by Ahmed Osman
• Two fragmentary wine-jar dockets were found by British archaeologists, working at the site of Tell el-Amarna, the new capital which the Pharaoh Akhenaten built for himself and named Akhetaten. They bear only the dates Year 28 and Year 30. Although they most probably belonged to Amenhotep III, some scholars have argued that they might possibly have belonged to Horemheb. It is true that Horemheb’s name has been found in Amarna, a city abandoned even before he came to the throne, but there is no reason to suggest that it was used as a place of residence for Horemheb or any of his officials, for otherwise we should have found more examples dating from different years of his reign as well as some archaeological remains.
A similar wine-jar label dated Year 31 was also found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, who had already been dead and buried for four years when Horemheb’s reign began. In this case clearly the date could refer only to Amenhotep III.
• Year 59 in relation to Horemheb was found towards the end of the last century in the inscriptions of a tomb at Sakkara, the burial place for Memphis from the time of Ramses II. The tomb belongs to a scribe of Ptah named Khayri and the inscriptions give an account of a legal dispute about ownership of a piece of land that lasted over a long period of time during reigns of different kings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties.
Scholars faced with this figure of Year 59 looked upon it as too long for Horemheb’s reign for a variety of reasons. He is known, before coming to the throne, to have been a high official during the nine years of Tutankhamun as well as the four years of Aye; he has not left much in the way of monuments other than those usurped from his predecessors or rebuilt using their materials; nor do we have any information about military activity by Horemheb in Asia that one would expect to be a feature of such an extended reign. In spite of these circumstances, scholars, without any supporting evidence, assumed that the reigns of the four Amarna kings – Akhenaten, Semenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Aye – had been added to those of Horemheb: ‘It has been widely accepted that this is an inclusive date incorporating the reigns of Horemheb’s four predecessors … some 32 years in all, thus implying a minimum of 26/27. Neither the actual reading nor the broad conclusion is to be challenged, though it should be emphasized that no other example of an inclusive date is known (my italics). It is evident that the existence of the Amarna kings was ignored officially in the Nineteenth Dynasty (or at least under Seti I and Ramses II), but there is no indication that it was common practice to assign their regnal years to Horemheb.’5
It is true that Akhenaten and the three Amarna kings who succeeded him were omitted from the king lists of the time, and Akhenaten himself has been referred to as ‘the rebel’ or ‘the fallen one of Akhetaten’, but a date found on a fragmentary papyrus of the Nineteenth Dynasty, now in the British Museum, mentions ‘Year 9 of the rebel’ and, according to Gardiner ‘the reference must surely be to the reign of Akhenaten’,6 indicating that the lengths of the Amarna kings’ reigns were not, in fact, added to those of Horemheb.
The basic cause of the confusion that has arisen over the reference to Horemheb’s Year 59 at Sakkara are two. Firstly, Egyptologists took it out of context and did not relate it to the rest of the information given in the Sakkara tomb inscriptions, which are not presented in strict chronological order; secondly, there is a missing word between Year 59 and the name of the king, which could radically affect the meaning that the scribe of the text intended to convey.
The inscriptions, which begin on the north wall of the tomb, relate to a piece of cultivated land, measuring thirteen arourae (about three hectares) and situated on the west bank of the Nile, somewhere to the south of Memphis. The land was given as a reward by Ahmosis (c. 1575–1550 BC), the first king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, to a shipmaster named Neshi. It passed down from generation to generation and became known eventually as ‘the village of Neshi’.7 Two centuries later, some time before Horemheb came to the throne, the heirs of Neshi consisted of six brothers and sisters who owned the land between them, with one of the sisters, named Urnero, appointed trustee over them. This trusteeship was subsequently disputed in the reign of Horemheb by another sister, Takharu. The tomb inscriptions, to place them in strict chronological order, recall:
1 An examination of witnesses (see also Appendix C), who gave evidence about events long before the reign of Horemheb, going back to the time of Akhenaten, who was not referred to by name but as ‘the fallen one of Akhetaten’, his capital city. At the end of these proceedings it was decided that the land which was the subject of dispute should be divided between the six heirs, with each one given his or her individual share.
