Ankhsenamun

Born Ankhesenpaaten at the height of the Amarna revolution, Ankhsenamun was the third of the six daughters of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, raised in the new capital of Akhetaten and shown throughout its art in the intimate family scenes characteristic of the period. Her birth is generally placed in the mid-1340s BC. With the collapse of her father's religious experiment she changed her name, as her husband did, replacing the Aten element with that of the restored god Amun.

That husband was Tutankhamun, himself almost certainly a son of Akhenaten by another wife, making the royal pair half-siblings or close kin — a marriage that concentrated the Amarna bloodline in its last generation. Ankhsenamun appears beside the young king on objects from his tomb, including scenes of easy domestic affection on the small golden shrine. The couple had no surviving children; two mummified female fetuses buried in KV62 are generally taken to be their stillborn daughters, an identification consistent with genetic testing.

Her name is attached to one of the most discussed episodes in Late Bronze Age diplomacy. Hittite records relate that after the death of an Egyptian king, his widow — called Dahamunzu, apparently a rendering of the title "king's wife" — wrote to Suppiluliuma I declaring that she had no son and asking for a Hittite prince to marry and make king, adding that she refused to take a servant as husband. The astonished Hittite king eventually sent his son Zannanza, who died on the journey, souring relations between the powers. The widow is most often identified as Ankhsenamun after Tutankhamun's death around 1327 BC, though some scholars argue for Nefertiti; the question is unresolved.

What followed is sparsely documented. A finger ring pairing her cartouche with that of Ay, the elderly courtier who succeeded Tutankhamun, may indicate a marriage legitimizing his accession, but she is absent from Ay's tomb, where his earlier wife Tey appears as queen. After the ring, Ankhsenamun vanishes from the record; neither her death date nor her burial has been identified.