Lives of the Ancient Egyptians, page 16
Second, Sennefer was surrounded by a loyal and loving family. He was married twice, to a royal wet-nurse named Senay and a chantress of Amun named Merit. Third, he enjoyed royal favour as ‘one who satisfies the heart of the king’, and could boast that he had ‘reached old age in the praise of the Lord of the Two Lands’. This patronage manifested itself in concrete terms. Sennefer was granted the privilege of a Theban tomb, famous for the ceiling of its burial-chamber, which is covered with a representation of a vine, laden with pendant bunches of black grapes. He may have been responsible for the vineyards of Amun, or perhaps he was just a wine connoisseur and bon viveur, ‘the mayor who spends his time in happiness’. The pillars of the tomb, a feature found in royal sepulchres of the same period, also suggest an owner who aspired to the very best. Indeed, Sennefer may even have usurped a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, originally intended for Hatshepsut, for himself and his family.
Another impressive mark of the king’s esteem was being granted permission to have a granite pair-statue of himself and his wife Senay placed in Karnak temple, where it might receive offerings from worshippers. The statue showed the couple at the height of their prosperity: Senay wearing a formal dress and a huge wig, Sennefer adorned with the gold of honour, the rolls of fat around his torso demonstrating his wealth. He also sported his most treasured possession, an amulet in the shape of two hearts conjoined, inscribed with the throne name of Amenhotep II.
The pair-statue was evidently well used by visitors to Karnak, and the lap was worn away by the repeated presentation of offerings. Unusually, the piece was signed by the sculptors who made it, Amenmes and Djedkhonsu, ‘outline draughtsmen of the temple of Amun’. In this small detail, the two worlds of a high official are revealed: the public reputation and the private relationships. Sennefer seems to have used his contacts within Karnak temple to procure the services of skilled craftsmen for his own personal project. Such arrangements must have happened all the time, but are rarely attested in the written record.
The final piece of evidence for Sennefer’s life and character is an even more remarkable survival: a sealed and unopened letter addressed to a tenant-farmer named Baki who worked in the town of Hu (ancient Hut-sekhem). In the correspondence, Sennefer announced that he was due to arrive in Hu in three days’ time, and ordered Baki to have supplies ready. The tone of the letter is both imperious and hectoring. Sennefer warned Baki: ‘Do not let me find fault with you concerning your post’, and admonished him again a few sentences later: ‘Now mind, you shall not slack, for I know that you are sluggish and fond of eating lying down.’ Baki may, of course, have been particularly lazy or inept, but it is equally possible – and perhaps more likely – that this was the way Sennefer addressed all his subordinates. Egyptian officials were not always as perfect as their tomb reliefs and statues tried to suggest.
52 | Amenhotep III
RULER OF A GOLDEN AGE
The conquests of the early 18th Dynasty created an Egyptian empire in the Near East and Nubia, stretching ‘from Karoy [el-Kurru, near the Fourth Cataract] in the south to Naharin [the Kingdom of Mitanni, beyond the Euphrates] in the north’. Egypt prospered from this huge hinterland as exotic and valuable goods flowed into the treasury and royal workshops. Control of the Nubian deserts gave the pharaohs access to unparalleled quantities of gold, promoting trade and increasing national prosperity still further. The late 18th Dynasty was, therefore, quite literally a ‘golden age’ of power and prestige. Its zenith coincided with the reign of a king who consciously surrounded himself with gleaming objects as a metaphor for the brilliance of the sun: Amenhotep III.
He was born around 1403 bc, late in the reign of his grandfather Amenhotep II, after whom he was named. The boy was given the additional epithet mer-khepesh, ‘he who loves strength’; however, the strength of his reign was to be economic rather than military. When Amenhotep was only about two years old, his father acceded to the throne as Thutmose IV. The young prince probably grew up in the royal nursery within the harem palace at Gurob, on the edge of the Fayum. Here, he would have come to appreciate the lavish decoration and furnishings that were to be an abiding passion for the rest of his life.
