Do we have the mummy of Nefertiti?

By Marianne Luban © 1999

@Pharaoh

Published in

Egypt

· 3 Sep 2023

When Victor Loret, a French Egyptologist, found a trio of denuded, unidentified mummies lying side-by-side on the floor of the tomb of Amenhotep II (designated "King's Valley, No. 35"), he described them as an older woman, a little prince and a young man (1). Later, it was determined that the "young man" was, in fact, a woman, her baldness having confused even a Frenchman like Loret:

"The last corpse nearest the wall seemed to be that of a man. His head was shaved but a wig lay on the ground not far from him. The face of this person displayed something horrible and something droll at the same time. The mouth, running obliquely from one side nearly to the middle of the cheek, bit a pad of linen whose two ends hung from the corner of the lips. The half-closed eyes had a strange expression; he could have died choking on a gag but he looked like a young, playful cat with a piece of cloth. Death, which had respected the severe beauty of the woman and the impish grace of the boy, had turned in derision and amused itself with the countenance of the man.(2)"

The female mummy who had managed to retain a "severe beauty", has, in recent years, been identified as Queen Tiye, the Chief Wife of the pharaoh, Amenhotep III. A sample of hair from the head of this mummy was compared with a lock of hair within a small case discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun. The two samples were deemed a perfect match. However, since the identification has been challenged for several reasons, this mummy is still mostly known to Egyptologists as the " Elder Lady" (3). The young prince has not been identified, although I think he bears a considerable facial resemblance to the latter and may be Prince Thutmose, the eldest son of Amenhotep III, who died at an undetermined age and was succeeded as heir by his brother, who later became Amenhotep IV or Akhenaten.

Akhenaten was the 18^th Dynasty king who established the monotheistic worship of the sun-god, the Aten, and built his capital, Akhetaten, ("The Horizon of the Aten") in the desert on the site now known as Tel el Amarna. He abolished the worship of the gods of Egypt and, as a result, the temples fell into neglect and the priests lost much of their wealth and power. Such cultural activities and scholarship that would normally have been centered around the temples went into a decline and the ordinary people who made a living supplying these edifices of the gods with commodities of every sort, also felt the crunch. In addition, Akhenaten's effectiveness as administrator of the Egyptian Empire, the legacy of his warlike ancestors, is in considerable doubt. As a result, it was unlikely that this pharaoh's iconoclastic and eccentric seventeen-year reign was popular with anybody except his faithful followers at Akhetaten (4). The foremost among these was Akhenaten's beautiful queen, Nefertiti.

The exact age of the mummy, the man- who -proved -a - female, cannot be positively fixed, but the body is not entirely without clues as regards its place in the chronology of ancient Egypt. The process by which this woman was mummified seems to date her to the latter part of the 18^th Dynasty (5). The unusual shape of her skull puts her in the Amarna period, where this type of cranial formation was either artificially fostered or a genetic condition. The skull of the "Younger Lady" from KV35 corresponds closely to those of Tutankhamun and the mummy of a young individual from KV55, (the so called "tomb of Queen Tiye"). It is also like the heads of the Amarna princesses, as seen in the art of that era. And, not least, there may have been a skull shaped like that of the "Younger Lady" under the tall, blue crown of Queen Nefertiti, the Great Royal Wife of Akhenaten.

Clearly, the mummy has suffered from the cavalier attentions of ancient plunderers. Like the other two mummies with which it was found, its skull is pierced with a large hole and the chest has been hacked away (6). Worse yet, the face, which would have otherwise been excellently preserved, has been cruelly mutilated, it's mouth and cheek no more than a gaping hole. On the other hand, the mummy seems to have suffered from an unjust lack of attention from modern investigators. I suppose it has been difficult to imagine this hairless, battered corpse as having once been a beautiful anybody, much less an Egyptian queen of legendary loveliness. Some have postulated that this might be the body of Sitamun, a daughter of Amenhotep III, whom he also seems to have married and who would perhaps have been interred with him and her mother, the chief queen. Sitamun, it is true, would have been considered of a very high status, and it is far more likely that a king's wife would have been taken to the two royal caches by the priests of the re-burial commissions than a mere king's daughter (7). At this writing, I do not know whether a DNA sample has been taken from the mummy in question for comparison with that of the other 18^th Dynasty royals (8).

