Tutankhamen (31 page)

Within a couple of years Nefertiti, too, was dead and buried in the Amarna royal tomb. So, too, was Kiya, most prominent of Akhenaten's harem queens and mother of several of his children including Tutankhaten. With the sudden loss of almost all his female relations, Akhenaten needed a consort – a theoretical or actual wife – who could perform the female rites that would support his kingship. He solved the problem by elevating his eldest surviving son by Nefertiti, Smenkhkare, to the position of co-regent, with Meritaten by his side
as Great Queen. Now Meritaten could assume the religious and political roles played by Tiy, Nefertiti and Kiya. This she did with consummate ease; like Tiy, but unlike Nefertiti, her name was mentioned in diplomatic correspondence and her fame spread throughout the Near East.

Akhenaten died in the autumn of his regnal Year 17 and was succeeded, as he had planned, by his co-regent Smenkhkare, with Meritaten by his side. But barely had Smenkhkare interred his father in the Amarna tomb than he himself died. Smenkhkare was succeeded by his young half-brother, Tutankhaten, whose elevation to the throne was supported by his half-sister, the dowager queen Meritaten, and his great-grandfather, Ay. Meritaten interred her husband in his own tomb in the Royal Wadi – Amarna's own Valley of the Kings – then ruled Egypt as regent on behalf of the young king. When Meritaten died approximately two years after her husband, she too was given an appropriate Amarna burial. Tutankhaten, at just eight years old, married his slightly older half-sister Ankhesenpaaten, the only surviving princess, and started to rule – theoretically – alone.

Of course, an eight-year-old could not rule unaided. Tutankhamen inherited a group of advisers who were all too well aware of the problems which beset both the monarchy and the country. Prominent among these advisers were Ay and Maya and the two viziers, Pentu and Usermont. Amenhotep-Huy was viceroy of Kush (Nubia), his wife, Taemwadjsi, was chief of the harem, and Generalissimo Horemheb was commander-in-chief of the army. Horemheb is a curiously opaque character who managed to achieve the near impossible feat of maintaining a relatively low profile throughout the Amarna Period while retaining a position of authority. He was not only a high-ranking soldier, he was ‘king's deputy in the entire land' and ‘Noble of Upper and Lower Egypt'; titles which suggest that he was Tutankhamen's designated heir. If this literal interpretation of his titles is correct, it must surely have been a formality, as no one could reasonably have
expected the young Tutankhamen to predecease Horemheb nor, indeed, to die without fathering a son.

Tutankhaten had been born during Akhenaten's reign. He had spent his entire, short life entirely within the boundaries of Amarna, where he had been raised to worship the Aten via his own family. He had known no other way of existence, no other god, but his advisers had, and they could see the damage wrought by Akhenaten's policies. Seventeen years of royal navel-gazing had left Egypt weak and vulnerable, her foreign policy in tatters and her internal economy corrupted. With Smenkhkare and Meritaten dead and buried, it was time to make a decisive break with the past. Tutankhaten was young enough to convert to the old, tried and tested ways. He could become a traditional New Kingdom monarch; an ideal combination of brave warrior, wise administrator and conscientious priest. By stressing his own personal orthodoxy, by restoring
maat
to chaos, without actually identifying his grandfather Akhenaten as the source of that chaos, the new king would prove his worth and Egypt would be renewed.

The new king did indeed inaugurate a new age. Superficially, he was able to accomplish much of what he intended. But the twenty years of Akhenaten's rule could not simply be forgotten. The lingering Amarna influence is most obviously detected in official art, which retains many of the Amarna features, but there is also a subtle alteration in the relationship between the king, the gods and the people, which is reflected in elite tomb art, where the enthroned god Osiris now displaces the king in the scenes that decorate the walls.

