However, his status as king is not confirmed by any contemporary documents and he may well be an invention of later Saite rulers to legitimise their kingship.
[1] If not, he would merely have been a local mayor of Sais who served in office for this period of time prior to the accession of king Necho I.
The Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen has suggested[2] that Nekauba's reign be raised by a decade from six to 16 years, though this seems somewhat ambitious for such an obscure ruler.
In 2002, Olivier Perdu published a newly discovered Year 2 donation stela found near Sebennytos which dates to Necho I's reign.
Ryholt maintained that there was no independent Saite king named Nekauba who intervened between Tefnakht II and Necho I. Ryholt also stressed that possible evidence for the removal of an intervening king between Tefnakht II and Necho I was provided by Perdu's aforementioned argument concerning the similarity of the two stelae (although Ryholt attributed the Year 8 stela to Tefnakht II instead); the attribution of 6 years to Nekauba would separate the two stela by a minimum of seven years whereas if Nekauba did not exist, the two stela might have been produced within one to two years since Necho I would have been Tefnakht II's immediate successor.