by Ahmed Osman
We also know that the siege of Avaris conducted by Ahmosis lasted for many months. The reason was that he could not assault it on foot, but had to approach by water. In the case of Zarw, the Waters of Shi-hor covered the approaches to the north and west, the Waters of Pa-Twfy protected the south, and a canal, crossed by a guarded bridge, connected the two waters, closing off the west side completely. To the east lay the Sinai desert. That is why Ahmosis’ siege lasted so long. In the case of Qantir and Tell el-Dab′a, however, both locations were easily accessible by land from almost any direction, as well as lacking the heavy fortifications to resist an attack.
Furthermore, the Tell el-Dab′a excavations have revealed no settlement in the area from the end of the Hyksos rule to the time of Horemheb. If Pi-Ramses is to be regarded as the Ramses of the Old Testament, the city rebuilt by the Israelites – who arrived in Egypt in the reign of Amenhotep III and settled in the very Pi-Ramses area – the lack of any trace of their existence at Tell el-Dab’a is yet another indication that this cannot have been the site of Pi-Ramses. In any case, as I believe the Israelites had already left Egypt proper for Sinai during the second year of Ramses I, the city of Ramses must have started before that date.
(iv) A Theban Site for Tiye’s City
One scholar who has championed a site for Zarw-kha, Tiye’s city, distant from the Eastern Delta is Georg Steindorff, the German Egyptologist, who suggested that the pleasure lake referred to in the scarab was actually the lake known today as Birket Hapu, which was dug to the south-east of Amenhotep III’s Malkata royal compound at Western Thebes, where it served as a palace harbour connected to the Nile. Steindorff was led to this view because the Malkata complex was known as ‘The House of Neb-Maat-Re Aten Gleams’, which repeats the name of the vessel in the pleasure lake scarab. However, scholars have not been happy with this theory for a variety of reasons:
1 None of the many inscriptions found that bear the name Malkata mentions Zarw-kha or relates Malkata to Queen Tiye;
2 The dimensions of Birket Hapu are 2750 by 1080 yards, about four times the size of the pleasure lake, and there is no evidence that Birket Hapu was enlarged after its original construction;
3 While the Malkata remains prove that the king was there from his early years – Year 8 has been found – the majority of the buildings in the Malkata compound, which would have been accompanied by the construction of the lake, do not seem to have been built before the beginning of Amenhotep’s third decade, contradicting the scarab date of Year 11 ;
4 As the scarab lake covers an area of about 720, 000 square yards, it would not have been possible to complete it in fifteen days unless it involved digging a short canal to fill an existing depression with the waters of the Nile: a much bigger, artificial lake like Birket Hapu must have taken far longer to create.
(v) A Middle-Egypt Site for Tiye’s City
More recently, the fact that a similar name to Zarw-kha – Darwha – has been found on two papyri of the Twentieth Dynasty led Yoyotte to suggest1 the possibility of identifying Tiye’s city with the location mentioned in these Ramesside texts – the vicinity of the city of Akhmim in Middle Egypt. As some of the titles held by Yuya and Tuya, the parents of Queen Tiye, indicate that they held positions in Akhmim, it has been thought by many scholars that this must have been their city of origin. On the other hand, while it is possible that Tuya could have come from Akhmim, Yuya has been suspected of being of non-Egyptian origin (and I have argued that he was actually Joseph, the Israelite Patriarch).
But even if, as Yoyotte suggests, Tiye was born in Akhmim, this does not make it her city in the sense that she owned it, which is the implication of the scarab text. Furthermore, Yoyotte places Tiye’s city as being in the vicinity of Akhmim, in which case, on the basis of Yoyotte’s own argument, ‘her city’ cannot have even been the city of her birth, but another city which she acquired later, and the scarab reference cannot relate to Akhmim. Nor is Akhmim called Zarw-kha in any text. Finally, as the location suggested by Yoyotte comes from a Twentieth Dynasty text, this could have been a new place that did not exist at the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty two centuries earlier.
