Fig. 5.5 Kiya
Kiya never bore the consort’s title of ‘King’s Wife’ and never wore the royal uraeus, but she was clearly an important and highly favoured member of the harem, accorded great respect in her lifetime and allowed to play a part in the rituals of Aten worship which had previously been confined to Akhenaten and Nefertiti.29 Not only did Kiya have her own sunshade, which would have come with its own endowment of land and therefore its own income, she was allowed to officiate both alongside Akhenaten and, surprisingly, alone. We have no confirmed portrait of Kiya in the round, but her two-dimensional image has survived, enabling us to recognize her calm and slightly smiling face which appears altogether softer and less angular than that of Nefertiti. Both women favoured the true Nubian wig which may well have served as a symbol of their status. We know that Kiya bore the king at least one daughter as we have a relief showing the proud parents together with their unnamed offspring. There is also strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that Kiya gave Akhenaten at least two sons. Kiya remained in favour during the middle years of Akhenaten’s reign and her name is associated with both the earlier and the later forms of the Aten’s name. By Year 12, however, Kiya had vanished, possibly disgraced but more likely dead, and her name and image had been erased from Maru-Aten. She disappeared without making use of the elaborate grave goods which were being prepared for her and her mummy has never been found.
The Amarna workmen’s village was tucked into a little valley in the cliffs a discreet 1.2 kilometres to the east of the main city and conveniently close to the southern group of tombs. Here were housed the labourers – possibly experienced workers imported from the Theban workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina – occupied in cutting the royal and other tombs in the Amarna cliff.30 Here also lived their wives, children and dependants and the officer in charge of the workforce, who was provided with a larger and more elaborate home. In contrast with the more haphazard city proper, the village was laid out with a strict regularity and was enclosed by a wall with a single guarded gate. Within the complex each workman was allocated a small unit measuring a mere five by ten metres, and seventy-three such houses were built in six straight terraced rows facing on to five narrow streets. The workmen were provided with only the basic shell of their home, and each house was finished off by the family using local mud-bricks. This allowed a degree of diversity in the internal planning of the houses, although the standard home was divided by cross-walls into four small rooms: a reception area, a family room, a bedroom or storage room and a kitchen which did not necessarily have an oven. None of the village houses contained a bathroom.
Conditions within the houses must have been, to modern eyes at least, unacceptably crowded, and we may assume that good use was made of the flat roof which could have served as an additional living and sleeping area. It is even possible that some of the houses were extended upwards to provide a second storey, perhaps a large private room reserved for the women of the family and their rituals. Some of the painted plaster fragments recovered in the earliest excavations at the village show what appear to be convolvulus flowers twisting around a papyrus stem; these plants were important elements employed in scenes of childbirth and suckling.31 Outside the village wall individual families built small private chapels where they could not only worship but sit in peace, eat meals and perhaps even keep animals. Some enterprising villagers, undaunted by the lack of soil and water, every drop of which had to be transported from the main city, maintained small allotments where they raised pigs and even attempted to grow vegetables.32
The geography of the Amarna cliffs meant that the tombs of the nobles fell into two distinct groups on either side of the royal wadi. Generally speaking, Akhenaten’s officials chose to be buried, as they had lived, close to their place of work, so we find the tombs of the priests and the officials of the royal residence included in the northern group, while the southern group houses the tombs of the great state officials such as Mahu, Parennefer and Ay. Forty-five tombs were started for Amarna’s élite although, due to the short-lived nature of the site combined with a shortage of skilled workmen, only twenty-four were inscribed and few were completed. These élite tombs must represent Akhenaten’s innermost circle of trusted friends who would have had little choice but to be seen to support every aspect of the new religion including the establishment of the new burial ground, and whose tombs may well have been the gift of the king himself; the decorative scheme within the tombs certainly suggests that Akhenaten, if not actually their designer, would have been fully aware of their content. No cemetery for the wider population has yet been found at Amarna, although there was a small graveyard associated with the workmen’s village, and it seems likely that those who could afford it may well have chosen to be interred in their ancestral home towns. The less important members of society were presumably buried, as they were at other cities, in relatively simple tombs and graves dug into the desert sand.
