In late October 1886, a group of local farmers dug for treasure at the Middle Egyptian site of Tell el-Amarna. We can imagine them, working early in the morning and in the stillness of the evening to avoid the sweltering heat of the midday sun, swathed in robes, scarves across their faces to protect against the swirling dust and sand that covers this once-proud capital. History has not preserved the names of these fellahin, but they made a truly spectacular discovery. While working in the ruins of a large mud-brick complex which would later be known as the Hall of Records, they unearthed hundreds of clay tablets covered in the angular cuneiform script – the diplomatic lingua Franca (or indeed, lingua Acadia) of the Late Bronze Age world. Unaware of the true value of what they had found, the fellahin ferried the tablets across the river to the small village of Dar em-Moez, to a local antiquities dealer by the name of Elias.
He too was puzzled by the tablets, so he packed them in coarse linen bags and loaded them onto his donkey. Then he took them to the nearby town of Sohag, where he showed them to the superintendent of a French-owned flower mill, a certain Monsieur Frenay, who worked as an agent for the Louvre Museum and who was always on the lookout for new historical treasures for the museum’s growing collection. After examining the haul, M. Frenay agreed to purchase some of the tablets and they ended their journey in the Louvre galleries in Paris.
When examined by French scholars, the tablets were wrongfully dismissed as fakes and returned to M. Frenay, who donated them to the French School in Cairo. The remaining tablets travelled to Luxor and fell into the hands of another antiquities dealer, Mohammad Mohassib, who successfully sold most of the collection to British and German agents.¹ By then, the true value of these tablets – later known simply as The Amarna Letters – had become known to the academic community. Five years later, in 1891–92, the famed British Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie found more fragments of these letters in the ruins of the Hall of Records.² By that time, the first transcriptions of the tablets had also begun to appear.
Over a century of dedicated scholarship has shown the Amarna Letters to be a unique collection of diplomatic correspondence written during the reigns of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten, Smenkhare and Tutankhamun. The majority of the surviving letters are written by vassals of the Egyptian state – local rulers of cities in modern-day Israel and Palestine such as Acre, Byblos and Jerusalem – and contain a plethora of requests for military or financial aid, complaints about rival rulers and lists of tribute sent to the Egyptian king. A smaller portion of the corpus, known as the ‘Brother Correspondence’, consist of more personal notes written to one another by the great kings of the Late Bronze Age, the rulers of Mitanni, Babylon, Assyria and Alashiya.³ This assemblage of letters represents the physical manifestation of a complex poker game of international relations, which had been carefully cultivated by one of the most notable pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty: Amenhotep III. Very much the Roi-Soleil of Egypt, Amenhotep did not establish himself on the international scene in the Eastern Mediterranean through unending warfare and conquest – like his predecessor Thutmosis III. Instead, he maintained power through a system of inter-marriages and diplomatic gifts. While foreign rulers referred to him formally as ‘my brother’, it is clear that there was a hierarchy in these relationships – and that Amenhotep stood at its head.
Nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in his correspondence with the King of Babylon, Kadashman-Enlil. In an annoyed letter to Amenhotep, Kadashman-Enlil writes:
‘my brother, when I wrote to you about marrying your daughter, in accordance with your practice of not giving a daughter, you wrote to me saying, “From time immemorial no daughter of the king of Egypt is given to anyone.” Why not?’⁴
This was a particularly sore point for a proud King of Babylon, who had in fact given several of his own daughters to Amenhotep as wives. Nevertheless, the Egyptian pharaoh was steadfast in his refusal. An Egyptian princess marrying a foreign king could in extreme cases lead to a foreign ruler having a claim-by-birth to the throne of Egypt, and that could not be tolerated. Instead, King Kadashman-Enlil was reduced to (somewhat pathetically) asking Amenhotep to send any Egyptian noble woman who Kadashman-Enlil could then claim to his own courtiers was indeed a princess of Egypt. Other letters written to Amenhotep by foreign rulers detail the great wealth which was exchanged between them and the Great King, including silver, gold and furniture of exotic woods and ivory.⁵
In many ways, Amenhotep’s Egypt was a golden period during the New Kingdom. After the traumatic experience of the Hyksos occupation during the Second Intermediate Period, Egypt emerged resplendent on the international stage. The early 18th Dynasty rulers, namely Ahmose I, Amenhotep I and Thutmosis I, busied themselves with re-establishing control of areas once dominated by Egypt. But they also sought to secure control of a ‘buffer zone’ of vassal states across Canaan to prevent any foreign armies from setting foot on Egyptian soil again.
This expansionist policy naturally brought the Egyptians into conflict with other states, both in the Near East and Nubia. Ahmose I focused primarily on Nubia after his expulsion of the Hyksos. He sailed south with his army and re-established Egyptian control of the massive river fortress at Buhen, installing a new commander by the name of Turi.⁶ The Nubian kingdom of Kerma which had so threatened Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period was finally crushed by his grandson Thutmosis I, who recorded his victory in harrowing detail in the Tombos Stela:
‘After he overthrew the chief of the Nubians, the despoiled Nubian belongs to his grip. After he had gathered the border markers of both sides, no escape existed among the evil-of-character; those who had come to support him not one thereof remained. As the Nubian Iwntyw have fallen to terror and are laid aside throughout their lands, their stench, it floods their wadis, their blood is like a rainstorm. The carrion-eating birds over it are numerous, those birds were picking and carrying the flesh to another (desert) place.’⁷
Conquests in the Near East followed during the reign of Thutmosis III, who successfully attacked and ravaged the Mitannian Empire, taking his army as far north as the Euphrates River in modern-day Iraq.⁸ His son, Amenhotep II, consolidated his father’s conquests, establishing a network of vassals whose fickle loyalties would both protect and frustrate the Egyptian state for several centuries.⁹
So this was the time into which Amenhotep III rose to the throne. Egypt’s power had been reasserted, potential foreign challengers had been soundly defeated and extensive trade routes could now be established, bringing exotic goods to the Nile Valley from as far as Afghanistan and Sub-Saharan Africa. This wealth was channelled into an impressive building programme within Egypt, which would not be surpassed until the reigns of Seti I and Ramesses II, the latter of whom in particular did in fact usurp a great number of monuments and statues originally built by Amenhotep III. Among Amenhotep’s most notable construction achievements was a vast pylon at the Karnak Temple and his own immense mortuary temple built on the West Bank of the Nile across from the modern city of Luxor, of which only a pair of giant statues – the so-called Memnon Colossi – remain.
