Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter-Reformation

AMARNA

SUNSET

AMARNA

SUNSET

Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb,

and the Egyptian Counter-Reformation

Aidan Dodson

The American University in Cairo Press

Cairo New York

First published in 2009 by

The American University in Cairo Press

113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2009 by Aidan Dodson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Dar el Kutub No. 4198/09

ISBN 978 977 416 304 3

Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dodson, Aidan

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 13 12 11 10 09

Designed by Andrea El-Akshar

Printed in Egypt

To Dyan: thanks for a wonderful first decade!

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Maps

Abbreviations and Conventions

Preface

Introduction: Sunrise

1  The Noonday Sun

2  The Waning Sun

3  The Northern Problem

4  The Living Image of Amun

5  The Zananzash Affair

6  God’s Father to God

7  The Hawk in Festival

8  Sunset

Notes

Appendices

1  Chronology of Ancient Egypt

2  Relative Chronology of Egyptian and Foreign Kings of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Dynasties

3  Royal Names of the Late Eighteenth Dynasty

4  Tentative Genealogy of the Late Eighteenth Dynasty

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

All images are by the author except where otherwise stated.

Maps

Figures

MAPS

Map 1. The Nile Valley

Map 2. Tell el-Amarna

The capital letters indicate the locations of the city’s Boundary Stelea that mark out the city limits; a further three stelae were located on the west bank.

Map 3. The Near East during the fourteenth century BC

Map 4. Thebes

Buildings in black are those extant at the end of the reign of Akhenaten, those in dark gray are additions by Horemheb.

Map 5. The Temple-Complex of Amun-Re at Karnak

ABBREVIATIONS

AND

CONVENTIONS

Where titles of individuals are capitalized, they are more or less direct translations of the original Egyptian. Persons of the same name are distinguished by roman numerals or letters according to a basic system that has developed within Egyptology since the 1970s—see Dodson and Hilton 2004: 39.

PREFACE

In presenting yet another book on the Amarna Period to the world of Egyptologists, Egyptophiles, and other interested individuals, one feels the degree of trepidation one might otherwise associate with going alone into the zoo tiger-enclosure at feeding time. More so than almost any other era in ancient history, the reigns of Akhenaten and his immediate successors have come to be possessed by a wide variety of individuals, for whom this is something far more than simply a remote period of history. A hint of the widespread usage and abusage of the Amarna Period by people alive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries AD can be obtained from the lamented Dominic Montserrat’s superb Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (2000). That book should be compulsory reading for all who consider immersing themselves in the murky waters of Amarna studies.

Part of the problem has been a failure by nonspecialists to appreciate that very little of the Amarna story is indeed fact: much of what we think we know is actually (more or less) inspired guesswork based on what Sir Alan Gardiner so rightly called the rags and tatters that pass for the raw material of ancient Egyptian history writing. As such, scholarly interpretations can change radically overnight with the appearance of new hard evidence. Indeed, readers familiar with my previous published work on the period will doubtless be surprised that some of the key conclusions of the first half of this book are diametrically opposite to ideas I have vigorously propounded and defended over the past three decades. However, my change of views has been a result of the availability of new data, and it is important to be prepared to reconsider one’s position, even if it means repudiating long-held beliefs.

Thus, in spite of a century of further research, many nonspecialists remain convinced that the picture put forward by Arthur Weigall in 1910, and other popular works in the following decades, represent the facts of the Amarna Period. Thus Egyptologists who produce new interpretations can run the risk of being accused of such things as slandering the Founder of Monotheism (note capitalization) or of homophobia when pointing out that it now seems Akhenaten’s gay lover was actually his (female) wife!