Under normal circumstances the king’s advisers would be the sons of his father’s ministers who would have been raised alongside him in the royal school attached to the harem. Throughout the dynastic age we can trace many families of statesmen who pass down their royal duties from father to son. Akhenaten, however, displays a clear and unusual preference for new, but not necessarily young, blood, and many of his courtiers, whom Alan Gardiner has classed as novi homines,33 claim to have been discovered, taught or raised to their present position through the generosity of the king. Clearly, Akhenaten relished his role as a creator and teacher. Tutu, a statesman so distinguished that he was
Fig. 5.6 The families of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten
mentioned in the Amarna letters, admits to being ‘a servant favoured by his Lord; his teaching and his instruction are in my innermost heart’, while the mayor of Amarna bore a name which translates as ‘Akhenaten created me’ – a name which can hardly have been given to him at birth. Even Ay, who almost certainly came from a distinguished line of civil servants, tells us that ‘my Lord taught me and I do his teaching’. The Royal Scribe and Chancellor, May, was perhaps the most fulsome in his public appreciation of his patron:
Listen to what I say… for I tell to you the benefits which the ruler did for me. Then truly you shall say ‘How great are those things that were done for this man of no account!’… I was a man of low origin on both my father’s and my mother’s side, but the prince established me. He allowed me to grow… He gave me provisions and rations every day, I who had once been one who begged bread…34
Parennefer, the royal butler, is the only official known to have followed the royal court from Thebes. This preference for new blood may simply have been a reflection of the king’s wish to avoid the advice of those closely associated with the old traditions and the old cults, but it may perhaps add some support to the suggestion that Akhenaten did not enjoy an entirely normal royal childhood networking in the royal nursery. The old families, whose sons would have expected to serve the king, seem to have been excluded from the delights of Amarna life. Perhaps generations of political experience encouraged them to keep a low profile during such an innovative regime.
The rock-cut tombs are, due to their nature, in a much better state of preservation than the mud-brick city, although here too there has been a great deal of deliberate destruction both ancient and modern, plus damage due to a variety of natural causes and problems resulting from post-dynastic usage as homes, burial sites and even Coptic churches. Bats have proved a particular nuisance in many of the tombs, not only corroding the walls, but causing an extremely unpleasant odour. Norman de Garis Davies, whose inspirational work of recording the tombs at the turn of the century has ensured that they are today accessible to scholars, gives some idea of the extent of the problem while working in the tomb of the Chamberlain and Treasurer, Tutu:
The surface of the stone… is most unsightly and sadly corroded; indeed in the upper parts the sculpture is almost effaced. This is due to the countless bats that infect the tomb and m
ake their presence known to the nose as unpleasantly as to the eye… [in a footnote] When working here I cleared the tomb of them in an hour or two by a massacre of about a thousand victims – a good proof of how easily the pests could be kept down or exterminated.35
It is in the scenes that decorate the tomb walls that we are permitted a glimpse of the royal family as they go about their daily duties in a city whose architecture is represented in a somewhat idiosyncratic form. The most elaborate tomb is that belonging to Ay and Tey and here, as we might expect, Nefertiti features prominently. We have already considered the scene at the Window of Appearance where both husband and wife receive gold from the king and queen (Fig. 2.3). Here Nefertiti, in contrast to the equivalent scene in the tomb of Ramose, is permitted to play a full part in the ceremony and, although she still stands behind Akhenaten, she joins in the presentation. The three little girls are making a valiant attempt to be helpful; Meritaten is actually holding a tray of collars and also presents directly to her putative grandparents. Meketaten holds a tray but stands with one arm around her mother’s neck – it looks as if she too has the right to present gold, but is too young to cooperate – while baby Ankhesenpaaten, perhaps bored with the ritual, turns to caress her mother. All the royal family appear to be completely naked, although it seems likely that the garments of the king, if not those of the queen, are merely hidden behind the balcony wall. Both Ay and Tey are clearly having a wonderful time. Ay already has five necklaces around his neck as he reaches out to catch another, and included in a pile of loot at his feet is a remarkable pair of red leather gloves. The next scene shows Ay departing the palace, wearing his gloves and holding them out to the admiring crowds.
