News from the Valley of the Kings

Two very different articles for you:

1) Paul Rymer told me that National Geographic has an article in their September issue. There's nothing terribly new for regular readers of News from the Valley of the Kings but it is produced to the usual Nat Geographic lush production standards and is really very nice.

2) Rather more detailed, for my international readers, there is a very comprehensive article by Antonio Crasto, co-authored with P. Pietrapiana and G. Suadoni.  It is titled "Conferme dal DNA della famiglia de Akhenaton" (Confirmation of the DNA of Akhenaten's Family).  I'm afraid my Italian isn't good enough to offer a full summary but the article considers the permutations of elleles for the children of  KV55 and KV35YL.  This is a promising area of research.  I looked at myself and I believe the chance that Tutankhamun is the son of KV35YL and a brother of KV55 is about 3% - 4%.  That doesn't mean that we are 96% sure that KV55 and KV35YL are Tut's parents because I didn't look for instance at combinations like KV55 and another sister - or cousins for that matter.  We don't know the composition of the royal family well enough to assess the probability precisely. 

Antonio's article then looks at the possible lineage from Thuya to Akhenaten or Neferitit and onwards to KV21A and the foetuses.  (Interestingly, this DNA trail keeps coming back to Thuya and not Yuya - I suspect that Yuya was part of the historic royal family and maybe Thuya was a foreigner?)

Sadly my Italian isn't good enough to follow the logic, but the article then goes on to propose - I think ... the language is a real struggle for me - that KV35EL is Nefertiti (not Tiye) and that KV35YL is actually Akhenaten.  That's a radical suggestion.  Setting the issue of gender aside for one moment, we know that KV35YL could be a child of Amenhotep III - KV35YL is an unknown princess in the Hawass theory.  Indeed, with the addition of a Queen-Consort (Kiya), the Crasto theory does seem to fit the micro-satellite data as well as my own theory and better than the Hawass theory.  However, I am not convinced it fits historical facts as the new Crasto theory requires KV21A (putatively Akhesenamun) to be the daughter of  Akhenaten and the Queen Consort not of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.  Indeed, Crasto and colleagues suggest that Nefertiti was the Queen of Amenhotep III and the mother of Akehnaten and Smenkhare (KV55). 

For me this is unsatisfactory in a number of regards but I will leave it to those whose Italian is good enough to read the detailed reasoning to comment further.  However, the article does raise one clear point.  There is no indication in the JAMA that the gender of the supposedly-female mummies, notably KV35YL (in this case), was determined genetically by testing for the absence of SRY (the male gene on the Y-chromosome).  If this was not done, then it is a clear experimental lacuna.  Upon inspection, the main JAMA paper doesn't mention how the gender was determined for the mummies which weren't tested for SRY.  Presumably it was by pelvic examination or some similar forensic method?  Given the feminised appearance of Akhenaten in some reliefs and statues, this does seem to be a possible oversight.  (The absence of SRY isn't a definitive test for femaleness either - for example 1 in 20,000 women have something called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome and have a Y chromosome with an SRY gene - but we can say that a woman who possesses SRY is highly unlikely to have been fertile.)   

Personally I don't think the KV35YL is Akhenaten any more than the KV55 mummy is, but it is a theory which opens up new lines of questioning and demonstrates that there is still some way to go before the family tree printed in magazine like National Geographic can really be said to have been proven.

While I am adding videos, here is one of the CAT scan on K35EL and KV35YL. Obviously we now know that neither is Nefertiti but it is still worth watching for good shots of the mummies.

An article has appeared on a Spanish site which duplicates much of my eariler article showing that KV55 is probably not Akhenaten including extrapolition of the DNA to cover Nefertiti (although I am not credited); however the author comes to a different conclusion than me and opines that KV55 is Akhenaten. In coming to this conclusion it theorises that there was a genetic mutation between the two generations. Unfortunately the author, Juan de la Torre Suárez, President Andalusian Association of Egyptology doesn't cite any evidence for the frequency of mutation in the allele concerned.  Personally I think somatic mutation is unlikley and continue to believe that the evidence points against KV55 being Akhenaten, but when I re-write my article for our new magazine I'll address the mutation point directly and research what is known about mutation frequency in this allele.  (Some alleles are more susceptible to mutation than others.)

However, the article does confirm my view that KV55 and KV35YL need not be siblings.  They identify KV35YL as Beneretmut, the sister of Nefertiti.  

My thanks to Monkia and Andie Byrnes for sending me the link.