Amenhotep II left buildings or additions to standing monuments at nearly all the major sites where his father had worked. In the first three years of his reign, constructions in the names of the two kings were erected, most notably at Amada in Lower Nubia, where a temple celebrating both equally was built to honour Amun and Ra-Horakhty, and at Karnak, where both kings participated in eliminating the vestiges of Hatshepsut’s monuments by masking them with their own. In the court between the Fourth and Fifth pylons the columns added and the masonry placed around the queen’s obelisks carried sometimes the name of one ruler and sometimes the name of the other. It remains impossible to say whether the alterations were effected simultaneously (during a co-regency) or consecutively.
He left monuments at Pnubs on Argo Island, at Sai, Uronarti, Kumma, Buhen, Qasr Ibrim, Amada, Sehel, Elephantine, GebelTingar (a chapel near the quartzite quarry on the west bank at Aswan), Gebel el-Silsila, Elkab, Tod (a bark chapel of the co-regency), Armant, Karnak, Thebes (including his tomb, KV35 in the Valley of the Kings and a now-destroyed funerary temple), Medamud, Dendera, Giza, and Heliopolis. A temple construction of limestone was the object of the reopening of the Tura quarries in year 4 of the reign, but the location of that temple is uncertain; it was not the king’s funerary temple at Thebes, since that structure was built of sandstone and brick.
The sites where Amenhotep ITs construction efforts left the deepest impressions were Giza and Karnak, despite the fact that the king’s work at Giza was not particularly ambitious. None the less, he built a temple to the god Horemakhet, the sun-god identified with the Great Sphinx. It has been noted that, since the time of'Thutmose I’s reign, the area around the Sphinx was frequented by princes and pilgrims who visited the great pyramid complexes of Khufu and Khafra. The Sphinx and its amphitheatre became the site of a cult of royal ancestors, including Amenhotep II himself and his son, Thutmose IV, who set up the Sphinx Stele between the paws of the great lion statue. The cult of Horemakhet and the royal veneration continued into Roman times, such that pilgrims left votive offerings in the enclosure wall of the amphitheatre or in the chapels if possible. Amenhotep II’s dedication of a small temple to Horemakhet (also described as Hauron on the king’s foundation deposit from the site) was thus an important development in the history of the Sphinx as a focus of worship. His own sons left stelae in his temple, some bearing depictions that indicate that a statue of Amenhotep II once stood against the breast of the Sphinx. Mark Lehner has reconstructed the appearance of the Sphinx with this i8th-Dynasty statue in place.
When Amenhotep II had finished his programme of erasures on the monuments of Hatshepsut at Karnak, he was able to concentrate on preparations for the royal jubilee at this temple. Just as ’Thutmose III had constructed the festival temple known as ‘Effective of Monuments’ in the precinct of Amun at Karnak, so Amenhotep II created a building for his sed-festival. His pavilion, as reconstructed by Charles Van Siclen, was a court of relief-carved square pillars with decorated walls on the sides. Dated to the later part of his reign both by its artistic style and its inscriptions, it fronted the temple’s south entrance at the Eighth Pylon, effectively creating a new main gateway to the complex, just as Hatshepsut had done before him. In front of this sed-festival court were the estates of Amun, or gardens that produced vegetables and other sweet plants. Tfie pillars carried the unusual dedication of‘a first occasion of repeating [or “and repetition oP] the sed festival’ which may imply that he had already celebrated a jubilee before building this court. These formulas are, however, difficult to interpret and may simply be wishes expressed for the king’s coming jubilees. Following an old tradition, Amenhotep ll’s relief decoration in the festival pavilion contained elaborate royal regalia for the king, that particularly emphasized solar connections—for example, multiple sun discs on top of crowns, and tiny falcons set above the sun discs, creating identity with the falcon-headed Ra-Horakhty.
The small temple of Thutmose III at Deir el-Bahri had used similarly extravagant solar symbolism and was also a monument dating to the period after the king’s jubilee preparations had been made. Amenhotep II’s festival building included scenes of his mother, Merytra, who served as his queen and, more importantly, ‘god’s wife of Amun’. The building was dismantled at the end of the i8th Dynasty, to accommodate alterations of the quadrant by Horemheb (1323-1295 BC), and it was later rebuilt in a different architectural form by Sety I (12941279 BC) at the beginning of the 19th Dynasty.
Amenhotep II also built a temple to Amun in northern Karnak, a precinct later dedicated to Montu of Thebes. However, the blocks of this building now form part of the foundations of a temple constructed under Amenhotep III and later adapted in the Ptolemaic Period. Its original function remains unknown. Other gateways and blocks from North Karnak, however, indicate that the king was interested in developing this sector, perhaps because of its position in terms of extending the north-south axis of the central part of Karnak. Stone door elements from a palace of the king were found north of the temple proper, perhaps indicating the location of a ceremonial residence for Amenhotep II. The king’s interest in Montu’s temple at Medamud some 8 km. to the north is perhaps also notable, since later there was certainly a processional way between northern Karnak and Medamud.
World History
