by Ahmed Osman
Meketaten’s Sarcophagus
A fragment of the sarcophagus of Meketaten, Akhenaten’s second daughter, who died some time after his Year 12 and was buried in her father’s royal tomb at Amarna, was found, with the praenomen of Amenhotep III beside the praenomen of Akhenaten. In another book Redford reports the first appearance of Akhenaten’s daughter in the decoration of one of Akhenaten’s temples at Karnak where ‘possibly no earlier than the fourth year of the reign … we first see two daughters toddling behind the queen’.2
If Amenhotep III was not alive in Year 4 of his son’s reign when Meketaten had been born, it would not have been possible for his name to appear on his second granddaughter’s sarcophagus. Its presence indicates that he was alive when the sarcophagus was made, although this could have been at any time after the birth of the princess. Moreover, in this example the praenomen of Amenhotep III have been spelt differently. Instead of using the figure of the goddess Maat in writing the middle part of the word ‘Neb-Maat-Re’ – ‘Maat’ signifies ‘truth’ – Akhenaten spelt it phonetically, indicating an advanced stage in his rejection of the old religions, which did not take place until after he had left Thebes for his new capital, Amarna. The sarcophagus inscriptions cannot therefore be dated earlier than that.
The Amarna Rock Tombs of Huya and Meryre II
A scene and inscription in the tomb of Huya, steward to Queen Tiye, at Amarna has been interpreted as evidence that Amenhotep III was alive and in Amarna after the second half of Akhenaten’s Year 8. The scene is drawn in two halves on the lintel of the doorway leading from the first hall of the tomb into the inner rooms.
The scene on the left shows the household of Akhenaten (Akhenaten, Queen Nefertiti and their four daughters), that on the right the household of Amenhotep III, Queen Tiye and the Princess Baketaten). Howard Carter, the British archaeologist who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, saw the juxtaposition of these two scenes as evidence that the old king was alive at Amarna: ‘This equipoise of the two households not only confirms the coregency of the two kings, but gives reason to suppose that Amenhotep III continued to live for at least a year or so after the birth of Akhenaten’s fourth daughter, Neferneferuaten Tasheri.’3
Redford, who does not agree with Carter, goes on to argue that, as Tiye is shown without her husband on the outer (south) wall of the hall in question, Amenhotep III must have already been dead when construction of the tomb began: ‘Presumably, if the decoration of the tomb kept pace with its excavation, the scenes in the first hall showing Tiye alone would have been carved before the lintel jambs.’4
This is an over-simple approach. We have to examine the whole hall of Huya’s tomb, as well as the neighbouring tomb of Meryre II, in order to establish which came before which of the tomb scenes. The argument is a somewhat complex one, but from the nature of the scenes, the number of princesses shown and their relative ages, it is possible to make the following deductions (see also Appendix B):
• The South and North Walls, where four daughters of Akhenaten are depicted, plus Baketaten, the daughter of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye: Year 10;
• The East Wall, which does not show any of Akhenaten’s daughters but depicts Baketaten, looking the same age as she is shown on the South and North Walls: Year 10;
• The West Wall is a unique scene showing celebrations that took place in Akhenaten’s Year 12 and bears the date ‘Year 12, the second month of winter, the eighth day’.
This dating has a further significance in the coregency argument. The temple scene shown on the East Wall shows a colonnade with a statue of a king and queen placed between each pair of columns. The inscribed names are now only partially preserved, but it seemed certain to N. de G. Davies, author of The Rock Tombs of El Amarna,5 that here we have Queen Tiye’s statue with alternating statues of her husband, Amenhotep III, and her son, Akhenaten. While Akhenaten is given his two names, Amenhotep III has only his praenomen, ‘King of the South and North and Lord of the Two Lands, Neb-Maat-Re, given life’. This last epithet, ‘given life’, can appear only if the king was alive at the time the statue was placed in position and the inscription made.
