We have exhausted our superlatives on Thutmose III, but that is all right; we won’t be needing them for a while. Not that the Conqueror’s son was not a fair enough fighter himself. If we can believe the stories that have come down to us—which we probably should not—he surpassed even his renowned father in feats of arms. Thutmose III had driven an arrow nine inches out of the back of a copper target two inches thick; Amenhotep II drove his arrow clean through a target three inches thick. He trained his horses so ably that they did not sweat, even when galloping. He rowed a boat (with a thirty-four-foot oar) four miles without stopping, and then landed it alone; his two-hundred-man crew had collapsed long before. He could outrun anyone in Egypt, and no man could draw his bow.
All this braggadocio is harmless, though a psychologist might wonder whether Amenhotep II was trying to surpass an impressive father. But Amenhotep II was not a Nice King. Soon after his father died, he had to lead a campaign into Syria to suppress a “rebellion” of the local princes there; these worthies soon acquired the habit of trying out a new king to see whether he would be as competent or as interested as his ancestors had been. The account of Amenhotep’s first Syrian campaign leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth. Probably the actual events did not differ greatly from what had happened under his father; but there is a difference in the selection of the details which Amenhotep II wished to commemorate. After capturing seven of the rebel princes, Amenhotep brought them back to Thebes, hanging head down at the prow of the royal barge. He then bashed in their heads personally and hung six of the bodies on the walls of Thebes. The seventh was sent down into Nubia to be draped over the battlements of the city of Napata as a lesson to the Nubians.
As an act of barbarity, this is pretty tame compared with the daily activities of the Assyrians or the morning prayers of the Aztecs. The technique was still being used in enlightened En gland, during the enlightened eighteenth century A.D. The English were more economical with their corpses; they cut them to pieces in order to spread the effect—a head here, a torso there—it all added up. A popular artistic motif in Egyptian reliefs was the bashing of captives by the king; he holds not one but several victims by their hair, which presumably saved time in the long run. However, one may reasonably doubt that the king performed this deed in person. Like so many other rituals, it was either delegated or not done at all; the representation became the deed. So perhaps I am being unfair to Amenhotep II when I suggest he enjoyed hitting people over the head.
What ever his methods, they were successful—in large part, perhaps, because of his father’s previous prowess. A few campaigns into Syria and Nubia convinced the regions in question that it didn’t do to mess with Amenhotep, and the king spent the rest of his life in a normal royal fashion—quarrying obelisks, building at Karnak, excavating his tomb—and, one presumes, shooting arrows through targets. He also amused himself with certain pursuits which might be genteelly summarized as “wine, women, and song.” One day when Amenhotep was sitting around in the palace, making a happy hour for himself (as the saying went), he got to feeling nostalgic and decided to dash off a note to an old comrade and drinking companion. This official, who was at one of the forts in Nubia, was so impressed by the letter, written in the king’s own hand, that he had it reproduced on stone. It was found by George Reisner at Fort Semna.
I do not propose to translate this text. Authorities differ as to the interpretation of some of the more interesting sections, and the whole document gives an impression of remarkable incoherence. We often have this feeling about mutilated inscriptions, but in this case I am inclined to wonder how much of the incoherence might be due to Amenhotep’s condition when he wrote it. What are we to do, for example, with the ladies who are familiarly referred to as a servant girl of Byblos, a little maiden of Alalakh, and an old woman of Arapha? Is Amenhotep insulting his rivals, the princes of these cities, by derisive epithets, or is he reminding the friend of his youth of certain memories they have in common? I suppose this peculiar letter could be interpreted more favorably as a touch of good fellowship from one jolly soldier to another; but I am prejudiced against Amenhotep II. We should, however, say one nice thing about him before we leave the subject. So let us add that there may be a grain of truth in the king’s claims about his archery.