The Amarna tomb of Parennefer, ‘he who washes the hands of His Majesty’, includes a Window scene which was largely completed and painted in antiquity, but which has suffered extensive modern damage. Fortunately, with the help of earlier copies, Norman de Garis Davies was able to restore the scene to a remarkable extent.36 His reconstruction shows the royal family again on the balcony, with the Aten caressing Nefertiti in an almost sexual way; one ray encircles her waist, a small hand is placed on her left breast which is exposed by the folds of her dress, and a third hand appears round the side of her crown. Akhenaten too is gripped firmly around the chest by the Aten ‘as if to prevent them [i.e. the king and queen] losing their balance as they lean over the window-sill’. Nefertiti, shown at a slightly smaller scale than Akhenaten, stands behind her husband and observes while the king leans forward and waves his arms. Her face is largely destroyed, but we can see that both king and queen are blessed with remarkably long necks and exaggerated Amarna profiles. It is very obvious that the queen has two left hands; the Amarna workmen only mastered the distinction between left and right hands and feet at some time between Years 6 and 9, and even then this distinction was reserved for the royals, with the less important citizens condemned to hop through life on two left feet. The three royal daughters are in the room behind the window, in the company of two bowing attendants and their aunt, Mutnodjmet.
Elsewhere in the tomb of Parennefer we see the royal family enjoying a stroll, possibly on a visit to the tombs. The king is grasped firmly by the Aten, while he in turn has his right arm passing around Nefertiti’s neck so that the fingers of their right hands are somewhat clumsily entwined. The artist, evidently wishing to stress this unusual handhold, has both extended the length of Akhenaten’s right arm and exaggerated the size of the two right hands. Nefertiti’s dress is again transparent and open to reveal her abdomen, hips and thighs, and she has abandoned her trademark crown in favour of a simple wig and uraeus. She is of even smaller stature than in the Window scene; here the top of Nefertiti’s head barely reaches Akhenaten’s armpit.
The tomb of Huya is of particular interest to those following the movements of the extended royal family. Huya, Superintendent of the royal harem, Superintendent of the Treasury, Steward in the house of the King’s Mother, the King’s Wife, Tiy’, was, as his titles imply, the major-domo of Queen Tiy and a favourite of Akhenaten. His tomb, which includes the standard scene of its owner receiving gold from the king and queen, is in many ways a celebration of Tiy’s visits to Amarna. Although we know that Tiy had her own Amarna sunshade, and is likely to have had her own Amarna home, there is no evidence to suggest that she took up permanent residence at the new city. For a long time egyptologists were convinced that, following the death of her husband, Tiy had gone into semi-retirement at the palace of Medinet el-Gurob on the edge of the Faiyum. Here stood a mud-brick complex which has yielded many inscriptions of Amenhotep III and Tiy, including the famous yew head which shows Tiy as an elderly woman (Plate 3). However, the assumption that the building functioned as an 18th Dynasty harem palace is by no means proven; many of the recovered artefacts are religious or even funerary rather than domestic, implying that Gurob
Fig. 5.7 Nefertiti and Akhenaten entertain Tiy
may well have been a cult centre for the worship of the dead Amenhotep III.37 Tiy, a commoner queen who owed her exalted position to her marriage with the king rather than to her birth, may well have been determined to keep her deceased husband’s memory alive. Her inscriptions, which come complete with references to Osiris, make it clear that she at least had not entirely abandoned the old ways of thinking:
The King’s Chief Wife, his beloved, the Lady of the Two Lands Tiy made it as her monument for her beloved brother [husband] for the Ka of the Osiris the King [Amenhotep III] justified.