Amenhotep also commissioned a great number of official scarabs, which carried texts detailing important events during his reign. Among these are the Marriage Scarabs, which testament his marriage to his Great Royal Wife, Queen Tiye, in Year 11 of his reign,¹⁰ and also the Lion Hunt Scarabs, which document his successful hunt of over 100 lions in the desert. A further five scarabs, known together as the Gilukhepa Scarabs, record the arrival in Egypt of one of Amenhotep’s foreign wives, Gilukhepa, the daughter of King Shuttarna of Mitanni, with a retinue of 317 female servants.¹¹
Taken together, the written evidence from the reign of Amenhotep III, along with a wealth of archaeological evidence in the form of extraordinarily well-made objects, suggests a period of peace and prosperity in which Egypt’s power was unchallenged and – by extension – the land itself was untroubled by internal strife.
However, this peaceful state of affairs came to an abrupt end. In Theban Tomb 92, belonging to Kheruef, a Steward of Amenhotep III’s Great Royal Wife Queen Tiye,¹² are depictions that date towards the end of the thirty-eight-year reign of the king. In these depictions, the once powerful ruler is shown as frail and elderly – even ill. Several caches of black granite statues of the goddess Sekhmet, the goddess of both disease and healing, have been found in Luxor dating to the reign of Amenhotep III. Their presence has been explained as an offering to the goddess ordered by an increasingly infirm king.¹³ Amenhotep eventually succumbed to his illness, dying in his middle age and leaving behind his wife, Queen Tiya, and his son, who took the throne under the name Amenhotep IV. History, however, would remember him under another name: Akhenaten.
* * *
It was early summer 1353 BC. Heat-haze flickered over the assembled courtiers who gazed on their pharaoh. He stood resplendent in a chariot covered with inlays of electrum. As he drove, armed mercenary troops dressed in the garish colours of their tribal dress flanked him on either side. Led by the king, the dazzling procession moved at a stately pace towards an unremarkable spot in the desert at modern-day Tell el-Amarna. According to a boundary stela cut in white limestone and set up at the limits of the new settlement, the king sacrificed a great number of cattle and fowl, as well as bread, beer, wine and incense to his god the Aten, the sun-disk. He then solemnly swore to continue his construction of a mighty city dedicated to the Aten, a temple – the ‘House of the Aten’ – and palaces and other mighty buildings.¹⁴ Advocating the worship of the Aten above Egypt’s traditional pantheon, Akhenaten wanted his new capital at Tell el-Amarna to be a physical manifestation of this religious change in direction. It is of course not known what the assembled courtiers thought of their new king’s decision, but it is possible that some of them shuddered at the prospect of leaving their sprawling estates in Thebes and Memphis and following their messianic ruler into his new desert utopia.
While still a relatively new and untried king, Akhenaten had already caused some stir in Egyptian society. Early in his reign he had set up a shrine for the sun-disk, the Aten, within the large Karnak Temple in Thebes, traditionally dedicated to the Theban triad of Amun, his consort Mut and their son, Khonsu. He had also ordered the construction of monumental sandstone statues of his own image.¹⁵ The latter decision was expected; his father, Amenhotep III, had famously constructed several such giant statues of himself all over Egypt. But Akhenaten’s statues broke with tradition. In their depiction of the king, they merge male and female attributes, giving the ruler an otherworldly appearance that has even caused modern observers to claim that he was suffering from various illnesses and physical deformities.¹⁶
This is not substantiated, and the statues should rather be viewed as one of many attempts made by Akhenaten to redefine royal monumental and religious tradition within the – admittedly somewhat hidebound – New Kingdom society.
The new king increasingly devoted himself to the worship of a single god, the Aten, spurning the traditional role of pharaoh as High Priest of Egypt’s entire pantheon of gods and goddesses. He may have done this out of a genuine religious fervour, although there were also clear practical benefits. During the early and mid-18th Dynasty, the god Amun had appeared as the pre-eminent deity of kingship and victory. Worshipped at the Karnak Temple in modern Luxor, his importance grew exponentially as the Theban rulers of the Second Intermediate Period rose up against the Hyksos occupiers and commenced their conquests in the Near East and Nubia. Many of the spoils from these campaigns – both material wealth and prisoners-ofwar – were donated to the Temple of Amun, along with vast donations of agricultural land. By the reign of Akhenaten, the priesthood of Amun at Karnak controlled enormous resources, potentially enough to challenge the supremacy of pharaoh. Akhenaten may have felt it proper to put the priesthood in their place by blatantly favouring another god over theirs.
Another aspect of the worship of Aten which must have appealed to Akhenaten was the complete omnipresence of the royal family. As Jacobus van Dijk has noted, during the Amarna Period, ‘personal piety was now identical with total loyalty towards Akhenaten personally’.¹⁷ This is particularly notable in the elite houses excavated at Akhenaten’s capital of Tell el-Amarna, where the traditional household shrines dedicated to various local gods, or gods related to the home and protection of the family, were now replaced by shrines dedicated to Akhenaten himself and his family, although traditional gods, such as Bes, were still worshipped, even at Amarna.¹⁸
In founding his vast new capital at Tell el-Amarna, Akhenaten not only made himself a focal point for all divine worship, he also disbanded the priesthoods of other Egyptian gods, including Amun at Karnak. The long boulevards at Amarna were constructed for the purposes of public spectacle. Each morning when the king rode in his chariots from the palace to the Great Aten Temple to conduct offerings to the god under the open sky, the route would be lined with citizens and dignitaries. It was a daily affirmation of the semi-divinity of the ruler, as well as a demonstration of his military might, taking the form of regiments of Egyptian and foreign auxiliary troops running alongside him.