Akhenaten's dissolution of the state temples had struck at the heart of Egypt's prosperity. The traditional temples managed a wide portfolio of assets including land, ships, quarries and peasant labour. Effectively, and with little fuss, they had served as production, storage and distribution mechanisms, with their priests acting as highly skilled accountants and their grain-filled warehouses serving as a form of state bank which could be drawn on in a crisis. Tutankhaten was to be
credited with re-establishing the traditional state gods, re-opening their temples, re-dedicating their statues and re-establishing their priesthoods. As a first step along the road to polytheism he was renamed Tutankh-Amen (Living image of Amen), Ruler of southern Heliopolis [Thebes], while his consort Ankhesenpa-Aten became Ankhesen-Amen (She lives for Amen).

Maya, now chief of the treasury, embarked on a tax-raising campaign. Visiting the major temples from the Delta to Aswan, he ensured that the dues that had once been diverted to the cult of the Aten were now being received by the state. He commenced the demolition of Akhenaten's stone buildings both at Thebes and at Amarna (the blocks being thriftily re-used in Tutankhamen's own building works), while assuming responsibility for the restoration of Amen's vandalised monuments. The Theban stone masons picked up their chisels and Tutankhamen's image was added to the third pylon (gateway) at the Karnak temple; by completing this pylon, originally started by Amenhotep III, Tutankhamen was able to make a public affirmation of his relationship with one of Egypt's most glorious kings. For similar reasons, Tutankhamen completed and decorated Amenhotep's entrance colonnade at the Luxor temple. Back at Karnak, an avenue of ram-headed sphinxes was created to run between the tenth pylon and the Mut temple, the sphinxes being craftily recycled from the sphinxes originally made for Akhenaten's Karnak temples. Tutankhamen was represented in colossal form – either as himself, or as a god bearing his face – at the Karnak and Luxor temples and at his own memorial temple, which was now under construction on the west bank. Scenes of Tutankhamen driving his chariot into battle against his Asiatic enemies, and campaigning against the Nubians, decorated his memorial temple walls; it is a moot point whether these scenes are to be interpreted literally or not. Meanwhile, hidden away in the Western Valley, his tomb was being excavated. As ‘Overseer of Works in the Place of Eternity' and
‘Overseer of Works in the West', the multi-titled Maya probably assumed responsibility for this as well.

Similar restorations and enhancements occurred throughout Egypt, although the evidence for this is now sadly lacking. Memphis, whose status as Egypt's administrative capital is testified by a marked increase in the number of tombs belonging to bureaucrats, has a couple of lintels inscribed with Tutankhamen's name. An Apis bull died and, for only the third time, was given a full, formal burial at Sakkara. Other information is more nebulous: there are references to a ‘Resthouse' built by Tutankhamen near the Great Sphinx, and the northern official Maya mentions a mysterious ‘House of Nebkheperure [Tutankhamen]'. Nubia benefited from major temple reconstructions at Kawa and at the Soleb temple of Amenhotep III, and Amenhotep-Huy raised a new temple at Faras, in Lower Nubia.

A series of artefacts recovered from Amarna – faience finger rings and a block that shows Tutankhamen, while still Tutankhaten, offering to Amen and Mut – testify to his early reign at Amarna. Abandoned workings in the Royal Wadi may even be the beginnings of his original tomb. Amarna, however, was not a good site for a capital city; it was remote, and too firmly associated with the cult of the Aten. Within four years of his accession Tutankhamen's advisers had made an important decision. Thebes would once again serve as Egypt's religious capital, while the civil service would be based at Memphis. Initially a significant population remained at Amarna, but, when it became clear that the court would never return, numbers dwindled and the mud-brick city crumbled. Only the workmen's village survived to be re-occupied and even expanded before its abandonment during the reign of Horemheb.

