Isis and Henut-Taneb may also have become royal wives. Their names were written in royal cartouches but they were never important enough to be named in their grandparents’ tomb. Nebetah, however, does not appear to have become a queen, and it seems that she may have been the family afterthought, too young to follow in her sisters’ footsteps.
Amenhotep III enjoyed a lengthy reign, celebrating three sed festivals, or jubilees, during his regnal years 30, 34 and 37. The heb-sed, a tradition which stretched back to the dawn of Egyptian history, was originally a public ceremony of rebirth intended to reaffirm the king’s powers after each successive thirty years on the throne. However, kings who had achieved their first three decades felt free to bend the rules in subsequent years. As life expectancy at birth throughout the New Kingdom was less than twenty years, thirty years on the throne was by anyone’s reckoning a remarkable achievement, and the celebration of an official jubilee gave the king and his people the excuse for a magnificent and lengthy party. Amenhotep, who was evidently something of an antiquarian, claimed to have discovered, hidden in the palace archives, an ancient order of service for the celebration of the heb-sed, and to have revised his own ceremony accordingly.
Although the heb-sed was traditionally celebrated at Memphis, Amenhotep chose to duplicate his festivities at a site now known as Malkata, literally in modern Arabic ‘the place where things are picked up’, on the west bank opposite Thebes, where he already had a royal residence. Here, in good time for his first extravaganza, he built a gaily painted mud-brick festival hall and a T-shaped ceremonial lake for use in the water procession. A vast array of tempting food was prepared, some of which was ‘donated’ by local officials, numerous jars of wine were made ready, and a host of dignitaries, both mortals and gods, was invited to witness the celebrations and enjoy the feast. Among the court officials present was Tiy’s steward Kheruef, who recorded the highlights on his tomb wall:
The glorious appearance of the King at the great double doors in his palace, ‘The House of Rejoicing’; ushering in the officials, the king’s friends, the chamberlain, the men of the gateway, the king’s acquaintances… Rewards were given out in the form of ‘Gold of Praise’ and golden ducks and fish, and they received ribbons of green linen, each person being made to stand in order of rank.29
After the jubilee the festival palace was demolished in order to expand the sacred lake in time for the second celebration. The excavation of this lake, still visible in modern times and now known as the Birket Habu, was one of the largest civil-engineering projects ever undertaken in dynastic Egypt. It measured two kilometres by one kilometre, and tens of thousands of labourers must have been involved in the excavation of many tons of earth. For a long time it was thought that the Birket Habu was the pleasure lake ordered by Amenhotep for his beloved queen and recorded on yet another scarab:
His majesty commanded the making of a lake for the great Queen Tiy in her home lands of Djarukha, its length being 3700 cubits and its breadth being 600 [or 700] cubits. His majesty made a festival of the opening of the lake in the third month of the inundation season, day six, when his majesty sailed in the royal barge ‘The Sun Disc Dazzles’.30
Unfortunately the measurements do not tally. Queen Tiy’s pleasure lake took only sixteen days to construct and, given that a dynastic cubit equalled 52.5 cm, must have been far narrower than the Birket Habu.