Yoyotte has put forward this alternative siting for Tiye’s city because he objects to the identification of the border city of Zarw on mainly philological grounds, his reason being that the name Zarw-kha is spelt in the scarab with different hieroglyphic signs from those we find in other texts:
If we take away the two final signs, as they are not to be regarded as letters but determinatives indicating a city, we are left with five letters. And if we take off the final letter ‘kha’, as it is not to be regarded as part of the name but merely as indicating that the name belongs to a city, we are left with four signs on the scarab. Henri Naville, the Swiss Egyptologist, has been able to show that the first sign in Zarw, is the equivalent of the Hebrew letter sadhê, the Arabic çade, the same as the other hieroglyphic first letter appearing in the other texts .2 (The fact that there is no matching letter either in Greek or Western languages explains why different readings – Thel, Sile and Djarw as well as Zarw – occur.) In a private discussion Yoyotte agreed that Naville’s interpretation of the first sign on the scarab was correct. He also has no quarrel with the final hieroglyph, which can be interpreted as either ‘w’ or ‘u’. It is the symbols in between which persuaded him that we are dealing with two different cities, not one.
On the scarab we have – that is, the Hebrew and Arabic ′ayin, plus ‘r’ – while in other texts we simply have a seated lion . However, the distinction is more apparent than real. Naville was also able to show that it was the practice sometimes to use the seated lion, for which the Ancient Egyptian word was ‘′r’ as an alternative method of expressing the two consonants, ′ayin, plus ‘r’: ‘The reading of the lion is ′r; we have a considerable number of examples of it.’ He went on to cite various words sometimes spelt one way, sometimes the other: ‘Therefore in the name , Zarw, we find according to the usual transcription of Egyptian into Hebrew, צ ע, = ç′ and ר, = r.’3
This would read Ça′rw. In addition, Naville noted that ‘ayin’ in Egyptian is not always used as a consonant and cannot consequently be noted as an essential part of the name.4 There is therefore no philological justification for suggesting that because the name Zarw is written one way on the scarab and with simply the seated lion in other texts, we are dealing with two different cities.
APPENDIX E
The Body In Tomb No. 55
THE rather confused evidence about the identity of the body in Tomb No. 55 suggests that the last days of the joint reigns of Akhenaten and Semenkhkare coincided with a time of internal turbulence in the affairs of Egypt.
Contents of the Tomb
Inside the tomb the remains of a large wooden gilded shrine were found, with inscriptions indicating that it was dedicated by Akhenaten to the burial of his mother, Queen Tiye. In addition, the names of Tiye and her husband, Amenhotep III, occurred on various small objects. Another part of the chamber yielded a coffin, with inscriptions including the titles and cartouches of Akhenaten. Inside the coffin was a mummy and, nearby, there were four canopic jars. Four magic bricks, to protect the deceased in the underworld, were also found in situ, inscribed with the name of Akhenaten.
According to Weigall,1 the entrance of the tomb showed the remains of at least two closures. There was part of an original wall of rough limestone blocks, cemented on the outside, and above the ruins of this there was a second, more loosely constructed, wall. The second wall had been partly pulled down and had not been built again. On fragments of the cement, impressions of the necropolis seal, a jackal crouching over nine captives, were found, and fragments of small clay sealings, inscribed with the name ‘Neb-kheprw-re’ (Tutankhamun), were also discovered, scattered in the rubbish. All the antiquities recovered from this tomb are now in the Cairo Museum except a few objects, including one of the four canopic jars, which were given to Davis, the American sponsor of the excava
tion, and are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Mummy
As a result of Queen Tiye’s name being found on the shrine as well as on other funerary objects, Davis concluded that the tomb and the mummy it contained were hers. The coffin had originally lain upon a bier, but, when the wood rotted away because of the damp, the coffin collapsed and the mummy partly projected from under the lid. The flesh of the mummy had consequently also rotted away, leaving the skeleton as the only bodily remains.