I think it is safe to assume that, were the mummy of Queen Nefertiti to be discovered, it would probably have little remaining of the exquisite beauty of the famous bust in the Berlin Museum. Yet, in my view, the bone-structures of the "Younger Lady" and Nefertiti, as immortalized in stone, are strikingly similar. Each has a slender neck of extraordinary length and a strong, but very beautiful jawline. Seen from the front, the mummy's jaw appears quite square in the manner of the likeness of Nefertiti. Also very alike are the noses that descend in almost an unbroken line from the brow and the angle of the eye sockets in relation to the nose. The eyelids are long in both cases. The mouth of the mummy is now impossible to determine, so I gave her the full lips of the sculpture in my restoration of the mummy's profile and these seem to fit quite well with the rest of the face. Unlike the figures of her mother-in-law, Tiye, Nefertiti does not give the impression, in her portraits, of being an especially diminutive woman and sometimes she is shown as being nearly on a level with the king. While the mummy of the "Elder Lady" measures only 1.455 metres, the younger one is 1.580 metres in height (9). Since the putative mummy of Tiye's husband, Amenhotep III, is only 1.561 metres, I think we may safely conclude that, with such parents, Akhenaten was lucky to have been 1.580 metres tall, himself (10). The chances of Sitamun, his sister, ever achieving this "height" are even less.

Limestone bust of Nefertiti, Berlin Museum

There is little doubt in my mind that, in order to facilitate the wearing Nefertiti's famous unique crown, a tight, narrow head-dress, the skull would be shaved like that of the mummy of the "Younger Lady" from KV35. Moreover, the one preserved ear of the mummy appears to be "double-pierced", a feature I have observed in more than one of Nefertiti's probable portraits (11). As an experiment, I took a full-size photo of a life-size bust of what is thought to be a young Nefertiti and decided to do some measuring to determine if its dimensions co-respond to the facial measurements of the mummy as obtained by G. Elliot Smith, the professor of anatomy who wrote the invaluable book, "The Royal Mummies" (1912).

Smith obtained 94mm as a "minimal frontal breadth" on the mummy. This I understand to be the distance of the forehead between the two frontal lobes. These are very clearly marked on the bust and, measuring between them, I got 94-95mm, as well. Smith gave 112 mm as an "auricular height". I don't know exactly how he measured the height of the ears, but when I put my tape measure at the base of the chin of the bust, 112 mm was the point where the ear is attached to the head in its upper part. As a "total facial height", Smith got 119 mm. I would say this is not an easy thing to measure on a bald -headed mummy, but perhaps Smith saw the shadow of a hairline. The bust I measured has no hairline because the queen is wearing a diadem (it being a "composite statue" upon which a crown, presumably the tall blue one, would be added of a different material). However, placing my tape at the tip of the chin, I see that 119 mm is a very reasonable facial height for this bust and could have been where the natural hairline began. The only thing left that I was able to measure was the nose. Smith got 56 mm for the nasal height and, yes, if I place my tape at the end of the nose of the bust I get 56 mm up to the spot where the nasal bridge begins--the part that is supposed to jut out from the brow. I say "supposed to" because this would not be very pronounced in either the case of the mummy or of the bust. In most of her busts Nefertiti seems to have almost a "Grecian profile". Since this is very noticeable on the mummy, it is one of the reasons I think she may be Nefertiti. Unlike Smith, I cannot get a nasal breadth of 25 mm. This is simply too narrow and is probably due to the desiccation of the cartilage that one sees on all Egyptian mummies. The marks for "double-piercing" of the ears are very evident on the bust I measured, although the holes were never drilled, the piece having been left unfinished.