Inside the sanctuary of the temple, statues – Queen Tiye alternating again with her husband and son – under the portico represent figures holding altars between their extended arms for the reception of gifts. In the centre is a naos (inner sanctuary of the temple) standing free from the wall. It is set on a platform to which three or four steps lead up. Here we see Queen Tiye drawn twice, standing on the steps, once with her husband, once with her son, and Amenhotep III himself, depicted inside the temple where the inscriptions have already made it clear that he was alive. A statue can sometimes be a representation of a dead person, but here, because they are shown on the steps, they are living persons.
Davies himself noted that it is not usual to erect statues on steps. Yet he refused to accept the clear evidence of the East Wall that we are not looking here at depictions of statues, but of real figures: ‘ “Statues” I have said, but in truth there is nothing to prevent us from seeing in them four royal personages, except for the difficulty of granting the existence of two kings together at this time.’6 He also chose to disregard the fact that the characters depicted are shown, not within the naos, facing outward, in a position of receiving offerings, which would have been the case if they were statues, but on the steps facing the naos, offering gifts to the Aten, which indicates that the royal characters were alive and worshipping.
As for Redford, he preferred to regard the old king as dead in the lintel scene and a statue on the East Wall, avoiding a real examination of the scenes that would date the decorations correctly and even relying on a misleading judgement by another scholar to obtain more support for his preconceptions. He quotes7 the German scholar Alexander Scharff, who noted in his book Archiv für Orientforschung that Amenhotep III’s accompanying jamb inscription to the lintel scene is not followed by the epithet ‘given life’. Neither Scharff nor Redford seems to have examined the lintel scene carefully, for at the bottom of Amenhotep III’s cartouche, which is shown behind his head, the signs for ‘given life’ are clearly visible, just as they are on the East Wall.
The Age of Baketaten
Redford next takes issue with Frederick J. Giles, the Canadian Egyptologist, who argued that Baketaten in the tomb scenes ‘could not be older than fourteen at the most. On the assumption that Tiye married Amenhotep III in his second regnal year at the age of sixteen, Tiye would have given birth to Baketaten if there were no coregency, in the last year or so of her husband, when she was fifty-four. Since it is unlikely that Tiye was as young as sixteen at the time of her marriage, or as old as fifty-four at the birth of Baketaten, the assumption of a coregency of about twelve years is almost obligatory.’8
Redford complains that Giles’s ‘entirely unwarranted manipulation of numbers and his assumptions regarding Tiye’s age at various times in her life do not command the respect of the uncommitted reader’.9 However, he is using the inability of an opponent to present his case to try to persuade us that he has none.
Examination of the mummy of Amenhotep III suggests that he was about fifty when he died. As he ruled for a full thirty-eight years and died at the start of the thirty-ninth, he could only have been around twelve when he came to the throne and about fourteen when he married Tiye in or just before his second regnal year. As Tiye was not the heiress, whom he had to marry irrespective of her age, we should expect her to be younger than he, as this was the custom of the time, and it is thought that she was only eight years of age at the time of the wedding. This would not have been unusual in that era. The prophet Muhammad married a nine-year-old girl when he himself was fifty, and I think this custom of marrying young girls who had not yet reached puberty accounts for the number of ‘barren’ women who later give birth to children in a variety of biblical stories.
How old was Baketaten in the tomb scenes? Carter has made the point: ‘Among many such scenes in El Amarna
private mortuary chapels depicting these children [Akhenaten’s] the relative age of each child is shown by her height. Careful discrimination of that kind excludes the possibility of twin births, and is therefore serviceable when estimating their ages. A reckoning such as the above cannot, of course, be considered exact, but error cannot be more than say a year.’10
In Huya’s tomb scenes Baketaten is shown consistently as being about the same age as Akhenaten’s third daughter, Ankhsenpa-aten. Carter also noted the similarity in size of the two princesses: ‘Judging from the stature of Baketaten figured in this picture [the lintel scene], she was about the same age as Ankhsenpa-aten.’11 Merytaten, the eldest daughter of Akhenaten, was born towards the end of Year 1 of her father. The second daughter, Meketaten, was probably born in Year 3, as she appears as a very young child the following year in the decoration of Akhenaten’s temple at Karnak. If we allow two more years for her birth, the third daughter, Ankhsenpa-aten, would be born around Year 5 of her father, thus making her five or six years of age when Huya’s tomb was decorated in Year 10. (She is seen for the first time in Aye’s tomb, dated by Davies to Year 9 of her father’s reign, and was never depicted with her parents at Thebes.)