When he had opened the tomb, Davis called two medical men (a Dr Pollock of Luxor and ‘a prominent American obstetrician’) to examine the skeleton. They agreed with him that it belonged to a woman, thus reinforcing his belief that the remains were those of Queen Tiye. Later, Davis was disappointed, and even personally upset, when the remains were examined by Grafton Elliot Smith, at the time Professor of Anatomy in Cairo Medical School, who concluded that the skeleton was that of a man and, influenced by the other opinions at the time regarding the ownership of the mummy, announced that he did not think ‘there can be any serious doubt that these are really the remains of Khouniatonou (Akhenaten)’.2
Smith also concluded that the remains belonged to a man who was about twenty-five or twenty-six years of age at the time of his death. Akhenaten is known to have ruled for at least seventeen years, had been married either on coming to the throne or shortly before, with his first daughter Merytaten being born either late in his first year or during his second year. Consequently, Egyptologists believed that he could not have been less than thirty (thirty-three according to our conclusions) at the time of his assumed death. Nevertheless, even this did not seem to cause Smith to change his mind: ‘If, with such clear archaeological evidence to indicate that these are the remains of Khouniatonou, the historian can produce irrefutable facts showing that the heretic king must have been twenty-seven, or even thirty, years of age, I would be prepared to admit that the weight of the anatomical evidence in opposition to the admission of that fact is too slight to be considered absolutely prohibitive.’3 This view was held for a long time and supported by some Egyptologists, especially Weigall and Aldred.
In his report Smith also indicated that the skeletal remains from Tomb No. 55 had some features similar to those of two of Akhenaten’s ancestors. He found that ‘the configuration of the upper part of the face, including the forehead, was identical with that of Yuya, Akhenaten’s maternal grandfather’, while ‘a curious and unusual bony ridge passing from the nasal spine to the alveolar point in his skull occurs also as a peculiarity of the skull of Amenhotep III (Akhenaten’s father), also in the molar teeth.’ In addition he noted: ‘The general structure of the face, and especially the jaw, is exactly that portrayed in the statues of Akhenaten. These physical features prove pretty conclusively that the mummy is that of a male member of the royal family who had in his veins the blood of both Yuya and Amenhotep III.’4
More than a decade passed. Then Smith, seemingly still convinced that the remains found in Tomb No. 55 were those of Akhenaten, tried to overcome Egyptologists’ objections regarding the contradiction between the anatomical evidence relating to the mummy’s age with their demand for an age of at least thirty years for Akhenaten when he fell from power in his Year 17. He wrote: ‘In considering this difficult problem I naturally turned to consider those pathological conditions which might cause delay in the union of the epiphyses (the growing ends of shafts of long bones). Of these, the most likely seemed to be the syndrome described by Fröhlich in 1900, now known as dystrophia adiposogenitalis. In patients presenting this condition cases have been recorded in which the bones at thirty-six years of age revealed the condition which in the normal individual they show at twenty-two or twenty-three, so this suggested the possibility of bringing the anatomical evidence into harmony with the historical data. In support of this solution there are the very peculiar anatomical features of Akhenaten when alive, which have been made familiar to us by a large series of contemporary portraits. Forty years ago archaeologists were puzzled by the pictures of this Pharaoh, and it was suggested that he was a woman masquerading as a man. In the light of our present knowledge, however, they seem to be quite distinctive of Fröhlich’s Syndrome and afford valuable support to the suggestion that this was the real cause for the delay in the fusion of the epiphyses. In addition to this, the skull – both the brain case and the face – reveals certain important peculiarities. There is a slight degree of hydrocephalus (water on the brain) such as is often associated with Fröhlich’s Syndrome and also an over-growth of the mandible, such as may result from interference with pituitary.’5
One wonders what anatomists three thousand years from now might identify as the abnormality suffered by some of the models who posed for Picasso’s paintings? Smith may have been misled by the fact that the Amarna revolution produced two distinct kinds of art: while one was naturalistic, representing an image as near to its original as possible, as for instance the limestone dyad of Akhenaten and Nefertiti in the Louvre; the second school was romantic, giving an exaggerated form of its models, the best example of this being the four Osirian colossi of Akhenaten found at Karnak. To take this representation, which is almost a caricature, as representing the form of the original is not fair, particularly when Smith had the skeleton, although damaged, at his laboratory to examine at leisure. No doubt his complete pre-conviction that these bones belong to Akhenaten helped to make him err in his judgement.
