The predictable behaviour of the River Nile made Amenhotep’s own country the most prosperous and fertile in the ancient world. The annual inundation, or flooding, ensured that the Egyptian farmers could, with relatively little effort, grow crops which were the envy of their neighbours and, while the agricultural land was under water, provided a vast labour force available for work on state projects. If the Nile failed to flood, or if the waters rose too high, there could be grave problems, but Amenhotep was truly blessed by Amen, and the Nile behaved impeccably throughout his lengthy reign. Grain was grown in vast quantities; it was used to pay the wages and to make the bread and beer which were staples of the Egyptian diet, while any surplus was stored in vast warehouses to provide against future lean times. Amenhotep’s highly efficient civil service, which included a band of tax collectors who visited the primary producers on a regular basis to extract payment in kind, ensured that the warehouses were constantly topped-up.
Life was good for those who dwelt along the Nile. A wide range of vegetables, fruit, fish, fowl, small game and meat was available to supplement the basic diet of bread and beer. The thick Nile mud, sun-dried into bricks, made an excellent and very cheap building material, while both limestone and sandstone were available for the more permanent construction of temples and tombs. Flax was grown to spin into linen cloth, papyrus was grown for paper, and the deserts which bounded the Nile Valley were exploited for their precious metals and minerals which included gold, turquoise, amethyst and jasper. Only good quality timber was missing; this had to be imported from Lebanon. This superabundance of natural bounty had been boosted during the earlier part of the 18th Dynasty by the booty brought back from successful foreign campaigns. As the Egyptian empire grew, the royal coffers were further supplemented by the taxes and tribute extracted from Asian and African vassals eager to remain on good terms with their overlord. Egypt now held control over Nubia’s mineral riches, and a steady stream of gold flowed into the treasury. At the same time there was an expansion in merchant shipping and an increase in foreign trade which was accompanied by an influx of exotic visitors who introduced new ideas and new skills so that Aegean, Asian and African influences started to creep into the hitherto rather insular Egyptian arts and crafts. Egypt was now truly cosmopolitan in a way that she had never been before.
Exaggerated rumours of Amenhotep’s fabulous wealth spread throughout the Near East. His brother kings were envious and not too proud to try to divert some of that wealth towards themselves. A surprisingly large part of the surviving 18th Dynasty diplomatic correspondence is concerned with lists of valuable goods exchanged between kings, and there was a great deal of childish bickering over the relative values of presents expected, requested, received and sent. Tushratta of Mitanni, newly ascended to his throne, was certainly not too embarrassed to ask point-blank for a generous allocation of gold:
May my brother treat me ten times better than he did my father… May my brother send me in very great quantities gold that has not been worked, and may my brother send me much more gold than he sent to my father. For in my brother’s country gold is as plentiful as dirt.5
Tushratta’s letter was accompanied by a greeting gift which, although lacking the ‘very great quantities of gold’ which were so desirable, nevertheless included one inlaid golden goblet, twenty pieces of lapis lazuli, ten teams of horses, ten chariots and thirty men and women.
Egypt’s New Kingdom population of approximately 4 million benefited from the strong economy. As the king grew ever richer he was able to pass his wealth downwards by creating employment for vast numbers of labourers and craftsmen. The civil service and the army had developed into efficient professional units; bureaucrats and soldiers were now rewarded for acts of outstanding loyalty or bravery by a gift of gold presented at a special ceremony by the grateful king. The priesthood of Amen-Re, already in receipt of a good income from its numerous assets supplemented by generous offerings from the royal palace, was now entitled to a large share of all foreign tribute, and the enormous temple storehouses were slowly filling. The new-found affluence of the Egyptian élite was reflected in the fashions of the day, which rejected the pure lines of the classic linen sheath dresses, kilts and tunics popular during the Old and Middle Kingdoms in favour of more frivolous garments; voluminous pleated, folded and fringed clothes were worn with full make-up, an array of semi-precious jewellery, earrings – a new fashion for men and women – and long, heavy wigs. The brightly painted tombs of the nobles on the west bank at Thebes suggest a relaxed hunting, fishing and banqueting lifestyle which makes the more muted Old and Middle Kingdom scenes appear positively austere.
