The death of Akhenaten in his seventeenth regnal year, the mystery of his burial and the KV55 debate, the succession through Neferneferuaten, Smenkhkare and Tutankhamun, the counter-revolution and proscription of Akhenaten's memory, and ancient and modern evaluations of his reign, including the problems of evidence

What this dot point is asking

NESA's "Evaluation" strand for Akhenaten wants you to explain how his reign actually ended (his death, his uncertain burial and the KV55 debate), trace the confused succession that followed (Neferneferuaten, Smenkhkare, then the child-king Tutankhamun), describe the counter-revolution that proscribed his memory, and then weigh up how ancient hostility and modern historians have each constructed an "Akhenaten" of their own. This is the page that carries the historiography and source-evaluation weight of the personality.

The answer

The end of the reign: death in regnal year 17

Akhenaten died in his seventeenth regnal year. Most chronologies place this c. 1336 BC, giving a reign of about seventeen years from c. 1352 BC; a minority of chronological schemes shift the whole reign later, placing his death c. 1334 BC. No ancient text states a cause of death, and no contemporary Amarna document survives describing his final illness or funeral, which is itself significant: the silence is part of the evidence problem that runs through this whole dot point.

Akhenaten had prepared a tomb in the Royal Wadi at Akhetaten (the "Royal Tomb," Amarna Tomb 1), cut into the cliffs east of the city. Its decorated chambers include mourning scenes for the death of his second daughter, Meketaten, around year 14, and fragments of a royal sarcophagus, later reconstructed from smashed pieces. When the court abandoned Akhetaten after the restoration of the old gods, Akhenaten's burial almost certainly did not stay in the Royal Wadi. Most historians think his body, or at least his burial equipment, was later moved to Thebes, but the transfer itself is not directly documented, only inferred from what was found (and not found) at Amarna and in the Valley of the Kings.

The mystery of the burial: KV55 and the identity debate

In 1907, Edward Ayrton, working for the American businessman Theodore Davis, discovered an unlabelled, badly damaged tomb in the Valley of the Kings, numbered KV55. Inside were a gilded coffin originally made for a woman and later reworked with kingly regalia, four canopic jars with a face resembling images of Kiya or Meritaten, magical bricks naming Akhenaten, and a deteriorated male skeleton. The uraeus and cartouches on the coffin had been deliberately cut away, so the occupant could not simply be read off the coffin.

Early anatomical study (G. Elliot Smith, 1912) put the skeleton's age at death in the mid-20s, which sat awkwardly with a seventeen-year reign and a king who had fathered at least six daughters by around year 12; this led some Egyptologists (for example Cyril Aldred) to argue the body must belong to the shadowy successor Smenkhkare rather than Akhenaten. Later re-examinations (R. G. Harrison, 1966; Joyce Filer, late 1990s) produced differing estimates, keeping the debate open for decades.

A CT-scan and DNA study led by Zahi Hawass (published 2010) revised the estimated age upward, to roughly the mid-30s to mid-40s, and identified the KV55 individual genetically as the father of Tutankhamun, a finding widely, though not universally, read as confirming Akhenaten. The same study identified the "Younger Lady" mummy from KV35 as Tutankhamun's mother and a full sibling of the KV55 male, an identity that has never been proven to be Nefertiti and instead points to an otherwise unnamed sister-wife. Critics such as Marc Gabolde have questioned both the revised ageing method and the reliability of degraded ancient DNA for fine-grained kinship claims, so the identification remains probable rather than certain.

The succession puzzle

After Akhenaten's death, the throne passed through at least two poorly attested rulers before reaching Tutankhamun, and Egyptologists disagree about their number, order, and even their sex.

Neferneferuaten

A king's throne name (sometimes paired with the epithet "beloved of Akhenaten" or "beloved of Nefer-kheperu-re") appears on scattered monuments and jar labels from the end of the Amarna period. Many historians argue this was Nefertiti, ruling briefly as a female king after functioning as Akhenaten's close co-regent, following a pattern comparable to Hatshepsut's assumption of kingship generations earlier. Other historians attribute the name instead to Akhenaten's eldest surviving daughter, Meritaten, or her younger sister Meritaten-tasherit. No surviving inscription gives an unambiguous parentage or gender for this ruler, which is why the debate persists.

Smenkhkare

A second, equally shadowy figure, attested chiefly through a handful of monuments and as the husband of Meritaten. Some historians place Smenkhkare as a brief co-regent overlapping the end of Akhenaten's reign; others place him immediately after Akhenaten's death; a minority have even argued "Neferneferuaten" and "Smenkhkare" were two throne names of the same person. The KV55 mummy was, for decades, proposed as Smenkhkare's before the 2010 study shifted opinion back toward Akhenaten.

