Thutmose IV may have begun a course that Amenhotep III completed, particularly in deliberately identifying himself with the sun-god. At Giza, on one stele he was shown wearing the gold s/tebiu-collar and armlets strongly associated with the solar deity’s favour. These jewels are often shown on representations of the king in funerary contexts, but on this stele (as well as on an ivory armlet from Amama, and on the king’s chariot) Thutmose IV is shown wearing them as a living ruler. Thutmose IV left a statue of himself as falcon king at Karnak (now in the Cairo Museum), and on a relief from his sandstone court at Karnak a statue of the king as falcon was pictured among other royal statuary. In these images the divine and solar aspects of the kingship are supreme.
The trend of elevating the royal associations with Egypt’s major gods (as seen in Thutmose Ill’s veneration of his own and earlier kingships in his jubilee temple within the precinct of Amun) became even more prominent during Thutmose IV’s reign. While never abandoning the notion that the dynastic line was best strengthened by marriage of the king to a king’s daughter (for both political and economic reasons), Thutmose IV, like Amenhotep II, increasingly emphasized divine associations of royal females. He placed his mother in the role of‘god’s wife of Amun’, as if she were the goddess Mut herself. This was her primary role, although Tiaa also held the titles of‘king’s mother’ and ‘great royal wife’ during most of Thutmose IV’s reign. Monuments with her name are known from Giza, the Faiyum, Luxor, Karnak, and the Valley of the Kings. This intentional association with the mother-goddess Mut was supplemented by iconographic and inscriptional connections between Tiaa and the goddesses Isis and Hathor. The king appears to have apportioned the ceremonial roles of priestess and queen among Tiaa and two other great royal wives. Tiaa appears in the Karnak jubilee court of her son, where she holds a mace while witnessing the monument’s foundation ceremony. In Amenhotep ITs jubilee pavilion Merytra (name later changed to Tiaa) was shown likewise holding a mace and a sistrum in her other hand. The imagery here probably signifies these queens’ status as ‘god’s wives of Amun’. The mace became a standard iconographic element of the ‘god’s wives’ later on.
A non-royal wife Nefertiry, attested in Giza and Luxor temple, was ‘great royal wife’ alongside Tiaa during the earlier years of rule, and Thutmose capitalized on this mother-son-wife triad (as did Amenhotep III later) to portray roles—for example, at Luxor temple— where he, as both god and king, accompanied his mother and wife goddesses enacting the roles of mother, wife, and sister-goddesses. Later, after Nefertiry had apparently either died or been set aside, he followed the trend of his family and married a sister, whose name may be read as laret. It is possible that he may have had to wait for laret to reach a marriageable age. Amenhotep Ill’s mother, Mutemwiya, was never acknowledged by Thutmose IV, either as major or minor queen, but a statue of Amenhotep’s court counsellor, the treasurer Sobekho-tep (buried in TT 63), shows the Prince Amenhotep in a favoured position before his father’s death. The tomb of Amenhotep’s royal nurse, Hekarnehhe (TT 64) also shows the young heir, but, since the tomb was completed in Thutmose IV’s reign, Mutemwiya does not appear. Several other princes are mentioned in texts in Hekarnehhe’s tomb, as well as in a rock graffito at Konosso, but it is not clear whether these are sons of Amenhotep II or Thutmose IV.
World History
