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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1996-02 > 0823551512


From: Chris Bennett <>
Subject: Re[2]: Adultery redux
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 1996 12:18:32 PST


Subject: Re: Adultery redux
Author:
Date: 2/2/96 9:29 PM

<snip>
>
>I'm not at all familiar with Egyptian genealogy, but reading this causes a
>question to burn in my mind and cry out for an answer.
>
>Are there those alive today who claim to be descendants of the pharaohs ?

While that particular question doesn't burn in my mind. I would be
interested in the proposed parentages of Tutankamon and the arguments pro
and con. I had always believed he was either son or brother to Akhenaten.

Dana White

___________________________________________________________________________

Re: modern descents from the pharaohs. The Descents from Antiquity charts
issued by the Augustan Society outline a possible pharaonic descent; the
arguments for a very similar descent are detailed in Settipani's book on
descewnts from antiquity. I posted a fairly detailed analysis of the
pharaonic portion of the DfA descent here in October. My basic conclusion
is that, while there are all sorts of holes and hypotheses in the
documentation, something like the DfA descent probably happened, but the
proposed transition from pharaonic to non-Egyptian lines is very unlikely,
and it is also very unlikely (though not impossible) that we will ever
trace one.

Of course, the point of my adultery e-mail is that there are so many male
generations involved in any such extended descent to modern times that
one's confidence in its accuracy must be vanishingly small, even if the
documentation is perfect. Which, as Gordon Fisher pointed out and I
entirely agree, is no reason not to study it.

Re: Tutankhamen: There are three hypotheses I am aware of - that he was
the son of Akhenaten, a younger son of Amenhotep III, or a grandson of
Amenhotep III by a younger sibling of Akhenaten. Its strongly bound up in
the larger historical question of whether or not there was a coregency
between Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. If there was no coregency then
Tutankhamen cannot have been a brother of Akhenaten; if there was then all
possibilities are open. THere is an inscription of Tutankhamen's where he
refers to Amenhotep III as his father (but this could mean ancestor), and
a lock of the hair of queen Tiye (Amenhotep III's wife) was found on his
chest. The case against him being a son of Akhenaten is partly based on
the fact that there are any number of depictions of Akhenaten's daughters
but no sign of any son. This doesn't necessarily mean much -- in the 18th
dynasty, as in many other Egyptian dynasties, princes who were not the
crown prince are conspicuously absent from the record, so much so that it
was once argued that a new pharaoh may have slaughtered all his brothers
on acession (as was the case in the early Ottoman dynasty). Ramses II was
very innovative in publicising the existence of all his sons.

CHris

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