His bow was buried with him in the tomb in the Valley of the Kings where his body was found, one of the few royal mummies that survived to our times in their original burial places. Tomb robbers had been at it and had removed everything of value from coffin and body. Then, when Egypt went into its last illness, and the depredations at the royal tombs passed the bounds of endurance, priests moved the bodies of the kings into secret hiding places, after removing anything of value overlooked by the ancient tomb robbers. One of the places chosen was the tomb of Amenhotep II, and eventually he had fourteen other bodies for company. When this cache was discovered in 1898, Amenhotep’s mummy was left in its sarcophagus, and the other royal remains were crated and about to be sent off to Cairo, when orders came to return them to the tomb. There has always been a vociferous minority who feel that the mortal remains of Egypt’s kings should be left in honorable burial, not exposed to the gaze of curious sightseers. The procedure ought to be safe, since everyone knows that nothing worth stealing would be left on the mummies. However, the ancient and honorable profession of grave robbing is one Egyptian tradition that has been handed on from father to son, down to the present day; and some of the boys near Luxor evidently failed to read the newspaper accounts which explained that Amenhotep no longer owned anything worth stealing. They broke into the tomb again in 1901 and slit through the mummy wrappings, to find nothing but a mummy. It is surprising that they bothered, since the grapevine among the brothers of the less legal crafts operates more efficiently than archaeological newsletters, and thieves, of all people, ought to “case” a place before they rob it. Perhaps it was just a matter of old habits, which reputedly die hard. They did make off with Amenhotep’s bow, however.
As for dignity and honorable burial, Amenhotep II got little of either. After the 1901 break-in his body was left in his open sarcophagus, with a spotlight shining on his unwrapped face. Tourists came in droves. Eventually the king was taken to the Cairo Museum to join nine other royals from his tomb, whose remains had finally been removed in 1900. (In case you’re counting, three uncoffined mummies were left in a side chamber of the tomb, since they were assumed to be members of the family of Amenhotep II; a fourth, also uncoffined, was broken to pieces by the frustrated 1901 robbers.)
Amenhotep’s wife—one of many, no doubt—was named Tiaa. She is not called King’s Daughter, so she was probably a commoner. However, she was the mother of his heir, and that counted for a lot. The son and heir was another Thutmose—the Fourth, by modern reckoning. His is a more elusive personality that fails to convey any positive image, pleasing or the reverse. He made brief excursions into Syria and Nubia in order to put down the usual revolts, and he piously finished and erected the obelisk that his grandfather and namesake, Thutmose III, had begun at Karnak. The largest surviving obelisk, it is now in Rome and commemorates the names of both Thutmoses. The most interesting memorial left by Thutmose IV is the stela that nestles between the paws of the Sphinx at Giza. The stela tells the story of how Thutmose, as a young prince, lay down to rest in the shadow of the great stone beast after a tiring hunting trip. As he slept, the sun god, of whom the Sphinx was believed to be the image, appeared to him in a dream and begged him to clear away the sand that had covered most of the huge statue. As a reward, Re would see to it that the young man inherited the throne. Thutmose got the crown and carried out his part of the bargain. So he says, at any rate.
Some Egyptologists have interpreted this story to mean that Thutmose was not the original heir. Divine intervention was a popular substitute for legitimacy, so the theory may have some foundation. Amenhotep II had several sons, two of them probably older than Thutmose, but they may have died of natural causes before their father. There is no evidence in pharaonic Egypt of a new king executing potential rivals—brothers, nephews, uncles, and cousins—which was a popular and useful custom in the Ottoman Empire, not to mention medieval and Renaissance Europe. That doesn’t mean it might not have happened, but without specific examples it is a plot for historical fiction, not legitimate history.
By now, one point should have been made clear—it takes more than a pith helmet and a shovel to make an Egyptologist. Most of the books on archaeology that are written for the “layman”—an opprobrious epithet, for whose use I apologize—tell and retell the accounts of excavations as if that one activity were the sole source of an archaeologist’s data. Now and then an attempt is made to give the linguist his due by mentioning the Rosetta stone, and by recounting the life of Jean-François Champollion and the process by which he deciphered the hieroglyphs. Philology and excavation are certainly important subfields of Egyptology, but as I have tried to demonstrate, there is hardly any aspect of knowledge that is not grist for the mill of the archaeologist. One of the unexpected subjects he has had to contend with—in Egypt, at least—is genealogical research. Generally, family trees are interesting only to the twigs of the particular tree. But the genealogies of the ancient Egyptians can give an archaeologist vital information about such matters as inheritance, marital customs, and family life. Royal family trees, of course, are a legitimate subject of historical study. An English historian would have a hard time discussing the Wars of the Roses and the advent of the Tudor dynasty without bringing up the marital—and extramarital—activities of the sons of Edward III. In Egypt, royal genealogies are particularly important because they shed light on a problem that is still in dispute—the problem of the inheritance of the throne.