A new mud-brick festival palace was built beside the Malkata lake where it was serviced by the extensive royal village. Here, the contrast between the formal and well-planned architecture of Amenhotep’s stone-built temple precincts and the rather rambling and disjointed layout of his own home is striking. The king’s palace fronted on to a large open courtyard and included private quarters, a bedroom, bathroom and robing room, plus the necessary harem accommodation and an audience chamber, and was served by an untidy cluster of kitchens, offices and storerooms. Although the walls and ceilings of the palace are largely destroyed, painted plaster fragments show that the walls of the king’s bedroom were decorated with an elaborate and entertaining frieze of naked Bes figures above a pattern of false door panels and alternating ankh (life) and sa (protection) signs, while the ceiling was painted with stylized vultures with outstretched wings. Next door was a smaller residence intended for the queen (now known as the South Palace). The crown prince had use of a large porticoed palace (the Middle Palace), while a fourth palace built without harem accommodation (the North Palace) was probably the home of Queen Sitamen. Also included within the complex were several great houses for high officials, smaller cottages for lesser courtiers, servants’ accommodation, storehouses, workshops, a temple of Amen, sundry small chapels, a workmen’s village and formal pleasure gardens. The complex was linked to the Nile by a canal, and to the king’s mortuary temple by a causeway.31
We have a mere handful of scenes showing Amenhotep towards the end of his lengthy reign.32 His earlier portraits had depicted a prime physical specimen displaying all the manly vigour expected of a New Kingdom monarch. His later images are less stereotyped. The king appears languid to the point of lethargy, his clothing is unconventional, and there has been a general consensus of opinion that we are looking at a fat and tired old man suffering from some unspecified but debilitating sickness. On one battered limestone stela, recovered from the Amarna house of Panehesy and now housed in the British Museum (Plate 4), we find the king propped limply in a chair ‘with drooping head and with his corpulent body collapsed to a certain flabby lethargy, with his hand hanging listlessly to his knee’.33 Beside him sits Queen Tiy who, although her image has been badly damaged, is always interpreted as bursting with rude health. In other representations we see the bloated king dressed in a long pleated linen garment which some have considered more suited to a woman than a man. Despite his idiosyncratic style, James Baikie speaks for many when he describes what he takes to be the king’s obvious decline into obesity and mental decay:
The great king was still well short of his fiftieth year; but he had doubtless ‘warmed both hands before the fire of life’, with the consequences which usually follow on such indulgence of the relishing and enjoying faculties; and now he had to put conclusion to the verse – ‘It sinks and I am ready to depart’.34
Obesity may be associated with various diseases including arteriosclerosis, inflammation of the gall bladder and gall-stone formation, all of which were to be found in ancient Egypt. However, the portraits of Amenhotep do not show a clinically obese old man. Indeed, they do not even show a particularly old man. Amenhotep appears singularly free of wrinkles and he does not display excessive folds of fat as shown on the Deir el-Bahri portrait of the Queen of Punt. It therefore seems likely that the king’s extra pounds are nothing more sinister than the inevitable results of a lifetime of overindulgence which were not seen as a matter for shame. Indeed, rolls of fat and pendulous breasts were the well-respected signs of male old age in dynastic Egypt.
Amenhotep had certainly had every opportunity to overeat and drink to excess, and his only physical exercise seems to have occurred during his regular visits to the harem. Although he was still actively seeking new brides, the days of hunting wild lions and shooting fierce bulls were long gone, if indeed they had ever occurred; quite often the daring hunts commemorated in royal inscriptions involved the slaughter of ‘wild’ animals which had already been captured and penned. Similarly Amenhotep had avoided, through accident or design, all military action. He had not led the fight against the vile Ibhat in person, delegating the command of the army to the viceroy Merimose, and he had never felt the need to embark on a military campaign or to make a tour of his foreign possessions. While it may be going too far to suggest on such limited evidence that Amenhotep was basically a lazy man who enjoyed his creature comforts, there is certainly no evidence to suggest that he was ever tempted to exchange the luxury of the palace for the rigours of an army tent.
