ARCE lecture with Dr. Aidan Dodson

good afternoon everyone my name is Richard Sandifer and I'd like to welcome you to our program this afternoon on behalf of RC Georgia and the Carlos Museum uh just a couple of words of introduction there RC that's a r c e that stands for American Research Center in Egypt and the Georgia chapter so if you want to find out more about RC you can just go out to Google and put in the acronym Arce and also the Carlos museum at Emory University is helping to sponsor this program and we're very grateful to them and I think we have a great program this afternoon uh we're very very pleased and happy to have with us uh Aiden Dodson and uh Professor Dodson uh is from the UK and uh he is probably well known to most of uh Professor docs Dodson received his PhD from Christ college at Cambridge and uh currently he is a professor at the University of Bristol in the UK and as most of you probably know he appears on television regularly uh he did it's well you know they talk about this is the holiday season but it's almost like the two tank common season there's just about a program on that almost every day and oftentimes Professor Dodson is on that so uh in addition to that uh he is the author of many books that most of you have if you're interested in egyptology have seen some of them I think over 25 books and uh he is the uh writer of something like over 400 scholarly papers and articles and reviews and uh he has also been working on a series of biographical uh books related to the Egyptian rulers and so he is well versed in the area that he's going to be talking about today now the way we're going to do this is there's at the bottom of your screen you'll have a q a and so if you would just go ahead and put any questions that you have at the bottom of the screen the Q a box and we'll get to those questions at the end of the talk and we'll uh handle them as best we can so we're really pleased to have with us Professor Dotson and I think you're going to enjoy the talk so Professor Dotson if you'd go ahead okay let's just get the screen shared there it is okay right let me just just a couple of things so I know what we're doing okay right um good evening or in my case it's good evening good afternoon to you is the problem with doing these kind of um International Zoom things we could be almost anywhere um at any time anyway so for me it's evening uh for you it's afternoon and the and brothers are appropriately given a sort of sunset comes between afternoon evening um I'll be talking about Amana Sunset which is to look at the tricky bit during the last years of Akinator and explore the question of his co-ruler on Co or co-rulers which has really been a bug bear of um Amala studies for a long time and the title is taken from one of my books on that particular period so right now I'm sure that pretty well everybody who is watching this lecture um is well aware of the basics that um the king and hotep IV after four or five years of his Reign changed his name to akinatan um throws Egyptian religion up into the air and it comes back down again as a sun Cult of the art and and as part of that he establishes a new capital city at Tel El amarna roughly halfway between the ancient capitals of Memphis and Thebes part of the revolution is also an artistic one here we've got a classic representation of the king and his wife Nefertiti um with their daughters um the artistic style of this is heavily distorted as compared with the normal Egyptian approach to things with um swelling hips uh heavy punch and also a very sort of naturalistic kind of position you know that this kind of Representative royal family will be unheard of before or after uh atkinarten's time with the representation of his God the artem as an abstract Solar Globe with arms coming down and holding the signs of life to the net the nostrils of the king and queen foreign come during the first 12 years this is when the religious Revolution happens it's when Amana is founded and then a year 12 we get what seems to be very much the Watershed of the of the rain and probably in the whole um experiment I suppose and the place we find out about this Watershed which comes in the 12th regnal year of akanaten is two tombs um of Nobles on the in the cliffs to the east of the city now the majority of the uh of these tombs are in a in two large groups but there's also two isolated ones the northernmost pair of Tomb chapels belonging to officials and these are um telemanna tombs one and two and here they are up on this Hillside um separated from the later one from the earlier ones by the Wadi on the right there and here we zoom in and here we are these little two little chapels very typical of the tombs belonging to the nobility of the period um above ground chapels cut into the Rock and then below them would have been The Descent to the burial Chambers so here they the two of them are at one and two and the two of them are clearly cut at the same time and most remarkably their decorations include two three includes see which represents part of the other it's very I think I'm aware of any other pair of tombs where you effectively look at one scene in one tomb and then go next door to see part two of the same representation it in the the first uh this is one of those uh the first of these representations into one um it's the the state of the wall um is very difficult to photograph as you can see here and therefore it's rather better to actually understand it from a line drawing and we've got we've got here is on the on the left the king and queen are being carried out of the Royal Palace on a uh on a carrying chair adorned with figures of lions and then they're moving out to be escorted from the palace which is the North Riverside Palace which is something we will have briefly look at a bit later on um in this lecture they're being carried out from there on southwards to the um the central part of the city and these kinds of representations which are pretty well unique to tombs of akanatan's Reign include interesting factors in the top left-hand corner you have got a plan of the king's residence on the right there you can see a little um little Shrine A Wayside Shrine of some description also you have a whole range and a whole range of individuals who are there escorting or standing it Bowing in in the king's honor as he goes by and then part two um which is in the next door tomb of Mary Ray II um we've got the representation of the king and the queen in a uh in a in a kiosk with their six daughters behind them and all around them are people from pretty well the whole of the Known World bringing tribute to them the nature of this tribute has been a matter of debate ever since these tombs were first recognized in the 19th century uh because this kind of of bringing of tribute is normally associated with some kind of military activity but there's no evidence that there's the case here and also the sheer range of different nationalities who are being represented makes it pretty clear this can't be just the uh the off the outcome of a single successful War iest Scholars have made proposals pretty well no note which pretty well nobody has generally agreed with and this is why the factors of this period of Egyptian history particularly is the how quarrelsome egyptologists are over it and I'm not sure there's any two egyptologists who would actually agree the full scenario for the whole of the Canadians period And before and the following follow-on so I have to emphasize that what I'm presenting tonight this afternoon is very much my my take on these things although of course I will be exploring where there are alternative views to be had okay so what do I think about this well my I wonder whether this actually is in some way the um opening party if you like of the city of Amana Akita as it was called by the ancient Egyptians because the city had been under construction sin for about um six seven years at the time when this this is all taking place and once