We are familiar with the relatively modern solutions to this problem, in which the right to rule descended from father to eldest son. Sometimes royal daughters were acceptable in lieu of sons, and sometimes not; but ordinarily it was the offspring of the reigning monarch, whether king or queen, who acquired the mystical sanction of the crown.
This procedure was not universal. In Nubia, to the south of Egypt, the crown went to the brothers of the king before reverting to his eldest son—a practical procedure, which avoided minority rule and the evils which attend upon it. Anthropologists have collected examples of even stranger rules of royal inheritance; there are rumors of societies in which queens were preferred to kings.
Egyptologists once believed that the queen held a peculiarly important position in regard to inheritance. A queen could not rule, but she alone could transmit the right to rule. By dogma, her husband held the throne only by virtue of his marriage to her, and her son had a prior claim—not on the crown, but on the next queen, who would ideally be his sister, the daughter of his mother. The mystical sanctity descended from mother to daughter; her son had no part in it. If the heiress-queen had only daughters, it was all the more incumbent on the next king—who might be her husband’s child by a lesser wife—to marry her eldest daughter, the heiress-princess.
This theory of inheritance has now been discarded by the majority of scholars, though you will still find it mentioned in older books. One of the objections to it is the fact that there is no queen’s title that distinguishes a royal heiress. If the job was that important, you would think it would have its own proper title. To go one step further—if an heiress-wife was so vital to a reigning monarch, we would expect that she would be honored by the position of chief wife. But not all chief wives were heiress-princesses, or even king’s daughters.
The trouble is that the Egyptians did not have family Bibles with pages for births and deaths. Sometimes we have the feeling that kings only mentioned their sons or daughters when they happened to think about them; additional offspring keep turning up, on newly found reliefs and inscriptions. Once in a while a king shows us a collection of sons and daughters; sometimes they are named, sometimes not. But never, or almost never, are we given all the information we would like to have—date of birth, names, parentage.
To further confuse the issue, we should note that Egyptian statements of relationship are often vague. It was recognized early in the game that the words “brother” and “sister” need not indicate ties of blood. They are terms of endearment, equivalent to “sweetheart” or “darling,” or even to “husband” or “wife.” But it took Egyptologists a few years to arrive at the dismaying conclusion that “father” and “son” are equally misleading. “Father” might be applied by a king to his grandfather, or to an even more remote ancestor; “son” seems to be used for grandson as well, and, at certain periods, as an honorary title. We are still clinging to “mother” and “daughter” as meaning what they seem to mean; but we can never be sure that a newly discovered inscription may not knock the sense out of those words too.
With these cheerful facts in mind, let us take a specific case—the marital situation of Thutmose IV. It presents some interesting problems—not to Thutmose, as far as we know, but to archaeologists. We suspect, to begin with, that Thutmose’s mother was not of royal birth. The evidence for the suspicion is negative evidence: the lady is never called “king’s daughter.”
So until we find a text that states her parentage specifically, we can establish her social status only as a probability. Let us assume that she was a commoner. The next step, for those who followed the “heiress” theory of legitimacy, was to look for a royal princess among the wives of Thutmose IV. If one existed, she would have been his half-sister—the daughter of Thutmose’s father, Amenhotep II, by a royal wife who was not Thutmose IV’s mother, because she (we think) was a commoner.
One of Thutmose’s wives was a princess of Mitanni, who could not have been an Egyptian heiress. Another wife was a woman with an unusual name, which, in view of its uniqueness, may not be a name at all. (And if you find that sentence confusing, the situation it describes is equally so.) A third queen of Thutmose IV was a lady named Mutemwiya, who was the mother of his successor; we assume that she was of nonroyal birth because she, like Thutmose IV’s mother, does not have the title “king’s daughter.”
