The court continued to be based at Amarna, but the sands were shifting rapidly and the Aten cult was about to be swept away. Those behind Tutankhuaten’s elevation to the kingship were older, experienced men: the God’s Father Ay (no. 65) and the military commander Horemheb (no. 66). They realized that the restoration of the old cults and certainties was the only option: Akhenaten’s reforms were simply too unpopular in the country at large to be sustained after his death. The reversal of policy came swiftly. In his second year as king, Tutankhuaten changed his name to Tutankhamun, signalling the reinstatement of Amun as chief state god and the demotion of Aten. At the same time, the royal residence was moved back to Thebes, and Amarna was abandoned. To mark this decisive break with the Atenist heresy, Tutankhamun issued a formal decree from the capital at Memphis. It recorded the restoration of the old deities, the reopening and rebuilding of their temples, the reinstatement of local priesthoods, and the dedication of new cult statues. Tutankhamun praised himself as the one who ‘performs benefactions for his father and all the gods… having repaired what was ruined… and having repelled disorder throughout the Two Lands’. Moreover, the king adopted a new title, ‘Repeater of Births’, making it quite explicit that he was the initiator of a new age.
Rebuilding and beautification of the major state temples began apace. At Karnak, the Aten temples were dismantled and the damage inflicted by Akhenaten’s henchmen was repaired. A figure of Tutankhamun was added to the decoration of the Third Pylon to record his decisive role for eternity. At Memphis, the king dedicated a new temple (‘the House of Nebkheperura’), and marked the restoration of traditional practices with the ceremonial burial of the Apis bull. In distant Nubia, temples were built at Kawa (ancient Gempaaten) and Faras, and restoration work carried out at Amenhotep III’s temple at Soleb. Indeed, Tutankhamun – or, rather, his backers – was particularly keen to associate himself with the golden age of his grandfather, who was now seen as the last legitimate king before the heresy. Thus, at one of Amenhotep III’s grandest monuments, Luxor Temple, a new processional colonnade was added in front of the peristyle forecourt; its walls were decorated with scenes of the Opet Festival, one of the holiest events of the Theban religious calendar.
Of course, with the restoration of the old religion came the reinstatement of long-standing beliefs about the afterlife. These required Tutankhamun to make proper provision for his burial and mortuary cult. He seems to have begun a mortuary temple in western Thebes, not far from his grandfather’s, and a royal tomb in the western branch of the Valley of the Kings, similarly close to Amenhotep III’s burial. But dramatic events intervened to thwart these plans.
Just as he reached maturity, around the age of nineteen or twenty, Tutankhamun died prematurely – whether from natural causes or from foul play remains a cause of much speculation (although his mummy shows no signs of violence). It is tempting to suggest that the prospect of the king governing for himself, perhaps reversing the policies put in place by his puppet-masters, or at the very least dispensing with their services, was too unwelcome a prospect for powers behind the throne; certainly the main beneficiary from Tutankhamun’s untimely death was Ay. Whatever the circumstances, the funeral arrangements were unusually hurried. A small, non-royal tomb on the floor of the main Valley of the Kings was pressed into service as the royal resting-place. Several grave goods were reused or adapted for Tutankhamun’s burial. Even the king’s sarcophagus was second-hand, and had probably been made originally for one of the royal burials at Amarna; a new lid was found to fit the box, and even though it was made from a different stone, granite instead of quartzite, it had to suffice.
Tutankhamun was laid to rest in early spring. His tomb was broken into by robbers not long afterwards, but it was re-sealed with most of the contents intact. Later covered by spoil from another royal tomb, it was lost and forgotten for over 3,000 years. Tutankhamun himself was consigned to oblivion: despite his restoration of the old ways, he was too closely associated with ‘the enemy of Akhetaten’ to be counted as a legitimate pharaoh, so his name was deliberately excluded from the king lists.