When he was still a boy, Amenhotep suffered the loss of his older brother, Amenemhat. Not only must this have been a devastating personal bereavement, it also changed Amenhotep’s life forever, since he was now his father’s eldest surviving son and heir. By way of an induction into his new office, the Crown Prince was taken by his father on campaign in Nubia, to experience the military role of kingship at first hand. Amenhotep seems not to have taken to army life: with a single exception (a minor skirmish in Nubia), his reign of thirty-seven years would be devoid of campaigns, in stark contrast to the frequent battles waged by his predecessors.
His preparation for the throne was all too brief. At the tender age of about twelve, he became king in succession to his father. The mix of emotions must have been compounded by the untimely death, in the same year, of his sister Tentamun. The young Amenhotep had to perform the burial rites for both a father and a sister; this was followed soon afterwards by his coronation at Memphis (ancient Ineb-hedj). To complete a momentous year, Amenhotep issued a commemorative scarab announcing his marriage to the lady Tiye (no. 53), the woman who was to be his constant companion throughout his reign.
At first, affairs of state were handled by Amenhotep’s mother, Mutemwia, in her capacity as regent. Amenhotep himself set about demonstrating his virility, in preparation for assuming the reins of power as soon as he reached adolescence. To this end, in the second year of his reign, he took part in a staged bull-hunt in the Wadi Natrun. In a single day’s hunting, he claimed to have killed fifty-six bulls out of a total of 170 slaughtered by the royal party. After resting his horses for four days, he rode out again and killed another forty, commemorating the whole event on another set of specially issued scarabs. Kingship required not just brute strength and mastery of the untamed forces of nature, but also concrete expressions to impress the people and propitiate the gods: temples. So Amenhotep set his architects and builders to work on a series of projects, from a small temple to the vulture-goddess Nekhbet at Elkab (ancient Nekheb) to a limestone shrine at Heliopolis (ancient Iunu). Work was begun on a tenth pylon in the temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak, and on Amenhotep’s royal tomb in the isolated western branch of the Valley of the Kings.
The pace of building increased with the appointment of Amenhotep son of Hapu (no. 55) to the ministry of works, and the king also took steps to tighten his grip on the powerful priesthoods, appointing his brother-in-law Anen as Second Prophet of Amun in Thebes and Chief of Seers (High Priest of Ra) at Heliopolis. With the wealth of the great temples at his disposal, Amenhotep could lavish ever greater resources on his building projects, magnificent statuary, and the dedication of new cult images.
In the tenth year of his reign he issued a further commemorative scarab to record the number of lions (102) he had killed during his first decade on the throne, and, in the same breath, to note his diplomatic marriage to princess Gilukhepa, daughter of Shuttarna II, king of Mitanni. The lady arrived in Egypt with a retinue of 317 women. She was not Amenhotep’s only foreign wife. He also married two unnamed Babylonian princesses; the daughter of the king of Arzawa; and princess Tadukhepa, the daughter of Tushratta, Shuttarna II’s successor as king of Mitanni.
Despite such a collection of consorts, it was Amenhotep III’s first wife, Tiye, who remained undisputed favourite, and the most influential woman at his court. Her position is reflected in the fifth and final commemorative scarab issued by the king, to mark the excavation of a ceremonial lake for Tiye in her town of Djarukha (perhaps her birth-place, Akhmim). It measured 3,700 by 700 cubits (1,938 x 367 m; 6,358 x 1,204 ft), and the lavish opening ceremony involved the king and queen being rowed on it in the royal barge ‘The Aten Gleams’. This name reflected the increasing focus on solar worship under Amenhotep III: his palace at Thebes was called ‘Splendour of the Aten’, while one of his favourite epithets which he applied to himself was Aten-tjehen, ‘dazzling Aten’. This fixation on the visible disc of the daytime sun as a metaphor for kingship was to be the defining characteristic of his son’s reign.
