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Kiya was one of the wives of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Little is known about her, and her actions and roles are poorly documented in the historical record, in contrast to those of Akhenaten's 'Great royal wife', Nefertiti. Her unusual name suggests that she may originally have been a Mitanni princess.Reeves, C. Nicholas. New Light on Kiya from Texts in the British Museum, p.100 The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 74 (1988) Surviving evidence demonstrates that Kiya was an important figure at Akhenaten's court during the middle years of his reign, when she had a daughter with him.William J. Murnane. Texts from the Amarna Period in Egypt. Edited by E.S. Meltzer. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1995. () Page 9, pp 90–93, pp 210–211.Aidan Dodson. Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter Reformation. The American University in Cairo Press, 2009. () Page 17. She disappears from history a few years before her royal husband's death. In previous years, she was thought to be mother of Tutankhamun, but recent DNA evidence suggests this is unlikely.
However, there is no confirming evidence that Kiya was anything but a native Egyptian.Jacobus Van Dijk, "The Noble Lady of Mitanni and Other Royal Favourites of the Eighteenth Dynasty" in Essays on Ancient Egypt in Honour of Herman te Velde, Groningen, 1997, pp. 35–37. In fact, Cyril Aldred proposed that her unusual name is actually a variant of the Ancient Egyptian word for "monkey," making it unnecessary to assume a foreign origin for her.Cyril Aldred. Akhenaten, King of Egypt. Thames & Hudson, 1991. () Page 286.
In inscriptions, Kiya is given the titles of "The Favorite" and "The Greatly Beloved," but never of "Nobelwoman (iryt-p‘t)" or "Great Royal Wife", some believe this indicates that she was not of royal Egyptian blood, but in fact the two are not causally related. Many queens of royal descent have not been shown to bear these titles, such as Mutnofret, the Younger Lady, and Tanedjemet. Her full titles read, "The wife and greatly beloved of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, who lives on Maat, Neferkheperure-waenre, the beautiful child of the living Aten, who shall live forever continually, Kiya." All artifacts relating to Kiya derive from Amarna, Akhenaten's short-lived capital city, or from Tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings. She is not attested during the reign of any other pharaoh.
The British Egyptologists Aidan Dodson and Dyan Hilton wrote:
Akhenaten and his family were based in Thebes for the first four years of his reign, establishing the new capital city at Amarna in Year 5. Kiya is not attested during this early period. Only after the move to Amarna does she emerge through inscriptional evidence as one of Akhenaten's wives.
Kiya's name appeared prominently in the temple installation known as the Maru-Aten, at the southern edge of the city, according to epigraphic studies. The inscriptions in the Maru-Aten were eventually recarved to replace the name and titles of Kiya with those of Akhenaten's eldest daughter, Meritaten.
One or more "sunshades" or side-chapels in the city's largest temple to the Aten, the Per-Aten, also originally bore the name of Kiya. These sunshades were later reinscribed for Meritaten and Ankhesenpaaten, the third daughter of Akhenaten. Some of the recarved inscriptions indicate that Kiya had a daughter, whose name is not preserved. Marc Gabolde proposes that Kiya's daughter was Beketaten, who is more often identified as a daughter of Amenhotep III and Tiye.Marc Gabolde. The End of the Amarna Period. Last updated 2009-11-05.
The most spectacular of Kiya's monuments is a gilded wooden coffin of costly and intricate workmanship that was discovered in Tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings. The coffin's footboard contains an Atenist prayer that was originally intended for a woman, but was later revised to a refer to a man – with enough grammatical errors to betray the gender of the original speaker.William J. Murnane. Texts from the Amarna Period in Egypt. Edited by E.S. Meltzer. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1995. () Page 243. The style of the coffin and the language of its surviving inscriptions place its manufacture in the reign of Akhenaten. Scholarly opinion now makes Kiya its original owner.Cyril Aldred. Akhenaten, King of Egypt. Thames & Hudson, 1991. () Page 205. The richness of this coffin, which is comparable in style to the middle coffin of Tutankhamun,Bell, M.R. "An Armchair Excavation of KV 55." JARCE 27 (1990) Pages 98–99. provides further evidence of Kiya's exalted status at Amarna.