But, against all the odds, the vulnerable and manipulated boy king was redeemed; the discovery of his tomb and its marvellous contents brought him back to life and made his name live again, to be celebrated beyond all other pharaohs.
63 | Ankhesenamun
T
UTANKHAMUN
’
S CHILD BRIDE
Akhenaten’s religion was essentially a cult of the royal family, in which the king, his wife and their three eldest daughters played leading roles. Although the king and Nefertiti were pre-eminent, forming a triad with the heavenly Aten, the daughters were none the less essential to the image of a ‘holy family’ that the king wished to project. Hence, from the moment of her birth, Ankhesenpaaten, the third daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, was a public commodity, used by the royal court for its own ends. Her particular fate was to remain the plaything of more powerful individuals for the rest of her life.
Ankhesenpaaten (‘she lives for the Aten’) was born in or around her father’s ninth year on the throne. If the official propaganda is to be believed, father, mother and daughters enjoyed a close and loving relationship. A stela used for private worship shows the king and queen sitting facing each other, with their three eldest daughters playing around them. Ankhesenpaaten stands on her mother’s shoulder and plays with one of the uraeus-ornaments hanging down from her crown, as any small child would. But this was no ordinary family.
When she was just eight years old, Ankhesenpaaten’s father died, and her life was thrown into turmoil. Since her eldest sister, Meritaten, had been elevated to the role of King’s Great Wife, and her other sister, Meketaten, had died in childbirth some years earlier, Ankhesenpaaten found herself in the position of heir apparent. After a few years of uncertainty as to which party would prevail, the throne passed, not to Ankhesenpaaten herself, but to her husband and half-brother, Tutankhuaten. He was no more than nine or ten, and unable to dictate policy. The young couple found themselves mere ciphers in the hands of older, more experienced operators. The adherents of the old religion saw in Tutankhuaten and his young bride the perfect cover for a swift abandonment of Atenism. To mark this decisive break with the Aten ‘heresy’, Tutankhuaten and his wife changed their names: the -aten element was dropped, to be replaced by the old state god, Amun. Hence Tutankhuaten became Tutankhamun (no. 62), while Ankhesenpaaten became Ankhesenamun.
Despite the circumstances of their union, they seem to have felt real affection for each other. However, their married life would be struck by tragedy. Their attempts to start a family came to nothing when two successive daughters died in the womb or were stillborn. One was seven months old, the other eight or nine months. Despite these sadnesses in their family life, Ankhesenamun and her husband enjoyed some relatively untroubled times together. A series of eighteen scenes on the little golden shrine from Tutankhamun’s tomb show the couple at intimate moments. When Tutankhamun was hunting, Ankhesenamun would pass him arrows. At other times she might fasten a collar around his neck, support his arm, or play a sistrum for him. He reciprocated this affection, pouring liquid into his wife’s cupped hands, or greeting her fondly when she came to him in his open-air pavilion.
But such companionship was not to last. Tutankhamun died tragically young, just as he and his wife reached adulthood. Ankhesenamun was left a widow before her twentieth birthday. She may have been desperate enough to write to the Hittite king Shuppiluliuma, begging him to send her one of his sons to marry. It seems she knew only too well the alternative: a ring-bezel with the paired names of Ankhesenamun and the God’s Father Ay seems to indicate that the latter bolstered his claim to the throne by taking his predecessor’s widow as his own consort. The fact that Ay may have been Ankhesenpaaten’s grandfather, and was certainly many decades older than her, was not going to stand in the way of his ambition. For Ankhesenamun, this turn of events must have compounded her grief at the loss of her young husband. What became of her, however, is not known. The ring marking her union with Ay is the last record of Ankhesenamun. Thereafter, she disappears from history: an ignominious end to a life that was never her own.
