Of course the mummified infants could prove if both Tutankhamun and his queen
were the sons of Nefertiti--via mtDNA. Woodward had already been able to
sequence both mt and nuclear DNA from the larger foetus.

A way to rule out [or confirm] if Tut is the son of Queen Tiye and Amenhotep III
is via the mummy of Thuya, the mother of Queen Tiye. Of course, there is the
mummy of Amenhotep III, but it is in pretty bad shape and there is some doubt
about the mummy, "The Elder Lady" being that of Queen Tiye. However, Thuya is
undoubtedly Thuya and her mtDNA would be the same as that of her daughter. So,
if the mtDNA of Tutankhamun and Thuya are a match, then the king should be
a son of Tiye and Amenhotep III. Unless he was the son of Sitamun, who, if she
was the daughter of Tiye [and not a sister of Amenhotep III, as some have
suggested] would share Thuya's mtDNA and then there might be a problem, as
Sitamun was also a wife of A III. It is obvious that the polygamous lifestyle
of the pharaohs makes the search for the parents of Tut more complex--perhaps
hopelessly so.

In a process of elimination, if the mtDNA of Tut matches neither a foetus nor
that of Thuya, a different mother for the pharaoh than one of the famous queens,
Nefertiti or Tiye [or even a daughter of Tiye], must be implied. There is Kiya,
whoever she might have been. In the end, Tut may even have been a son of
Meritaten and the ephemeral
Smenkhkare. In that case, his mtDNA would still be the same as that of a
foetus, as Nefertiti, Ankhesenamun and Meritaten would all share mtDNA. Would
his nuclear DNA be helpful then? Not necessarily, as Akhenaten and Amenhotep
III had the same, being father and son, and so would Smenkhkare, if he was a
brother of Akhenaten! Perhaps that's why Hawass brought up the block with the
inscription--because it has proved impossible to determine the parentage of
Tutankhamun via his DNA on account of what I have written above. In the long
run, though, it would be better if Tut's mtDNA showed new blood being
introduced via, say, Kiya. Then it would be more likely that his father was
Akhenaten as, historically, Tut seems to have been too young at his accession to
have been sired by Amenhotep III, anyway, who should have been long dead by the
time Tut was nine years old.
Probably, Ankhesenamun was quite a bit older than her husband, perhaps even up
to a decade. Recently, it has been suggested that it was Ankhesenpaaten Junior
who became the wife of Tut--but who was her mother? What a tangled web, indeed!

I am inclined to agree with Jon that Tut was the son of Akhenaten, born sometime
around his Year 12. However, I think Smenkhkare was not a son of Akhenaten but
his younger brother, a man fit to be the husband of Meritaten in the AE way of
thinking. In fact, Smenkhkare even looks like Akhenaten in his portrait in the
tomb of Meryre II. I feel doubtful that Akhenaten had any other living son but
Tutankhamun and certainly none that was old enough to be a spouse for Meritaten.
Anyway, Meritaten should have been the "heir presumptive" for quite some time
and, after awhile, I'm sure it occurred to Akhenaten that she have a husband
with whom she could rule jointly rather than give the Egyptians another
woman-king. However, once Tutankhamun was born to Akhenaten, he became the
heir. However, it seems to me this was not recognized by Smenkhkare and
Meritaten until after Smenkhkare died. Some older sister then became the regent
of little Tut [maybe even Ankhesenamun!] until he grew old enough to act the
part of a king, at least. That's probably why Smenkhkare and even Meritaten
lost some of their funerary equipment to Tut--one was an illegal king and the
other only a temporary one.


Marianne Luban
Author of "The Exodus Chronicles: Beliefs, Legends &
Rumors from Antiquity Regarding the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt", Second
Edition, New and Revised (2008)
http://tinyurl.com/5kbywp