In one photograph, the "Elder Lady", the prince and the younger female (if, in fact, she is actually younger) (12) all seem to be arranged en familie, candles burning at their heads. I believe that they were found together is no accidental grouping and that the ancient restorers of the royal mummies may have understood that this trio was closely related. While it is true that the mummy's left arm is not raised in the queenly attitude, such as is that of "The Elder Lady", this does not necessarily disqualify her from being a king's wife in the unconventional and chaotic Amarna era. In fact, the right arm of the corpse is broken off above the elbow and a right arm that appears to have been flexed was discovered nearby in the chamber of the tomb where these mummies rested. We have found no other female royal mummies with a raised right arm, but this anomaly can possibly be explained by Nefertiti's special status, which will be addressed herein: Nefertiti, it is believed by many, suddenly disappears from the iconography and textual records in about Year 13 of the rule of her husband, King Akhenaten. Since there are no reliefs showing her funeral, it has been assumed that she fell from favor for some reason and was supplanted by her own daughter, dying in a state of disgrace. In contradiction of this theory, that Nefertiti was given a queenly burial could be assumed because pieces of an ushabti figure bearing her name has been found. In fact, a reconstruction of it from portions in the Louvre and Brooklyn Museums (13) bears the inscription "Great Heiress of the Palace, praised of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt (Akhenaten?) ... Great Royal Wife, Neferneferuaten, Nefertiti, given life forever." Still, as we know tombs were prepared far in advance of a person's demise, this broken ushabti does not guarantee us much information about Nefertiti's ultimate position within the royal circle. No one knows how old Nefertiti was when she died or exactly where she was (originally) buried. Even though she was a mother at least six times, giving birth to six princesses with whom she is often shown, she may have begun her child-bearing very early and been no more than thirty when her eldest daughter was fifteen. However, there is no proof that Queen Nefertiti died a young woman and there is also no conclusive proof that the mummy in KV35 is particularly young. The third molars of the mummy are reported not to have erupted, a normal indication of youth, but wisdom teeth do not erupt in all people. At this point we will examine the part that Nefertiti may have played in the reign of her husband, and its aftermath, and the work of art, so different from the world-famous bust of the queen, that most belies Nefertiti having disappeared around Year 13. This is a limestone statue of the aging beauty, also in the Agyptisches Museum, Berlin (14).

In this sculpture Nefertiti is draped in a transparent, open robe that does not conceal her breasts in any way. On her head, instead of a tall, blue crown, she wears a rounded, blue helmet-like hat. It is quite clear that the figure of the queen has succumbed to the pull of gravity and the effects of numerous pregnancies. Her lovely face is actually ravaged--much older than it looks in any other portrait of Nefertiti of which I am aware. The point here is time, which not only destroys beauty but is the stuff of which chronologies are made. In this statuette Nefertiti, unless she was extremely ill when it was executed (her body certainly doesn't appear wasted) must have been a bare minimum of thirty years old.

Yet, as was mentioned, the conventional wisdom has pronounced that Nefertiti died or disappeared after Year 13 of Akhenaten. What are the mathematics involved here? Let us suppose that Akhenaten became co-regent with Amenhotep III at a minimum of age sixteen, a man in oriental terms, his own highest attested regnal year being 17. Just when he became sole king cannot be known with accuracy but, thirteen years later, Akhenaten would be twenty-nine. Indeed, Nefertiti, in her last portraits, looks this age-- at very least--and may have even been between thirty and forty (15)