Amenhotep, officially head of the army, the priesthood and the civil service, relied heavily upon the small core of bureaucrats who ran the country on his behalf. Included in his cabinet were men of high birth, born to inherit their fathers’ positions, who had been raised alongside the king in the royal school, and men of more humble origin who had, by their exceptional intelligence and ability, earned promotion to the most influential positions in the land. Amenhotep gathered around him some of the finest administrators in his country’s history, and Egypt’s prosperity throughout his reign bears witness to their success. Most famous of all his bureaucrats was Amenhotep son of Hapu, a relatively humble man from the Delta town of Athribis who rose to become ‘Scribe of Recruits’ and ‘Overseer of All Works of the King’, and who was the mastermind behind the tasteful elegance of many of Amenhotep’s Theban monuments. Amenhotep son of Hapu was richly rewarded for his services; he was allowed to place his own statues in the temples of Amen and Mut at Karnak and was eventually given the unprecedented honour of a splendid mortuary temple close to that of his master on the west bank at Thebes. For many years after his death Amenhotep son of Hapu was revered as a wise man and worshipped as a demi-god at the Theban site of Deir el-Bahri. His cult continued until the Graeco-Roman period.
Freedom from expensive and time-consuming foreign campaigns allowed Amenhotep and his ministers to turn their attention inwards, towards the improvement of their own land. Making full use of the vast wealth and surplus labour at his disposal, and deploying some of the best architects and craftsmen which Egypt was ever to produce, Amenhotep instigated a building programme for the glorification of Egypt’s gods and, of course, the commemoration of his own name. Construction started on an unprecedented scale up and down the Nile as insignificant mud-brick chapels were demolished to be replaced by impressive stone temples dedicated to an array of local gods. Heliopolis (temple of Horus), Sakkara (the Serapeum), Hermopolis (temple of Thoth) and Elephantine (temple of Khnum) were among those regional centres which benefited from the king’s generosity. Nubia received more than her fair share of new monuments, while at the northern capital of Memphis the ‘Castle of Nebmaatre’, a temple dedicated jointly to the god Ptah and to Amenhotep himself, dazzled all who saw it.
At Thebes the Karnak complex, home of the state god Amen-Re and his family, saw building works at the temples of Mut and Montu. The beautiful White Chapel of Senwosret I, now demolished, was used as filling inside a magnificent decorated pylon or gateway which Amenhotep built to face the river, while a smaller undecorated pylon flanked by two colossal statues of the king was constructed on the south side of the temple of Amen. Gazing from an elegant plinth over the sacred lake, an outsized stone scarab-beetle observed the aquatic processions of the god and his entourage. All these monuments, erected with surprising speed given that Amenhotep’s architects and builders were working without the modern benefits of steam power and the combustion engine, were well designed and well built, each lavishly decorated by master-craftsmen using the finest materials that the treasury could supply. Amenhotep himself tells us that his temple of Montu combined every type of noble and precious metal; the principal materials used included vast amounts of electrum (a mixture of silver and gold), gold, bronze and copper, augmented with lapis lazuli and turquoise.
Three kilometres to the south of K
arnak stood the hitherto rather shabby Luxor Temple, a shrine dedicated jointly to Amen, to the ithyphallic god Min and to the celebration of the divine royal soul or Ka. Amenhotep rebuilt Luxor as a sandstone palace fit for the gods, so that it formed a suitable theatre for the annual Opet Festival, a lengthy celebration during which the king’s own identity would effectively merge with that of Amen. This connection with the divine soul made Luxor an eminently suitable place for Amenhotep to tell the story of his divine conception as the son of Mutemwia and Amen-Re, a story-line which he had copied wholesale from the walls of King Hatchepsut’s mortuary temple at nearby Deir el-Bahri.