would strongly suspect that having built a new capital city from scratch the king might well want to show it off to the the world The Wider world so I'm wondering whether that actually was this is represented here which is a great party to open the city of Amana oh but what's interesting is if this is in one in one sense the high point of acknowton's Reign the point where you know all his dreams of his City his religion have all come true where this also this great Gathering also sowed the seeds of Destruction because not long after this we start getting deaths certainly among the royal family and probably more widely and it has been suggested I can't prove it it's been suggested that not only were gifts being brought into the country by these various delegates but also the seeds of disease have you just lived through a pandemic we know how relatively small number of people traveling around can actually spread a disease widely and so I wonder whether or not not only say is this the great moment who Triumph but by bringing in people who are infected with something we don't quite know what but something nasty uh that that's um of um destruction and it's a worthwhile noting that about 15 years after this event we know that Egyptian prisoners of War taken prisoner by the Hittites in North Syria brought plague into the land of the Hittites which modern modern turkey kind of area and that was so virulent that the large chunks of the royal family and and many others were also carried off by it so one wonders whether this is actually the ground zero of that whole event that whole episode which will carry on for decades afterwards and outside Egypt as well now the evidence for royal family rapidly um dying is to be found in the Royal Tomb at Amana um Amana tomb number 26 which is very interesting because unlike earlier Royal tombs which were very much designed around just the burial of the king this also has apartments for the burial of Memphis royal family in particular this little Suite there and the Earl and possibly the earliest or to the best documented of the deaths is to be found here and this is the death of Princess mekitartum we know this happens after year 12 because mekatartan is shown along with her Five Sisters on the um in the in in the scene which we've just seen in the Tomb of Mary Ray II but not long afterwards she is no longer there and here and also in this adjacent room we also have um evidence of the death of two other princesses so that half of the king's female children appear to be dead within a very short time of that year 12. um celebration these scenes Are all uh so spread between those two those two rooms that of Mecca Tartan we know it's definitely her because the we have warning seen here of the quit the princess on the left top left there on her deathbed um with on the right the remains of figures of her parents uh mourning her and also in an adjacent wall of the same Tomb of the same burial chamber we have the scene at the bottom there which shows um a figure of the princess um a standing figure of her being mourned by her parents and also rather significantly three of her sisters now we also have on the wall another the rule of the adjacent chamber two more almost identical death bed scenes the unfortunately the label texts on these are destroyed so we don't know who they are however if one then looks looks at them in conjunction with the scene or scenes of makitarten we see that there are two daughters missing who are the youngest two daughters nephinephru Ray and the teppen Ray and on the base of that I think it's probably um the only obvious solution to this is that both the youngest pair of daughters have died um guide first and then followed by their Elder older sister makitarten leaving say just the three other girls Merit art and kessen patatan and nepha nephru art and tasheret um alive the cause of death has of these of these these girls has been a matter of debate of course um there is on the middle middle top um scene up here there is outside the um the death chain there is a figure of a b being carried by a nurse and this has been used to argue death in childbirth however there's some major problems with this first of all Egyptians never refer to the mode of death of a an individual in there too secondly the all the girls in question will be have been too young to Bear a child to guide in the birth of mekatartum is potential is the eldest of these and she's only 10. okay it's possible to conceive a child at the age of 10 but rather rather unlikely yet the other two are probably only two or three years old and it's quite impossible so why is there a baby being shown outside the death chamber in all three of these cases well it has been suggest suggested by a Dutch colleague Van Dyke that this may actually be a a very a very concrete Amana expression of the idea of rebirth which forms important part of Egyptian funerary belief and that possibly in this particular case in these in this in in Amana a funery belief which we are only know a tiny amount about because it's only the evidence is so it's so minimal there may have been a conception of the the that when somebody died they were rebought they were reborn literally as a baby in arms but unfortunately that's as you know there is all we have are these releases in fact these reliefs have been damaged since these drawings were done so therefore it's we can't really go much further with this and also not long afterwards or possibly at the same time because all we can really say is this stuff is happening between year 12 and the end of akinaten's Reign four years later on um is that Queen T the mother of akkenarten also dies um and her burial does not take place in one of these side rooms like the princesses did but she's actually buried in the same room which is to which was intended to hold her her son's burial um so her burial presumably took place somewhere on in the in the burial chamber of the royal tomb here um that it took place here is suggested by one of the reliefs on the wall of this um room horribly damaged but the very careful tracing work by the late professor Jeffrey Martin revealed on the left there is a standing figure and the figure is because of the uh of the way it's represented um appears to be that of a female and therefore Queen T is the most likely candidate because a large number of fragments of her sarcophagus were found in the Tomb as well so putting two and two together we've got this female figure in the burial chamber we also have um sarcophagus fragments belonging to Queen T so therefore it looks like she is also a victim of this um of this this Spate of Royal deaths and given that the you know the royalty are the best fed and all those sort of things and then and you know they're getting this massive mortality rate in the royal family one suspects that it's that that is that there's going to be paralleled uh lower down society as well and just here are um reconstructions uh by Martin by Martin Raven of the uh of the two ends of um Queen T's sarcophagus like most of the other hard Stone material in the Royal tomb it was used to fragments after once the prescription of econ's memory gets going probably the end of the reign of Titan come on and there is this massive three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle to be carried out regarding them as we'll see one the sarcophagus of akanaten himself has actually been restored but the one of T thus far has only ever been restored on PayPal now with the death with the with with amidst all this I think it's where we should place the remarkable elevation of a man called Spencer Ray to um to kingship now stranger um has been a matter for debate like like most everything else to do with this with the with the period ever since he was first identified in the 19th century um and there have been various proposals as to where he should be placed whether he should be placed purely as a co-ruler with akanatan whether he should be placed as a um an