Sometime after Year 13, Nefertiti was replaced as Great Royal Wife by her own daughter, Meritaten (16). Donald Redford writes: "In even the earliest reliefs Nefertiti is very often accompanied by a little daughter who follows behind her, clad like her mother and shaking the sistrum... If Meritaten was already a toddler in the second year of the reign, when the talatat structures began to arise, she can scarcely have been born later than the earliest months of her father's occupancy of the throne." (17) By this reasoning, Meritaten was barely past reaching puberty in Year 13, hardly a rival to supplant a renowned beauty still possibly under the age of thirty who had been greatly loved by her husband, to all appearances. A tomb painting depicting the "great durbar" of the previous year shows the royal couple affectionately holding hands. Was Nefertiti perhaps dead within the next twelve months? But if Nefertiti had not died but had fallen out of favor by Year 13 and was yet a young woman of, say, twenty-eight or nine--why are there still portraits being commissioned of her in middle age with the uraeus on her brow? The obvious answer is that the queen did not die young, nor was she disgraced or supplanted in favor of another. If anything, the status of Nefertiti was elevated after Year 13 and that of her daughter, Meritaten, for the same reason (18), a theory that increasingly gains support. In fact, it is very likely that Akhenaten declared Nefertiti his co-regent, styled "Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten" (19), and that the khepresh-crowned individual who is probably seated next to him in the Stele of Pasi, whom he chucks under the chin and who does seem to have the lithe body of a woman, is not a young man named "Smenkhkare" after all. Dr. James P. Allen, curator of the Egyptian department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, convinced me, with his article entitled "Akhenaten's Mystery Co-regent and Successor" (20), that the evidence for Nefertiti as co-regent and perhaps subsequent sole "king" exists for those whose minds are open to the notion. Arguments offered by Julia Samson, following those of J.R. Harris, in her "Nefertiti and Cleopatra" (21) are compelling, as well. Earl L. Ertman, in his article "Is There Visual Evidence For A 'King' Nefertiti" (22), sums it up: "The visual and textual evidence continues to mount that Neferneferuaten Nefertiti was co-ruler with her husband throughout much of his reign, performing duties and responsibilities of a king, if not actually holding the title. Her regalia and depicted actions suggest that she operated as co-king prior to Akhenaten's final years. Whether she ruled only while her husband was alive or also, in fact, succeeded him as sole ruler is still being reviewed and debated."

In my view Nefertiti was the co-regent of Akhenaten, but it was one of her older daughters who eventually became a "woman-king" called "Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten", there being possibly three persons with the prenomen "Ankhkheperure" before the reign of Horemheb.

Why would an Egyptian king bestow so much simultaneous power and responsibility upon his own wife? The most logical answer would be that Akhenaten was a sick man and trusted only one individual implicitly--Nefertiti. It would also seem that the pharaoh, at least in Year 13, had no son that was even close to manhood because such an heir would have been the first choice to fill the role of "junior partner". Perhaps there were small sons or even the hope of an heir in Year 13. Whatever the situation was in this department, it is quite certain that the king's eldest daughter, Princess Meritaten, was ultimately given the title of Chief Wife and even foreign rulers seem to understand she is the mistress of Akhenaten's household. Meritaten perhaps gives birth to a little daughter, named after herself--although some have claimed the child as being that of Kiya, a lesser wife of Akhenaten. Regardless, Meritaten becomes a queen with a proper cartouche. Is it because she is the wife of Smenkhkare, the new co-king of the conventional wisdom--or is it due to the fact that the former Chief Wife is now the co-regent and has rejected this title in the manner of other "woman kings" before and after her (23)? We shall probably never know the answer to this puzzle or if Meritaten's father, sometime after Year 13, actually cohabited with her as a true wife or if her title was merely an honorary one at this point.

