The Succession Crisis and the Enigmatic Smenkhkare
The period between Akhenaten's death and Tutankhamun's coronation is one of the most compressed and poorly documented transitions in Egyptian royal history. Within this narrow interval, at least two individuals held pharaonic authority, and possibly three. The archaeological footprint is so faint that scholars have proposed radically different reconstructions of who these people were and how they related to one another.
Two figures dominate the debate: Smenkhkare, who bore the prenomen Ankhkheperure, and a ruler who used the name Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten. Whether these were one person or two, and how either related to Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and the Younger Lady, remains genuinely unresolved. Dodson identifies Neferneferuaten as Nefertiti herself, arguing that she assumed pharaonic authority as co-regent and then sole ruler after Akhenaten's death. Other scholars have proposed Meritaten or an otherwise unknown woman. The 2010 DNA study by Hawass et al. added a further layer (analysed in detail in the essay "Who Was Neferneferuaten?") by confirming that the mummy known as the Younger Lady (KV35YL) was a full sister of Akhenaten and the biological mother of Tutankhamun, a figure with a strong dynastic claim in her own right.
The Amarna Mysteries draws heavily on Dodson for its political and dynastic framework but departs from him on this specific identification. The series treats the Younger Lady as the ruler who held the throne name Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten: Akhenaten's sister, Tutankhamun's biological mother, a woman who assumed pharaonic authority to protect her son's succession after her brother's death. Smenkhkare, in the series' reconstruction, was Akhenaten's younger brother, elevated to co-regent alongside the Younger Lady to provide male credibility in a court where conservative factions would resist female rule. To cement the arrangement, Smenkhkare married Meritaten, the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, binding the co-regency to both branches of the royal family.
This interpretation is defensible on several grounds. The DNA evidence confirms the Younger Lady was a daughter of Amenhotep III and Tiye, placing her squarely within the royal succession. Her identification as Tutankhamun's mother gives her a direct political motive to hold the throne on his behalf. The epithets associated with Neferneferuaten, including "beneficial for her husband," fit a sister-wife of Akhenaten at least as naturally as they fit Nefertiti. And the Younger Lady's mummy shows evidence of violent injury, consistent with the series' premise that her reign ended not through natural causes but through murder. Dodson's identification of Nefertiti as Neferneferuaten remains the most widely cited reconstruction, and the series acknowledges this openly. But the evidence is genuinely ambiguous, and the alternative reading that The Amarna Mysteries adopts sits within the range of positions that responsible scholarship permits.
In the series, Nefertiti never ruled as pharaoh. She is Tutankhamun's stepmother, the widow of Akhenaten, and the woman who watched three rulers die within weeks in the opening pages of The Poisoner's Throne: the Younger Lady, Smenkhkare, and her own daughter Meritaten. The question of whether natural causes or something more deliberate accounts for the pattern is the series' opening mystery.
This is where the inverted structure matters. The Amarna Mysteries operates in the tradition of Columbo rather than Agatha Christie. The reader gains early insight into who is responsible; the tension comes from watching Nefertiti navigate the impossible gap between knowing and proving, between justice and the survival of the state. The series epigraph captures the bind: "Justice is not a destination. It is a practice."
The Aftermath: Tutankhamun, the Dakhamunzu Affair, and the Return to Orthodoxy
Tutankhamun ascended to the throne as a boy of approximately nine. Under the guidance of powerful officials, his reign saw the initial restoration of traditional religious practices, proclaimed formally on the Restoration Stela (probably erected in his Year 4). The worship of Amun was reinstated, the priesthoods regained their former influence, and Tutankhamun's own name was changed from Tutankhaten ("Living Image of the Aten") to Tutankhamun ("Living Image of Amun"). His tomb in the Valley of the Kings, famously discovered intact by Howard Carter in 1922, provided invaluable artifacts that illuminate this transitional period.
