TL;DR: In brief
A pharaoh carried five formal names, each a small theology. Two of them — the throne name and the birth name — were written inside cartouches, and those are the names history remembers. Names were not labels but a portion of the person: to write one was to sustain its owner, to change one was to change allegiance, and to chisel one away was to attack the owner’s very existence.
The same man appears in the records as Tutankhaten and Tutankhamun; the same woman may lie behind Nefertiti, Neferneferuaten, and a throne name shared across a succession crisis. To follow the Amarna period — and the series built on it — it helps to know how Egyptian names worked, and why so much of the era’s mystery is, quite literally, a matter of names.
The Five Names #
At accession a king received a full titulary of five names. The Horus name proclaimed him the living Horus, the falcon god enthroned in a human body. The Two Ladies name placed him under Nekhbet and Wadjet, vulture and cobra, patronesses of the south and north; the Golden Horus name added a third epithet whose exact force scholars still debate. Then came the two names that mattered most in daily use. The throne name, taken at coronation and introduced by “King of Upper and Lower Egypt,” was the king’s official identity — Nebkheperure for Tutankhamun, Ankhkheperure for the shadowy Neferneferuaten. The birth name, introduced by “Son of Ra,” was the personal name he had carried from childhood — the name by which we know the kings today.
These last two were written inside the cartouche, the oval loop of rope that encircled and protected a royal name. On a monument, a Cartouche is a king’s signature, seal, and shield at once — which is exactly why cartouches drew the chisels of later enemies.
Names That Changed Sides #
Because a name declared allegiance, the Amarna period is full of renamings. Amenhotep IV — “Amun is content” — became Akhenaten when he broke with Amun for the Aten. A boy born Tutankhaten, “living image of the Aten,” was re-proclaimed Tutankhamun as the old cults returned, and his queen Ankhesenpaaten became Ankhesenamun beside him. These are not scribal quirks; each is a public statement of which god now stood behind the throne. The series’ chapters keep this discipline: characters bear the names their moment in the revolution would have given them.
Killing a Name #
Egyptian thought counted the name among the components of the person, alongside body, Ka, Ba, and shadow. A name spoken or read aloud sustained its owner in the afterlife; offering formulas ask exactly this — that the deceased’s name be pronounced. The reverse followed with terrible logic. Hacking a name from a monument — the practice modern scholars call damnatio memoriae — was an attack on the person’s eternal existence, and carving your own name over a predecessor’s (usurpation) quietly transferred his monuments, and his memory, to yourself. The Amarna kings suffered both on a historic scale: struck from the king lists, their names erased or overwritten, until archaeology recovered them three thousand years later. That recovery of names is, in a real sense, what the whole modern study of the period has been — and the silence the erasers left behind is the space the series’ mysteries live in.
A note on grading: the five-part titulary, Cartouche convention, the Amarna renamings, and the erasures are all directly attested. The interpretation of the Golden Horus name is genuinely uncertain, and the identity behind the throne name Ankhkheperure is one of the period’s open questions — the series’ answer to it is a flagged interpretive choice, argued on the series’ research pages, not settled fact.