I am not one of those, like Samson, who is willing to completely dispense with the shadowy individual called "Smenkhkare" as a male. I believe there could have been a certain young man named Smenkhkare married to Akhenaten's eldest daughter, Meritaten, who became pharaoh for an instant, and that it may have been some of his funerary equipment that was altered for Tutankhamun. How to fit Smenkhkare into this theory of Nefertiti as co-regent with Akhenaten is problematic. However, since his reign lasted no longer than a year, it would not offend reason to postulate that this prince (perhaps a son of Amenhotep III by a minor queen) succeeded his half-brother, Akhenaten, and even adopted the same prenomen of "Ankhkheperure" so as to smooth over the traces that there ever was a female co-regent in the interim.

Of course, there are those who take the opposite view, steadfastly maintaining that there was only one "Ankhkheperure", the young man otherwise known as "Smenkhkare". Aidan Dodson, for example, has attempted to demonstrate a progression of this male co-regent's loyalty to the senior king by the changes in the inscriptions of a set of canopic coffinettes, which were ultimately used by Tutankhamun (24). Dodson's theories in this area don't make much sense to me even though I am not able to dispute his epigraphic conclusions. I would tend to think that if Smenkhkare were a co-regent of Akhenaten and he wanted to mollify or please the heretic, he would probably have gotten some new coffinettes for his viscera that didn't display any of the traditional and taboo gods of Egypt or feature an emblem of Nekhbet, that great vulture goddess, smack in the center of his forehead. Are we to believe the co-regent sat in state with double emblems on his brow while Akhenaten contented himself merely with one--the cobra? It appears to me that if young Smenkhkare wanted to show the "progress" he was making in currying favor with Akhenaten, he could have "re-worked" a lot more on these coffinettes than a few cartouches! ! So, somehow, it seems more logical to me to believe that those canopic coffinettes were never fashioned or modified during the sway of Akhenaten for anyone in a subordinate position to him and whom he ostensibly trusted to help him carry out his policies but by individuals who sat on the throne after Akhenaten was gone, even so they wanted to be associated, nominally, with the latter.

In the twelfth year of his rule the pharaoh, Akhenaten, had at least one lovely wife and six growing daughters. This family unit is portrayed in the tomb of an official, Meryre II, with the king and queen perpetuating the artistic innovations of this regime by showing their affection for one another. Before two more years had passed, tragedy evidently struck. Perhaps it was due to a plague that may have eventually decimated the royal house, but there is no doubt that, by Year 14, Akhenaten's second daughter, the Princess Meketaten, was dead. We see her laid out in scenes in the Royal Tomb at Amarna, mourned by her distraught parents and the entire court. Most interestingly, these depictions also contain the figure of an infant, held in the arms of a nurse.(25) That the child is a male, perhaps the long-awaited heir, is indicated by the great deference shown to him with fan-bearers hovering in attendance lest strong light, heat or insects threaten this precious individual. Pestilence or no, the tiny, nameless person tantalizingly inserted into these scenes does likely survive and in due course becomes the pharaoh Tutankhamun, the most famous king of Egypt ever.

Unidentified female mummy from KV35, dimensions slightly restored

As it happens, the great posthumous renown of Tutankhamun is the only sure thing in all of this, for the period in which he was born, known to Egyptologists as the "Amarna Era", is shrouded with a figurative mist that shifts now and then but never lifts enough for scholars to get a firm grasp of the events of the time. In fact, the Amarna Era is highly vexatious to many scholars because it presents itself as a bundle with "loose ends" of which it is difficult to make a neat parcel. Theories have abounded nevertheless and many of them appear to be earnest efforts to render the events of this particular time as "normal" as possible, even harmonious, with a smooth succession from one king to the next. Yet it is my belief that the Amarna Era and its aftermath was far more chaotic and unusual than has been heretofore supposed. That is, supposed in modern times, because the ancient writers have certainly offered hints of the irregularities to which I refer, most of which have not been taken seriously by Amarna experts.

In his Year 17 Akhenaten apparently died, but there are indications that perhaps he was forced from his throne. At any rate, he disappears from the record. Even though Nefertiti may have been her husband's choice for a co-regent, it is doubtful that, after Akhenaten had passed from the scene, that she would have had any legal rights to the throne with grown daughters of the king being present.

