Aidan Dodson

And that the DNA of the father was that represented by a mummy, which some have argued is Akanan, some Smenkhare.

There's probably a whole podcast purely on the wrangling around this.

Yeah.

The issue is that it was proclaimed that there was a brother-sister marriage, and it was argued that Akhenaten and a sister were married and produced to Dan Hamun.

There's a problem with that in that we have no sister of Akhenaten who is a potential candidate.

And the amount of material we've got from Amarna, you'd expect her to be there.

Yeah, that's the thing, is that the publication 2010...

only gave preferred interpretations of the DNA, not the full range of them.

And it was only subsequently that a French colleague got a tame DNA specialist to look at the results again.

And the same genetic signature is produced by three generations of first cousin marriages, as would be produced by a brother-sister marriage.

Brilliant.

Exactly.

But that also would tie in with her father being a brother of Queen Tea, etc.

So it works relatively well.

It all ties up very nicely.

Potentially, anyway.

But again, this is all work.

I have to emphasise with everything I talk about in Ancient Asia, this is a working hypothesis.

I'm not saying this is the fact, but for me, the data suggests that this is probably the best working hypothesis we've got at the moment.

The thing is, the reason why it was all left was that after Akhenaten's death, Amarna is abandoned fairly rapidly.