Abandoning Amarna meant abandoning the Amarna cemeteries. Most of the Amarna elite tombs were unfinished and it seems that only one, the tomb of Huya, Steward of Tiy, had actually been used. However, the Royal Wadi definitely had been used, and the royal
tomb, plus, perhaps, neighbouring tombs used for Smenkhkare and Meritaten and the lesser princesses, housed a significant number of Tutankhamen's extended family and their valuable grave goods. Everyone knew what this meant. The Wadi would have to be guarded night and day and, even then, there was no guarantee that it would not be robbed. Who would guard the guards? Things came to a head when tomb security was breached, goods were stolen, sarcophagi were smashed, tomb walls were defaced and some of the mummies were damaged. The decision was taken to move the royal burials to the security of the Valley of the Kings as quickly as possible. Maya, in his role as overseer of works in the Valley of the Kings, would probably have assumed responsibility for this.

The Amarna royal tombs were re-opened and their contents – including the remains of Tiy, Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Kiya, Smenkhkare, Meritaten, Meketaten, Meketaten's husband (a younger brother to Smenkhkare?) and the three younger princesses – transferred to workshops in the Theban necropolis, one of these being the unfinished private tomb KV 55. The two New Kingdom caches, created during the Third Intermediate Period, suggest that the Amarna burials would have been immediately stripped of their valuables. These would have made a valuable contribution to Tutankhamen's coffers and, in some cases, to his own funerary provision. The mummies were then moved to more suitable resting places, with some of them eventually finding their way into the two New Kingdom caches. Tiy's burial was reassembled, as was the burial of Smenkhkare (albeit in Kiya's ‘restored' coffin), and for a time the two lay side by side in KV 55. Then, early in Ay's reign, the tomb was re-opened, the burials were again plundered and Tiy – Ay's sister – was given a more appropriate burial alongside her husband in the Western Valley. Her shrine, cumbersome and unwieldy even when dismantled, was simply abandoned in KV 55. Smenkhkare – who may well have been thought to be Akhenaten – was given a travesty of a royal burial with the unwanted odds and
ends that no one wanted. The tomb was then re-sealed and, fairly soon after, concealed beneath a layer of flood debris. With Ay dead and no one else left to mourn the Amarna court, it was simply forgotten.

Tutankhamen and Ankhesenamen had no living children. This was not a major problem; the king was still young, and he had a harem full of beautiful women to tempt him. However, it did become a problem when Tutankhamen died unexpectedly in a hunting accident in his regnal year 10. Funerary tradition dictated that Tutankhamen should be buried by his successor, as ‘he who buries, inherits'. Not only would this ensure Tutankhamen the best possible afterlife, it would demonstrate to the gods and the people that his successor was indeed entitled to claim the throne. But his designated heir, Horemheb, was absent, campaigning, unsuccessfully, in the Near East. Under these highly unusual circumstances we might have expected Ankhesenamen, the most prominent surviving descendant of Akhenaten, a king's daughter and king's wife, to step forward. This would not have been without precedent: the 12th Dynasty Sobeknofru ruled as a female pharaoh under similar circumstances, and her reign was accepted by all. Instead, we find Ankhesenamen writing to the king of the Hittites, asking for a son who will become her husband. At the very least this suggests an atypical delay between Tutankhamen's death and his burial: a delay which allowed Ankhesenamen to wait for a response, receive the Hittite envoy, send him back home, and wait for her groom. It is a delay which would, presumably, have allowed Horemheb ample time to return home. We do not see Ankhesenamen again.

Tutankhamen's ministers settled the succession to their own satisfaction. The elderly Ay – a compromise candidate – interred his great-grandson in his own tomb; a pious gesture which ensured that Tutankhamen was adequately provided for, while allowing Ay himself to take over Tutankhamen's far larger tomb. The two stillborn daughters born to Ankhesenamen were interred alongside their father; here
they could support and protect their father for all eternity. Four years after his accession Ay, too, died and was interred in Tutankhamen's original tomb. As his intended heir, his son or grandson Nakhtmin, had predeceased him, he was succeeded by Generalissimo Horemheb. Horemheb erased Tutankhamen's name from the Restoration Stela – Tutankhamen's manifesto – and inserted his own in its place. The Amarna Age had well and truly ended.

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