It is partly against this background that the present book has been produced, attempting to put forward an up-to-date presentation of the period from the high point of Akhenaten’s reign through to the assumption of power by the Nineteenth Dynasty four to five decades later—in broad terms the last decades of the fourteenth century BC and the first of the thirteenth century. Treatments of this period have generally been overshadowed by the earlier years of Akhenaten, or distorted by a specific focus on Tutankhamun: my aim is therefore to try to produce a balanced view of these decades. Inevitably there are areas where the view put forward is very much my own—in some ways inevitably, given the lack of real consensus among Amarna Period specialists—but I have aimed to indicate areas where alternative interpretations exist, and I have made references to them. In this connection, I must point to the work of Marc Gabolde, whose 1998 book is an essential companion for anyone wrestling with the problems of the Akhenaten/Tutankhamun era. As will become clear, I differ widely from him in many areas, yet without his imagination and dogged research some of the key discoveries that have changed the history of the period—in particular the final proof of the true gender of King Neferneferuaten—might not yet have been made. I must thank him for various stimulating discussions and observations over the years.

I have tried to avoid novelty for the sake of it, and where I put forward or support a view that differs from the received wisdom—rare as that commodity is in Amarna studies—it is because this is either what seems to produce the most coherent scenario, or what sticks most closely to what the bare evidence suggests. On the other hand, the overall picture put forward inevitably depends on assuming the correctness of certain hypotheses—but with the acknowledgment that they are just that and do not claim to be facts, whatever those might be!

I am sure some readers may object that my characterization of the post-Akhenaten reaction as a counter-reformation is anachronistic. However, I see a number of parallels between the post-Akhenaten situation and that which prevailed in Europe during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries AD. Both involved a reaction to radical religious upheavals (Atenism in Egypt and Protestantism in Europe) by proponents of orthodoxy, but they combined an attempt to reverse these changes with significant alterations to the nominal status quo ante to reflect the new environment. The parallels seems thus not inapposite.

In writing this account, I have attempted to balance readability and accessibility for the more general reader with the demands of scholarship—hence the large swath of endnotes and extensive bibliography. Such a balancing act is difficult, and I am sure Egyptological colleagues would have wished to see more exhaustive analyses of certain points, while the nonspecialists may scratch their heads as to why an apparently esoteric detail is accorded so much space. However, I hope my compromises have not been too heinous. Similarly, translations aim for readability and basic accuracy, rather than cutting-edge grammatical analysis: in all cases, publications of the original texts are accessible via endnotes.

As always in such an enterprise, I have to thank all my various friends and colleagues for their help and stimulus over the years. Although it is always invidious to single out individuals, I must in particular thank Marc Gabolde and Ray Johnson for information, Diane Bergman, Martin Davies, Dyan Hilton, Salima Ikram, Jaromir Malek, David Moyer, Chris Naunton, Bob Partridge, and Cat Warsi for help with images, and Martin, Dyan, Reg Clark, and Sheila Hilton for their most useful comments on the manuscript. Any remaining errors or cases of faulty logic are of course wholly due to me.

    INTRODUCTION:

SUNRISE

The middle of the fourteenth century BC saw Egypt at the height of her powers. The conquests of the Thutmoside kings of the earlier part of the Eighteenth Dynasty ( fig. 1 ) had created a network of client states stretching some six hundred kilometers up into Syria, while her Nubian possessions stretched a similar distance south of Aswan ( maps 1 and 3 ). From these areas poured tribute and traded goods that made the cosmopolitan court of King Amenhotep III probably the most opulent in Egyptian history, the wealth from which financed great new building projects throughout the country. These included major sanctuaries far into Nubia, now a formal viceroyalty stretching beyond the Fourth Cataract. Here in particular the king could be found not simply as a divine ruler, but also as a god capable of being worshiped by his human alter ego. ¹ Not only was Amenhotep III a god at Soleb, but his wife, Tiye, was a goddess at nearby Sedeinga (fig. 2). ²

Fig. 1. The classic image of Thutmose III as conqueror, on the south face of the west tower of Pylon VII at Karnak.

Fig. 2. The temple at Sedeinga in Nubia, in which Queen Tiye