If this explanation is accepted as corresponding more closely to the facts, Baketaten must also have been five or six at that time. If there was no coregency between Akhenaten and his father, Baketaten could not have been Amenhotep III’s daughter, being six years of age ten years after her father’s death – yet the inscription in Huya’s tomb confirms that she was. Furthermore, the very name Baketaten indicates that she was born during her brother’s reign when he started relating his own daughters’ names to the Aten. In this case Baketaten would have been born around Year 31 of Amenhotep III when her mother, Queen Tiye, was around thirty-seven, a late, but not impossible, age for giving birth.
Fragments from Amarna
Two objects bearing Amenhotep III’s name, found at Amarna, indicate he was at Amarna at the time. The first is a fragment of a granite bowl with the late name of the Aten, the praenomen of Amenhotep III and the phrase “in Akhetaten”; the second a fragment of a statue of a kneeling person holding an offering slab. Between his outstretched hands is an inscription that includes the late Aten name, followed by the praenomen of Amenhotep III. The Aten’s name is also found twice on the front edge of the slab with Amenhotep III’s praenomen to the right and Akhenaten’s name to the left.
Redford rejects the possibility that Amenhotep III was either at Amarna or even alive at the time these objects were inscribed, which should be, according to the late Aten name, some time after the second half of Year 8. He writes: ‘The most these miserable fragments allow is a cautious suggestion, and nothing more, that a cult of Amenhotep III continued after his death.’12
What Redford is suggesting, without any supporting evidence whatever, is that, in the city of the Aten, another god was worshipped by Akhenaten, a human god, his own father. Not only would the monotheistic beliefs of the king not allow this; the idea of a king being worshipped during or after his life is non-existent in the new city. No funerary temple has been found there for Akhenaten, who was himself the one and only prophet of the new God. The simple explanation is that some time after the latter half of Year 8 Amenhotep came down from Thebes to visit his son and coregent, during which time these objects were made, indicating that both kings were worshipping the Aten. There are other indications that Amenhotep III was converted to worship of the new god, although he continued to worship the older gods as well.
8
THE COREGENCY DEBATE (II)
The Theban Tomb of Kheruef
A SCENE on the south side of the entrance corridor to the tomb of Kheruef, a high official of the period, in Western Thebes shows Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) offering libation to his father, Amenhotep III, who stands, facing him, before Queen Tiye. Part of the accompanying inscription found fallen nearby has the cartouches of both kings facing each other. Although this was sufficient for H. W. Fairman, the British Egyptologist, to regard it as yet further evidence in support of a coregency, Redford is not convinced and regards Amenhotep III as already dead at the time.
In every case where the two kings are shown together, opponents of the coregency try to persuade us that either the elder king is dead or that what we are looking at is his statue. The argument at Amarna is that, although Amenhotep III was depicted as being alive and at Amarna, this was purely because he could not be represented as Osiris, the ancient god of the dead, who was banned from the city of the Aten: now here, in the tomb of a Theban official, who is himself seen addressing a long hymn to Osiris, when we find Amenhotep III depicted as a living king – and no traces of the phrase ‘true of voice’ that usually follows the cartouche of a deceased king – Redford argues that the libation scene belongs to ‘the category of idealised portrayals. It is not a specific incident that is here being recorded. Nor can one argue that just because Amenhotep III is shown receiving an offering and about to eat – activities again reserved for the living – he must have been alive when the relief was carved. …’1
What Redford is, in fact, saying is that there is no evidence in this scene to indicate that Amenhotep III was dead. However, as Redford is not prepared to agree that he was alive, he presents this new explanation – although the old king is not represented here as dead, the representation took place, in a formalized, stylized, abstract manner that has nothing to do with time, after he had died. This is incorrect.