2 Urnero was married to a man named Prehotep, by whom she had a son, Huy. Huy, who had been working in the land of Neshi since the reign of the king who preceded Horemheb, undertook cultivation of his mother’s holding after the land had been divided among the Neshi heirs. The name of the king who preceded Horemheb has been lost from the inscriptions apart from the initial letter, ‘A’, but it can only have been Aye. Prehotep subsequently married another woman by whom he had a second son, Tjaui, and later, after Horemheb had ascended to the throne, Prehotep took steps to register the land of his first wife in the name of Tjaui, the son by his second marriage. This illegal transaction eventually became the subject of further litigation some years later in the reign of Ramses II, the third king of the Nineteenth Dynasty, when Huy died. His son, Khayri, tried to take over cultivation of the land, but found himself challenged by Tjaui’s grandson, Khay.
3 It was the mother of Khayri who began legal proceedings in Year 14-plus – the number of months is missing – of Ramses II to establish his ownership of the land, arguing that he was the descendant of Neshi through his grandmother, Urnero. In the tomb account of the events that followed Khayri is referred to by name only once and is elsewhere called mos (the son and heir), to indicate his claim as the rightful inheritor.
4 In Year 18, Khay (the defendant in this action) went to court and presented the registration records showing that the land had been registered in his grandfather’s name. He claimed, in addition, that Huy, the plaintiff’s father, had merely been employed to work on it. The tomb account explains: ‘Khay complained in the great court in Year 18. The priest of the (litter), Amenemope, who was the officer of the great court, was caused to come together with him, bringing a false land register in his hand. [Accordingly], I (Khayri) ceased to be the child of Neshi.’8
5 The plaintiff mos and his mother then appealed to the vizier in Heliopolis against the court’s decision. The vizier ordered the land registers from Pi-Ramses, the residence of Nineteenth Dynasty kings in the Eastern Delta, and showed the mother of mos that they did not include her son’s name. ‘You are not in the documents,’ they were told. However, after further protests by the plaintiff that he was indeed mos, the legal son and heir, the vizier instructed the court at Memphis to hear local witnesses to see whether the plaintiff could support his claim.
In the subsequent testimony the word mos is again used, but in this case to establish that Huy, the father of the plaintiff, was the rightful heir of Neshi, the original owner of the land. The long tomb list of witnesses, for instance, begins with the testimony of the goatherd Mesman, who swore: ‘[As Amun endures and as the ruler endures], I shall speak truthfully to the Pharaoh … I shall not speak falsely, and if I speak falsely cut off [my nose and my ears]; [let me (be banished) to Kush]. As to the scribe Huy, child of Urnero, it is said that he is the child (mos) of Neshi … ’
After hearing these and other witnesses9 the court decided that Khayri (mos) was, in fact, the rightful heir as a result of his descent from Urnero, his grandmother, and his father, Huy. The tomb inscriptions record: ‘They gave me land, thirteen arourae, and land was given to the heirs before the notables of the town,’ said the descendant mos at the successful conclusion of his case.10 A copy of the court’s findings was placed in the Hall of Judgement, accompanied by a list of the judges who had made them.
The above ac
count is given in chronological order. This, however, was not the method followed by the scribe invited by the tomb owner, who became known by the name of Mos after the case, to relate this somewhat complex story in his tomb. It is important to remember here that we are not dealing with a high official, employing an official scribe to provide an autobiographical account of his life, but with a private citizen employing a freelance scribe – and, on the evidence, one with not very tidy thinking processes – to record events that were significant in the citizen’s own life.