While it was occupied for less than half a century, Tell el-Amarna – the city Akhenaten built to honour his god and distance himself from the old gods of Thebes – has survived the ravages of time well. Due to meticulous scientific excavation, it has become an invaluable archaeological resource, to such an extent that much of our knowledge of Egyptian settlements is ultimately based on Tell el-Amarna. While the city’s archaeological remains have informed modern researchers about ritual and everyday life in the capital, the Amarna Letters have simultaneously provided a tantalizing glimpse of Akhenaten’s foreign policy.
The Amarna Letters are naturally a biased corpus – they contain primarily letters written to the Egyptian pharaoh and not his responses. Descriptions of the initial finding of the archive also suggest that many tablets were destroyed. This selective survival of material makes it more dangerous to rely exclusively on this assemblage when discussing Akhenaten’s attitude to the surrounding world. It does, however, seem clear that Akhenaten did not have his father’s exquisite flair for diplomacy. In a series of notorious letters sent to Akhenaten from King Tushrata of Mitanni, the Mitannian king complains bitterly that Akhenaten did not – as promised – send him statues of solid gold, but rather of gold-plated wood,¹⁹ hardly the most surreptitious of diplomatic moves.
Over sixty letters in the archive are from Rib Addi, the Mayor of Byblos, who repeatedly pleads for Akhenaten to send him help in the form of an army to fight off his enemy, Aziru. Akhenaten did not despatch help and Rib Addi was eventually murdered by Aziru. Akhenaten responded by ordering Aziru to Egypt, where he detained him, but then mysteriously released him back to his people, who promptly deserted the Egyptians and joined the ascendant Hittite Empire.²⁰
Akhenaten’s relations with his vassals in Canaan, including Rib Addi, were overseen by a group of native Egyptian diplomats called ‘commissioners’ (rabisu) in the scholarly literature. The Egyptian titles held by these individuals are unknown, although many are thought to have held military offices, such as ‘troop commander’ and ‘stable master’.²¹ At an unspecified point in Akhenaten’s reign, one of his vassals, Satatna, the Mayor of Akka (modern Acre in Israel), wrote the king a terse letter complaining that an Egyptian commissioner by the name of Sjuta ‘turned against’ him over a complex matter of a deserter whom Sjuta had refused to hand over to Satatna for punishment.²² The resolution to this conflict is not known, but the commissioner Sjuta appears again in another letter, this one from Abdi-Heba, the Mayor of Jerusalem. In this letter, Abdi-Heba assures the Egyptian ruler of his loyalty and, in an extravagant demonstration, entrusts eighty prisoners-of-war and twenty-one (no doubt beautiful) women to Sjuta to bring back to pharaoh as tribute.²³ The name ‘Sjuta’ appears to be an attempted literal rendering of the Egyptian name Sjuty, which in itself is a variant form of the name Seti.²⁴
Seti was not, at this time in Egyptian history, a common name, although it underlined the familial relations this commissioner had in the northeastern Nile Delta and the cult Seth at Avaris. Given the quasi-military role of the commissioners, it is reasonable to assume that this Seti is identical to the troop commander Seti who appears on a fragment of a votive stela currently held in the Oriental Institute Museum in Chicago (OI 11456).²⁵ In this monument, Seti is mentioned alongside his son, the stable master Paramessu and his brother, the Fan-Bearer of the Retinue, Khaemwaset. At a later date, this same Seti appears on a statue deposited by his son within the temple enclosure at Karnak. On this statue, Seti is listed as both a ‘judge’ and ‘troop commander’.²⁶
This troop commander, judge and commissioner could not have known it as he was making his way back from Jerusalem with a caravan of prisoners-ofwar and concubines – and he probably did not even know during his lifetime – but he was to be both the father of a king and the spiritual ancestor to one of the most notable royal dynasties Egypt had ever seen: the Ramessides.
* * *
It is generally accepted that Akhenaten died in Year 17 of his reign, even though the last inscription by this king and his enigmatic Great Royal Wife, Nefertiti, has been dated to Year 16.²⁷ What followed the reign of Akhenaten was a certain amount of confusion. Part of this confusion was caused by later Egyptian rulers, including Ramesses I and Seti I, who sought to destroy the memory of the – to them – heretic and oppressive Amarna rulers by defacing and destroying their monuments, and omitting Akhenaten and his immediate successors from official king lists. It seems clear, however, that Akhenaten was followed by Smenkhare, a perplexing monarch who ruled for less than a year, and Neferneferuaten, a female pharaoh who ruled for only two years. The precise identity of these two rulers is a hotly contested subject, with some Egyptologists suggesting that one or both of them were in fact to Akhenaten’s Great Royal Wife, Nefertiti, continuing to rule from Tell el-Amarna after her husband’s death.²⁸
After Smenkhare and Neferneferuaten, a far more illustrious character took the throne of Egypt at the tender age of 10. Tutankhaten, the son of Akhenaten and one of the lesser royal wives, had been raised in Amarna, but upon his ascension (most likely aided, or perhaps impelled, by powerful members of the royal court such as the later Pharaohs Ay and Horemheb), he changed his name to Tutankhamun, married his sister, Ankhsunamun, and moved the royal capital away from Tell el-Amarna and back to Thebes. The young king’s name change was significant; it represented a definitive break with the royal veneration of the Aten and in some ways a return to normality. Amun, Lord of Thebes, was again established as pre-eminent in the Egyptian pantheon and in the royal ideology. To monumentalize this theological and political shift, Tutankhamun ordered the creation of a Restoration Decree.²⁹ Written in the king’s first regnal year on a large round-topped stela, the decree was originally set up in front of the Third Pylon at the Karnak Temple, well within the god Amun’s domain:
‘Now when His Majesty arose as king, the temples of the gods and goddesses, beginning from Elephantine [down] to the marshes of the Delta, [had] fallen into neglect, their shrines had fallen into desolation and become tracts overgrown with [///] plants, their sanctuaries were as if they had never been, their halls were a trodden path. The land was in confusion, the gods forsook this land’.³⁰
The meaning of the decree is clear. Tutankhamun had risen as a saviour of Egypt, restoring the temples and the cults to their rightful places and, in doing so, securing the favour of the gods. Tutankhamun’s attempts at restoration were by no means limited to such rhetorical blandishments. Among the most ambitious building projects of his reign was the completion of a large colonnade at the Luxor Temple, original begun by Amenhotep III.³¹ Tutankhamun clearly desired to associate himself more closely with his distant ancestors than with his own father.