independent ruler afterwards also in more recent years as we'll be exploring shortly there's been a debate over whether he was really a she and a whole range of other issues but to start off with the question about when stranger was actually held Royal titles now the the basis for my arguments which are that he was only ever a co-regent of akinaten probably for a relatively brief period of time somewhere perhaps year 13 or 14 of the Reign is derived from the place where we find his his best known attestation which is again in the Tomb of Mary Ray II the tomb we've already been talking about because of its containing the the scene of the get of the of the bringing of gifts to um akanatan and this is and on the right there um which I've marked there on this on the slide here as durbar this is um where that scene is to be found on the right hand wall then directly next to it is a partly carved relief which is of Spencer Ray and his wife merita Merit artan being the actually the eldest daughter of akanatan it's also worth noting that directly in front of these two bits of decoration is the beginning of a sloping passageway to the burial chamber of the two and because of the presence of that um it seems very unlikely that the Rel that the anybody would have put the unfinished relief on with on the other wall above um because it would get in the way once that once work had started on cutting that burial Passage so all taken together I would argue that this The Unfinished relief of Spanish was carried out as part of the same decorative um decorative's phase as that of the Year 12 durba and therefore this because this this the the durbar is an important historic event uh one we suspect it wasn't left very long after year 12 for it to be done so I therefore argue that all the decoration in the Tomb is to be dated soon after year 12 around year 13 stroke 14. foreign and this actually is the relief in question nowadays pretty well nothing of the ink sketch in the middle survives I've been there and had a look at it and so really we are having much having to rely on reliability of the People Who sketched it in the 19th early 20th centuries when it was in this rather better condition um also this wall has suffered because the grade out element to the text were cut was stolen in the 19th century and have never been recovered luckily squeezes were made in the mid 19th century of these texts also with just pen and ink copies as well so we can actually we're reasonably happy of what actually is said there and say we've got the cartouches of Spencer Ray and never and um Merit art and there further reinforcement the idea that the rain should be placed within the reign of back in art and uh can be derived from this jar found in the Tomb of titanical moon uh with an erased um set of inscriptions these inscriptions have the the remains have been studied by Christine Lubin of the Kessner Museum in Hanover and he's able he was able to identify the only impossible wrist restoration of the inscription is what I've shown on a show on the screen there uh which is the cartouches of akinatan and Spencer Ray um all um together and although having names of Kings together does not prove they rule together it's useful uh corroborative evidence for what I was saying about the what I'm saying about the dating of Sven Clare on the basis of the um on the basis of the decoration in the Tomb of Mary Ray II but who was um train karate and why is he appointed because it seemed very unlikely that he was a son of akhenaton and therefore if this would be following the usual Middle Kingdom pattern of appointing the uh the heir to the throne to to Joint rule in advance of actually taking over as Soul King my thought is that this is all to do with concerns at akkenarten's own mortality um it seems very likely that the um the addition to his daughters akananda had a son took the future tatankhamun who we know from the basis of his acted on cameroon's age at death would have been only a small child at the time of this sort of post-year 12 um a problem with of disease and so on and it may have been that akhenaton was very concerned that he would die and that his young son would be left to the mercy of some Regent who may not wish to carry on with religious and artistic Revolution and therefore I think that he appoints my guess is he's probably the brother of akhenaton uh to a co-regency not with any intent that svenjare would ever become the soul king of Egypt but rather that he would be akinatan's right-hand man um and co-regent but when akanatan died he particularly if he died before Tatanka Moon as he was at that point had come of age then that spring hurray would carry on to be his co-ruler and make sure that the the Revolution was continued what else have we got of Australia apart from this um this this very bet this this is almost this ghostly now uh representation of the two of Mary the second well here at Memphis um this is a very old 1960s photograph of the ruins doesn't quite look it's rather more overbuilt now than that um from the ruins of Memphis in the 19th century uh came this relief block which can only be restored as giving the names of svenkhare and meritartum unfortunately this block is now lost also um in the Central City at Amana the great palace there had an extension made to it here I'll just uh aerial photograph of it this and here is the uh the uh the architectural plan of it um this great multi-columned structure was added on the right there and this structure was um built or these partly built with blocks which have the name of strength ra um his pre-noman outkeep through Ray marked on it it's been called the coronation Hall probably isn't that um during the 1920s and 30s when this was excavated the excavators were always keen on giving sort of sexy names to buildings uh particularly useful when you're trying to talk when you're talking to a general public about these things to try and raise funds for excavations um so and this was the name which was given to this particular large structure um but no real evidence what it is a few years ago I caught a Belgian colleague suggest it might be some kind of via a grape Harbor which seems to be it's far too it seems far too large in a wrong location or something like that so we don't quite know what it is but it represents a major piece of addition to the Royal Palace during the time that smear was Pharaoh um is attested by a number of ring bezels um the fiance rings with on the uh on the bezel of them royal names and we have a range of the full range of royal names of people who are known um Ana on these on these things and also seal impressions as well so we've got not only Akana and we've got Nefertiti some of the daughters and even as well but here we've got the ones of Spencer Ray which were found at least one initially found by Flinders Petrie when he excavated atomana in the early uh early 1890s and what we've got here are first of all his pre-noman which is ankh kepuru Ray and also a series of other ones which give his nomen which is spencare Jessica Peru so these were early pieces of evidence for his existence and Presence at Amana okay now a further sort of facet of the whole question about the identity of Australia comes from a tomb found in the Valley of the Kings in 1907. this is notorious tomb 55. um which has been like has been the mat again the subject of a huge amount of debate over the years um what was found was clearly incomplete burial what we have on the left is are the remains of a wooden Shrine of Queen T in the Middle Ground we've got a broken coffin lying on the ground in Niche Beyond is uh some you can just see some canopic jars and also other material was found in the Tomb as well um and so there's a number of different interpretations of it the key one has all been about the question of the identity of the coffin and the body which was contained in it which has been examined on more than one occasion and the bra and the consensus has generally been that it was