The ambiguity of the problem may seem complete at this point, but it gets worse. For there may not be three queens involved at all; by the mental dexterity with which all true historians are endowed, we can reduce the three to one. The Mitannian princess could have taken an Egyptian name—Mutemwiya, for example. The lady with the strange name may be the Mitannian princess in disguise, and/or Mutemwiya. The titles of these ladies (however many they may be) add to the confusion. Asiatic princesses are not called “king’s daughter.” Mutemwiya is not called “king’s daughter.” The weirdly named queen is called “king’s daughter,” which makes her identification with either or both of the other two somewhat dubious. In fact, the whole business is extremely dubious, and I see no way out of it. The only point that can reasonably be made is that this is one of several cases that has led most scholars to dismiss the theory of the heiress-princess. It can, of course, be claimed that Thutmose IV had still another queen, unknown to us, who was an heiress-princess, but this is pretty weak logically. You can prove anything if you are allowed to make up the necessary evidence.
The Mitannian princess, whose name is not recorded, was the first such alliance of which we know, but it was not the last. This marriage, together with the relative absence of military activity on the part of Thutmose IV, suggests that he had come to terms with Egypt’s rival state to the north and had chosen diplomacy over conquest. His reign was peaceful and quite possibly brief; the mummy identified as his has been described as a frail young man. It was not found in his tomb, which is in the Valley of the Kings; Thutmose IV ended up, like so many of his peers, in one of the caches of royal mummies. His son and successor was destined for greater fame and fortune.
The name Amenhotep means “Amon is satisfied.” Amon had reason to be satisfied. The old provincial god of Thebes was now Amon-Re, king of the gods, and his priests controlled what was probably the richest ecclesiastical establishment in all of Egypt. To the temple of Amon, with its ever-growing circle of administrative and financial offices, came a goodly proportion of the foreign tribute. The memory of Thutmose III was still fresh in the minds of Egyptian vassal princes in Syria and Palestine; the military campaigns of his son and grandson reinforced Egyptian prestige in those areas and kept Asiatic tribute pouring south into Egypt. From Nubia and from the mines in the eastern desert gold continued to flow into the coffers of the king and the god. And to the king, besides gold and tribute, came letters from the rulers of the great powers of the ancient Near East—not only Mitanni, but Hatti, Babylon, and Cyprus—humbly requesting gold and offering their daughters for the harem of Horus.
As the head of this luxurious and wealthy society, Amenhotep III deserved the epithet “the Magnificent,” which has been given him by modern historians. In his youth he showed signs of the athletic ability which had been the boast of his grandfather, Amenhotep II; an inscription claims that he killed over one hundred lions between his first and tenth years of reign. But the third Amenhotep carried out no important military campaigns, not even the customary punitive expedition into Syria at the beginning of his reign.
Among his wives Amenhotep III numbered not one but two Mitannian princeses. They are only names to us—Gilukhepa and Tadukhepa, just for the record—but his chief queen was a more remarkable figure. Her entrance into the royal family was treated in a manner that is unique in ancient Egypt. Amenhotep the Magnificent announced his marriage in a series of commemorative scarabs, the same shape as the well-known beetle amulets, which modern tourists have carried away from Egypt by the thousands, but large enough to contain a short inscription on the flattened base. This inscription read:
May he live, Amenhotep III, given life, and the King’s Great Wife Tiye, who lives. The name of her father is Yuya, the name of her mother is Thuya; she is the wife of a mighty king whose southern boundary is as far as Karoy, and northern as far as Naharin!
This announcement can be interpreted in a number of ways, but to me it sounds like a challenge. Tiye was not a king’s daughter. The tomb of her parents was found in 1905. It had been entered in ancient times, the coffins opened and some of the grave goods stolen. A lot was left, though, and the exposed mummies were in excellent condition. Tiye’s father, Yuya, was a fine-looking man; suggestions that he was non-Egyptian, of Asiatic or Nubian origin, have no actual basis in fact. Yuya’s titles are not indicative of high rank. He is called “Master of the Horse,” and parts of a model chariot found in the tomb bear out this role. His wife had the usual titles of a court lady, in addition to being designated “Mother of the King’s Chief Wife.” Yuya’s only other title of interest is that of “Father of the God.” What god, one might ask? The king? We will defer this question until later, if you don’t mind. It’s another of those arguments Egyptologists love.