The king’s new limpid pose and his unconventional garb probably owe little to
his actual physical condition. Amenhotep’s last portraits, which may have been produced some time after his death, were composed during a period when Egyptian artistic conventions were undergoing a profound change. It is therefore not surprising that we find Amenhotep being depicted in the exaggerated manner soon to be favoured by his son. His ‘dress’, which is again very similar to the garments worn by his son, may well have been a contemporary garment; long gowns were by no means confined to women.35 Some observers, however, have chosen to read these portraits as indications of something far more sinister. They have seen a king in moral and physical decline, prematurely aged by his sexual decadence. The marriage with his own daughter is the ultimate indication of aberrant sexual taste, while the public donning of a woman’s robe is an indication that Amenhotep had abandoned heterosexuality in favour of public cross-dressing and ‘Greek love’.36 As the king had now totally given himself to the pleasures of his decaying flesh, Queen Tiy, still very much compos mentis, must have taken effective control of Egypt. Again Baikie has summed up the thoughts of many:
There can be little doubt that during the later part of his reign, at all events, while it was Amenhotep who wore the Double Crown, it was Tiy who ruled; and probably the easy-going, good-natured king was quite content with the arrangement. Tiy’s supremacy over her husband’s mind leaves little question as to where we are to look for the chief influence in the upbringing of her young son. His vivid, capable mother must have been almost everything to the young prince, and increasingly so as the years went on, and his father gradually sank into the lethargy of premature decay.37
While we have absolutely no proof that the king had become senile, and indeed madness through sexual excess is more common in fiction than real life, there is some evidence to suggest that he was suffering very badly from toothache. Painful teeth were an unfortunate fact of Egyptian old age, as the desert sand and particles of grinding stone which invariably became incorporated in the food wore away the surface of the teeth until the sensitive pulp was exposed and became infected. Not only was this persistent toothache very painful, it undermined the general health of the sufferer. The skill of the Egyptian doctors was famed throughout the Near East, but even they could suggest no cure for the ailing king. Even a dedication of 600 statues to Sekhmet brought no relief. In despair, Amenhotep wrote to his brother-in-law Tushratta, asking if he could help. Tushratta responded by sending the cult statue of the goddess Ishtar of Nineveh, another female warrior with the power to heal:
May Ishtar, Mistress of Heaven, protect my brother and myself for a hundred thousand years, and may our mistress grant us both great joy. And let us act as friends.38
As Egypt’s king suffered, the political situation in the Near East was shifting. Egypt remained the dominant world power but the Hittites, a non-Semitic people based on the Central Anatolian plateau, were pursuing expansionist policies which posed a threat to Mitanni’s north Syrian possessions. At the same time in central Syria, Amurru or ‘the West’, a region populated by disparate bands of semi-nomadic peoples and bandits, was now united under the Canaanite-speaking Prince Abdi-Ashirta and making a determined effort to assert itself as an independent state. Both Tushratta and Amenhotep took steps to restrict the growth of Amurru but neither was entirely successful, and Abdi-Ashirta and his son Aziru – both nominally Egyptian vassals – were able to continue their expansionist policies unchecked. Amenhotep, perhaps because he had grown used to international inactivity, continued his friendship with Tushratta but took no effective action to intervene. He seems not to have realized, or not to have cared, that Mitanni was under increasing pressure, and he showed very little concern over the fate of his lesser vassals. Indeed the peoples of Tunip – a small independent state eventually overrun by Amurru – were later to complain that they had begged for help from Egypt for twenty years, in vain.39
The goddess Ishtar travelled to Egypt, but it was a wasted journey. Soon after her arrival Amenhotep died at Thebes during the seventh month of his regnal year 38. Tuthmosis, the crown prince, had predeceased his father, and so it was his younger son, now Amenhotep IV, who performed the funerary rites and buried Amenhotep III in a suitably regal tomb in the Western Valley, close to the Valley of the Kings (WV 22). Amenhotep was not, however, destined to lie in peace. His tomb – which almost certainly housed the richest royal burial Egypt had ever seen – was robbed during the 21st Dynasty, and his battered mummy, rescued by the necropolis officials, rewrapped and labelled, was eventually stored with other displaced royal mummies in the cache held in the tomb of Amenhotep II. Here, in 1898, a mummy bearing the label of Amenhotep III was discovered by Victor Loret and transferred to Cairo Museum. The unfortunate king was by this time in a sorry condition. He had suffered a severe mauling at the hands of the tomb robbers: his head, right leg and left foot had been snapped off and his back had been broken. G. Elliot Smith, who unwrapped the body in 1909, found that the mummy had been packed with resin, which had set hard under its covering of skin. ‘It was a great disappointment to find only these broken and blackened bones to represent the body of