somebody who died in their mid to late twenties although there have been a couple of outliers claiming a much older greater age but interestingly neither of these claims of a greater age are backed up with any kind of detailed analysis as to why the fact that that every other anatomist who's looked at the the remains uh reckon it's in its twenties um the two the only two possible candidates for this for the owner of this um coffin and we don't know no certain simply because when the cartoon shares have been cut out from the coffin wherever they appear um are akinat and svenka right they're the only two um adult the only two male um pharaohs who are floating around at this particular time and the age of the body really does have a major impact on this because there's no way that akanaka could we can have been as young as his his twenties on in his death so therefore the only other other solution is that the body is that of svenkhare the rest of the history of the Tomb um is all problematic because there's also magic bricks belonging to akinat and as I already said there's the shrine of Queen tea so the most likely solution to what's happened here is initially um the the three bodies which has originally been married in the Royal tumor to mana akinaten spenceray and Queen T were moved here when when um Amana was shut down during the reign of Tutankhamun but then the bodies of Tea and acan Art and were later removed now Queen T's body has now been identified as the so-called elder lady in the two environment hotep II so that was clearly she was clearly moved out and moved either primarily or secondarily to that location uh what happened to akhenaton um well he certainly know his body hasn't turned up anywhere else and therefore my suggestion is it probably was destroyed there seems to have been very much a nuanced attack on the memories of the various uh Amana Kings akanaten was certainly sort of Beyond The Pale um was basically ignored and specare possibly had an intermediate um fate which was his body was left behind but it was deprived of names what's interesting also is that the coffin which is buried in was actually made for Kia the disgraced second wife of akhenaton who seems to be disappear from view soon after year 12. so this would tie in with the idea that stranger's lifespan was quite short and that he when he died there was a need to provide a coffin for him and that the Reese and the coffin of the recently disgraced Kia was brought into use to um provide for his internment and this is the skull from there from the um from the coffin which on the basis of say that seems most likely that is that of Spencer Ray now then we come to one of the things which a major issue which for a long time confused studies of what was going on in the latter part of economic drain because we have this cartouches on the left of Uncle Ray Jessica Peru but also we also have another king floating around whose name includes the element but always with an epithet added which is a an epithet which Associates a person with akinatan it's beloved of one of the elements of akanatan's prenomen but rather than having as the Noman it's nephinephratum with the addition of an epithet now for a long time it was assumed that svenger had changed his name to Nathan F ruarten or alternatively that the name was originally an f and f through ART and and it was changed to uh Spanish and also at the back against the background of this it was assumed that the person was I think the same person and the fact that Spencer Ray is shown in the Tomb of Murray II with a wife that that was a male and therefore we had a male throughout whatever um throughout this um kind throughout all this and various ideas have been were developed on the basis of on the basis of that um the name uh the combination of Manchester Ray plus epithet yeah plus epithet is to be was is to be found on this box or box lid from Moon which names and the King's great wife Mary Tartan and given that Spencer Ray had been long known to be associated with Merit art and on the basis of the scene in the Tomb of Mary the second this was taken as a further confirmation that this equation was correct that they were the same person um and that one had changed their name to the other and on the grounds that the more elaborate one um is possibly the more the later of them it was argued that way around although others had argued the the priority in the other direction but they but until the 1970s everybody was perfectly happy this was the same male individual but then um in the 1970s um a couple of British egyptologists um John Harris and Julius Sampson um had a closer look at some of the Ring bezels from Amana which gave the I might want to call the extended form of the Yankees name and looking at this one particularly zooming in they noticed that there are a couple of signs in the um in the name which shouldn't be there which are these two here they don't form the element that any part of ankhep ruray beloved of wire in Ray which is one of the versions of the epithet given to Nathan fuarton what these signs are actually are the Egyptian sign for t which as I suspect many of you will wear is the um feminine ending for a name so suddenly Nephron is becomes a female not a male and initially there were attempts there was a because it always been this assumption that they were the same person to make special Ray a woman as well which then starts becoming problematic given that representation in the Tomb of Mary Ray II but I have to point out that some people still um accept this equation of nephrot and strength array um I have to say I I certainly don't and it wasn't until denying early 1980s that it was noted that actually there were no overlaps if you like there's no example of smear having the long version of the prenomen with the epithet in it which you might expect if they were indeed the same person so the it then becomes a reasonable hypothesis to actually what you've got here are two separate individuals one a male and one a female the confirmation of methanephro Art and status as a female because there had been some suggestions that the uncut Keppra the one with T's might belong to yet a third if it's another individual uh was a result of um the French egyptologist Mark gerbodes a close examination a number of items in the Tomb after tahamun which had originally been made from artem in particular there was this um this pectoral and a close look at this Cartouche in its final form is out of tadun but had originally belonged to Neff nefruit and was really quite instructive because there are some people who had still clunged the equation of Spanish and the idea that both of them were a male with this straight with this version of the Cartouche with FEMA belongings to a different individual but having a close look at this it was possible to recognize that the name read naphanephratan and then a group which had been which had originally been read as being part of the name akinaten because the bird which we see at the bottom is however what Mark was nif and everyone n which means sort of the Ben F1 beneficial to finally ha s which is her husband so the whole thing actually reads nothing beneficial for her husband which first of all well and truly uh indicates that definitely was indeed a woman and secondly that she is closely linked with a husband and that probably as king she is in such she is probably what wrote ruling alongside him so where we got we've got to at this point is that we have two individuals floating around Spencer Ray who is we can I so I would argue is very briefly a co-ruler around year 13 or 14 of Akinator 17 at known regnal years and then we have this individual the female King nephinephrus and well the image I've shown I've chosen there to represent her is something from the tomb of today Moon which at one point been thought to be have been made originally for akkenarten because of the breasts and the belly however the breasts are not the uh male breasts which thought