64 | Maya
R
OYAL TREASURER
‘My God, it’s Maya!’ These immortal words, beamed around the world, were uttered by a Dutch archaeologist on 8 February 1986 when he stumbled into the underground chamber of a tomb at Saqqara and caught sight of an inscription naming its owner. They convey the excitement generated by the rediscovery of the lost burial-place of Maya, one of the most important officials of the late 18th Dynasty. Not only was Maya a key player in the reign of Tutankhamun, his career spanned the entire Amarna Period and its immediate aftermath. His story demonstrates how some of those most closely associated with the heretic regime of Akhenaten changed sides with unseemly haste to save their own careers.
Maya did not come from a particularly high-ranking family. His father, Iuy, was a mere ‘official’, while his mother, Weret, was a songstress and musician in the cults of Amun and Hathor – common part-time roles for the wives of New Kingdom bureaucrats. Weret seems to have died when Maya was still young; the maternal role in the family was taken by Iuy’s second wife, Henutiunu. She evidently forged a strong bond with her stepson, since he gave her a prominent place in the decorative scheme of his tomb. Three further boys, Nahuher, Nakht and Parennefer, completed the family. Some or all may have been Iuy’s sons by his new wife, and hence Maya’s half-brothers.
Whether by talent or good fortune, Maya grew up in close proximity to the court of Amenhotep III (no. 52). He boasted later in life of ‘the presence of the King having been granted to me since I was a child’. Under Amenhotep’s successor, Akhenaten, Maya received promotion to his first significant office of state. Indeed, his rise seems to have been swift. By the middle part of Akhenaten’s reign, he had already garnered a host of important dignities and roles: true and beloved scribe of the king, Fan-Bearer on the King’s Right-Hand, and Overseer of All the Works of the King. His principal office, however, was a military one, Overseer of the Army of the Lord of the Two Lands. This must have brought him into close contact with another aspiring army officer, Horemheb (no. 66). The two men’s careers were to remain intertwined. Like other senior courtiers, Maya began a tomb for himself, cut into the hillside at Amarna (ancient Akhetaten). He would have been as shocked as the rest of the government when Akhenaten died after seventeen years on the throne, and his entire revolution faltered.
Maya decided to back a return to orthodoxy. He had by now married a woman named Meryt (‘beloved’), and was undoubtedly assured of continued wealth and status if he supported the counter-revolution, led by his old colleagues Ay (no. 65) and Horemheb (no. 66). The latter had moved swiftly to take control of the army after Akhenaten’s demise, so, wisely, Maya concentrated on civilian affairs; perhaps the two men simply divided the reins of power between them. Maya retained his former role as Overseer of Works, taking responsibility for Tutankhamun’s royal building projects in the Valley of the Kings, which may have included the reburial of Akhenaten and members of his family in a Theban tomb. At Karnak, Maya supervised work on the avenue of sphinxes leading to the Mut complex, in the hypostyle hall, and on the Second, Ninth and Tenth Pylons. To speed up the work, he ordered the dismantling of Akhenaten’s Aten Temple at Karnak and reused the blocks as filling for Tutankhamun’s own constructions – a complete refutation of the old regime and everything it represented. At the same time, he may have ordered the scenes and texts in his unfinished tomb at Akhetaten to be carefully erased and covered with plaster, to expunge any record of his involvement in the government of Akhenaten.
Maya’s enthusiasm for the restoration of the old order extended also to economic matters. As Overseer of the Treasury under Tutankhamun, he led a royal mission to levy taxes and restore cults – the first may have been a necessary prerequisite for the second – throughout the entire length of Egypt, from the First Cataract to the Delta. He was rewarded for his loyal service with the ‘gold of honour’ and prisoners of war brought back from military campaigns in Asia. He enjoyed direct access to the palace and glorified in epithets normally reserved for the king: ‘who appeases the Two Lands’, ‘who unites the Land with (his) plans’. Indeed, the decoration of Maya’s Memphite tomb, begun at the height of his powers, recalls a royal sepulchre, with reliefs in monochrome golden-yellow, the colour of resurrection. With Ay and Horemheb, Maya was one of the triumvirate of powerful men behind the throne of the boy king.