Perhaps someday we shall know in whose reign Nefertiti actually died. Geoffrey Martin and Nicholas Reeves are searching for her tomb, but somehow I doubt they will discover her mummy in it. Regardless, we have no conclusive information that says Queen Nefertiti cannot have been alive up to and during the reign of Tutankhamun.

Indeed, in order to be the age she appears to be in her last portrait, she would have had to be still there. In the aftermath of the Amarna period, Queen Nefertiti would certainly have been regarded as the wife of a reviled heretic, but there is no real reason to believe that her mummy would have been targeted for destruction beyond the usual rough handling of royal mummies by tomb robbers for the valuables their corpses contained. Although the ultimate victor in the struggle for power that seems to have taken place in this part of the 18^th Dynasty, Horemheb, razed Akhetaten, desecrated its royal tomb and is even thought to have exercised damnatio memoriae in the tomb of King Ay, his predecessor, we cannot be sure that he would have tried to completely obliterate her remains. Still, signs that there was animus directed against her by someone do exist (26). Nevertheless, even though Thutmose III eventually destroyed the monuments of his ambitious aunt, Queen/King Hatshepsut, the other "woman-king" of the 18^th Dynasty", I am convinced her mummy, in very good condition, is still with us. It makes sense that Nefertiti should have been removed from Amarna, where she was probably entombed, and be afforded a safe haven in the tomb of a powerful ancestor of her husband's family, Amenhotep II, still in his sarcophagus and giving sanctuary to a number of displaced persons. Perhaps we ought to let go of our romantic notions about this royal lady, Nefertiti (The-beautiful-one-comes), take another look at the younger female from KV35 and concede that death is something against which even the greatest beauty rarely prevails.