Tiy’s devotion to her dead husband, and Akhenaten’s respect for his father, may explain why Amenhotep III appears on the lintel to the north doorway of the first hall in the tomb of Huya (Fig. 5.6). The decoration of this lintel is curiously asymmetrical and unbalanced by Egyptian standards. The lintel is divided in two by a vertical line. The right-hand side shows Amenhotep III seated to face Tiy and one of the royal princesses, while the left-hand side shows Akhenaten and Nefertiti who both face left, although Nefertiti’s head is turned towards Akhenaten, and four of their daughters who are approaching from the left.
In the same tomb we see Queen Tiy enjoying a meal with Akhenaten and Nefertiti. The royal couple sit side by side opposite the dowager queen, their feet raised on hassocks, with the two eldest princesses seated on small chairs beside their mother. Huya appears as a small, bowing figure at his mistress’s feet. Scenes of the royal family eating and drinking are very rare, yet here Akhenaten is tucking into something which looks very much like a giant kebab or even a rack of ribs, while Nefertiti gnaws on a duck. Beside the royal diners, individual food stands are piled high with every delicacy Egypt could offer. Drink flows freely, and in a parallel scene we are shown Tiy, Akhenaten and Nefertiti with goblets raised to their lips (Fig. 5.7). This conspicuous consumption and obvious enjoyment of the bounties of the Aten, which brings to mind the generous offerings which Akhenaten felt it appropriate to supply for the enjoyment of his god, may perhaps go some way to explaining Akhenaten’s less than streamlined shape.
Amenhotep III is absent from the scene, but seated beside Tiy is a young girl wearing a side-lock who is identified merely as the ‘King’s Daughter’ Beketaten. Neither her father the king nor her mother is named. Beketaten, whose name means ‘Handmaiden of the Aten’, is clearly associated with Queen Tiy and we would expect her to be Tiy’s daughter by the late Amenhotep III. Confirmation of this parentage is suggested by her inclusion in Huya’s ‘lintel scene’ where she appears with Tiy before Amenhotep III. However, this is the first time that we have heard of Beketaten, who seems to have sprung from nowhere. Her obvious youth, the observation that her name includes the ‘Aten’ element and the fact that she is never specifically identified as the daughter of Amenhotep III have combined with a mistaken assumption that Queen Tiy’s visit to Amarna must have occurred during Akhenaten’s Year 12, and have led to speculation that Beketaten must have been born after the start of Akhenaten’s rule. That would imply either that she was not the daugh
ter of Amenhotep III, who was presumably dead when she was conceived, or that Amenhotep III was alive during his son’s reign.38 Unfortunately, Huya neglects to date this intriguing scene, and we have no idea which year or years Tiy visited her son.
Neither her size nor her side-lock should necessarily be taken as an indication that Beketaten was a very young child at the time of her visit to Amarna. The artists who decorated the tombs were not always consistent in their depictions of the royal children and Beketaten may well be much older than her portrait suggests, maybe as old as thirteen or fourteen. If we are correct in the assumption that Tiy married at the age of twelve and remained fertile into her mid-forties, it is perfectly possible for her to have had a five-year-old daughter at the time of Amenhotep III’s death. All these assumptions, although nothing more than educated guesswork, allow little difficulty in inserting Beketaten into the royal family as Akhenaten’s sister, and it is tempting to speculate whether Beketaten could in fact be the renamed Princess Nebetah, Akhenaten’s youngest sister, about whom so little is known. An alternative theory, that Beketaten may have been Tiy’s granddaughter adopted by her grandmother, is plausible but suffers somewhat from a lack of evidence,39 while the suggestion that Beketaten was Tiy’s daughter by her son Akhenaten, which was first put forward by Velikovsky and then taken up by some of the more sensational writers of historical ‘biography’, is entirely groundless.40
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