One might also ask why Amenhotep married this daughter of commoners and made her his consort. Queen Tiye was chief wife in the fullest sense, appearing conspicuously upon the monuments of her husband and receiving letters from foreign monarchs which imply that she had a voice in political decisions. There is a small head in the Berlin Museum which is usually assumed to be be a portrait of the lady; although interpretation of physiognomy is always subjective, there is no way that woman could have been a meek, submissive wife. It’s a striking face with a full, firmly set mouth framed by hard lines; the chin is outthrust and the eyes hooded. Beautiful, no; but not all the great charmers of history have been beauties.
It is pure romantic fiction to claim Tiye so captivated the youthful king that he defied convention by raising her to such a high position. There are a number of prosaic theories to account for her rise to power. Some are based on the exasperating absence of evidence about family connections and relationships. As I mentioned when discussing Hatshepsut, we know very little about the collateral branches of the royal family. How much power did such cousins have? Did they carry some of the royal prestige—and if so, for how many generations? Maybe Yuya was distantly related to Amenhotep III. Maybe he had enough personal influence with the king and the party in power to push the claim of his daughter. Such suggestions abound, and there is absolutely no proof of any of them. Yuya and Thuya had at least one other child—a son, Anen, who was second prophet of Amon. This is not a neglible title, but it is not on the same level as vizier or high priest. Unlike his parents, who were honored by a tomb in the royal valley, Anen was buried elsewhere. It’s all very confusing, but I just don’t get the impression that the king’s in-laws necessarily had much power at court.
We don’t know how old Amenhotep III was when he inherited the throne. The mummy that has been identified as his probably isn’t. In the earliest reliefs from his reign he is accompanied by his mother, which has led scholars to suppose that he was a minor when he became king. The marriage scarab is dated to his second year, and if he was hunting lions during his first years of rule, he can’t have been a toddler.
One of his first projects, perhaps, was the great colonnaded hall that stands on the east bank of the Nile, not far from the modern Winter Palace hotel. (The original structure was added onto by a later king, Ramses II.) It dominates the view of modern Luxor from the riverbank. At Karnak Amenhotep built a huge new pylon, the third, by today’s reckoning.
Though Amenhotep, like most Egyptian kings, had royal residences all over the place, his principal palace was at Thebes, on the West Bank across from modern Luxor. There’s not much left of it today, but originally it was a great sprawling structure that covered almost eighty acres and included several subsidiary palaces, presumably for his queen and his heir. Next to it the king excavated a huge harbor connected to the Nile; the resultant earth mounds are still visible, though only an informed eye would recognize them for what they are. The modern name of the site is Malkata. Amenhotep called it “The Mansion of Nebmaatre Is the Dazzling Aten.”
Nebmaatre was Amenhotep’s throne name. But who, one might ask, was the dazzling Aten?
This is our first encounter with a name—a god—who was to loom large in succeeding years. Originally aton was a common noun that referred to the sun itself. Later on the word acquired a “god” determinative and became personified during the reign of Amenhotep’s father, Thutmose IV. Just how far his prominence extended under Amenhotep III is open to question. So far as we know, Amenhotep built no temples for him and raised no statues.
Unless, as recent theories propose, he didn’t need them because Amenhotep himself was the “Dazzling Aton.”
Every Egyptian pharaoh was a god—sort of. He was the Horus while he lived and Osiris after he died. He was called “the good god,” and “Son of Re,” and like Hatshepsut, Amenhotep III carved a series of reliefs showing his mother being impregnated by none other than Amon-Re. But was Amenhotep III more of a god than other kings?
After he had been on the throne for thirty years Amenhotep III celebrated his first Heb-Sed, or Sed festival (also referred to as “jubilee.”) The ritual goes back to the earliest dynasties and was a complex performance involving a number of activities such as making offerings to the gods and receiving offerings, and running races. One can’t help wondering whether this originated as an actual test of the ruler’s vigor, which was identified with that of the tribe or city. Such procedures are known, not only from Africa, but from other parts of the world; failure could be fatal. It makes a certain amount of sense, really, if one believes in magic. A weak ruler could weaken an entire people and was replaced for the good of the group.
Be that as it may, the Egyptian version was one of rejuvenation. The king was restored, by dogma if not in actuality, to full strength. In theory the first jubilee took place after the king had ruled for thirty years and was repeated at three-year intervals thereafter. There are innumerable exceptions to the rule, however, and it may be that special circumstances required emergency treatment. Amenhotep III celebrated three such jubilees, the last in his thirty-seventh year.