The actual significance of Tutankhamun’s reign is debateable. Certainly it represented a break with the religious experimentation of Akhenaten’s reign and a return to normality, but it did not in any way represent a political break with the ruling dynasty or the elite that had surrounded Akhenaten at Amarna. This break would not truly come until the reign of General Horemheb, who almost certainly had no direct bonds of kinship to the Thutmosoid line. There is no direct evidence of what societal role the ancestors of the future Seti I played during the reign of Tutankhamun. From the previously discussed fragmented stela OI 11456³² dedicated to Seti I’s grandfather, the commissioner and troop commander also named Seti, however, it is clear that his brother, Khaemwaset, was not only a member of the elite himself, as a Fan-Bearer of the Retinue, but also through the family connections of his wife, Taemwadjsy. This lady, about whom history preserves next to no information, was the sister of Amenhotep, called Huy, Tutankhamun’s Viceroy of Kush. The Viceroy of Kush served as the direct representative of royal power in Nubia and therefore constituted the highest authority in that part of the world. It is difficult to imagine that the sister of such a powerful man would be married into a family which held low status, and on this basis alone it is clear that the two brothers, who would become the great-uncle and grandfather of Seti I, came from an elite family within Egyptian society.
During Tutankhamun’s reign, two dignitaries rose to particular prominence: Ay, a former Fan-Bearer on the right side of the king during the reign of Akhenaten and possibly the brother of Akhenaten’s mother, Queen Tiya;³³ and Horemheb, a military officer who – very much like the commissioner Seti – had served as an envoy to foreign lands and risen through the ranks to become commander-in-chief of the Egyptian army. It is likely that, due to Tutankhamun’s tender years, it was Ay and Horemheb who effectively controlled the country. Towards the end of his reign, Tutankhamun designated Horemheb as the Deputy of the Lord of the Two Lands,³⁴ a title which generally meant that its holder would succeed to the throne in case of the king’s untimely death without heirs. And Tutankhamun did indeed die young, at the age of 18 or 19, leaving no heirs to the throne. However, it was Ay who is shown leading the burial of the boy king in paintings within Tutankhamun’s fabled tomb, and it was Ay who took the throne after his death as the new pharaoh. It appears as if Horemheb was somehow outmanoeuvred. This in itself is curious: how could an aged vizier have check-mated the commander-in-chief of the entire Egyptian army. Two possibilities present themselves; one is that Ankhsunamun, the widow of Tutankhamun, refused to marry Horemheb, who had been born a commoner. Another is that Horemheb was not in the country when Tutankhamun died, but away on campaign. This would have given Ay ample time to legitimize his own claim and sidestep Horemheb entirely.
Ay quickly married Tutankhamun’s widow, Ankhsunamun, to legitimize his own claim to the throne, and during his relatively brief reign, he sought to continue the revitalization of the old cults begun by Tutankhamun. He also nominated his adopted son, Nakhtmin, to take the throne after him. However, with Ay’s death, Horemheb refused to be circumvented again. Nakhtmin never inherited his father’s throne, and instead Horemheb took power in what might have amounted to a military coup and the last of the blood relations to the 18th Dynasty rulers fell from power.
* * *
The Opet was an extravagant annual festival celebrating the Theban triad of Amun, Mut and Khonsu at Thebes. During the festival, the gods were carried from the inner shrines in the Karnak Temple on gilded barges to the Luxor Temple. Here, the ruling king was often re-crowned and his bond with Amun as the Lord of Victories and the pre-eminent god of kingship was reaffirmed. The first Opet Festival after the death of King Ay must have been even more extravagant and festive: at its climax the new king, Horemheb, would be crowned. As the general prepared to take this ultimate power for himself, he must have marvelled at how far he had come. Very little is known about Horemheb’s parents, but it is likely that he was not a member of one of the great noble families of Egypt at all. Born in Herakleaopolis Magna near the entrance to the Fayum, Horemheb was a part of a burgeoning trend of military elites, which had begun to emerge during the early to mid-18th Dynasty.
In earlier periods the elite had unequivocally been scribes, and the scribal ideals of learning and wisdom were held in high regard. But due to the expansionist nature of the 18th Dynasty, certain soldiers within the standing army began to rise to prominence. On the battlefield it was easier for an individual to truly shine, regardless of what family he came from or what bureaucratic position his father and grandfather had held.