Tutankhamun

Tutankhaten, a son of Akhenaten (his mother is now most plausibly the "Younger Lady" identified by the 2010 DNA study as Akhenaten's full sister, not Nefertiti), became king around 1332 BC at about nine years old, guided by senior officials including Ay and the general Horemheb. He married Ankhesenamun, a daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Early in his reign, both were renamed from the "-aten" to the "-amun" form, publicly signalling the reversal of Atenism, and the Restoration Stela at Karnak records the reopening of temples, the recasting of divine images, and the reappointment of priesthoods. The court returned to Memphis and Thebes, and Akhetaten was abandoned as a royal residence by around 1332 to 1329 BC, though some administrative activity lingered for a time before the site was finally deserted.

The counter-revolution and the proscription

The reversal that began under Tutankhamun hardened into active erasure under his successors, Ay and then the general Horemheb (who reigned from about 1323 BC). Akhenaten became, in later official language, "the enemy" or "that criminal of Akhetaten": a Ramesside-period text from the tomb of the necropolis official Mose refers to "the time of the rebel of Akhetaten" without ever naming him directly, treating his reign as an illegitimate interruption rather than a normal kingship.

The Abydos King List, carved under Seti I, and the Turin Canon, a papyrus king list compiled under Ramesses II, both omit Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Ay entirely, assigning the intervening years directly from Amenhotep III to Horemheb. Horemheb went further than textual omission: his building programme at Karnak, including the ninth and tenth pylons, reused talatat (the small, easily handled sandstone blocks distinctive of Akhenaten's temple architecture) as rubble fill, physically demolishing the Aten temples to build monuments celebrating the restored Amun cult. Cartouches of Akhenaten, and often of Tutankhamun and Ay as well, were chiselled out on surviving monuments or usurped, with Horemheb sometimes claiming their works as his own.

Interpretation timeline: from ancient enemy to modern debate

Evaluation: ancient hostile memory vs modern interpretations

The ancient tradition, so far as it survives, is uniformly hostile or silent: Akhenaten is "the enemy of Akhetaten," omitted from the king lists, his temples reused as fill. Because rediscovery only began in the 19th century, modern historians have had to build an "Akhenaten" almost from nothing, and their portraits differ sharply.

James Henry Breasted, the pioneering American Egyptologist, called Akhenaten "the first individual in human history" in The Dawn of Conscience (1933), reading the Aten cult as a genuine, precociously modern step toward monotheism and Akhenaten himself as a sincere religious idealist. Sigmund Freud, writing as a psychoanalyst rather than an Egyptologist, argued in Moses and Monotheism (1939) that Moses had been an Egyptian priest of Atenism who carried a version of Akhenaten's monotheism to the Hebrews after the pharaoh's fall, a speculative but historiographically influential link.

Donald Redford, by contrast, argued in Akhenaten: The Heretic King (1984) that the Aten cult was less a tolerant universal religion than a personality cult centred on the king as sole intermediary with the divine, and that Akhenaten's suppression of Amun and disruption of established administration mark him as an autocratic, even totalitarian, ruler. Nicholas Reeves, in Akhenaten: Egypt's False Prophet (2001), pushes further still, presenting the religious revolution as substantially a mechanism for consolidating royal and economic power rather than sincere theology. Dominic Montserrat, in Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (2000), steps back from the "visionary or tyrant" question itself to study how successive modern eras (each shaped by their own preoccupations, from Egyptology's earliest decades to more recent popular culture) have continually reinvented Akhenaten in their own image, arguing that any single confident modern verdict says as much about the historian's century as about the eighteenth dynasty.

How to read a source on this topic

Section III sources on Akhenaten's death and legacy typically include the Restoration Stela, king-list extracts, museum-style descriptions of the KV55 finds, or quotations from modern historians. Three reading habits matter here.

First, separate ancient EVIDENCE from ancient MEMORY. A talatat block or a canopic jar is physical evidence from the period; the Restoration Stela and the Turin Canon are later, hostile MEMORY produced to serve the successor regime's interests. Both are useful, but for different questions.

Second, treat the KV55 material as a live scientific debate, not a settled fact. Different studies (1912, 1966, late 1990s, 2010) reached different age estimates using different methods; a source describing "the mummy of Akhenaten" without qualification is simplifying a genuinely contested identification.

Third, when a source quotes a modern historian, identify which side of the "visionary or tyrant" debate they represent (Breasted or Freud favouring an idealist reading; Redford or Reeves favouring an autocratic reading; Montserrat questioning the whole framing) before using them to support an argument.