Many Egyptologists have tried to produce an explanation for her prominence. Numerous scholarly discussions of Tutankhamun's parentage during the late twentieth century, and the early years of the twenty-first, have mentioned the hypothesis that Kiya was Tutankhamun's mother. If she had indeed borne a male heir to Akhenaten, this distinction might well merit unique honors. However, genetic studies of the Egyptian royal mummies, led by Zahi Hawass and Carsten Pusch, have now established that Tutankhamun's biological mother was KV35YL, the "Younger Lady" discovered in the mummy cache in the tomb of Amenhotep II.
Various scenarios have been advanced to explain Kiya's disappearance. Having suggested that Kiya was the mother of Tutankhamun, Nicholas Reeves writes that "it is not beyond the realm of possibility that she fell from grace in a coup engineered by the jealous Nefertiti herself."Nicholas Reeves. "The Royal Family." In Pharaohs of the Sun, ed. RE Freed, YJ Markowitz, SH D'Auria. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 1999. () Pages 91–92. Having argued that Kiya was Tadukhipa, daughter of the King of Mitanni, Marc Gabolde suggests that she "paid the price" for a deterioration in the alliance between Egypt and Mitanni and was sent back home.
There is evidence that Kiya was still alive in the seventeenth year of Akhenaten’s reign, the very year in which he died. Some scholars believe that she was defeated in a political struggle with Meritaten and was ultimately disgraced, along with her daughter.
It is uncertain whether Kiya ever used the rich funerary equipment that was prepared against her death. If her disappearance resulted from disgrace or exile, the answer would be no. On the other hand, if she died in good standing with Akhenaten, she probably would have received a lavish burial appropriate to her station. In the latter case, a likely site for her interment would be the Amarna Royal Tomb, which includes a suite of three chambers evidently used to house female members of Akhenaten's family.Aidan Dodson. Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter Reformation. The American University in Cairo Press, 2009. () Pages 18–24. At least two and possibly as many as three different individuals were interred in this suite, including Akhenaten's daughter Meketaten, the only one whose name survives. Two of the chambers originally included painted plaster reliefs depicting Akhenaten, Nefertiti, certain of their daughters, and other mourners lamenting the deceased. Some Egyptologists have suggested that one of these scenes of mourning refers to Kiya, although no specific evidence supports this claim.Nicholas Reeves. The Complete Tutankhamun. Thames & Hudson, 2000. () Page 24.
Further, the conventional interpretation of the mourning scenes is that they represent the death in childbirth of the deceased,Cyril Aldred. Akhenaten, King of Egypt. Thames & Hudson, 1991. () Page 30-32 although this view has recently been challenged.Jacobus van Dijk. " The Death of Meketaten," in Causing His Name To Live. Studies in Egyptian Epigraphy and History in Memory of William J. Murnane. Edited by Peter J. Brand and Louise Cooper. - Culture & History of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 37 (Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2009), 83–88. The conventional interpretation has encouraged speculation that Kiya died bearing Akhenaten a child, but again, no clear-cut evidence is available.
DNA test results published in February 2010 have shown conclusively that the Younger Lady mummy was the mother of Tutankhamun, and by extension a wife of Akhenaten. The results also show that she was a full sister to her husband, and that they were both the children of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye. This family relationship rules out the possibility that the Younger Lady was Kiya, because no known artifact accords Kiya the title or attribute "god's daughter." For similar reasons Nefertiti is also ruled out. The report concludes that either Nebetah or Beketaten, younger daughters of Amenhotep III who are not known to have married their father, are the most likely candidates for the identity of the Younger Lady mummy.
On another hand, Joyce Tyldesley expressed doubt about veracity of genetic testing due to contamination and inbreeding in royal family that could potentially make ambiguous readings of genetic relationships between examined indiviudals. She views as improbable that such important lady as Akhenaten's sister would be ommited in sources from Amarna had she been mother of his heir, and ignoring genetic results, she still considers it is plausible that Tutankhamun was son of Kiya.
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