoc against Amun-Re and the other gods, he obviously did not see them as a threat. His god was the only god, so how could they be? As far as he was concerned they didn't exist. However, the desecration of Thebes implies a sudden fear of celestial opposition. Had Meritaten come to believe that her father had been demoniacally possessed by some rival god? Perhaps Akhenaten's uncharacteristic apathy, or possibly a mental breakdown following his wife's death, had ignited such fears. Indeed, such a scenario may well have led to the anti-Amun reprisals in the first place.

Smenkhkare, on the other hand, obviously considered Amun-Re to have had the upper hand and he tried to make amends. Although there is no surviving record of Meritaten's death, her husband's return to Thebes must presumably have been made once she was no longer around to stop him. However, Smenkhkare seems to have done too little, too late,
for he too died within a few months to be replaced by his apparent brother Tutankhamun. However, as Tutankhamun was only about eight at the time, the real power doubtless resided with the chief minister, Ay. Tutankhamun was immediately married to the eldest surviving princess, Meritaten's teenage sister Ankhesenpaaten, and rapid attempts were made to repair the damage to the monarchy.

This new regime was responsible for the final condition of Tomb 55, which leaves us with another intriguing question. How had Smenkhkare eventually come to be buried in the grotesque burial effects originally adapted for Akhenaten? The answer may be found in two very different tombs – the defiled tomb of Akhenaten and the magnificent tomb of Tutankhamun.