After more than two decades on the throne, Amenhotep’s thoughts turned to the royal succession, and he appointed his eldest son, Crown Prince Thutmose, to the High Priesthood of Ptah in the capital city of Memphis. Father and son officiated together at the funeral and burial of the Apis bull. Back in Thebes, the king inaugurated work on one of his most significant projects to date, a temple at southern Ipet (Luxor). This bold new edifice, aligned towards Karnak rather than the river, was designed to serve as the backdrop for the annual Opet Festival at which the king communed in secret with the supreme god Amun-Ra, being rejuvenated by the experience and emerging to popular acclaim as ‘Foremost of all the living kas’. The implicit deification of the living king was made rather more explicit in the decoration of one of the inner chambers, which described Amenhotep’s birth as having arisen from a union of his mother and the god Amun. Shortly after work began at Luxor, tragedy struck when Crown Prince Thutmose died; his place as heir was taken by his younger brother, who was to carry Amenhotep’s glorification of the monarchy to its extreme.
The king’s thirtieth anniversary jubilee was an occasion for national rejoicing. The festivities were overseen by the trusted official, Amenhotep son of Hapu, and took place at Thebes, which from now on was the court’s permanent home. At the climax of the celebrations, the king, his mother Mutemwia, his consort Tiye and his daughter Sitamun, newly elevated to the rank of ‘King’s Great Wife’, sailed together across an artificial harbour in a dazzling golden bark. The solar imagery could not have been more explicit, with the three generations of royal women symbolizing the goddess Hathor’s roles as mother, wife and daughter of Ra. Two further jubilee festivals followed, in the king’s thirty-fourth and thirty-sixth years on the throne; at the latter celebrations, Amenhotep appeared covered from head to toe in gold jewelry. But no amount of formal association with the sun god could change his inescapable mortality. After a reign of thirty-seven years, Amenhotep III died, aged about fifty. Egypt’s dazzling sun had finally set.
53 | Tiye
QUEEN WITH AN INTEREST IN POWER-POLITICS
In the official record, the reigns of Egyptian monarchs often look like one-man shows, dominated by the person of the king, with other members of the royal circle afforded only minor bit-parts. By contrast, Amenhotep III’s glittering reign was very much a double-act. From his first year on the throne to the end of his life, his wife Tiye was his constant companion and support. In state texts, her name was closely associated with her husband’s. She was the recipient of the king’s favour to an extraordinary degree, the monuments dedicated to her ranging from a boating lake in Middle Egypt to a temple in Nubia. In common with earlier generations of 18th Dynasty royal women, Tiye exercised considerable influence at court and took an active and public role in government. She thus, unwittingly, set the scene for the extraordinary rise to power of her daughter-in-law, Nefertiti (no. 57).
Tiye was the daughter of middle-ranking provincial officials from Akhmim in Middle Egypt. Her father, Yuya, was a priest in the local temple of Min and overseer of its herds of cattle. Tiye’s mother, Tuyu, was a songstress in the cults of Amun and Hathor, and a leading temple musician ‘chief of entertainers’ in the cults of Amun and Min. Both parents were therefore closely involved in their local communities, but did not hold high office in regional or national government. When the newly crowned Amenhotep III chose Tiye as his wife, in the first year of his reign, he was therefore breaking with recent royal tradition by marrying a commoner from such an obscure background. But the bond between the couple, neither of them much older than twelve, was clearly strong from the start. Amenhotep promoted his parents-in-law, appointing Yuya as Master of the Horse and lieutenant-commander of the king’s chariotry, while bestowing on Tuyu the dignity of King’s Mother of the King’s Great Wife. Tiye’s brother, Anen, likewise received promotion. The king was keen to admit his wife’s family into the inner royal circle.
Tiye clearly took to royal life, enjoying the luxury and sophistication of Amenhotep III’s court. New fashions of clothing were sweeping Egypt, under the influence of its extensive foreign contacts, and Tiye enjoyed her fair share of elaborate garments. One of her most exotic creations was a feather dress with two vulture-wings that wrapped around the hips and thighs, tightly belted at the waist and held in place by wide shoulder straps. But Tiye was no mere dilettante. With her husband’s encouragement, she began to involve herself in affairs of state. She sent letters on her own behalf to foreign rulers, and received their replies, contributing to the upsurge in diplomatic correspondence characteristic of Amenhotep III’s reign.