The tomb inscriptions flit from one period to another. They begin by stating that the litigation over ownership of the land began in the reign of Ramses II. Then the scribe moved back to the time of Horemheb and the conflict between Urnero and Takharu that ended with division of the Neshi land between the six heirs. Having dealt with this aspect of the story, he moved forward again to the time of Ramses II, giving Year 14-plus as the date when Huy died and his son, Khayri, was not allowed to possess and work the land that had been worked by his father. From this point he largely followed events in their chronological order until he came to the Memphis court’s decision to return ownership of the disputed land to Khayri. The court’s decision is followed by a list of judges, then the phrase that has created all the confusion: ‘Before the court this day, year 59 [ .?. ] under the majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt Djeserkheprure-Setepenre, [son of Re], Horemheb-Meiamon.’11 Finally, the scribe ends his account by taking us right back to the examination made by the priest Aniy at the time in the reign of Horemheb when the dispute broke out between the plaintiffs grandmother, Urnero, and her sister, Takharu.
The above date, Year 59, comes at the end of the court’s ruling, before the beginning of the examination of witnesses at the time of Horemheb. It seems to be some kind of a flashback to the original dispute between Urnero and Takharu. However, some scholars have been confused into accepting Year 59 as an actual date in the reign of Horemheb because they took the view that it relates to the text which follows it. Yet, even if the scribe chose to give the Memphis evidence and the list of judges after the actual decision of the court, the opening phrase ‘Before the court this day …’ at the end of this muddled section suggests that the date applies to the court’s decision. Certainly one would expect a date referring to the successful conclusion of the case rather than events that were the subject of a different court hearing three generations earlier.
The question therefore remains: in what sense was the scribe linking two separate disputes – one in the reign of Horemheb, the other brought to a successful conclusion in the reign of Ramses II? The missing word that was placed originally between ‘Year 59’ and ‘Horemheb’ would certainly have changed the meaning of the phrase in question. Although this can only be conjecture, it seems reasonable to suggest that the scribe may have been indicating the time that had elapsed between the original dispute, involving Urnero and Takharu, and the end of the mos-Khay dispute over the same piece of land. In this case, the inscription, sandwiched between accounts of two separate court actions, that has caused all the confusion may have read: ‘Before the court this day, Year 59 [since] under the majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt Djeserkheprure-Setepenre [son of Re], Horemheb-Meiamon’ and then sketched in the distant origins of the dispute with a copy of the examination made by the priest Aniy at the time of Urnero and Takharu.
The mos inscriptions cannot be used, as we have seen, to prove that Horemheb had a long reign. Nor is there any justification, without any evidence, for saying that the total years of the four Amarna kings – Akhenaten, Semenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Aye – were added to the length of Horemheb’s reign. It is not only pure supposition, but a course of action for which we find no other example in the history of Ancient Egypt and a course that is contradicted by the British Museum papyrus that mentions ‘Year 9 of the rebel’, a clear reference to Akhenaten. We have no record of any major military conflict by Horemheb in Asia when we know for certain from other sources that the situation created by the emergent Hittite power there called for urgent action. Nor has Horemheb left any major monuments – as one would expect if he had a long reign – other than the Amarna constructions he usurped, dismantled and re-used.
In the same mos text that refers to Akhenaten we find, as we have seen, the initial ‘A’ of another Amarna king, who must certainly have been Aye. Is it likely that the same scribe who identified these kings would ignore the length of their reigns in the very same text? In any case, it was the names of the Amarna kings that were banned from mention, not the length of their reigns.
In the circumstances, as Year 13 is the last sure date that we have for Horemheb and it agrees with Manetho’s account, this should be regarded as being around the time that he died, already an old man who had been a general in the army as long ago as the start of Tutankhamun’s reign twenty-six years earlier.