these are very clearly female ones so this is another item which was originally made for Nathan F ruarten like the pectoral I've just shown which was then used for the ultimately used in the burial after time for Moon and who okay who was nephe nephruart well suggestions have been made of various individuals however I think most of them seem to be uh gratuitously um obtuse because when we look at the names of Nefertiti for much of the of the rain from probably sort of two or three years into acknowton's Reign her full name is nephinephrou Art and Nefertiti so therefore including that at the the the the name of this female pharaoh well some have argued no this is simply an epithet which has been transferred from Nefertiti to naphanephro Art and however when you look at the way that the name the Cartouche is put together it's rather interesting because for those of you who read hieroglyphs you'll see that the um the odd sign on the left which forms the part of the um name the arten is written back to front and actually what you if you look at the Cartouche it should it's really in two halves as two separate names one reading from One Direction Nefertiti and the other reading in the other direction definitely art and so I don't think it can be seen simply as an epithet which could then be transferred to another individual rather it is a name and what I would argue has happened here is that when is that sometime after the death of Nefertiti is elevated to female kingship and in doing so her name is an abbreviated to the nephonephroatan element of it with the addition of epithets yeah Okay so we've got we've identified we've identified this female female pharaoh who appears to be um Nefertiti who has been promoted so what do we what sort of what have we got which survives um relating to her well this is the North Riverside Palace the area uh where the um royal family seems to have had their principal residence and it's not the ruins in the Middle Ground these are the ruins of the 1930s um the 1930s dig house for the Egypt exploration Society um what the actual the palace and its surrounding things are these various um lumps and bumps and um and pieces of mud brick walls which survive and amongst the uh various fragments of painted plaster because the the the Palaces of Amana and some of the ordinary houses were exquisitely decorated with with we painted plaster we have a number which can be reconstructed as giving the name of um naphanephroton and another example and with the example of the epithet beneficial for a husband is um is visible there so she's certainly present here at the the what you might call the family home of the kings of the Amana of Iraq of um Amana now however she doesn't seem to have been elevated to a full-scale female King immediately on the basis of this um Steeler now this stealer has been the basis for various other speculations uh which still appear frequently in the literature let's just look at it from the first initially however from the way which it is now being now interpreted what you've got here are two kings um naked Kings um in an affectionate position but unfortunately the cartoon shares have never been filled in the paired cartouches at the top are those of the artem written twice either side of the sun this globe the ones relating to the figures seated figures are the three figures of the three cartoon which is on the right and immediately the fact there are only three cartouches and no space for a fourth indicates these are not two fully fledged pharaohs what you've got is one who has is fully fledged has two cartouches but the other one has to be a queen because um of the fact they've only got a single Cartouche as to who these are well again if you take a close look at the left hand figure the um the way that the chest has been carved is clearly a female breasts contrasting with the much more blunted um in in Brint we call man boobs I'm not sure whether that's a term which you fight we have you have in the states uh on the right so what we have here are Nefertiti and akanatan but what's remarkable is that the figure of Nefertiti on the left there is where's the blue crown of a king of Egypt rather than the flat-topped Crown which Nefertiti herself normally um normally um Sports so what we seem to have here is there is a period where Nefertiti is what you might want to call a crowned queen she is wearing faryonic regalia but doesn't actually have the king's title of the Pharaoh interestingly there's a similar kind of situation of somebody um with wearing ferionic regardia but without using an actual photonic titles yet later on in 21st Dynasty where we have a couple of representations of the high priest of a moon um pinagem the first who is shown so the possibility of somebody being elevated to Crown status without actually being Pharaoh there is a later precedent for that it's worthwhile pointing out some of the other speculations about this because when the idea of the equation of Spencer a and Nephron was put together this this Steeler was cited as a representation of spenceray and Akhenaten um and then further you and because of their the affectionate um pose therein then used as an argument for a homosexual relationship between the two kings um at that point the fact that there weren't enough cartouches for it to be two kings was completely ignored as well as the um the the uh the physique of the left-hand figure and so therefore the idea of homosexual relationship between akanat and Spencer a past to become a fact and is now well embedded in quadruple secondary and tertiary um literature however now knowing what we do that the nephinephroton was a woman and almost certainly Nefertiti uh these two gay lovers are actually um um a heterosexual husband and wife um but unfortunately the the the the store it's such a good story um regarding the idea of akinat and then sprinkle Arabian gay lovers it's so becoming Bend in literature and it's become what I now call a zombie fact something which was once um a valid um Theory but now disproved in scholarly terms it is probably going to still be around for another hundred years in the secondary and tertiary literature so we have a number of items which were intended for um left nephrus burial which ended up inundre barrel and this says the uh one of the figures which is certainly identifiable as that of a woman also identifiable as from the intended foreign other canopic coffinets and in fact when you when you tot it all up both items which are definitely the x-neth nephroat and um because there's actually traces of her names still visible and others where one is heavily um suspicious possibly 25 percent of these sort of major items in the in the Tomb ofanka Moon might well um derive from her but the fact they were actually used for the burial after Jennifer Moon and not for Neff nephro Artemis burial there's no indication that they were that her burial was stripped to um secondarily stripped to provide material um is an interesting thing and I'll be returning to that um that issue a little bit later on and another um piece of evidence for the for Nefertiti transitioning to um King is this rather interesting head in in Hanover um where the face which has which was originally identified as akinatum but doesn't doesn't really have his face but has a face which is comparable with faces clearly of uh Nefertiti it was out at the um this the rather awkward way that the blue crown has been attached to this um this this head um it's now been recognized that the reason for this is originally this head was a head of Queen Nefertiti with her distinctive flat topped Crown but then that cat that Crown was cut away and a new blue crown added when she became either a female pharaoh or the pre or her previous status as a crowned queen now this point at which she transitions from being crowned queen to King was a matter for debate until relatively recently it's important to recognize how Egyptian history can be changed almost just by one