Smenkhkare

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Preceded by: Akhenaten	Pharaoh of Egypt 18th Dynasty	Succeeded by: Tutankhamun
Smenkhkare
a portrait of Smenkhkare in the naturalistic style of the late-Amarna period, associated with the sculptor Thutmose
Reign	1334–1333 BC
Praenomen	Ankhkheperure Living are the Manifestations of Re[2]
Nomen	Smenkhkare-Djeserkheperu Vigorous is the Soul of Re, Holy of Manifestations[1]
Consort(s)	Meritaten
Died	1333 BC

Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare (sometimes spelled Smenkhare and Smenkare; meaning "Vigorous is the Soul of Ra") was a Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, successor of Akhenaten, and predecessor of Tutankhamun. One academic source states that Smenkhkare's sole rule lasted for approximately 1 year at the most.^[3]. Other Egyptologists suggest that this pharaoh's independent reign may have been as short as a few months. Tutankhamun's reign began immediately after Smenkhkare's death. Some scholars have speculated that Smenkhkare, rather than Akhenten, was the father of Tutankhamun.^[4]

[edit] Identity

The identity of the Pharaoh whose praenomen is Ankhkheprure, who is usually known as Smenkhkare, is somewhat mysterious. Egyptologists do not even agree whether he was a man or a woman - although the position that he was a man is traditional, and more common. The difficulty is that Smenkhkare shares some names with Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten, and it is possible that Nefertiti was Smenkhkare, as it is not unheard of Ancient Egypt for women to become kings (e.g., Hatshepsut).

Two sets of names are associated with Smenkhkare:

• Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten, who is probably the queen we know as Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and who may have ruled as co-regent with her husband;
• Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare, who may be identified as the husband of Queen Meritaten – Akhenaten's daughter and Chief Wife after Nefertiti's death.

To date, no objects other than the wine jar label, six royal seals and a depiction of king Smenkhkare along with his Queen Meritaten are known, whereas some clearly feminine objects with the name Ankhkheprure Neferneferuaten were reused in the burial of Tutankhamen. This suggests that Smenkhkare refers to a single person who was different from Nefertiti. The throne name of Ankhkheperure is occasionally written in the feminine form Ankhetkheperure, with the feminine "t". This suggests that Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten was likely Nefertiti, and a separate individual from Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare. A fragmentary stela from Amarna, now known as the Coregency Stela, adds more evidence as well as more confusion. It is known that the stela originally portrayed three figures, identified as Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and Meritaten. However, at some point after the stela was made, the name of Nefertiti had been gouged out and replaced with the name Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten, and Meritaten's name had been replaced with that of Akhenaten and Nefertiti's third daughter, Ankhesenpaaten. Why Nefertiti's clearly feminine figure would be renamed with a throne name in the masculine spelling is still debated to this day, as is the reason for Meritaten's usurpation by Ankhesenpaaten. Some suggest the fact that Smenkhkare appeared in the record about the same time that Nefertiti disappeared, and yet was still portrayed as having performed the rites reserved for the heir to the throne at Akhenaten's funeral, indicates that Smenkhkare and Nefertiti were the same person. However, it has also been suggested that Smenkhkare adopted Nefertiti's names, albeit with the masculine form of writing. Either way, since we know that Smenkhkare was married to Meritaten — eldest daughter of Akhenaten — the theory that Smenkhkare was actually Nefertiti seems unlikely; why and how would Nefertiti impersonate a man and take on her own daughter as a spouse?

According to James Allen's most recent research (below), Ankheperure Neferneferuaten was Akhenaten's co-regent in the latter's final 2-3 years but this person was a lady who is different from Ankheperure Smenkhkare who was a young man at death. The latter certainly ruled Egypt for a brief period on his own since he is attested in his Year 1 on a wine label from "the House of Smenkhkare"^[5], in the tomb of Kheruef and by the six seals with his name. Allen^[6] contends that Smenkhkare was not Neferneferuaten who would be a junior co-regent of Akhenaten. Neferneferuaten is attested by a Year 3 graffito date from the Tomb of Pere (TT 139) who was a minor Priest of Amun. This implies that in Akhenaten's final years, Neferneferuaten sought a compromise with the Amun priesthood before being replaced by Smenkhkare.