Almost all the royal scenes in Kheruef’s tomb are related to Amenhotep III’s sed festival celebrations. This was a rejuvenation ritual and celebration that kings normally held for the first time after ruling for thirty years, then in shorter intervals after that. Amenhotep III celebrated three such jubilees in Years 30, 34 and 37, but Akhenaten is known to have celebrated two jubilees while still at Thebes during his first five years. The Aten, his God, also celebrated, as kings did, many jubilees. Here Amenhotep IV is presenting his father with libation on the same occasion. (See also Appendix B (ii).)
The Meidum Graffito
A graffito from the pyramid temple of Meidum, in Middle Egypt and dating from the time of Amenhotep III, persuaded Carter of the coregency between Akhenaten and his father: ‘The graffito reads: “Year 30, under the majesty of the King Neb-maat-Re, son of Amun, resting in truth, Amenhotep (III), prince of Thebes, lord of might, prince of joy, who loves him that hates injustice of heart, placing the male offspring upon the seat of his father, and establishing his inheritance in the land.” The “heir” referred to in this graffito can be no less than Amenhotep IV, who afterwards assumed the name Akhenaten. There was probably some reason for establishing this young prince upon the throne.’2
As usual, Redford does not agree with this view. He argues that the ‘male offspring’ referred to is not the king’s son: ‘The addition after the praenomen (coronation name) of ‘son of Amun’ is especially significant. In formal inscriptions it is Amun who is spoken of as establishing the king on his (i.e. Amun’s) throne … The inscription refers entirely to the king (Amenhotep III); it is he who is called the “male”, and it is his own inheritance that is spoken of as being established. “His father” is none other than Amun, the epithet “son of Amun” in the first line being possibly a semantic antecedent.’3 The point the author is making is that, as Amenhotep III was celebrating his first jubilee in Year 30, this inscription indicated the re-establishment of the king on his ancestral throne and the reconfirmation of his inheritance. Yet if we look back at the text we find first that the date given relates to the king himself, Amenhotep III, the son of Amun, and this is followed by three phrases:
1 Who loves (he, the king, loves) him that hates injustice of heart;
2 Placing (he, the king, who is placing) the male offspring (the heir) upon the seat of his father;
3 And establishing (he, the king, who is establishing) his (the heir’s) inheritance in the land.
Nobody can say that, just be
cause the king is called the ‘son of Amun’ or the ‘son of Re’ or of any other god, the statement that follows refers to the god rather than the king, and it is clear here that it is the king who is the subject of all the subsequent verbs. Then again, jubilee celebrations did not indicate inheritance, but rather rejuvenation of power.
To justify the use of the very strange epithet ‘who hates falsehood’ it is equally clear that the king must have been referring to some kind of opposition to a decision of his. The injustice he implies seems to be ‘not placing the heir upon his father’s seat’, but, by placing his son there, the king was doing the just thing and securing the inheritance for him. Here Amenhotep III appears also to be defending an action that had taken place prior to Year 30. The only reasonable explanation would be that Amenhotep III felt that his son and heir, Amenhotep IV, whose mother, Tiye, had not been the heiress, might be challenged over inheriting the throne after the old king died. He therefore decided, while still alive, to appoint him as coregent to guarantee his inheritance. If a coregency of twelve years is accepted, this must have started in Year 28, with the priests of Amun being the almost certain source of protest. This protest could be the same as that mentioned on one of the border stelae at Amarna where Akhenaten referred to some critical comments he had heard about himself before he moved out of Thebes.
The king was regarded as the physical son of Amun. As Tiye was not the heiress when she and Amenhotep III were married, she could not be regarded as the consort of Amun and her son, Amenhotep IV, could not be considered the physical son of Amun. In the Eighteenth Dynasty that meant he would not be accepted as the legal heir and king. This same situation faced an earlier Pharaoh, Tuthmosis III, whose mother was not the heiress when she married. On that occasion an adoption ritual took place at Karnak where the image of Amun, carried by the priests, chose Tuthmosis III as Amun’s son. Once Amenhotep IV had been rejected by the priests, he in turn rejected Amun, chose Aten as his father, first forced Amun out of his supreme position, then destroyed all the other gods, eventually establishing Aten as the only legitimate God of whom Akhenaten was the son. The real sense of Amenhotep III’s statement in the Meidum graffito cannot be understood other than against this background.