Smenkhkare (alternatively romanized Smenkhare, Smenkare, or Smenkhkara; meaning "Vigorous is the soul of Re") was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh of unknown background who lived and ruled during the Amarna Period of the 18th Dynasty.

[3] If a son of Akhenaten, he was presumably an older brother of Tutankhamun, as he succeeded the throne ahead of him;[4] his mother was likely an unknown, lesser wife.

[5] An alternative suggestion, based on objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun, is that Smenkhkare was the son of Akhenaten's older brother, Thutmose and an unknown woman, possibly one of his sisters.

[11][12] Some Egyptologists have speculated about the possibility of a two- or three-year reign for Smenkhkare based on a number of wine dockets from Amarna that lack a king's name but bear dates for regnal years 2 and 3.

[14] While there are few monuments or artifacts that attest to Smenkhkare's existence, there is a major addition to the Amarna palace complex that bears his name.

In particular, the confusion of his identity compared to that of Pharaoh Neferneferuaten has led to considerable academic debate about the order of kings in the late Amarna Period.

[23] However, a hieratic inscription discovered at the limestone quarry at Dier Abu Hinnis suggests that Nefertiti was alive in Akhenaten's Year 16, undermining this theory.

In comparison to the theories mentioned above, Marc Gabolde has advocated that Smenkhkare's Great Royal Wife, Meritaten, became Pharaoh Neferneferuaten after her husband's death.

The main argument against this is a box (Carter 001k) from Tutankhamun's tomb that lists Akhenaten, Neferneferuaten, and Meritaten as three separate individuals.

[22] There has been much confusion in identifying artifacts related to Smenkhkare because another pharaoh from the Amarna Period bears the same or similar royal titulary.

[30] Neferneferuaten has since been identified as a female pharaoh who ruled during the Amarna Period and is generally accepted as a separate person from Smenkhkare.

[35][36] James Peter Allen pointed out the name 'Ankhkheperure' nearly always included the epithet 'desired of Wa en Re' (referring to Akhenaten) when coupled with the nomen 'Neferneferuaten'.

"[39][40] Theories arose when the two pharaohs Smenkhkare and Neferneferutaten were still considered the same, male person, that he and Akhenaten could have been homosexual lovers or even married.

This has been interpreted to mean that at one point Nefertiti may have been a coregent, as indicated by the crown, but not entitled to full pharaonic honors such as the double cartouche.

For instance, when the mortuary wine docket surfaced from the 'House of Smenkhkare (deceased)', it seemed to appear that he changed his name back before he died.

He has been put forward as a candidate for the mummy discovered in KV55, which rested in a desecrated rishi coffin with the owner's name removed.

The authors determined that the royal mummies of the 18th Dynasty bore strong similarities to contemporary Nubians with slight differences.

[56] Initial studies conducted on the KV55 mummy indicated that the individual was a young man with no apparent abnormalities in his mid-twenties or younger.

The content was retold on the Archaeology News Network website and is representative of a portion of the dissent: A specialist in human osteology and paleopathology, Baker takes issue with the identification of the skeletonized mummy KV55 as Tutankhamun’s father, Akhenaten.

These earlier analyses – documented with written descriptions, photographs and radiographs – show a pattern of fused and unfused epiphyses (caps on ends of growing bones) throughout the skeleton, indicating a man much younger than Akhenaten is believed to have been at the time of his death.

Baker also uses a photograph of the pubic symphysis of the pelvis to narrow the age of KV55 to 18–23 based on recent techniques used in osteology and forensic anthropology.

He published his conclusions in 2010 where he 'utterly excluded the possibility of Akhenaten': [T]he unambiguous male skeleton from Tomb 55 proved decisively by a long list of biological developmental features his age at death to be in the range of 19–22 years which fully agrees with the results of the previous determination by Harrison (1966)...