During these years Amenhotep produced an enormous number of portraits of himself—statues all over the place, not to mention reliefs in the temples. Some of the earliest show a baby-faced Amenhotep, with round cheeks, a pouting mouth, and large slanted eyes. This would be in keeping with his age when he assumed the throne, but the change actually begins with his father, Thutmose IV, whose tomb images show him with similar features. Portraits from late in the reign of Amenhotep include several that seem to be more realistic, showing him as paunchy and slumped, with a lined, tired face. A letter from the king of Hatti, saying that he is sending a divine statue to help his brother king back to health, supports the idea that toward the end of his reign Amenhotep was suffering from some form of illness, and some scholars point to the mummy which was identified as his as further proof. It has horribly abscessed teeth. I, and others, doubt that this is the body of Amenhotep, but that doesn’t mean he was a healthy man. As we are constantly informed, indulgence and lack of exercise aren’t good for people.
Unfortunately the neat progression of artistic depictions, from baby-faced to aged, may not be so neat after all. Not long ago an authority on Egyptian art, W. Raymond Johnson, concluded that many of the statues once believed to date from early in the reign of Amenhotep III were actually produced during that king’s later years, after the first Heb-Sed. The change is deliberate, according to Johnson, indicating not only bodily rejuvenation but a change in the status of the king. He became a literal, living god, none other than the Aten himself, and the alteration of his features was accompanied by changes in his ornaments and attire, indicating his divine nature. Like most theories in Egyptology, this one is still being debated.
Like other kings of the Eighteenth and Nineteeth Dynasties, Amenhotep built himself a mortuary temple along the cultivation on the West Bank. Amenhotep’s mortuary temple was the largest of the lot. So badly destroyed was it that in modern times nothing remained except a vast plain covered with weeds and prickly camel grass—and two of the most imposing monuments on the West Bank, the so-called Colossi of Memnon. These giant, badly battered statues marked the entrance to the temple. Recent excavations by a German team have uncovered buried remains of the structure itself, including some fine statues.
The man responsible for the erection of these gigantic statues is an interesting character in his own right. His name was Amenhotep, son of Hapu, and like that of another great official, Imhotep, it survived in men’s memories for millennia, so that he became a demigod. His only titles were those of a scribe and he is shown in the traditional scribal position, seated, with his writing implements on his lap. But the king Amenhotep must have cherished him, for there are several such statues, carved by the king’s order, and the scribe even had his own mortuary temple, a signal token of royal favor. He was eighty years old when he died, and how we wish we knew more about him!
Amenhotep the king broke with tradition by building his tomb in the West Valley of the Kings, not the main East Valley, where his ancestors rested. It was, of course, robbed in antiquity, but it was extensive and beautifully decorated. Some scholars believe that two separate sets of rooms were intended for the burials of the great royal wife Tiye and one of her daughters, Satamon, who also held the title of chief queen, which means that Amenhotep not only married his daughter but had two chief wives simultaneously.
Satamon is another of those elusive princesses. Nothing much is known about her. Maybe she died young. That would explain why she was never married to her brother, the heir, as was customary, but it doesn’t explain why she married her father. Amenhotep may have married another of his daughters. Why? Theories abound, but they are only theories. If Satamon was buried in Amenhotep III’s tomb she didn’t stay there. Her present whereabouts, like those of many royal women of this period, are unknown. Her mother, Queen Tiye, is missing too. We will have more to say about her in the next chapter.
It may seem that we have given rather short shrift to a king who merited the appelation “Magnificent.” Yet despite his accomplishments Amenhotep III is less well known (and, to me, less interesting) than his immediate successors. The great royal wife, Tiye, had presented her husband with several daughters and at least two sons. One of the sons, a prince named Thutmose, died before his father, which made his younger brother the heir. Tiye’s second son came to the throne bearing one of the traditional names of his house, Amenhotep, which honored the great god of his city. He didn’t keep it long. As Akhenaton, the name by which he is known to history, he initiated changes in religion, art, and society that make him the most controversial and intriguing of Egyptian kings; and his successor, under the irreverent journalistic nickname of “King Tut,” is better known to the world at large than are any of the great rulers of ancient Egypt.