Notes

A total of seventeen mummies, both labelled and anonymous, were discovered in KV35, among them great kings of the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th Dynasties.
Romer, John, Valley of the Kings (New York, 1981)
The identity is based, not on hair, but on the inscription of Queen Tiye's name and titles on the mummiform case. To suppose that the mummy is Queen Tiye is to suppose that the hair in the case actually came from the head of that great lady. Since the hair of the mummy is still dark brown and without gray and the teeth only moderately worn, it has been questioned that this can be Tiye, who, according to the generally accepted understanding of her history, must have been quite an elderly lady when she died. However, that is only if one assumes a short or no co-regency between her son, Akhenaten, and his father, Amenhotep III. As I believe, judging from facial characteristics, that this mummy is, indeed, Queen Tiye, I would have to find it a powerful argument for a lengthy co-regency. The late Cyril Aldred proposed it was as long as twelve years.
The possibility exists that, although the temples of the old gods were abandoned, the new religion did not actually catch on in Egypt anywhere except at Akhetaten, the royal city.
Smith, G. Elliot, The Royal Mummies (Cairo, 1912)
In order to get at the "heart scarab", which in the case of a royal mummy, could be made of gold and other valuable materials.
The priests of the re-burial commission, who transported the mummies to the Deir el Bahari cache and KV35, appear to have been quite selective in whom they chose for these repositories. Because of their polygamous habits, the pharaohs presumably had plenty of daughters, yet few that were not queens found their way into the two collections of royal mummies. Likewise the male progeny. I know of only two example of mummies of little princes with "the Horus-lock" on their otherwise shaved heads. The one in the tomb of Thutmose IV was not even removed for safe-keeping in KV35 with his father, but was found propped up against a wall of his father's own tomb (KV43) by Howard Carter in 1903.
Professor Scott Woodward of Brigham Young University, a microbiologist, has taken samples of several of the mummies. I eagerly await his findings.
Somewhat over 5 feet 2 inches.
Amenhotep III is the shortest of the pharaohs whose mummies we have--except the mummy of Thutmose I, measuring only 1.545 metres. However, I believe this mummy is most certainly that of a woman and not a man. See my article "Is the Mummy Thutmose I Really Hatshepsut", Discussions In Egyptology, Vol. 42, InScription, Issue 4, Autumn, both 1998, and Kemet, Spring, 1999.
A yellow quartzite head, Aegyptisches Museum, Berlin, and the Wilbour Plaque, which can be viewed on pages 72 and 90, respectively, of the Metropolitan Museum's The Royal Women of Amarna, which will be further used as an illustration source for the works of art discussed in this article.
We have no real idea at all how old Tiye was when she died, although the great Amarna scholar, Cyril Aldred, wrote that, historically, fifty years had to go by between her marriage to the king and her death. The "Elder lady" is hard to pinpoint as well. Because of her hair and other considerations, she has been given the round number of forty, (although Wente and Harris in their X-ray Atlas of the Royal Mummies gave her, on the basis of forensic examinations, a minimum age of 25 and a maximum of 35) a rather problematic figure to adjust to the chronology of the life of Queen Tiye , the mother of the heretic pharaoh, Akhenaten--unless she was a mere toddler upon her marriage. However, age estimates of the mummies have always tended to be on the conservative or low side.
Depicted in Volume One (page 78) of the Amarna Letters published by KMT Communications, San Francisco. Some have seen this ushabti as being the proof that Nefertiti predeceased Akhenaten. Even if Nefertiti died in the reign of a later pharaoh, her old title may have been restored to her but the crook and flail added to her burial equipment to signify she had once been a co-regent or a "pharaoh" in her own right.
Pages 77 through 79, The Royal Women of Amarna.
In her The Royal Women of Amarna, Dorothea Arnold takes the position that Nefertiti, as co-ruler with Akhenaten, assumed the status of "wise woman", vacated by the deceased Queen Tiye and is therefore prematurely aged in her portraits. I do not agree, as I cannot imagine the circumstances compelling enough to cause any woman, much less a celebrated beauty, to allow herself to be shown much older than in reality in any portrait, official or private.
James Allen, in "Two Altered Inscriptions of the Late Amarna Period" (JARCE XXV, 1988), argues that "Meritaten's promotion to Chief Queen probably did not occur until after Akhenaten's Year 17", and goes on to say that "there is evidence both for the existence of Nefertiti as queen sometime after Year 17 and for the appearance of Neferneferuaten even later."
Redford, Donald B., "Akhenaten, the Heretic King" (New Jersey, 1984)
In the article quoted above, James Allen expresses the idea that the writing of Meritaten's name on the "Coregency Stela" represents "a stage between that of King's Daughter (without cartouche) and Chief Queen".
Attestations of this prenomen exist as "Ankhetkheperure", using the feminine form.
KMT, Amarna Letters, Vol. One, Fall 1991
Samson, Julia, "Nefertiti and Cleopatra, Queen-Monarchs of Ancient Egypt" (London, 1997)
KMT, Amarna Letters, Vol. Two, Fall 1992
For example, both Hatshepsut of the 18^th Dynasty and Tawosret of the 19^th were once styled Great Royal Wife, but both relinquished this title upon becoming regents for their young princes.
"King's Valley Tomb 55 and the Fates of the Amarna Kings", KMT's Amarna Letters, Vol. 3.
The French scholar, Marc Gabolde, has published a 300 page study of the period from year12 of Akhenaten to the accession of Tutankhamun, "D'Akhenaton a Toutankhamon" (Paris, 1998). He cites the remnants of textual evidence that the child depicted in the scenes is born of Nefertiti, the Chief Wife of Akhenaten
Redford, Akhenaten, the Heretic King (page 228) "The four major shrines were still standing, though somewhat delapidated. The wreckers found as they approached that at Karnak, just as at Akhetaten (now largely abandoned), vandals had hammered out some of the reliefs here and there. The faces of the queen had often been hacked with hammer and chisel; less often had the king's visage been so treated."