Accounts by soldiers such as Ahmose, son of Abana,³⁵ and Ahmose-Pen-Nekhbet,³⁶ who both fought in campaigns in the Near East and Nubia during the first half of the 18th Dynasty, show the amount of wealth a skilful (and presumably lucky) soldier could assemble: land, captives to work it, precious materials such as gold and silver, as well as valuable weapons taken from defeated enemies. This mounting wealth helped to cement these military men and their families as a force to rival the traditional scribal elite. By the reign of Ramesses II, the relationship between these two factions had deteriorated and scribal exercises from this period openly mock soldiers, listing the hardships of their life and – perhaps revealing some panic on the part of the authors – desperately urging pupils to abandon any thought of giving up their studies and joining the army.³⁷ It was more than anything this new climate of some limited social mobility in a traditionally rigid and inflexible hierarchy, which allowed a relatively lowly ranked soldier like Horemheb to rise to the highest office in the land.
The Egypt Horemheb inherited was a far cry from the prosperous and peaceful land it had been under Amenhotep III. Akhenaten’s obsessive centralization of the administration and self-imposed isolation at Tell el-Amarna had taken its toll on Egypt’s internal administration, as had the instability caused by several successive kings ruling only for brief periods of time. Thankfully for posterity, we have a fairly clear idea of Horemheb’s priorities once his coronation was over. An extensive document, the Great Edict of Horemheb,³⁸ was set up in the Karnak Temple, carved into a large stone slab. The inscription purports to be a direct dictate from Horemheb himself to his scribes, wherein the king lays out a series of policies aimed at bringing some stability to the country. Chief among Horemheb’s concerns was the apparent spread of corruption that had been caused by the centralization of the Amarna Period. The king’s solution was simple and brutal: the Great Edict instructed that any officer of the army, or bureaucrat of the state, who dared to seize property to which he had no right was to have his nose amputated and afterwards be banished to the border fortress of Tjaru, presumably to serve as a common soldier. This would no doubt have amounted to an effective death sentence if passed against well-fed elderly administrators with sticky fingers.
This certainly seems a draconian punishment, but Horemheb may have felt that it was necessary in order to re-establish control of the country. As an old soldier himself, he undoubtedly also sought to strengthen the army by securing its provisions and properties. According to the Great Edict, Horemheb travelled throughout Egypt, energetically rebuilding temples which had fallen into disrepair, and undertaking new construction projects. Some of these projects, such as the building of several new pylons in the temple of Amun at Karnak, used the so-called talatat blocks, small limestone cubes originally used in the construction of shrines and temples dedicated to the Aten during the reign of Akhenaten.
Horemheb began the process of undoing and destroying the works of Akhenaten early in his reign. Tell el-Amarna was abandoned for good, temples built by Akhenaten were torn down and their building materials reused. The names of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Ay were deliberately chiselled from monuments, and statues of the heretic pharaoh were destroyed. In the most obvious attempt to suppress even the memory of the Amarna Period, Horemheb officially claimed that his reign had begun at the death of Amenhotep III, thus essentially removing all the following rulers (including Akhenaten and Tutankhamun) from the official succession. The later Ramesside king lists continued this tradition and excluded the rulers of the Amarna Period. To further underline his return to the traditional worship of Amun of Karnak, Horemheb also had statues carved showing himself standing next to the god. Such statues – and many others during his reign – ended the artistic experimentation characteristic of the Amarna Period and returned to a more orthodox artistic canon.
Alongside these administrative and religious changes, Horemheb began making plans for his burial. He was not a young ruler and the task was therefore quite urgent. Before becoming king, Horemheb had organized the construction of a large limestone tomb at the Saqqara necropolis near modern-day Cairo.³⁹ The tomb is shaped like a typical New Kingdom temple. A visitor would first have come to two large mud-brick pylons which flanked the entrance to the tomb’s superstructure. After passing through the pylons, one would have arrived at a series of courtyards and smaller storerooms. The courtyards were flanked with limestone relief showing triumphant scenes of Horemheb’s military career; Horemheb being awarded with the Gold of Valour by Tutankhamun, soldiers in military encampment and rows of defeated enemies being brought back to Egypt in chains as captives.
A 10-metre-deep shaft in the inner courtyard gave access to the tomb’s substructure consisting of several passages leading to one finished and one unfinished tomb chamber. The Saqqara tomb of Horemheb is one of the largest New Kingdom tombs in that vast necropolis, but despite its grandeur, it was the tomb of an ‘ordinary’ member of the elite, not of a king. Once crowned as pharaoh, Horemheb abandoned it in favour of a far grander burial in the Valley of the Kings.⁴⁰
In order for this tomb to be constructed, Horemheb needed the workers from Deir el-Medina. This village, located on the West Bank of the Nile at Thebes, had been founded in the early 18th Dynasty to house the sculptors, artists and craftsmen who worked on carving and decorating the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. During his reign, Akhenaten had moved the community from their homes at Deir el-Medina to another small village close to Tell el-Amarna⁴¹ so that they could work instead on constructing royal and elite tombs near his new capital. Horemheb moved the community back to Deir el-Medina and reorganized the village. Work soon began on a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings. This tomb, known as KV57 in Egyptological literature, was similar in overall design to earlier royal tombs. It consists of a long passageway and stairway leading to an ante-chamber and a pillared hall where the king’s red quartzite sarcophagus was placed. The decoration in KV57 was, however, more complex than earlier tombs. Depictions of gods and scenes from funerary literature had customarily been painted on the plastered surfaces of the tomb chamber and passageways. By contrast, Horemheb ordered that the scenes be carved from the limestone rock in delicate raised relief before being painted. This new technique would be appropriated by some of Horemheb’s successor, such as Seti I and Ramesses II, and used in the decoration of their own tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
As a king, one of Horemheb’s most important tasks was securing a succession, preferably in the form of a son. This duty had become even more imperative by the confused succession following the death of Akhenaten. If Horemheb wished to truly remove the spectre of the Amarna Period, he would have to establish his own dynasty. In order to do so he needed a queen. Queens in ancient Egypt did not hold direct political power, nor did a direct translation for the modern term ‘queen’ exist.⁴² These women were instead titled as hemet nesut weret, ‘Great Royal Wife’, and their primary duty was to provide as many heirs as possible to guarantee the succession. Horemheb was nearing middle age when he took power, and he had already been married once.