The new Luxor Temple was linked to the Karnak Temple by an avenue of sphinxes, which allowed the gods to travel in public splendour between their various homes. Amenhotep was particularly fond of public processions, and he covered Thebes with a network of sacred routes connecting all the major east and west bank temple sites. On festival days the whole city celebrated as the gods emerged from the darkness of their shrines to sail along the processional avenues in their sacred boats carried high on the shoulders of their priests, accompanied by an entourage of soldiers, musicians, acrobats and dancers. The proper enjoyment of festivals was taken very seriously. At the west bank village of Deir el-Medina the workmen were given official leave from their labours in the Valley of the Kings in order to brew festival beer, while those afflicted with severe post-festival hangovers were allowed further time off work to recover.
On the west bank at Thebes Amenhotep built himself an immense mortuary temple of unprecedented luxury, recording its splendours on a stela housed within the temple itself:
A fortress made out of fine white sandstone, wrought entirely with gold, its floors decorated with silver and all of its doors decorated with electrum… Its lake was filled by the high Nile, possessor of fish and ducks, and brightened with baskets of flowers. Its workshops were filled with male and female servants…6
The temple functioned during the king’s lifetime as a temple of Amen. After his death it would become more specialized, dedicated to servicing the cult of the dead king for all eternity.
Unfortunately, the mortuary temple intended to last for ever did not survive the vandalism of later pharaohs, most notably the 19th Dynasty King Merenptah, who demolished it in order to re-use its stone in their own buildings. However, the two seated quartzite statues of the king, each measuring 21.3m from pedestal to crown, which had originally flanked the temple entrance, remained untouched. There they still stand, isolated and battered but unbowed, beside the modern tourist road which leads to the west bank ferries. During the Graeco-Roman period these figures became known as the Colossi of Memnon, a corruption of Amenhotep’s throne name, Nebmaatre, into the name of the legendary Ethiopian hero who had been killed by the Greek Achilles at Troy. Visitors to Thebes were taught that Memnon himself was buried at the feet of the northern monument, and when every morning an eerie moaning sound was heard to emanate from this figure, the noise was understood to be Memnon greeting his mother Eos (Aurora), goddess of the dawn. In fact the noise was the result of structural damage caused by an earthquake; its exact cause is not known and various theories have been suggested including the evaporation of night-time moisture from within the statue, wind whistling through the fissures in the figure, or the expansion of the stone warmed by the morning sun. When the Roman emperor Septimus Severus restored the monument, Memnon was heard to cry no more.
Every Egyptian king needed a queen to complete his role and supply the next heir to the throne. The divine triad of Osiris, Isis and Horus set the pattern for the ideal royal family and, just as Egypt could not function without a king, the king who took the role of Osiris could never be complete without his wife (Isis) and the son who would eventually replace him (Horus). Amenhotep III had inherited his father’s harem and was not short of female companions, but he needed an official consort. He was therefore married within two years of his assumption to a young lady named Tiy, and Tiy, at twelve or thirteen years of age, became queen of the most powerful country in the world.7
… King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Nebmaatre, son of Re, Amenhotep ruler of Thebes, given life, and the king’s principal wife Tiy, may she live. The name of her father is Yuya and the name of her mother is Thuyu; she is the wife of a mighty king…8
During the first eleven years of his reign Amenhotep ‘published’ a series of large scarabs inscribed with several lines of text commemorating important events. These scarabs, issued in the same way that a contemporary monarch might issue a commemorative medal or coin, were distributed throughout Egypt and sent abroad to impress his fellow kings. The undated scarab issued to publicize the royal marriage makes it clear that Tiy was the daughter of a non-royal couple named Yuya and Thuyu who hailed from the prosperous town of Akhmim on the east bank of the Nile, opposite the modern town of Sohag. That an 18th Dynasty king should select a queen who was not already a high-ranking member of the royal family was curious but certainly not unprecedented. Marriage with a close relative may have had many advantages but it was not compulsory and, although many kings chose to marry a full or half-sister, Tuthmosis III and Amenhotep II had both selected non-royal women as their principal wives. Amenhotep’s own mother, Mutemwia, although she used the non-specific title of ‘Heiress’, never claimed to be the daughter of a king.