Other scholars contend that Smenkhkare was the same person as Neferneferauten and that he and Akhenaten ruled as co-regents for the last 2 or 3 years of Akhenaten's reign. On several monuments, the two are shown seated side-by-side.

[edit] Family

Smenkhkare's parentage is unknown — the leading theories are that he was a son of Akhenaten or Amenhotep III. Unlike the majority of other Pharaohs, the only claim he made was to have been "beloved" of Akhenaten, but he never states that the latter was his father. Moreover, whenever any of Akhenaten's daughters were referenced, they were referred to as "the king's daughter, of his loins, (daughter's name)." That there was no reference to another son would seem unlikely in a largely patriarchal society. Furthermore, as evidenced by Cyril Aldred (a prominent Egyptologist), Smenkhkare would have to have been born at least three years before Akhenaten's reign began, making it very unlikely (given Akhenaten's assumed minimum age of 12 at ascension) that he was Akhenaten's son. Since Akhenaten fathered six daughters but no known sons in his 17 year reign, he must have been a mature adult when he succeeded hsi father. This makes it more likely that the male king Smenkhkare was a son of Amenhotep III and, therefore, a younger brother of Akhenaten.

The tomb of Meryre II contains a roughly painted scene depicting a king and queen. It names the "King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Ankhkheperure, Son of Re, Smenkhkare, Holy-of-Manifestations, given life forever continually" as the husband of "the Chief Wife, his beloved, the Mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt, the Lady of the Two Lands, Meritaten" — it was through her royal blood that he may have claimed legitimacy to the throne, as was the practice in the period.

[edit] Tomb

In 1907, Arthur Weigall and Theodore Davis discovered a tomb known as "Tomb 55" in the Valley of the Kings. The tomb itself is a mystery, as the door bears the name Tutankhamen, the shrine bears hieroglyphs stating it was made for Queen Tiye, and the sarcophagus indicates that it was designed for Akhenaten's second wife Kiya, four cardinal bricks bearing the name of Akhenaten, and a very poorly preserved body that is considered (with about 80% certainty) to be a male around 20 years of age. There are some indications that the body shares common traits with Tutankhamen, suggesting a filial relation, but the poor degree of preservation makes this difficult to ascertain. While some scholars consider this to be the mummy of Akhenaten because its royal cartouches were deliberately erased from the king's coffin and his royal uraeus was removed--as were many traces of Akhenaten because of his controversial religious revolution, several anatomical examinations of the mummy's body rule out this popular hypothesis since Akhenaten would have been an infant when he ascended the throne and suggests that it was Smenkhkare instead. In contrast, Akhenaten had 6 daughters by his wife Nefertiti which shows that he was a mature adult when he assumed the throne. The archaeological evidence from the Amarna boundary stelas show that Akhenaten had broken with the Amun priesthood and moved Egypt's capital from Thebes to the site of El-Amarna by his 5th Year. Only an adult king in full command of his mental faculties would have embarked on such a radical shift in state policy whereas a child king would have been guided--and controlled--by the state's leading administrators such as Vizier Ay who would have acted to preserve Egypt's existing political and religious order. It must be stressed that it was Tutankhamun, not Smenkhkare, who turned against Akhenaten's religious revolution by shifting Egypt's capital back to Thebes. Hence, the deliberate damage to king KV 55's funerary goods can also be interpreted as a reaction against Akhenaten's immediate successor--Smenkhkare--who still followed Akhenaten's policies and maintained Egypt's capital at Amarna during his brief reign.

