Quick questions on Akhenaten's family background and early years: HSC Ancient History

As heir, Amenhotep IV married Nefertiti and, at some point after his accession, took the throne name that history remembers him by. Around Year 5 of his reign (c. 1348 BC), he changed his name from Amenhotep ("Amun is satisfied") to Akhenaten ("effective for the Aten"), the same period in which he founded his new capital, Akhetaten. The religious content of that change, and the escalation from Year 9 onward, is covered in full on the dot point about the Aten and the religious revolution; here the point is biographical: the name change marks the moment the private family background gives way to the public religious programme.

Nefertiti held the title Great Royal Wife from early in the reign. No surviving inscription names her father or mother, which has left her origins a genuine, unresolved historiographical question.

Kiya, titled "Greatly Beloved Wife of Akhenaten," is prominent in the middle years of the reign, with her own sunshade temple at Akhetaten and a distinctive style of representation (often a rounded Nubian-style wig, differing from Nefertiti's tall blue crown). Her origins are also debated, with some historians attaching the foreign-princess theory to her rather than to Nefertiti, though this too is unproven. She disappears from the monumental record around Years 11 to 12, after which her images and inscriptions were reworked and reassigned to royal daughters, most likely reflecting a fall from favour or her death rather than a peaceful retirement.

Akhenaten and Nefertiti had six daughters, repeatedly shown together beneath the rays of the Aten in Amarna art, in what appears to be broad birth order: Meritaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Neferneferuaten Tasherit, Neferneferure and Setepenre. Meketaten died around Year 14, an event commemorated in a mourning scene in the royal tomb at Amarna that shows Akhenaten and Nefertiti grieving over her body. Ankhesenpaaten survived Akhenaten's reign, was renamed Ankhesenamun, and later married the boy-king Tutankhamun.

Late in the reign, some monuments and inscriptions appear to give the eldest daughter, Meritaten, the title Great Royal Wife, a title elsewhere reserved for Nefertiti, and reference an "Ankhesenpaaten-tasherit" (a younger namesake) with no father named other than, by implication, Akhenaten himself. Some historians, including Cyril Aldred, have read this as evidence that Akhenaten took one or more of his own daughters as a wife in his final years. Others urge caution: Amenhotep III himself had elevated his own daughter Sitamun to the title Great Royal Wife late in his reign, alongside Tiye, which some historians take as a precedent showing such titles could carry ceremonial or religious significance for the ideology of kingship without necessarily proving a literal conjugal relationship. The question is not resolved by the surviving evidence, and a strong response presents it as a live historiographical debate rather than settled fact.

An older line of scholarship proposed that Nefertiti was Tadukhepa, a Mitanni princess sent to Egypt as a bride for Amenhotep III (and, on this theory, inherited by his son). This identification rests on no explicit ancient text equating the two women, and it is now largely rejected or heavily qualified by most Egyptologists, though it still appears in older publications.

The more widely favoured modern view holds that Nefertiti was Egyptian, possibly connected to the courtier Ay (later pharaoh), whose wife Tey carries the title "nurse of the great king's wife" on her own monuments. Because a wet-nurse title does not automatically mean birth mother, this is suggestive rather than conclusive: it is equally possible Nefertiti's birth mother was an otherwise unrecorded, perhaps deceased, first wife of Ay.

In the Theban tomb of Kheruef, steward of Queen Tiye, scenes appear to show Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV both present at Amenhotep III's later royal jubilee (Sed) festivals. Raymond Johnson, working from the stylistic sequence of reliefs at Luxor Temple's colonnade, has argued for a substantial co-regency of several years.

Wine-jar dockets, dated administrative labels from deliveries to Amenhotep III's Malkata palace, run up to his Year 30 without any dual dating referring to his son's own regnal years. Donald Redford reads this as showing Amenhotep III was still reigning alone at that late point in his life, leaving little room for a long prior overlap. William Murnane, who compiled the co-regency evidence systematically, remained cautious about accepting an extended joint reign.