The thirty-eight-year reign of Amenhotep III was primarily a period of peace and affluence. The construction of royal monuments during the reign was on a scale with few parallels, and the retinue of the king left tombs, statues, and shrines that rivalled those of many former rulers. Sadly, as in most periods, it is impossible to compare the fortunes of the rich with those of the poor. Whether the peasant’s life was economically improved due to the overall wealth in Egypt is unknown. The official documentation might suggest that the population as a whole enjoyed prosperity at some point, since Amenhotep III and his granary official Khaemhet boasted of the ‘bumper’ crop of grain harvested in the king’s crucial jubilee year 30. The king was remembered even 1,000 years later as a fertility god, associated with agricultural bounty. Still, this type of evidence is hardly unbiased, so we must admit our ignorance.
It is probable that Amenhotep III was a child at his accession. A statue of the treasurer Sobekhotep holding a prince Amenhotep-mer-khepesh probably shows the king shortly before his father’s death, and a wall painting in the tomb of the royal nurse Hekarnehhe (TT 64) describes the tomb-owner as the royal nurse of Prince Amenhotep, portraying the prince as a youth rather than a small naked child. The age of the king at accession could have been anywhere between 2 and 12, with a later age perhaps to be preferred given that Amenhotep’s mother, Mutemwiya, was barely more visible than Tiaa and Merytra, the preceding two kings’ mothers. A regency by Mutemwiya appears unlikely, and, if the king was indeed a small child at accession, his rule was conducted for him quite unobtrusively. An alternative possibility might be that members of Queen Tiye’s family assisted the king in his early rule. A scarab dated in year 2 of Amenhotep’s reign established the early date of his marriage to Tiye, and the identification on another scarab of the queen’s parents, Yuya and Tuya, underscores their prominence. There is, at present, no documentary evidence that Tiye’s family acted as a power behind the throne. This presumption has become so strong, however, that other non-royal ‘king-makers’, such as Ay (whose name in Egyptian resembles that of Yuya), have been thought to be from the same Akhmim family. The discovery of colossal statuary of the late i8th Dynasty at Akhmim, along with some of Amenhotep III, appears to give support to this idea, in so far as that geographic region benefited during the reigns of Amenhotep III and Tutankha-mun/Ay.
World History