Discovery and this is a good example of that because there had been for a long time because the last time we definitely had a representation of a dated representation of Nefertiti was year 12 in the durbar scene in two and the tombs uh ta1 and ta2 but then she had to have been around a little bit later because she's there in the morning scenes of her daughters so people were suggesting she might have died herself in round year 13 or 14. um as well as others who were arguing that she had then gone on to transition to um the female King the proof of her of of that she was still alive um in year 16 came from a discovery um up here at uh near Daryl bersher up here there are a large number of um of quarries many of which were worked during the time doing the built for the building of the city of Amana and this is one of them Quarry 320 and in it there is there is high up on this column a long graffito left by The Quarrymen and this um graffito the important point about it is that it is dated to year 16 first of aket day 15. where it has Nefertiti still as the full as an ordinary as a with the titles of King's great wife she has not yet transitioned to being a female pharaoh and this is only a year or so before the likely death date of akinaten and on that basis it looks as though her transition from being a crowned queen to being a female pharaoh it's probably a very late thing why might that have been well possibly the the need to the the prop the thing which had led to Spring car race um elevation still existed the danger of Akinator himself dying while still too too young uh to rule but array seems to have been a prince of the blood so if in the event of tutank artems like the moonstrong hearten's premature death it would have been okay for him to then become pharaoh however Nefertiti had was although probably had Royal Blood she certainly was not a princess she never holds the title of King's Daughter or King's sister and therefore is at least normally a commoner and possibly the idea of actually making a commoner female pharaoh was possibly a step too far but then the fact it actually happens before the end of akinatan's reign as we've seen from that um strip from the box which names the two of them um together and also a relief I'll be showing you shortly it may have been that he is now ill or concerned assassination or whatever and that finally just towards the towards the very end of his life he take he decides that the the risk of um of him dying without a male available um was too high and therefore that he finally does elevate his wife to kingship and the work of Ray Johnson who's been doing this amazing amount of work um on putting together various blocks originally from from Amana but now from but um and found Ash monane has now reconstructed this uh pillar fragment which clearly shows akinaten and Nathan F ruarten together with Princess and kessen per arton showing the two of them right at that very very end point of akenarten's Reign foreign dies probably soon after that relief is carved this is a quite late statue of him now in the Louvre and he is interred in the Royal tomb atomana you see the modern shelter over the entrance there to the Royal tomb and as we've seen Ridge already we have the the burial chamber of it here and on the right which is now a sunken thing but it was originally a raised um a raised Deus was his sarcophagus which it is used is it reconstructed from fragments as you can see awful lot of the fragments still missing um yeah now in the Kyrie Museum it's just been brought in from the garden it's now actually in the gallery in the galleries proper and actually this is an interesting thing and it's showing that even before her elevation to female pharaoh or crowned or crowned queen her status was pretty it was particularly prominent because the figures on the corner here which more traditionally would have been the four protective goddesses of the of death um has been been replaced by Nefertiti so actually this which was probably carved before year nine of her husband no matter whether any issues about her becoming a female pharaoh later on she was already goddess of the dead as far as was concerned now there are a couple of options as to how one reconstructs things um one option um is that on akinaten's death the female King nephenewarton then rules alone for about three years and then is followed by Moon or the version which I prefer given that she has been appointed originally as a co-ruler and also has no right to throne in her own right as being a commoner and also like obviously been the situation for spent Hare earlier on I would argue that the more reasonable likely reconstruction is that she continues on as a co-ruler on akhenaten's death but with akanatwood as her as a new co-ruler so I think what we see on acknowton's death is a do you want a roughly try and vert if you like of Nathan Ephraim the former Nefertiti along with as king and queen with her actually pulling the strings so but what can we say is going on given that like these sort of aren't my argument is that the idea behind her appointment as co-ruler of akkenarten and then on going on to become the co-ruler of tutankartan uh was to maintain the revolution well if that was akinaten's um intention all the evidence suggests that he would be spinning in his sarcophagus soon after this because all the evidence indicates that something completely different actually happens and from the point of and one of these things is to be seen here on the Sheikh Abdul Kerner Hill in the Tomb of a man called paelli this actually is an older tomb reign of that mosa the fourth or possibly Amon Hotel III um but during the time of neph nephruarten um some people wrote graffiti in there this is looking into the Chamber of the Tomb Chapel and the bit we're interested here is this door jamb and on this this is a graffito of year three of naphanephroatum you may wish to note that the graffito as it now stands is rather more extensive than what's left on the wall um because the whole lower part has now been lost but luckily it was copied in fact similarly in the early 20th century but what's interesting about this graffito a it's data to year three of nephron art it's the only dated thing to her Reign but also it is it is written by a priest of a moon and it's a prayer to a moon So within three years of the death of akhenaton uh this female ruler who seemed to have been his wife Nefertiti who had been linked closely with him in the religious Revolution is now turning things on it head by allowing Ammon to once again be worshiped um and we could have a priesthood but also note that she still actually still has that Alton in her name but actually the epithets on the graffito a such that one of them might even be beloved of a moon so what I think is happening it soon after akinator's death is that the new regime start to try and triangulate between the old and the new um bethanyfruit and probably brighter than her husband recognizing that the the Revolution was not sustainable that if there was going to be any future for her for today and also for um the art and some kind of compromise so possibly this is what's going on here and also we find on this stealer in Berlin this remarkable scene is to tax artem on the right although the net although the cartouches are damaged um they are the original ones the original his original ones he's worshiping Ammon and moot so we have a rapid about face although initially not a not a complete one because the rulers are continuing to have their names uh with the name of Art and in them and initially the um they they continue to be ruling from Amana because we have these ring bezels not only of um nothing for art and but also tatankhamun as well and also the idea that they might be buried here is also indicated by two unfinished tombs in the Royal Wadi atomana 26th there is akanathans there's also 29 and 27 which are clearly intended to be King's tombs um here we've got the area where 29 is looking at