Fig. 1.2 The royal names of Amenhotep IV
Amenothes “the Magnificent” ’.40 More recent scientific analysis has cast grave doubts on our acceptance of this body as the remains of Amenhotep III. It seems that the necropolis officials who ‘rescued’ the king may well have muddled up their charges and lost the magnificent Amenhotep III.41
2
A Beautiful Woman Has Come
She pure of hands, Great King’s Wife whom he loves, Lady of the Two Lands Nefertiti, may she live. Beloved of the great living Sun Disc who is in jubilee…1
Amenhotep IV emerged from an obscure corner of the royal court to become pharaoh of Egypt under the throne-name Neferkheperure Waenre (literally ‘The transformations of Re are perfect, the Unique one of Re’). Little is known of him before his assumption and, while his sisters and his brother are known to us from their statues and inscribed possessions, the young Amenhotep is to all intents and purposes invisible. Although we do have a few formal scenes showing him alongside his father, it is probable that these images were not carved during the old king’s lifetime. Our only certain mention of the young prince comes from the Malkata Palace which has yielded a wine-jar seal labelled ‘the estate of the King’s True Son Amenhotep’. We may deduce from this seal that, by the final decade of his father’s reign, Amenhotep was old enough to have his own establishment, and therefore that he was probably born before Year 29 when the court moved from Memphis to Thebes.
It is highly unlikely that the young Amenhotep had been sent abroad to be raised and educated outside Egypt. This idea, put forward by those who would like to interpret Amenhotep’s religious beliefs as Near Eastern rather than Egyptian in origin, shows a lack of understanding of the political situation throughout the later part of the 18th Dynasty. At this time Egypt was universally regarded as the centre of the civilized world, and the Egyptian royal court was acknowledged as the epitome of sophisticated luxury. All foreigners wished to emulate the Egyptians, and the Egyptians themselves were firmly convinced of their own cultural superiority. No Egyptian was likely to see a foreign education as in any way beneficial to an Egyptian prince, and the Egyptian royal sons did not enjoy the ancient equivalent of the Grand Tour. Instead, Egypt was in the habit of demanding that the sons of vassals and allies be sent to Egypt for their education. These young men, educated alongside the Egyptian princes in the school attached to the royal harem, served as hostages who would ensure the good behaviour of their fathers. They became so steeped in Egyptian customs and beliefs that, when they returned to rule their own countries, their loyalties in theory lay not with their own people but with the Egyptian king who had become their friend.
If Amenhotep was not raised away from Egypt, could there have been something about the young prince – perhaps something about his appearance or even his mental condition – which caused his family to shield him from public gaze?2 With the benefi
t of hindsight this seems possible, although it begs the question why, if the young Amenhotep was so badly disfigured, should he ever have been allowed to become king? Amenhotep III was free to choose his successor and, although custom and divine precedent made his eldest surviving son the natural choice, the Egyptians had no objection to a reigning king adopting a less obvious heir before his death. The royal harem, with its hundreds of wives, could surely have yielded a replacement prince, and the fact that Tiy was not herself of royal blood would have made it relatively easy for Amenhotep III to reject her son in favour of one more suited to be king.
In fact we should not be too surprised by Amenhotep’s hidden childhood as almost all New Kingdom royal children led sheltered lives away from the bustle of the court. Prominent royal offspring were very much the exception, and sons were particularly well hidden as, while daughters were almost always included in the traditional ‘family groups’ which adorned their fathers’ monuments, sons rarely were. Indeed, a casual examination of 18th Dynasty royal scenes could give the impression that, at a time when the royal harem contained many hundreds of women, Egyptian kings were incapable of fathering male children. Such scenes can be very misleading. They were never intended to be accurate portraits detailing every family member, but were formal representations of the monarch supported by his close female dependants – those included in the nuclear royal family – who were present in the scene as symbolic appendages enhancing the status of the king.
Nefertiti Page 5
