Word: ankhesenamen
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...would need means, opportunity and motive. Using these criteria, "we initially looked at the entire Egyptian empire," Cooper says. "But we quickly narrowed the focus to Tut's inner circle." Eventually, they winnowed the field to just four suspects: Maya, Tut's chief treasurer; Horemheb, his military commander; Ankhesenamen, his wife; and Ay, his Prime Minister. (Warning: plot spoiler ahead...
...Ankhesenamen too was ruled out. It was not impossible for the Pharaoh's wife to ascend the throne after her husband's death, and she may have been motivated by a mere power grab. A likelier scenario was that she was thinking more about her heirs. Two mummified fetuses were found in Tut's tomb. Both are thought to have been the royal couple's premature or stillborn daughters. If Tut was unable to sire healthy children, Ankhesenamen may have wanted him out of the way so she could marry someone who could...
...Cooper and King are convinced that Ankhesenamen and Tut were a close couple. They were half-siblings and had known each other from childhood. The paintings in Tut's tomb portray them as a loving pair, and the fact that their unborn children were mummified is unusual. Says King: "These are signs of a close family unit...
...that a letter was sent from an unnamed widowed Egyptian Queen to the Hittite King in what is now Turkey, pleading that one of his sons be sent south to marry her. The writer's fear was that she would otherwise be forced to wed one of her "servants." Ankhesenamen, as onetime Queen, would surely have seen Ay as a servant. Some people, including Cooper and King, believe that an ancient ring bearing her and Ay's names indicates that the two were in fact married, a move that would have legitimized Ay's Pharaohship...
Additionally, it has never been proved that Ankhesenamen wrote the letter to the Hittite King; some scholars believe the author was not Tut's widow but his father's. Similarly, the ring bearing Ay's and Ankhesenamen's names may indicate little, since in ancient Egypt there were no such things as wedding rings. "The ring merely shows an affiliation," says Eaton-Krauss...
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