[edit] The Mummy of Smenkhkare

The New York Long Island University professor Bob Brier notes that it was Dr. G.E. Smith, the head of the Anatomy department of Cairo University, who first established that this mummy was that of a young man "who probably died in his twenties."^[7] A subsequent examination of the KV 55 mummy by Dr. Douglass Derry, Smith's successor, confirmed that the bones of the KV55 mummy were that of a male who died in his twenties.^[8] Derry also observed that the skull of the KV55 mummy bore close similiarities with Tutankhamun's skull.^[9] As controversy continued to rage over the mummy's identity, Dr. R.G. Harrison--a professor of anatomy at the University of Liverpool--was allowed to perform the first and only modern examination of the KV 55 mummy's remains in the 1960's.^[10] Since most of its skeleton is complete--with only a portion of the sternum missing--Harrison was able to perform careful measurements and X-ray's of the mummy to reveal the internal structure of its bones. Harrison concluded that there was no evidence of either a deformed skull or a glandular disorder in the KV 55 mummy while the body of the remains was that of a normal male with no significant abnormalities.^[11] This finding also eliminated the possibility that the KV 55 mummy was Akhenaten since some scholars had believed that this pharaoh suffered from Froelich's syndrome, a glandular disorder which causes "an elongated head, underdeveloped genitals, and a feminizing of the physique" of the pharaoh--features with which Akhenaten is strikingly depicted in his own statues.^[12][13]

As Bob Brier writes,

"As we age, our cartilage turns to bone, and bones near each other fuse. This is one reason we become less flexible as we grow older. In the case of the body in Tomb 55, based on the fusion of the bones in the sternum, the age at the time of death was between nineteen and twenty years. From the collarbone the estimate is twenty to twenty-two years, and from the sacrum the estimate is less than twenty-three years. Teeth are also a good indication of age. The third molar [of the KV 55 mummy] had not fully erupted, which indicates an age between eighteen and twenty-two. These findings are confirmed by the pelvic bones, which suggest an age of twenty to twenty-one. Given all the evidence, it is clear that this is a normal male who died very near the age of twenty and thus cannot have been Akhenaten. This leaves Semenkare as the leading candidate."^[14]

Although little is known about him/her, Smenkhkare's face may actually be the most well-known of all the Pharaohs: the image often used to illustrate books, and exhibitions on Tutankhamun may well be of Smenkhkare. It comes from the middle coffin of Tutankhamun's tomb (pharaohs were buried in a series of 3 coffins, like Russian dolls), and it clearly differs in appearance from the images on the inner and outer coffins. With a number of other artifacts in Tutankhamun's tomb bearing Smenkhkare's name, and with a reconstruction from the mummy in KV55 bearing a strong similarity, it may well be the face of Smenkhkare. Being more attractive than the alternatives (notably in being more mature, less boyish), the image has however been widely adopted in modern times for illustrations of Tutankhamun^[15]. Smenkare's reign was probably brief, lasting perhaps no more than several months given the paucity of objects mentioning his name.

[edit] External links

• History of ancient Egypt
• Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt Family Tree
• KV55 Mummy
• KV55 KV 55's Lost Objects: Where Are They Today?
• Smenkhkare Djeserkheperu Ankhkheperure

[edit] Footnotes

1. ^ Peter Clayton, Chronicle of the Pharaohs, Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2006 paperback. p.120
2. ^ Clayton, op. cit., p.120
3. ^ M. Gabolde, D'Akhenaton à Toutânkhamon, Université Lumière Lyon II, Boccard, (1998), pp.219-221
4. ^ http://history.memphis.edu/murnane/Allen%20-%20Amarna%20Succession.pdf James Allen, The Amarna Succession, pp.16-17
5. ^ John Pendlebury, City of Akhenaten, vol II, pl 86 No.35
6. ^ The Amarna Succession by James Allen
7. ^ Bob Brier, The Encyclopedia of Mummies, Checkmark Books, 1998. p.182
8. ^ D.E. Derry, "Skeleton hithero believed to be that of Akhenaten," ASAE 31 (1931), pp.115-119
9. ^ Brier, op. cit., p.182
10. ^ cf. R. G. Harrison, An Anatomical Examination of the Pharaonic Remains Purported to be Akhenaten, JEA 52 (1966), pp.113-116
11. ^ Brier, op. cit., p.182
12. ^ Brier, op. cit., p.182
13. ^ Clayton, op. cit., p.121
14. ^ Brier, op. cit., p.182
15. ^ "Treasures of Tutankhamun," The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976. ISBN 0-87099-156-6.

[edit] Further reading

• Cyril Aldred, Akhenaten, King of Egypt.Thames & Hudson, 1988.
• Nicholas Reeves and Richard H. Wilkinson,The Complete Valley of the Kings. Thames & Hudson, 1996.
• Peter A. Clayton, Chronicles of the Pharaohs. Thames & Hudson, 1994.