page_title: Neferneferuaten
section_title: Female king
hierarchical_section_title: Neferneferuaten / Female king
caption_attribution_description: Español: Berlín. Neues Museum. Relieve con Akenatón y Nefertiti.
context_page_description: Ankhkheperure-mery-Neferkheperure/ -mery-Waenre/ -mery-Aten Neferneferuaten was a name used to refer to either Meritaten or, more likely, Nefertiti.
  The archaeological evidence relates to a woman who reigned as pharaoh toward the end of the Amarna Period during the Eighteenth Dynasty. Her sex is confirmed by feminine traces occasionally found in the name and by the epithet Akhet-en-hyes, incorporated into one version of her second cartouche.
  She is to be distinguished from the king who used the name Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare-Djeser Kheperu, but without epithets appearing in either cartouche.
  If this person is Nefertiti ruling as sole pharaoh, it has been theorized by Egyptologist and Archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass that her reign was marked by the fall of Amarna and relocation of the capital back to the traditional city of Thebes.
context_section_description: For some time the accepted interpretation of the evidence was that Smenkhkare served as coregent with Akhenaten beginning about year 15 using the throne name Ankhkheperure. At some point, perhaps to start his sole reign, he changed his name to Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten. An alternative view held that Nefertiti was King Neferneferuaten, in some versions she is also masquerading as a male using the name Smenkhkare.
  Things remained in this state until the early 1970s when English Egyptologist John Harris noted in a series of papers, the existence of versions of the first cartouche that seemed to include feminine indicators. These were linked with a few items including a statuette found in Tutankhamun’s tomb depicting a king whose appearance was particularly feminine, even for Amarna art which seems to favor androgyny. There are several stele depicting a king along with someone else—often wearing a king's crown—in various familiar, almost intimate scenes. All of them are unfinished or uninscribed and some are defaced. These include:
  An unfinished stele (#17813, Berlin) depicts two royal figures in a familiar, if not intimate, pose. One figure wears the double crown, while the other wears a headpiece which is similar to that from the familiar Nefertiti bust, but is the Khepresh or "blue crown" worn by a king.
  Aidan Dodson cites this stele to support the idea that Nefertiti may have acted at one point as someone with the status of a coregent as indicated by the crown, but not entitled to full pharaonic honors such as the double cartouche.
  Berlin 25574 depicts what clearly seems to be Akhenaten and Nefertiti wearing her flat top headpiece. They are accompanied by four empty cartouches—enough for two kings—one of which seems to have been squeezed in.
  Reeves sees this as an important item in the case for Nefertiti. When the stele was started, she was queen and thus portrayed with the flat top headpiece. She was elevated to coregent shortly afterward and a fourth cartouche was squeezed in to accommodate two kings.
  Flinders Petrie discovered seven limestone fragments of a private stele in 1891, now in the Petrie Museum, U.C.410 sometimes called the Coregency Stela. One side bears the double cartouche of Akhenaten alongside that of Ankhkheperure mery-Waenre Neferneferuaten Akhet-en-hyes ("effective for her husband"), which had been carved over the single cartouche of Nefertiti.
  The clues may point to a female coregent, but the unique situation of succeeding kings using identical throne names may have resulted in a great deal of confusion.
  A paper by Rolf Krauss of the Egyptian Museum, Berlin speculated a middle way by suggesting that while Smenkhkare/Neferneferuaten was a man, his wife Meritaten might have ruled with the feminine prenomen ‘Ankh-et-kheperure’ after Akhenaten’s death and before Smenkhkare's accession. Smenkhkare then takes the masculine form of her prenomen upon gaining the throne through marriage to her. While this was a step forward in establishing a feminine king, it also sparked a new debate regarding which evidence related to Meritaten and which to Smenkhkare.
caption: Berlin's Stele 17813, depicting a female Pharaoh caressing Akhenaten, Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Neues Museum, Berlin
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