Tutankhamun died around 1323 BCE at approximately eighteen years of age. The cause of his death has generated enormous popular speculation, with theories ranging from murder to chariot accidents. The 2010 DNA study and CT scanning identified bone necrosis in his left foot (Köhler disease), evidence of a severe malarial infection, and a fracture of his left femur. The current scholarly consensus, shared by Hawass and supported by the physical evidence, favors natural causes: a combination of genetic conditions, malaria, and the complications of a leg fracture. The Amarna Mysteries follows this consensus. The series treats Tutankhamun's death as natural, not as murder, and the dramatic tension of the final book arises not from his killing but from what happens in its aftermath.
What happened next is one of the most extraordinary episodes in ancient Near Eastern history. A series of cuneiform letters preserved in the Hittite archives at Boğazkale record that an Egyptian queen, referred to as "Dakhamunzu" (a rendering of the Egyptian title ta-hemet-nesu, "the king's wife"), wrote to the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I requesting that he send one of his sons to become her husband and Egypt's new pharaoh. The queen's letter, as preserved in the Hittite texts, declares that her husband has died, that she has no son, and that she refuses to marry a "servant." Suppiluliuma, astonished and suspicious, sent an envoy to verify the claim. The queen wrote again, more urgently. Eventually convinced, the Hittite king dispatched his son Zannanza to Egypt. Zannanza never arrived. He was killed en route, almost certainly by Egyptian forces opposed to the foreign marriage. The assassination precipitated years of warfare between Egypt and Hatti.
The identity of Dakhamunzu remains debated. Most scholars identify her as Ankhesenamun, Tutankhamun's widow. Some have proposed Nefertiti or Meritaten, writing after the death of an earlier pharaoh. The Amarna Mysteries identifies Dakhamunzu as Ankhesenamun and makes the Zannanza affair the climactic event of the final book, The Dakhamunzu Affair, exploring the conspiracy behind the prince's assassination and the political reckoning that followed.
Ay succeeded Tutankhamun as pharaoh, his brief reign of approximately four years serving as a bridge between the Amarna aftermath and the military succession that followed. Horemheb eventually seized the throne after Ay's death and made the reversal of the Amarna revolution complete. A damnatio memoriae expunged Akhenaten's name from official records, defaced his monuments, dismantled Akhetaten, and omitted the Amarna kings from the official king lists entirely. The length of Horemheb's reign remains one of Egyptology's open questions. His highest attested regnal year is Year 14, found on wine jar fragments from his tomb in the Valley of the Kings (KV57). However, a Ramesside legal text known as the inscription of Mose gives a date of "Year 59" under Horemheb's throne name. Since no one argues that Horemheb actually ruled for six decades, Dodson and others have proposed that a later scribe retroactively absorbed the combined reigns of the now-erased Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, and Ay into Horemheb's count, yielding a minimum of approximately 28 years of actual rule. The debate is covered in detail in a separate article on Horemheb's reign and legacy.
Horemheb's mummy has never been identified. His tomb (KV57) was robbed in antiquity, and its innovative relief decoration was never completed. The skeletal remains of a middle-aged woman found at his earlier Saqqara tomb have been tentatively identified as his queen Mutnodjmet, but the attribution remains contested. Without a mummy to examine, Horemheb's age at death is purely a matter of inference from career chronology.
Horemheb's reign also laid the foundations for the 19th Dynasty. His chosen successor, Paramessu (later Ramesses I), was not of royal blood but a career military commander from Avaris in the eastern Delta. The appointment signaled that the post-Amarna settlement would be built on institutional loyalty rather than hereditary claims. Paramessu's son Seti I and grandson Ramesses II would build on that foundation to create what many regard as ancient Egypt's greatest dynasty.
The deliberate erasure meant that much of what we know about this era has been pieced together from archaeological rediscovery rather than continuous historical memory.
The series maps its four books onto these political phases. The Poisoner's Throne covers the succession crisis. The Hittite Reckoning draws on the espionage and diplomatic pressures reflected in the Amarna Letters. The Restoration Murders tracks the violence that accompanies ideological reversal. The Dakhamunzu Affair confronts the aftermath of Tutankhamun's death, the queen's desperate letter to the Hittite king, and the conspiracy that destroyed the last chance for a negotiated peace.