the entrances to them and here we're looking down the corridor of 29 45 meters deep when it was abandoned so clearly a king had intended to be buried here and he's probably the most likely owner is nephron who had been already been who may well have started cutting it when she was crowned when she was crowned queen but here it comes to an end simply the word has come that it's not going to be used and the workers move away foreign material which is being put together for her but it's not used for her burial and what therefore seems to happen is on her death it's decided that she probably wasn't a proper um female king after all and that she's buried possibly as purely as a queen or possibly in even less um refined circumstances with her gone the control over the young king passes to I an army General who had been prominent at akinaten's court and may possibly have been the father of Nefertiti and in the new um new regime the attempt at triangulation is ended and the king and also the queen have their names changed from and here we've got this remarkable scene from a piece of gold foil showing I on the left on a larger scale than actually the uh Moon himself which very much does suggest where the power at this point lies and even there's also he's actually represented behind the king in a number of blocks from Karnak as well so so there is a new a completely new regime underway here um which and the and tracing that is a whole lecture in itself um but continues on with the uh with with returning to Thebes um extent carrying out wielding work at Karnak and also a decorative work at Luxor Temple where we have this possibly the last um surviving represent last representation of him a card before his premature death after his death the throne passes to I the previously been the military strong man behind the um behind behind the uh the throne and we have this remarkable representation of him opening the mouth of the Mummy of Titan uh this is a unique scene although we have opening of the mouth scenes in a in Royal tombs it's normally a generic one not actually of the next king probably this is all down to the fact that the only legal means why but we're under which I could take the throne was by carrying out the Kings internment it does seem that there was default position in Egyptian inheritance whether it be royal or otherwise is that um the person who acts like the eldest son by burying his father is legally speaking it but his Reign only lasts for four years um he is replaced by horimhab um who had all who had previously been part of the Regency alongside him um in the restoration um in in the post nothing period of restoration attitudinal Moon and eventually he indeed he then goes ahead and becomes um Pharaoh on his on on on eyes death with his wife Matt leshmet who possibly is the same woman as is shown a number of Amanda tombs as um the sister of Nefertiti and here are those representations we can't be certain nowhere is that clear but it does suggest that the that there that the the fact there is a sister of Nefertiti the latest nephratan called najmet and that horm later marries a lady of that name does is rather suspicious though we can't prove it one way or the other and then with um Horan hebb's death we have the accession of Ramesses the first the first of the new 19th Dynasty as another Army General that's three Army Generals in a row taking power and then we're into um the whole history of the 19th Dynasty so anyway just tonight I have just I've really focused on particularly the issues um surrounding the last years of akinaten and who's who are floating around there hopefully that will have been that has been a useful presentation and of course I'm happy to take questions uh with from the Q a box so thank you very much I'm also a member of the Georgia chapter of ours go ahead Ed uh oh okay no problem Richard Richard um yeah it's a member of our chapter and uh uh we're gonna handle the Q a and uh let's go ahead and start the Q a and do what we can with that so I suggest that I that I can see the Q a should I just read the questions out and then that might be that might be the easiest way Robin so somebody else trying to ask it as well that might be good just go ahead and do that yeah okay first one from Elaine Street spot ran nationalities are representing the kiosk scene well pretty well everybody there's syrians there's Nubians uh there are Hittites and I'm sure there are various other ones but it pretty well seems to be pretty well the whole of the um the whole they have all the Known World effectively uh from Fred Botha why would such detailed inscriptions of events be made in two tombs if the tombs were to be closed and the description's never seen again ah these are in the Chapels of the tombs it's important to recognize that an Egyptian tomb has two parts there is the public Chapel area and there is the closed burial chamber and the chapel air which is where these inscriptions as we found is intended to be open at all times so therefore they they would be permanently visible uh next one Anonymous attendee you said that I can dance man was destroyed I thought they had a mummy identified as him in the Cairo Museum that is the mummy I rep I identify as Spencer Ray um the uh there's the the debates over that body have gone on for years but I think the and although the the headline um as certainly presented by um psychoas and certain others it's it's akinatan I think the majority of egyptologists would not agree with that and would take the view that the age of of the Mummy is such that cannot be anybody other than Springfield array uh the from which leads on to Al Padilla's uh question have any genetic studies been performed on the mystery right yes they have um and they they indicate that the The Mummy is either the father or the paternal Uncle after Moon which is one of the reasons why um I would argue that Spanish is the um it's a brother of Akinator uh Fred Botha is closely associated with um akanatan why did his name not include Arsen at all as did the aims of so many others well bear in mind if he was a brother of avakinarten and probably in his twenties when appointed he'll have been born back and he would have been born way before the um the atonist Revolution and therefore he would have simply therefore wouldn't have received anatomist name because if his twin if he's in his twenties at this point he will you know he would have been born and the reign of Ammon hotep III and nobody under RAM and hotep III is given an atonist name again if these were ever pharaohs and it's surprising that record to their five names as pharaohs have not been found not really at all because it's actually there's a lot of pharaohs who we don't have all five names of the particularly in the New Kingdom the vast majority of citations of any King are simply by the two one or both of the cartouches and it's only if you've got major Temple inscriptions that the Horus nebti and Golden Falcon names are to be a a found so therefore as we don't have any standing Temple buildings of these two it's not surprising at all but but they're clear but the very fact they had double cartouches means where there's no doubt whatsoever that they were fully fledged pharaohs uh from Candy Hurley can you remind us why Kia was disgraced we have no idea all we know is she was um that every inscription of her has been mutilated her coffin was ended actually he wasn't buried in it and it was reused for um for um strength haray the it's interesting is that the her disgrace has led to another of these zombie facts about the Amana period which is the idea that there was some kind of split between um akanat and Nefertiti back in the 1920s the first inscript examples of the destroyed inscriptions of Kia were found but at that time it wasn't known that there was more than one wife of akanatan and therefore it was simply assumed that it was Nefertiti who'd been erased and therefore that therefore became these of an import an abiding Theory and