Tiye was the most influential woman of the king’s reign, and she survived her husband by at least a few years. She was so important to him that she not only appears with him on temple walls at Soleb and west Thebes, accompanying him at the jubilee festivities, but she was deified in her own temple at Sedeinga in Upper Nubia and became part of the royal solar programme. As the solar eye of Ra in the Sudan, she would have joined the deity Nebmaatra to return to Egypt and restore order {‘Maat’) to the world. The role she did not play was that of god’s wife of Amun, and it is this fact that accounts for her scarcity on the monuments from Karnak and Luxor. She is known only from a small shrine at Karnak later usurped for Tutankhamun—not at all at Luxor.
After her husband’s death, the king of Mitanni, Tushratta, wrote to Tiye asking her to remind her son Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten of the close relationship between him and Amenhotep 111. Perhaps upon her own death she was first entombed at Amarna, then moved to either (or both) KV 22 or 55. Tiye gave birth to Satamun, Henuttaneb, Nebetiah, and Isis, all of whom appear on statues and smaller objects associated with the royal couple. Satamun was the most elevated of Tiye’s daughters, and chairs made for her were found in the tomb of Yuya and Tuya (KV 46). She bore the title of‘great royal wife’ simultaneously with Tiye, while the other daughters were called ‘king’s wife’ or ‘king’s consort’. The economic and, particularly under Amenhotep 111, religious significance of the king’s marriage to his own daughters has been discussed a number of times already in this chapter and dates back to the beginning of the dynasty. In pairing his wife and daughter(s) with himself on monuments, Amenhotep encouraged the image of the sun-god accompanied by the mother goddess (Nekhbet, Nut, Isis) and the daughters of Ra (Hathor, Maat, Tefnut). More practically, the king enlarged his own holdings, not by giving his daughters to non-royal men to marry, but by himself marrying into wealth. He asked for and received a Babylonian princess as wife, and he married two Mitannian princesses (one of the latter, Taduhepa, having reached Egypt only just in time to become a widow and then marry Amenhotep IV).
Male offspring of Amenhotep III and Tiye certainly included Amenhotep IV. The mother of a king’s son and sem-priest Thutmose, who may have been older than Amenhotep, is unknown. Whether the king had offspring by his foreign wives is unknown, but there are a number of court women, princes, and princesses known by name from funerary objects unearthed near Malkata. Some of these may have been royal family members, others minor wives.
The body of a royal woman was found in the cache of mummies in the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV 35). She has been identified as Queen Tiye on the basis of hair samples matched to strands of the queen’s hair carefully boxed in Tutankhamun’s tomb. The certainty of this identification is in question, and confusion persists, given that objects in the name of Tiye were found both in KV 22 and in the enigmatic KV 55. The Japanese expedition at KV 22 has found elements of a coffin that could belong to a queen, but whether that would be Tiye or Satamun, the daughter whom Amenhotep III took as great royal wife during his reign, is unknown.
World History