Shortly afterwards, another examination of the remains was carried out by D. E. Derry, Professor of Anatomy in the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University. Derry, whose examination included restoring the skull, rejected Smith’s conclusions: ‘A complete reexamination of the question of the age of the bones was then instituted. In the first place it was found that the conformation of the skull does not support the statement that the person to whom it belonged suffered from hydrocephalus. The skull is undoubtedly of an unusual shape, but the type was not uncommon in the Old Empire, particularly in members of the royal families … It appears, as will be shown later, in the head of King Tutankhamun. It belongs to a type known to anthropologists as platycephalic, in which the skull is flattened from above downwards and correspondingly widened. It is indeed the very reverse of the shape produced by hydrocephalus.’6 Derry’s final conclusion was that the remains were those of a man no more than twenty-three, or at the most, twenty-four years of age when he died.
Derry also made the point: ‘During the unwrapping of the mummy of Tutankhamun the writer noticed that the head of the king resembled that of the so-called Akhenaten skeleton. When the head was measured, in so far as that was possible under the circumstances, it was found that the diameters of the two skulls approximated closely. This is all the more remarkable when we remember that the shape of the so-called Akhenaten skull is unusual and that in width it exceeded any skull ever measured by the writer in Egypt. Such a likeness to his supposed father-in-law in the man who had married Akhenaten’s daughter could only mean some blood relationship and therefore it was concluded that Tutankhamun must have been a son of Akhenaten, probably by another wife.’7
The age of the skeleton at the time of death, plus the facts that the tomb of Tutankhamun had already been found and that Reginald Engelbach, one of Derry’s early students, had been trying to argue that the coffin found in Tomb No. 55 belonged to Semenkhkare, persuaded Derry to accept this viewpoint and he concluded: ‘We are compelled to accept the remarkable likeness of the two skulls as indicating a common origin and that in all probability Semenkhkare and Tutankhamun were brothers. It is hardly necessary to point out that the similarity in the heads of the two men, who married sisters, renders the theory of hydrocephalus even more untenable, and particularly so unless we accept the suggestion that they themselves were brothers or at least closely related.’8
Nevertheless, this conclusion was not accepted by Aldred: ‘We may here limit comment upon Derry’s report to two observations. Firstly, his definition of the
hydrocephalus as causing only a ballooning of the skull requires some qualification. Secondly, it is not wholly unexpected that two contemporary male members of the royal house such as Tutankhamun and the occupant of the coffin, who would almost certainly have had several progenitors in common, could have had similar skull measurements. But if the profiles of the two heads are superimposed upon each other and orientated in the same plane, it will be seen how sharply they also differ. The skull is a distortion of the mummy-head with its prognathous profile, over-grown mandible and prominent supraorbital (above the eye socket) ridges.
‘However, let us approach the problem from another direction. In the early years of his reign, probably in Year 2, Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) built the Aten temple at Karnak from which have come the remarkable colossi figures now in the Cairo Museum, (J.E. Nos. 49528–9 and 55938). The last of these, which has been aptly described by Pendlebury as “a wonderful pathological study”, shows the young king apparently entirely naked without any signs of genitalia …
‘In the past, one of the difficulties in the way of a more precise identification of Akhenaten’s pathology both from the bones believed to be his [by Aldred, of course] and from the extravagant representations at Karnak and el-Amarna, has been the impossibility of his being an endocrinopath [a sufferer from disorder of the endocrine glands, which secrete into the blood hormones that have a particular effect on other organs or parts of the body] and also the father of at least six daughters. This is, however, a contradiction that will have to be faced unflinchingly, and, if it should ever be proved conclusively that he suffered from a chronic endocrine disorder, some other candidate will have to be sought as the father of Nefertiti’s children. The full significance of Akhenaten’s ostentatious parade of his domestic life will also have to be properly assessed. All such speculation, however, had better be left until a more thorough examination of the bones has been fully reported.’9