His first wife, Amenia, is almost exclusively known from her portrait in the form of a double statue owned by the British Museum,⁴³ and the marriage appears to have been childless. Amenia did not live to see her husband become king, but most likely died during the reign of King Ay and was buried in the one finished tomb chamber of Horemheb’s tomb at Saqqara.⁴⁴ When the tomb was excavated by the Anglo-Dutch mission in the 1970s, a second set of female remains were found interred in the unfinished tomb chamber. Investigation suggested that these belonged to Horemheb’s second wife, whom he married after becoming king. Her name was Mutnedjmet, and her marriage and later life appears a tragic tale. She was in her late twenties when she married the king, who was nearly twice her age. Her family ties are unknown, although she may have been a sister of the former queen, Nefertiti, and in this way helped Horemheb to legitimize his reign as pharaoh.
She retreated from public life only a few years after her marriage and died much earlier than expected in the 13th Year of Horeheb’s reign. The discovery of her skeletal remains from the tomb at Saqqara provides clues to what ended her life prematurely. With her body was found a much smaller set of remains belonging either to an unborn foetus or a very young infant. It is likely that she either died giving birth to this child, or as a result of a serious miscarriage. Her skeleton in fact shows evidence of repeated miscarriages and difficult births. As no sons or daughters of Horemheb are known from any source material, it can be assumed that these children were either stillborn or died as infants. These repeated tragedies sapped the queen’s strength and finally killed her, leaving Horemheb a childless widower.⁴⁵
Her death must have been a major blow to Horemheb. Growing old now without an heir, any plans he may have had for a dynasty by blood were abandoned. Instead, Horemheb decided to provide the required stability by naming his successor before his death. To choose this successor, Horemheb looked to his closest ally, his vizier Paramessu.⁴⁶ This Paramessu was the same man whose father had been the commissioner and troop commander Seti during the reign of Akhenaten, and whose uncle had been the fan-bearer Khaemwaset. On the fractured limestone stela in the Oriental Institute Museum in Chicago discussed above, Paramessu is given only the military title ‘stable master’. By the later reign of Horemheb, he had evidently risen well beyond these humble beginnings: on the 400 Year Stela,⁴⁷ which was set up during the reign of Ramesses II to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the construction of the temple of Seth at Avaris, Paramessu is listed as Horemheb’s vizier, one of two first ministers at his court.
On the 400 Year Stela, he is also named ‘His Majesty’s Deputy in Upper and Lower Egypt’ and ‘Hereditary Prince in the Whole Land’. These titles are crucial as they mirror those which Horemheb himself had been given before he took power as pharaoh. They effectively singled out Paramessu as Horemheb’s heir apparent. The attraction of Paramessu as a successor to Horemheb is obvious. Paramessu, like Horemheb, was a member of the military elite, having held military titles and being a descendant of a military family. During his long career he had held a number of significant military posts in Horemheb’s administration before finally becoming vizier; he had been ‘master of horse’, a fortress commander, ‘Charioteer of His Majesty’ and ‘General of the Lord of the Two Lands’. Like Horemheb, his family did not hail from the traditional Theban centre of power, but rather from the Eastern Nile Delta, probably near the settlement of Avaris. However, unlike Horemheb, Paramessu was both married and had at least one child, Seti, who was named after his grandfather.
This young man had already distinguished himself, despite his youth, and would undoubtedly have been well-known to the ageing Horemheb. He had, like his father, held a number of military titles such as ‘fortress commander’ and ‘master of horse’, alongside several religious titles, most notably High Priest of Seth.⁴⁸ Eventually, he was promoted by Horemheb to the same rank as his father, that of vizier. Paramessu and his son Seti in this way held the two highest offices in the land; one representing Horemheb as vizier in Memphis and the other in Thebes. By choosing Paramessu as his successor, Horemheb would not only guarantee a competent leader for the country, but also the foundations of a dynasty. The birth of Seti’s first-born son, Ramesses, was yet another incentive for Horemheb to raise this family as his successors.
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The precise length of Horemheb’s reign remains a subject of scholarly debate, although the discovery of a vast assemblage of inscribed wine dockets in his tomb do not contain any regnal years beyond Year 14.⁴⁹ How Horemheb died is similarly unknown, and while human remains from several individuals were found in his sarcophagus upon its discovery in 1908, none of these have been successfully proven to belong to the king. Horemheb’s reign had gone some way towards re-establishing the old ways, religiously and politically, after the relative chaos of the Amarna Period. Temples were once again being built to honour the entire pantheon of gods, the settlement of Tell el-Amarna lay abandoned and a significant restructuring of Egypt’s military forces had given the new ruler the tools to reassert Egypt’s dominance abroad.
After a long period of political and social upheavals, the new king Paramessu was no doubt eager to clearly define his reign as a new beginning. His first move to demonstrate this political break came in the form of his throne name. Once crowned, a king of Egypt would generally take five throne names. These names often contained clues towards the types of rulers they were determined to emulate and what policies they intended to enact. The five names of Paramessu can therefore provide us with vital clues to how he himself defined the terms of his kingship:
| 1. Horus name | Flourishing in Kingship |
| 2. Nebty name | Ascending as King like Atum |
| 3. Golden Horus name | Restoring Maat Throughout the Two Lands |
| 4. Prenomen | Established by the Strength of Re |
| 5. Nomen | Re has birthed him |
The first two names allude to the divine right of Paramessu to rule as king, something he would undoubtedly have been keen to underline, considering his lack of connection by blood to previous dynasties. His third name not only invokes Maat – the symbol of justice and the correct order of the world – but also shows that the king intended to restore order after the chaotic aftermath of the Amarna Period. This name also resembles one of the throne names of Ahmose, the first king of the 18th Dynasty and shows Paramessu’s desire to be considered the founder of a similarly powerful dynasty. While the prenomen or royal name chosen by Paramessu was Menpehtyre, he is today more commonly known by his nomen, or personal name, which in Egyptian is written as Ra-me-su, and anglicized as Ramesses I.