On the domestic stage, she fulfilled the female roles necessary to complement her husband’s preferred model of divine kingship. Hence, she was Mut to his Amun; she adopted the horns and disc of the goddess Hathor to his Horus; she associated herself with Nekhbet to draw an explicit parallel between the vulture goddess who helped the sun god in his journey across the heavens and a royal consort supporting her husband through his earthly reign. The royal iconographers also cast Tiye in a more fearsome role, as defender of the king: in one relief, she is shown as a sphinx, trampling the enemies of pharaoh in a scene adapted straight from the imagery of kingship. It is highly probable that Tiye was closely involved in this carefully worked-out propaganda: the pouting lips and downturned mouth seen on her statues suggest a steely resolve behind the façade of queenly beauty. Indeed, Tiye employed her own sculptor, a man named Iuty, to create her likenesses; he was but one member of her extended household, led by her steward Kheruef.
From shortly after her husband’s coronation until his third jubilee festival, Tiye was ever at Amenhotep’s side. In the last year of his reign, a statue of Ishtar, Mesopotamian goddess of love and fertility, was sent to Egypt by Tushratta, king of Mitanni. It might have been intended as a symbol of the royal couple’s enduring affection, but with Amenhotep III’s death just a year later, Tiye found herself suddenly alone. She moved her household to the palace at Gurob to live out her widowhood surrounded by her faithful female staff: the head of the household, Teye; the singer, Mi; the maids, Nebetya and Tama. To placate her son, the new king Amenhotep IV (later Akhenaten), Tiye also maintained a residence at his new city of Akhetaten (Amarna); here her household was supervised by the steward Huya.
Tiye seems to have been a formidable presence in the early years of her son’s reign. Having embarked on a revolution in government, he could not afford to do without her experience and counsel. On one occasion, Tushratta wrote to Amenhotep IV (as he then was), urging him to consult his mother on matters of state, since she was the only one who understood Amenhotep III’s policies in detail. That a foreign ruler held Tiye in such high regard is testimony to her profound influence and political nous.
Having survived her husband by almost a decade, Tiye died in her early sixties; she is generally thought to have been buried by her son in the royal tomb at Amarna. However, the discovery of two shabti-figurines, referring to her as the King’s Mother, in Amenhotep III’s tomb at Thebes, suggests that she may in fact have been laid to rest next to her husband – as she would certainly have wished. Her influence as the matriarch of the family continued for another generation: her grandson Tutankhamun was buried with objects bearing her name, including a lock of her hair. Devoted wife, wise mother, beloved grandmother; diplomatic correspondent, official consort, patron of the arts: Tiye was all of these and more, a larger-than-life figure who continues to fascinate, thirty-three centuries after her death.
54 | Userhat
LOWLY SCRIBE, ARTISTIC PATRON
To be able to read and write was a rare and valuable skill in ancient Egypt. Membership of the country’s tiny literate class opened doors to a career in the administration, to the corridors of power. Hence, to be a ‘scribe’ was something to boast about, even if it did not lead to high office. A good example was Userhat, who lived and worked in Thebes in the reign of Amenhotep III. Userhat’s motley collection of titles included Scribe of the Census of Bread of Upper and Lower Egypt, Overseer of the Cattle of Amun, and Deputy Herald; but, more often than not, he referred to himself simply as ‘scribe’. His entry into the lower echelons of government had been helped, no doubt, by his distant royal connections: he had been brought up as a ‘child of the royal nursery’.
He remained, however, a lowly official, a small cog in the huge wheel of Theban bureaucracy. He set up a household, married a woman named Mutnofret, and they had three children: nothing exceptional. What has guaranteed Userhat’s lasting fame is not his career but his choice of artist to decorate his Theban tomb. By chance, he clearly knew one of the best artists of the day, someone able to bring new verve and vigour to the traditional stable of motifs. As a result, the scenes in Userhat’s tomb are some of the most famous in the whole canon of New Kingdom private funerary art. In the hands of the anonymous artist, a standard scene of hunting in the desert was transformed into a dynamic composition of colour, movement and pathos: desert hares and antelope flee in panic before a hail of arrows; a wounded fox, caught in a thorn bush, slowly bleeds to death. Such emotion and sense of action are rare indeed in tomb art; the artist of Userhat’s tomb was clearly a master.