indeed it's still to be found today because um when if you go around if you're taking on a tour around Amana the the tour guide still tell you the story that akinat and Nefertiti split up however it was it wasn't until the 1960s that KIA was actually discovered as being an individual and who recognized that all these these erased inscriptions actually belonged to to her unfortunately as so often happens that once a zombie fact has taken hold in certainly the secondary and tertiary literature um it's still so as for every Egypt no egyptologist would now say that there was any um split between akanata and Nefertiti unfortunately there are still books out there which are still being produced which use this um out of um uh candy um Hurley do we know which if any of the six daughters with progeny of Nefertiti all of them were there's no that everything all the all his all the six daughters um shown with um Nefertiti are all um given the um actually specifically stated to be her daughters there is also one daughter uh known of Kia as well [Music] um from Sandy assini so if I'm mispronouncing your surname there um I was wondering whether what magic bricks are and what was the Scandal around Kia I think I've already said previously we have no idea what the issue was with Kia magic bricks are is they are something which are found in pretty well they were placed in pretty well every Egyptian burial chamber from the Middle Kingdom onwards and they are little they are bricks with the inscription on them which effectively intended to place uh between some modern terms a magical force field around the um the burial chamber um there are four of them were found in kb-55 um blowing into akanatan which indicates he must have been there originally but also if you look around um any Egyptian burial chamber included Uncle Moon they're a little there's a little niche a little Fair four little niches in the walls and that was where you put the magic bricks along with an amulet and then those issues would then be would be would be um sealed up and um and closed off but when you so go if you go around the tomb is the value of the kings ever go when you're in the burial chamber have a look for your little little niches uh where are we next one is from let me have a look from some Cindy Lovelace um can you advise your views on whether Nefertiti met a violent end yet um problem was when you're only giving a one-hour lecture there's a lot you can't pack in and there's a big question mark of course over whether Nefertiti's mummy has been correctly identified I have of the opinion it is a mummy called the younger lady from kv-35 just found alongside the mummy of mummy of tea and it and the um a CAT scan of it indicates that it that the person died through a massive blow to the face um which actually is now it's now gaping Hull although probably wouldn't have been when when the mummy was actually sort of was where the body was fresh um and I think this tie and given the fact that you've got nothing which I would argue the former Nefertiti um she is not actually treated as a king after her death that may well suggest some kind of violent assassination after which it's then decided that actually she wasn't she was never a real king and then she is buried um as as a non-king whether as a queen or whether even more further demoted uh we can't tell uh where are we carry on down um Arthur Farrow saying the degree of fusion of the Epic I can ever pronounce it the state of the bones um of the fk55 will indicate nature death in early 20s perhaps two or three years old until Uncle Moon yeah the the certainly it's in the in the 20s I think having spoken to a number of the anatomists who sort of talked dealt with it they they wouldn't wish to be deaf and it's about early or late 20s but it can't be anything later than the um than the late 20s uh Mrs grunwood again I think I've answered the question about why Ray and not art and he's born back in the reign of of Amon Hotel III when nobody has a name associated with um artum uh Patricia butts in ta2122 at ta1 and ta2 you identified the king and queen are appearing together in the carrying procession of the kiosk scenes can you point out exactly where Nefertiti is in located she's directly behind her husband if you look at them closely you can see there are sort of two parallel outlines of the individuals and all the fact she's there is also indicated by the fact that her name is mentioned in the inscriptions uh again Mrs Mrs Glenwood um if I is the father of Nefertiti why is she then disgraced I would say politics um all sorts if you follow you know his The History of the World Imagine evil history that that um blood this doesn't necessarily Trump politics so I think that it was probably necessary for her to be let's say we're disgraced but simply ignored as a as having been a king but of course all these cases all we can do is speculate you know and the biggest problem we have in egyptology is that half the actual events we're trying to explain we're not even sure those events actually happened we're just we're looking at very very patchy data which allows us to come up with a historical scenario but then moving on to um actually explaining the whys we're now getting even further into in into into speculation and almost fiction territory um so I think all I would use is say is politics that sometimes these things um another thing is I think I seems to be the great Survivor you know he's survived he's he eventually makes it to King and probably all he's doing is to try to make sure that what do whatever is necessary and it may well have been necessary for him to make sure he continued to have influence was to uh to join in with the general um relegation of his potential daughter to the outer Darkness Anonymous attendee read a theory that malaria was a fact and a downfall of Amana your thoughts well certainly all of the mummies not necessarily all but pretty well all of the mummies of the period which have been DNA tested indicated traces of malaria malaria probably was endemic in Egypt throughout its history and probably you know most of the royalty probably had a low level had a low level of it so I don't think that although it could actually have been a factor at certain points if the king or other individuals had an attack of it um it might be an issue I don't think it's a an issue about the downfall of the Amana Dynasty I think the the likelihood that they actually had a was a cause of community it's probably quite low simply because everybody had it pretty well so I think hang on uh yes and there's as yes as Ira Ram pill has just pointed out malaria is rarely fatal in adults I think because I understand it fake fatalities from malaria normally where somebody's got a degraded immune system for other for other things as well and that's probably reasonably fit young man I would have thought that um is probably unlikely to have been sort of majorly um affected by it okay uh I think we're kind of drawing to the end of our time period so it might be appropriate to go ahead and close here Professor Dyson we really appreciate you sharing your thoughts and uh insights into the amount of period with us this was an excellent talk and I I think it was really very informative to everybody and I'll say this I think this is being recorded and we will try to have it posted uh we're getting some of our programs posted on the Carlos Museum YouTube site and uh we'll make that available again just thank everybody for connecting with us we'll have more problems in the future I think we have a program coming up in January so we'll get information about that out to you and so thanks for connecting with us and have a good evening thanks good night or good afternoon or again wherever you happen to be in the world whatever's the appropriate uh salutation bye

Channel: Carlos Museum

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Length: 85min 44sec (5144 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 06 2022