Tutankhamun

The young Tutankhaten, still a child, had ascended the throne at Amarna, but soon afterwards, perhaps as early as his first regnal year or shortly afterwards, he abandoned the city founded by his father. People continued to live in Akhetaten for some time, but the court moved back to Memphis, the traditional seat of government. The old cults were restored and Thebes once more became the religious centre of the country. The king’s name was changed to Tutankhamun and the epithet ‘ruler of southern Heliopolis’, a deliberate reference to Karnak as the centre of the cult of the sun-god Amun-Ra, was added to it. The name of his great royal wife, his half-sister Ankhesenpaaten, was likewise altered to Ankhesenamun. Tutankhamun was by no means the first ruler in the history of the dynasty to have ascended the throne as a child. Both Thutmose III and Amenhotep III had been very young at their accessions, but in both cases a senior female member of the royal family (Hatshepsut and Mutemwiya, respectively) had acted as regent during their early years. No such option was available now; therefore the role of regent was played by a senior military official with no bloodlinks with the royal family, the commander-in-chief of the army, Horemheb. His titles as regent indicate that he gained the right to succeed Tutankhamun if he were to die without issue. Horemheb would in fact eventually become king himself, and in his Coronation Text (a unique inscription giving an account of his rise to power, carved on the back of a statue now in the Egyptian Museum, Turin), he seems to suggest that it was he who advised the king to abandon Amarna ‘when chaos had broken out in the palace’ (that is, after the deaths of Akhenaten and his ephemeral successor). Obviously the army had come to the conclusion that Akhenaten’s experiment had ended in disaster and had withdrawn its support from the religious reforms they had initially helped to carry through, another tell-tale sign of the important role played by the military in this whole affair.

The most important document of Tutankhamun’s reign is the so-called Restoration Stele, which presents an extremely negative description of the state in which Akhenaten’s reforms had left the country. The temples of the gods had become ruins, their cults abolished. The gods had, therefore, abandoned Egypt; if one prayed to them, they no longer answered, and, when the army was sent to Syria to expand the boundaries of Egypt, it met with no success. The prominence of this last phrase probably indicates why the army no longer supported the Amama policy. During Akhenaten’s reign, Egypt’s ally Mitanni had been defeated by the Hittites, who were now the major power in the north. This had prompted some of Egypt’s vassals, notably Aziru of Amurru, to try to establish an independent buffer state between the two rival superpowers. Egypt was beginning to lose some of its northernmost territory, and the army, restricted to limited police actions in Syria, was obviously unable to do anything about it. With the accession of Tutankhamun, these restrictions were evidently lifted, since the reliefs in the inner courtyard of Horemheb’s magnificent Memphite tomb (decorated around this time) include the claim that his name was ‘renowned in the land of the Hittites’, thus suggesting that, early in Tutankhamun’s reign, Horemheb must have been engaged in military confrontations with the Hittites. These skirmishes, as well as later ones, seem to have failed to establish a new balance of power. On the other hand, simultaneous attempts to reassert Egyptian authority in Nubia, documented by these same reliefs, were probably more successful.

In Egypt itself, a major campaign to restore the traditional temples and to reorganize the administration of the country was set in motion. The enterprise was led by the chief of Tutankhamun’s treasury, Maya, who was sent on a major mission to temples from the Delta to Elephantine, in order to levy taxes on their revenues, which had previously been diverted to the Aten temples. Some of the measures later described in Horemheb’s Coronation Text and in his great Kamak Edict may actually have been carried out during the reign of Tutan-khamun. Maya was also responsible for the gradual demolishing of the temples and palaces of Akhenaten, first at Thebes, but later at Amarna as well. Most of the Theban talatat found their way into the foundations and pylons of new construction works in Luxor and Karnak. As overseer of works in the Valley of the Kings, Maya must have organized the transfer of Akhenaten’s mortal remains to a small undecorated tomb in the valley (assuming that the body found in KV 55 is indeed Akhenaten’s, as seems likely); later he was responsible for the burials of Tutankhamun and his successor Ay (1327-1323 BCjand for the reorganization of the workmen’s village at Deir el-Medina when work began on the tomb of Horemheb.