When Tutankhamun died prematurely, Maya was responsible for the hurried preparation of the royal tomb and its contents. To ensure his own immortality, he had his name and titles inscribed on two objects destined for the king’s grave goods. Later, he would re-seal Tutankhamun’s tomb, after robbers had entered it, and supervise the beginning of work on a royal tomb for his longstanding colleague, Horemheb. The two men evidently continued to get along well, since Maya retained his high-ranking posts even after Horemheb had assumed the kingship. One of Maya’s final acts as Overseer of Works was to carry out the reburial of King Thutmose IV; an inscription in the tomb recording the operation may even be in Maya’s own handwriting.
Just a year later, he died, aged probably in his late fifties. His young daughters, given the touching names Maya-menti (‘Maya remains’) and Tjau-en-Maya (‘breath of Maya’), were adopted by another Memphite couple, Djehuty and Tuy. Despite Maya’s happy marriage, he and Meryt his wife had no surviving sons. So it fell to Maya’s younger half-brother, Nahuher, to act as heir and supervise the couple’s burial in their lavish tomb on the Saqqara plateau – to await the excitement of rediscovery 3,300 years later.
65 | Ay
T
HE GREAT SURVIVOR
Ay was born into a powerful provincial family in the region of Akhmim in Middle Egypt. It seems likely that he was a son of Yuya and Tuyu. If this was the case, the marriage of his sister Tiye to Amenhotep III propelled Ay into the inner circle at court, and gave him special access to the ultimate source of authority, the king. Whether by accident or design, Ay also had the good fortune to have in his household, as nursling and ward of his wife Tey, a baby girl who was destined for unparalleled power: Nefertiti. By the time she had grown up and married, and her husband had succeeded to the throne as Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten, Ay thus found himself with unrivalled connections. He was both foster-father to the King’s Great Wife and, probably, uncle to the king. He exploited his position to the full, rising swiftly to a position of prominence at the heart of Akhenaten’s regime. Ay’s military offices included Overseer of All His Majesty’s Horses and Commander of Chariotry, while his courtly status was expressed in his titles Fan-Bearer on the King’s Right Hand and royal scribe (private secretary to the king). Tey, for her part, was lauded as ‘greatly favoured of Waenra (Akhenaten), whom the King’s Great Wife favoured’.
Success and status under Akhenaten depended, more crudely than ever before, on the king’s personal favour. Absolute loyalty to the royal couple was a prerequisite; public devotion to the king’s new religion was also expected from high officials, and Ay knew very well what he had to do to retain his position at court. In his tomb, the largest private sepulchre at Amarna, granted by the king himself, Ay proclaimed his zeal for the new religious order by covering its walls with the most complete version of the Great Hymn to the Aten, the definitive expression of Akhenaten’s doctrine. Moreover, Ay consciously referred to himself as ‘one who listens to the king and follows his Teachings’. His reward was commensurate with such a lavish display of allegiance: the gold of honour, bestowed by the king, and a shower of other accolades including a pair of red leather riding gloves – the perfect gift for a keen horseman.
Ay must have expected to finish his career and end his days at Amarna, comfortable in his position at the king’s right hand. But the untimely death of Akhenaten changed everything. The king’s mysterious and ephemeral successor, Smenkhkara, had none of Akhenaten’s personal authority, nor perhaps the same extreme enthusiasm for his religious reforms. The once-powerful Amun priesthood who had been unceremoniously evicted from their temples by Akhenaten’s henchmen were determined to seize the opportunity to reassert themselves and return Egypt to orthodoxy. The general population, too, may have grown weary of Akhenaten’s excesses, while the army, for its part, was pragmatic enough to see that the tide was turning. In a blatant but brilliant volte-face, Ay turned his back on Akhenaten’s regime and presented himself instead as a counter-revolutionary who could and would restore the old order. He was clever enough to realize his usefulness to Akhenaten’s opponents: a public repudiation of the king and all his works by the man who had been their greatest champion would deal a fatal blow to Akhenaten’s entire project.
