page_title: KV55
section_title: Coffin, canopic jars and magical bricks
hierarchical_section_title: KV55 / Interpretation / Coffin, canopic jars and magical bricks
caption_attribution_description: English: This is perhaps the most mysterious royal sarcophagus located in the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. Egyptologists today generally agree that it belongs to either pharaoh Akhenaten or Smenkhkare based on the numerous Amarna era objects found in Tomb KV55 of the Valley of the Kings. However, considering the amount of damnatio memoriae inflicted against the sarcophagus, where all its royal cartouches were erased, it might well have belonged to Akhenaten himself whose memory was proscribed with the restoration of the cult of Amun after his reign. The sarcophagus was found in January 1907 in Tomb KV55 by Theodore Davis and Edward R. Ayrton.
context_page_description: KV55 is a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. It was discovered by Edward R. Ayrton in 1907 while he was working in the Valley for Theodore M. Davis. It has long been speculated, as well as much-disputed, that the body found in this tomb was that of the famous Pharaoh Akhenaten, who moved the capital to Akhetaten. The results of genetic and other scientific tests published in February 2010 have confirmed that the person buried there was both the son of Amenhotep III as well as the father of Tutankhamun. Furthermore, the study established that the age of this person at the time of his death was consistent with that of Akhenaten, thereby making it almost certain that it is Akhenaten's body. However, a growing body of work soon began to appear to dispute the assessment of the age of the mummy and the identification of KV55 as Akhenaten.
  Both the tomb's history and the identification of its single occupant have been problematic. It is assumed to be a royal cache and reburial dating from the late 18th Dynasty, prepared after the abandonment of Amarna and the dismantling of the royal necropolis there.
context_section_description: When KV55 was initially opened, Theodore Davis believed that he had found the tomb of Queen Tiye. However, it was quickly recognized that the human remains interred there were male. Georges Daressy further deduced that the gilded coffin found in the tomb was originally made for a woman and only later adapted to accommodate a king, through alterations to its inscriptions and the addition of a false beard, a uraeus, and the royal scepters (crook and flail).  The identity of the coffin's original owner has been a matter of much discussion over the years, with Tiye, Nefertiti, Meketaten, and Meritaten all proposed as candidates. It is now widely accepted that the coffin was originally intended for Akhenaten's secondary wife Kiya. It is also recognized that the four canopic jars discovered near the coffin belonged to Kiya, and that the female heads on the jars' stoppers portray her. Like the coffin, the canopic jars were altered for the burial of a king through the erasure of Kiya's titulary and the addition of a royal uraeus to each portrait head.
  All personal names inscribed on the coffin and the canopic jars were excised in antiquity, rendering the identity of the human remains inside the coffin a matter of long debate. Over the past century, the chief candidates for this individual have been either Akhenaten himself or Smenkhkare, another male member of the Amarna royal family.
  Evidence that the occupant of the coffin was Akhenaten is provided by the four magical bricks found inside the tomb. Two were inscribed in hieratic, but they are poorly preserved and the name of their owner is lost. The other two, however, are of better quality, with  hieroglyphic inscriptions naming the Osiris Neferkheprure Waenre, a reference to Akhenaten's nomen. The fact that all four bricks were orientated correctly and that three of them were positioned in close association with the coffin suggests that they were intended as a set and were made for the coffin's final occupant, who would therefore be Akhenaten.
caption: The desecrated royal coffin found in Tomb KV55
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