Amenhotep seems to have intended his marriage scarab to make an unusual situation clear to his people; to confirm that Tiy, although of relatively humble extraction, was not to be classed as a minor wife or a concubine. She was his consort, the queen of a great empire, and it was her son who would one day inherit the throne of Egypt. In fact Tiy was of humble birth only when compared to her exalted in-laws. Yuya and Thuyu were certainly not the ‘Egyptians of mediocre, if not of low, extraction’ identified by Gaston Maspero and others;9 they were members of the wealthy and educated élite who effectively formed non-royal dynasties parallel to the royal dynasty, handing positions of trust and power from father to son. Such families were often linked by marriage both to each other and to the royal family, and it is possible that Yuya was already related to the young king, perhaps as the brother of Mutemwia. Yuya, a former army officer, held several important posts including ‘Overseer of the King’s Horses’ and ‘God’s Father’ and served as a high-ranking priest of Min. Thuyu, like many upper-class women, was included among the musicians of the state god Amen, and she was also active in the more local cults of Min and Hathor. Like her husband, she held a series of positions at court but, not surprisingly, the title which gave her most pleasure and which was repeated over and over again in her tomb was that of ‘Royal Mother of the Chief Wife of the King’.
The queen’s brother, Anen, was a man of some standing who served as an official of Re at Karnak and, more importantly, as the Second Prophet of Amen at Thebes at a time when the cult of Amen was one of the most powerful and wealthy presences in Egypt. Anen was eventually interred alongside the great and the good in the prestigious Sheik Abd el-Gurna burial site on the west bank at Thebes, where curiously his damaged tomb makes no mention of the fact that he was brother-in-law to the king. His sister’s marriage may well have helped his career, but royal patronage via a sister was not something which Anen cared to acknowledge. Indeed, Anen’s parentage is confirmed only because Thuyu includes his name on her sarcophagus, suggesting that he may have predeceased both his mother and his sister.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that Tiy had a second brother, a man called Ay. We know that a courtier of this name rose to prominence under Amenhotep IV, but unfortunately Ay does not include details of his parentage in his elaborately decorated tomb. We can tell that Ay was close to the royal family as he refers to himself as the ‘One trusted by the good god’ and ‘Foremost of the companions of the king’. He includes among his many accolades some of Yuya’s titles, including ‘Overseer of the King’s Horses’ and ‘God’s Father’. As it was common practice for the first-born son to inherit his father’s titles
, and as Ay is known to have dedicated a chapel to Min at Akhmim, home town of Yuya and Thuyu, a link to the family of Tiy seems indicated. Even the names of Yuya and Ay hint that the two may have been related; we are not altogether certain how Yuya was pronounced but it is likely to have been something close to ‘Aya’, and both names may in fact have been nicknames or shortened forms of a more traditional Egyptian name. Cyril Aldred has even suggested that there was a close physical similarity between Yuya and Ay, with both displaying a large nose, receding forehead, protruding cheek-bones, prominent lips and a deep jaw. However, as we do not have Ay’s body, this resemblance is based on Ay’s portraits and statuary and is therefore not as clear-cut as we might wish.10
‘Yuya’ – perhaps because it was a nickname – was certainly an unusual name in ancient Egypt; the semi-literate artisans who were charged with labelling their patron’s monuments and funerary goods had trouble with the spelling and each eventually produced his own Yuya variant. Mis-spellings were by no means uncommon in Egyptian tombs, but Yuya’s name seems to have caused more problems than most, and this has led to suggestions that Yuya may have been an Asiatic with an unfamiliar foreign name.11 The idea that Tiy may have been of foreign blood, possibly a Syrian princess, seemed an attractive one to those who first studied her. Flinders Petrie was quite firm in his belief that Tiy, who he felt bore a striking resemblance to depictions of Asiatic prisoners at Karnak, was of northern Syrian extraction and Wallis Budge concurred, agreeing that the queen, with her fair complexion and blue eyes, ‘has all the characteristics of the women belonging to certain families who may be seen in North-eastern Syria to this day’. Others proclaimed Tiy to be of Lebanese extraction.12 In stark contrast, Tiy has also been claimed as a woman of Nubia-Kush with ‘full dark Africoid looks’.13
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