As the new cheer-leader for the traditionalists, Ay used his military connections to ensure that the throne passed swiftly to the young prince Tutankhuaten, too young to rule in his own right and utterly dependent upon his advisers. Having manoeuvred himself into position as fan-bearer to Tutankhamun and ‘the confidant of the king throughout the entire land’, Ay may have been instrumental in the abandonment of Akhetaten, the relocation of the court to Thebes, and the restoration of the old religion, proclaimed by royal decree. But Ay had unwittingly unleashed forces that threatened his own position. There were now other, equally ambitious, men surrounding the new king, individuals for whom Ay’s tainted background was anathema. More dangerous still, they had a figurehead in the person of Horemheb, an army commander who quickly established himself as a major power in the land, combining the highest military, diplomatic and administrative titles.
Tutankhamun’s brief, nine-year reign must have been both exhilarating and anxious for Ay, as he ruled through the young king while constantly watching his back for rivals. When Tutankhamun died unexpectedly early, Ay had, once again, to move swiftly to secure his position, and he did so in the most audacious manner. According to Egyptian custom, the individual who carried out the burial of the deceased became the legitimate heir, whether or not there was any blood relationship. At Tutankhamun’s death, there were no surviving descendants and the main royal line had become extinct. This left two possible successors, Ay and Horemheb. The latter probably enjoyed the backing of the army, but may well have been away on campaign. By contrast, Ay was in the right place at the right time to make his move. A speedy burial for Tutankhamun was essential if Ay was to stage-manage the occasion and thereby take the throne for himself. The tomb intended for the boy king was not yet finished, so a small, non-royal tomb on the floor of the Valley of the Kings was hurriedly pressed into service. Funerary objects were requisitioned and Tutankhamun was hastily buried. Moreover, to emphasize his legitimacy, Ay had himself depicted on the walls of Tutankhamun’s burial-chamber in the act of ‘opening the mouth’ of the dead king’s mummified body. Such a scene was unparalleled in the decoration of a royal tomb, but Ay’s purpose was clear, and he had already proved himself a master of propaganda. Just as he had used the walls of his own tomb at Akhetaten to proclaim his loyalty to Akhenaten and the Atenist religion, so he was now using the walls of Tutankhamun’s tomb to support his own accession to the throne.
Through a combination of political skill and crude ambition, Ay had reached the very pinnacle of Egyptian society. But his triumph was short-lived. He had waited a lifetime for the ultimate prize, and reigned for just three years. His hope of founding his own dynasty was also dashed when his son and Crown Prince, Nakhtmin, was shunted aside by Horemheb. This time around, nothing and nobody was going to keep the army commander from the throne. It was Horemheb who would be regarded by later generations as the first legitimate king since Amenhotep III; Ay would be expunged from history.
Ay’s entire life had straddled the fault-line between heresy and orthodoxy. He had turned both to his advantage, but in the end faced an insuperable dilemma: his close association with Akhenaten and the royal family had brought him power, even the kingship, but damned him forever in the eyes of posterity. His restoration of the old religion saved his career but sealed his fate.
PART 6
Imperial Egypt
Ramesside Period
The fabric of national life in Egypt had been left in shreds by Akhenaten’s ill-fated revolution. After the end of the Amarna Period, it fell to an army general, Horemheb (no. 66), to re-establish order. With military precision, he restored the orthodox religion, re-staffed the demoralized priesthoods with tried and trusted army colleagues, and reformed the law by means of a careful and thorough edict. Without any heirs of his own, he chose another army officer as his successor. The latter ascended the throne as Ramesses I, and kings of the Ramesside dynasty – most of whom also bore the name Ramesses – ruled Egypt for the next 200 years.