Acceptance of this date, and of a coregency between Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten, also helps to throw some light on the obscure origins of Horemheb. A stela of Neby, the official of Tuthmosis IV, now in the Leiden Museum, is divided into three registers. The top register shows Neby, ‘Troop Commander of Zarw’ and his wife, and the central one depicts two offering scenes. The right-hand scene shows a figure identified as ‘his son Horemheb’ making libation offering to Neby, ‘Troop Commander and Mayor of Zarw’, and his wife.12
As Horemheb was a rare name at the time, Wolfgang Helck, the German philologist, suggested that the young figure shown on the stela was none other than the future king. The close relationship between Horemheb and the Ramesside kings who followed him and founded the Nineteenth Dynasty point to the likelihood of this identification’s being accurate. It was Horemheb who appointed both Pa-Ramses (later Ramses I, first ruler of the Nineteenth Dynasty) and his son Seti (who succeeded his father as Seti I) as ‘Troop Commander and Mayor of Zarw’. The connection between the god Seth and Horemheb, Ramses I and Seti I has also been proven by the remains of a sanctuary found at the Eastern Delta site of Tell el-Dab’a, dedicated to ‘Sutekh (Seth), great of might’ and bearing the names of King Horemheb.13 Seti, while still Mayor of Zarw, was also the priest of Seth.
Helck’s suggestion was rejected, however, mainly because it was thought that, if Horemheb had been born so early, there was no coregency and he had a long reign, he would have had to be more than a hundred years old when he died. There is a possibility that Neby died at some time during the reign of Amenhotep III. The stela would not have been made until after his death and as his son, Horemheb, is not given a title in the stela he must have been very young at the time. Now, if we accept Year 13 of his reign as the year in which Horemheb died and a coregency of eleven years between Amenhotep III and his son, Akhenaten, it means that Horemheb, even if born in the first year of Amenhotep III, would have been only seventy – a possible age – at the time of his death.
10
A CHRONOLOGY OF KINGS
THERE is little dispute about the reign of Amenhotep III’s father and predecessor, Tuthmosis IV. Here the archaeological evidence agrees with Manetho that his reign lasted eight years. We are therefore now in a position to present a chronology, working backwards, for the three-quarters of a century or so that preceded the Israelite Exodus:
When did these kings actually reign? A convenient starting point in trying to answer this question is the reign of Tuthmosis IV’s grandfather, Tuthmosis III, which is accepted as having lasted fifty-four years. However, two possible dates have been suggested for his accession. Those scholars who allotted a long reign to Horemheb and refused to accept the existence of a coregency between Akhenaten and his father favour 1504 BC while supporters of a short reign and a coregency prefer 1490 BC, which, because of the arguments put forward in the three preceding chapters, I, too, prefer.
Although the reign of his successor, Amenhotep II, has also been the subject of argument, the twenty-three years accepted by Gardiner seems on the bulk of the evidence available to be neare
st to the truth. Amenhotep was succeeded in turn by his son, Tuthmosis IV, whose length of reign, together with those of Amenhotep III, the four Amarna kings, Horemheb and Ramses I, are given in reverse order in the table above. How long his son, Seti I, sat on the throne has been the subject of considerable controversy, with estimates of the length of his reign ranging from as high as fifty-nine years to as low as eleven. We are on safer ground, however, with his successor, Ramses II, who is known to have ruled for sixty-seven years, although here again two dates have been put forward for his accession, 1304 BC and 1290 BC. I prefer 1304 BC, the date favoured by supporters of a short reign for Horemheb and an Amarna coregency. If we subtract 1304 BC from 1490 BC we are left with a total of 186 years to be allotted between eleven kings as follows:
Subtracting this total of 157 years from the 186 years to be allotted between these kings, we are left with twenty-nine years for the reign of Seti I.
The reason for the confusion surrounding the length of time he sat on the throne lies in the conflicting evidence available and, in some cases, the way it has been interpreted. Although the highest surviving date of Seti is Year 11, Manetho gave Seti a long reign (fifty-one years according to Africanus, fifty-five according to Eusebius and fifty-nine years according to Josephus). These dates were brought into question by a figure in the Karnak scene depicting Seti’s campaign against the Shasu in his Year 1. The figure, which bore the name Ramses, was identified as the future king, Ramses II, shown here sufficiently grown-up to take part in his father’s battles. Clearly, if this was the case and Seti had a long reign, Ramses II would have been well over a hundred years old when he died after his own sixty-seven years on the throne.