Ramesses I was not a young man when he took the throne and his reign was so short that only few textual records have survived to show how he began the task of establishing his own legacy. From a stela set up on the Sinai Peninsula in the first year of his reign⁵⁰ we know that he – most likely for political reasons – excluded references to Horemheb and took full responsibility for bringing order back to Egypt after the Amarna Period:
‘Good god, son of Amun, born of Mut, Lady of Heaven, to be ruler of all that the sun’s disc encircles; he who came forth from the body, citories being (already) decreed for him; who sets in order the Two Lands once again, and who has increased the festivals of the gods.’⁵¹
While this stela is largely rhetorical and contains limited information about actual policies, the reference to renewed religious festivals was no doubt included to further underline Ramesses as a definitive break with the general neglect of traditional rituals during the Amarna Period.
During the second year of his short reign, we are informed by a dedicatory stela set up in the Nubian fortress of Buhen⁵² that Ramesses renewed the worship of the local god, Min-Amun, ordered a temple built in his honour and equipped it both with food offerings and with priests, slaves and no doubt land on which these slaves could work for the benefit of the temple. Another possible dedication stela from Karnak⁵³ suggests that Ramesses may also have donated land and wealth to Amun of Thebes. However, these sources do not contain the same level of policy detail as the Great Edict of Horemheb. Rather, the best documentation for this period of Egyptian history is in the form of a dedicatory stela set up at Abydos during the reign of Seti I, wherein he describes his own career during his father’s reign.⁵⁴
He claims to have witnessed the chaos of the Amarna Period, when there was ‘strife and trouble abroad in the whole land’ and where no one cared for the monuments of the gods or the tombs of their ancestors. Horemheb’s reign is completely excluded from the description, which moves directly to the ascension of Ramesses I: ‘So the Lord-of-All appointed my father as Ruler, to restore them to their places.’⁵⁵ According to this inscription, Seti was placed ‘like a star’ at the side of his father during his reign. It describes how the young prince regent was despatched by Ramesses I to the lands of Fenkhu to destroy the ‘dissidents of the desert’. The precise location of Fenkhu is not known, although the term generally refers to all the Levantine people encountered by the ancient Egyptians. It is likely that this campaign was the antecedent to the military excursions undertaken as soon as Seti himself took the throne, against Bedouins on the Sinai Peninsula and city-states in Canaan and Lebanon.
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But Seti’s role during his father’s reign was not merely administrative. More fundamentally, he was tasked with securing the foundations of the family dynasty. He had already married, and he may already have had a young son. Seti’s wife, the future queen Tuya, is poorly represented in the contemporary sources, although this is not in itself unusual. As in many ancient societies, the lives and precise roles of women are usually poorly documented.⁵⁶ We know from a fragmentary inscribed stone from Medinet Habu, which dates to the reign of Tuya’s son Ramesses II, that her parents were named Raia and Ruia. Raia was a Lieutenant of the Chariotry, and we may assume that he was a compatriot of both Horemheb and Ramesses I. It is tempting to assume that Tuya’s marriage to Seti was one of political expediency and that Raia, as a lower-ranked military man from a less important family, used Tuya to secure his family’s connection to the rising stars of Ramesses I and Seti. Marriages for love were far less common in ancient Egyptian society than they are in the modern Western World, and most marriages – at least within elite families – were organized to bring either political or economic benefits to both parties. Relationships based on love were known to the Egyptians, and dramaturgical love poetry was in vogue during the time of Seti and his immediate successors. But the source material is simply too poor to speculate whether Seti saw his new bride as a ‘rising morning star’ who captured his heart with her movements in the romantic manner described by a contemporary poem.⁵⁷
After the marriage, Tuya gave birth to a daughter, Tia, during the reign of Horemheb, before her father-in-law was crowned as king. This young princess would later marry a royal scribe who – confusingly – had the same name as her: Tia.⁵⁸ He would later serve as a tutor to her younger brother. With the birth of her second child, Ramesses, Tuya’s status as Great Royal Wife and future Mother of the King was cemented. While her public profile was withdrawn during the reign of her husband, she became a crucial public figure during the reign of her son, and may even have served him as an advisor and confidante.
Bearing in mind his growing list of descendants, the aging king Ramesses may have rested more easily, certain that his son had the support and the capability to continue his brief legacy and return order to Egypt. During the month of August in 1290 BC,⁵⁹ a message went out from the royal palace in Memphis: ‘The Falcon is Flown to Heaven.’ Ramesses was dead and the young Prince Seti was now ready to ascend the Horus Throne of the Living.
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The heat in the Valley of the Kings even in early October would have been oppressive. The Valley, a natural bowl surrounded by tall limestone cliffs, can reach temperatures of well over 40 degrees centigrade. It was a trial for the procession winding its way through the gorges leading into the Valley itself. Heading the procession was Seti, the future pharaoh, already wearing the regalia of office; the blue khepresh crown, or ‘war crown’, favoured by New Kingdom pharaohs, a white linen kilt, the skin of a leopard draped around his shoulders and gilded sandals. With him came dignitaries and family members.⁶⁰ After the sweating courtiers came rows of solemn priests, their bald heads shining under a merciless sun. They burnt incense, chanted and shook copper sistrums. Mingling with the noise was the lamentations and wails of the female mourners who followed the funeral train, tearing at their clothes, beating and scratching their chest and smearing their hair and faces with ash. The centre of the procession was taken up by two large wooden sleighs, pulled by teams of oxen. On the first was the wooden anthropoid coffin containing the mummy of Ramesses I, on the second the king’s canopic chest. Inside this chest were the four canopic jars containing the stomach, lungs, liver and intestines of the king, carefully preserved with natron.