The Egyptian Calendar: Reading the Dates
Every chapter in The Amarna Mysteries carries an Egyptian calendar date in its heading. These dates are not decoration; they serve structural functions within the narrative, marking the intervals between events and making patterns of timing visible to attentive readers. Understanding the system requires only a few principles.
The Egyptian civil calendar divided the year into three seasons of four months each, plus five additional days at the end. The seasons were tied to the agricultural cycle of the Nile:
Akhet (Inundation): the four months when the Nile flood covered the farmland, depositing the fertile silt that sustained Egyptian agriculture. Roughly July through October by modern reckoning, though the civil calendar drifted against the solar year over centuries.
Peret (Emergence): the four months when the floodwaters receded and the land emerged for planting and growing. Roughly November through February.
Shemu (Harvest): the four months of heat, harvest, and low water. Roughly March through June.
Each season contained four months, numbered rather than named in most administrative contexts: First Month of Akhet, Second Month of Peret, Fourth Month of Shemu, and so on. Each month had thirty days, numbered sequentially. A date in the series reads as, for example, "Second Month of Akhet, Day 30" or "Regnal Year 3, First Month of Peret, Day 15."
The five Epagomenal Days fell between the end of Shemu and the start of Akhet, outside any month or season. Egyptian mythology associated each day with the birth of a major deity: Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis, and Nephthys. These were liminal days, considered both sacred and dangerous, when the boundaries between cosmic order and chaos grew thin. In the series, events that fall on the Epagomenal Days carry particular weight.
The "Regnal Year" prefix appears in the series only after Tutankhamun's coronation, marking the beginning of a new reign's official count. Before the coronation, dates are given without a regnal year. This transition is itself a structural signal: the moment when the calendar begins counting from a new pharaoh's authority.
The front matter of each book includes a brief note on the Egyptian calendar with a visual timeline showing approximate modern-calendar correlations. Exact correspondence between the Egyptian civil calendar and the Gregorian calendar for this period involves scholarly debate about intercalation and drift; the series follows Belmonte's archaeoastronomical analysis for its correlations but does not force precise modern dates into the ancient narrative.
Further Reading
Belmonte, J.A., DNA, Wine & Eclipses: the Dakhamunzu Affaire (2013)
Darnell, J.C. and Darnell, C., Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth (2022)
Davies, N. de G., The Rock Tombs of El Amarna (1903–1908)
Dodson, A., Nefertiti, Queen and Pharaoh of Egypt: Lives and Afterlives (2020)
Dodson, A., Amarna Sunrise: Egypt from Golden Age to Age of Heresy (2014)
Dodson, A., Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter-Reformation (2009)
Hawass, Z. et al., Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun's Family (2010)
Kemp, B., The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People (2012)
Where the evidence permits more than one reading, the series states its chosen interpretation and confines creative invention to the genuine gaps in the record. For the reasoning behind one of the series' key departures, see the essay "Who Was Pharaoh Neferneferuaten?"
Further Reading: Exploring the Amarna Period in Depth
This pillar page introduces the Amarna period as both a historical subject and a foundation for mystery fiction. The following cluster topics explore individual aspects in greater depth:
The Amarna Letters: diplomacy, espionage, and the breakdown of empire
Akhetaten: anatomy of a purpose-built capital
The rock tombs of Amarna: monuments to careers that ended when the city did
The royal succession debate: who ruled after Akhenaten?
Nefertiti's disappearance: what the evidence actually says
Ay: God's Father, regent, pharaoh, and the debate over his family ties
The 2010 DNA study: findings, critiques, and what remains unresolved
The KV55 controversy: Akhenaten or Smenkhkare?
Tutankhamun's tomb: what Carter found and what it means
Tutankhamun's death: what the evidence says and what it rules out
The Dakhamunzu Affair: the queen's letter, the Hittite prince, and the assassination
A.J. Tilke is the author of The Amarna Mysteries, a four-book historical fiction series set in ancient Egypt's 18th Dynasty. The Poisoner's Throne (Book 1) publishes June 2026, followed by The Restoration Trilogy — The Hittite Reckoning, The Restoration Murders, and The Dakhamunzu Affair — later in 2026. A short-story anthology, The Twelve Hours of Night, is planned for 2027.
