thatlittleegyptologist:

I wouldn’t say ‘order of succession’ or anything that particularly complicated. Certainly there could be a ‘nominated’ successor, as seems to be the case of Tutankhamun and Horemheb. Horemheb seems to have been the favourite to take over should Tutankhamun not have produced a son during his reign, but was usurped (potentially) by Ay. I don’t know how common this would have been since there aren’t many instances where the line of succession is broken and we have a clear idea of who is related to whom. See: the Late Ramesside period where there are a lot of Ramesses’ but there are gaps in the knowledge and we don’t know how they’re all related, or the Early Dynastic period where we don’t know enough to say one way or the other. 

In some cases a royal daughter may have been married to a son of a high court official, and the son of the official becomes Pharaoh but the line isn’t broken because the Queen is from the royal line. So take the 4th Dynasty for instance; the king, Huni, has a daughter Hetepheres I. She marries Seneferu, who is potentially the son of Meresankh I, who is the sister (?) of Huni…who may be the father of Sneferu. Confused?  Yeah sounds about right. Basically, we don’t fully know. Anyway, Sneferu and Hetepheres I have a son, Khufu, who marries Meryetyotes I, and they have two sons (well they had more, but these two are important): Djedefre and Khafre. Djedefre married twice. Once to Khentetka, with whom we know no children (doesn’t mean there weren’t any, we just don’t have records), and also to Hetepheres II, who is also his sister. They did have children, but none of them became king. It is Hetepheres II’s other husband, Kawab, with whom she has 4 children, that she had Meresankh III who married Khafre, the brother of Djedefre. They had 5 children, including sons, but Khafre’s marriage (possibly) to Khamerernebty I was the one that produced king Menkaure. The problem from all of this is that it’s far from certain that any of the family/genealogical connections are correct. In fact, we’re not even sure that some of the ‘marriages’ even happened or if these people are related in the way we think they are (if indeed they are related at all). Basically, I’ve been say for 40 minutes staring at this, trying to explain it:

(image from the ‘Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt by Aidan Dodson and Dyan Hilton, which is something I’d recommend getting hold of if you’re wanting to do more work on this)

Failing that…we have Intermediate Periods where they duke it out.