After his death, Ramesses had been taken to the Per Nefer, the Good House, where the embalmers began work on his body,⁶¹ with the mummification itself conducted in a temporary tent-like structure. After removing the brain by whisking it with a metal hook and allowing it to run out of the nose, the internal organs were removed to prevent them spoiling and separately preserved. The body was then covered with natron – a type of salt from Wadi Natrun in the eastern desert – and left for thirty days; the salt served to leech all the moisture from the body. After this, the chest and stomach cavities were filled with straw and wads of linen to preserve the natural contours of the body, before it was wrapped in linen bandages interspaced with protective amulets. In all, the process of mummification took seventy days and was intended to preserve the body against the ravages of time, thus guaranteeing the deceased ruler a safe and eternal afterlife with Osiris in the Underworld.
When the procession reached the newly finished tomb which would be the final resting place of Ramesses I,⁶² the wooden coffin of the king was carried into the burial chamber, where it was placed upright so the deceased king could once again gaze upon his court. Seti approached his father’s coffin and held a ceremonial adze to his lips. This ceremony, the Opening of the Mouth, awoke the deceased pharaoh and restored to him his powers of speech as well as his ability to receive offerings of food and drink. The ceremony also served a political purpose. As the deceased king was identified with Osiris, the Ruler of the Underworld, the person who opened his mouth took on the role of Horus, the champion of his father and the God of Kingship. By conducting this ceremony, Seti affirmed his right to rule as the personification of Horus, divine ruler of the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt. When the ceremony was complete, the wooden coffin was carried to a large red quartzite sarcophagus and Ramesses was finally allowed to rest.
As Seti backed out of the tomb and saw it closed with a seal bearing his father’s cartouche, he may have experienced a pang of regret. He had undoubtedly taken part in the burial of Horemheb, standing together with his father, and by comparison to Horemheb’s lavish tomb, the tomb of his Ramesses was poor. His short reign meant that the workmen at Deir el-Medina had only had time to carve a short descending passageway and a burial chamber with three smaller antechambers. Unlike the delicate basreliefs which decorated the tomb of Horemheb, all the decorations in Ramesses’ tomb were simply painted directly on the plaster. It may have been partly this paucity which would later inspire Seti to order the construction of one of the most beautifully decorated chapels from New Kingdom Egypt in honour of his father at the Middle Egyptian site of Abydos.
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Despite the care taken by the Egyptian priests and workmen, the body of Ramesses I was not allowed to remain unmolested in his tomb. In 1817, the Italian collector and adventurer Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823) entered the tomb but found it empty. Its riches and the mummy of the king had vanished.
Unbeknownst to Belzoni, Egyptian priests had moved the mummy of Ramesses at the end of the first millenium BC, when tomb robbery and looting was widespread in the Theban Necropolis. They had reburied the king in another location, believing him safe. However, in the 1860s the Abd el-Rassul family had found the body of Ramesses I and had sold him to a private collector in the United States. Passing from collector to collector, the mummy eventually ended up in the Niagara Falls Museum in Canada. In the 1980s, Egyptologists hypothesized that the mummy was indeed Ramesses I, and a battery of scientific tests confirmed their speculation. In 1999, the mummy was sold to the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, and in 2003 it was given as a gift to the people of Egypt by the city of Atlanta. In October 2003, Ramesses I’s long journey back home ended to the sound of singing and a military marching band as his body was brought to rest in the renovated Luxor Museum.⁶³
Excursus: On the Threshold
‘It was he, indeed, who created my beauty; he made great my family in (people’s) minds. He gave me his counsels as my safeguard, and his teaching was like a rampart in my heart.’⁶⁴
Seti’s route to power was in many ways both common and unorthodox. He was the son of a king, and as such, he represented the proper order of succession. But unlike most ancient Egyptian kings, he had not been born to rule; he had not even been born as a member of the royal family. His succession to the Horus Throne of the Living owed a tremendous amount to a highly unusual set of circumstances, whose antecedents can be traced all the way back to the beginning of the 18th Dynasty. The strong focus on Amun of Karnak by the Thutmosoid kings and the constant lavishing of wealth and land upon the Amun priesthood created a justification for Akhenaten to carry out his political and religious revolution, breaking for a time the power of Thebes and shifting the political capital to Tell el-Amarna.
The chaotic line of succession and weak rulers which followed his death provided the opportunity for a strong military leader to emerge, and emerge he did in the form of the general Horemheb. Horemheb could himself be viewed as more in line with the later 19th Dynasty and the Ramesside kings than the 18th Dynasty to which he belongs. He represented a bridge between the old and the new. He was clearly associated closely with the old Theban royal family, through his marriage to Nefertiti’s sister but mainly by his strong association with Tutankhamun and Ay. Simultaneously, he represented the new breed of rulers to which Ramesses I and Seti I both belonged: members of the military elite who had risen to power, first within the ranks of the army before taking up administrative and religious posts.
Despite the efforts of both Horemheb and Ramesses I, the Egypt which Seti inherited was still weaker than it had been during the reigns of Thutmosis III and Amenhotep III. Horemheb’s administrative overhaul of the interior policies of the country had been effective, as had the return to religious orthodoxy begun by Tutankhamun and championed by Horemheb and Ramesses I. But Egypt’s foreign policy was still a major obstacle on the young king’s road to success. In the north, the Hittite Kingdom was on the move, sensing potential weakness from the untried Egyptian monarch. Many of the former vassal states in Canaan and the Levant had quietly switched sides to join with Egypt’s enemies. Even in Nubia, a province which had been effectively subdued and integrated since the fall of Kerma more than 200 years before, there were the faint stirrings of rebellion. The brief campaign undertaken against the Fenkhu during his father’s reign had been little more than an experimental sortie by the young Seti. Now that he was solely in charge of the country and the army, he began making plans for how to reassert Egypt’s dominance on the Near Eastern stage.