Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (15 page)

Egyptologists seem to be divided equally as to whether or not such finds evidence that Amonhotep was alive for so long. Two of the leading authorities on the Amarna period, for example, Donald Redford, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto, and Cyril Aldred, one-time Curator of the Department of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, come down on opposite sides of the fence, Aldred in favour of a long co-regency, Redford against.

Those who dispute the long co-regency explain such depictions of Amonhotep dating from the Amarna period as being venerations of a dead predecessor, which, they argue, were not intended to represent a living person. Such a debate could easily be settled concerning the pre-Amarna period, as the term
maet
kheru
– 'deceased' – usually accompanied depictions of someone who was no longer alive. Unfortunately, Akhenaten's new religion dropped this term, and everyone of importance was described by the term
ankh er neheh
– 'living for ever' – whether they were alive or dead.

There are two reliefs, however, which certainly do appear to be showing Amonhotep very much alive, well into the Amarna period. One, in the tomb of the steward Kheruef, shows Akhenaten paying homage to his father, and the other, in the tomb of the high steward Huya, shows Akhenaten and Amonhotep together with their respective queens. In the first scene Amonhotep's wrist is held affectionately by his wife, and in the second he is blessing his wife and daughter, Beketaten. In these scenes Amonhotep is certainly no statue, nor is he being venerated as a dead ancestor, as there is clearly an interaction between him and the other figures. Once again, as the Aten is in its later form, both must show scenes at Amarna after the year 9 of Akhenaten's reign.

Perhaps the firmest indication that Amonhotep was alive and living in Amarna for many years after Akhenaten's reign began are the Amarna Letters, as a number are addressed to him personally. With one or two exceptions, only the kings of Mitanni, Babylon and Assyria name the pharaoh with whom they are corresponding. Others simply use, 'My Lord', 'My God', 'Great King' and so forth. Of the nearly 350 letters, in less than a couple of dozen do we know to whom they were sent. However, ten of them were sent to Amonhotep, which appears to evidence that he was not only acting as co-regent but was actually present in the city to receive them. It seems most unlikely that these letters had been sent to Amonhotep before the Amarna period and had been brought from Thebes. The reason is that official records were kept on papyrus – which
have sadly disintegrated with time – but the clay tablets on which the Amarna letters were written were sturdier items meant only for messengers to carry with less risk of damage. Once they were received they would have been copied onto papyrus for the record and then discarded. Indeed, they were ultimately considered of no value and left behind when the city was abandoned. Accordingly, they were not an official archive, of which there would have been papyrus copies, and so there was no reason for them to have been brought to Amarna when the move was made from Thebes. Accordingly, those addressed to Amonhotep must have been sent to him while he was in Amarna.

We can further gather from the letters that Amonhotep must have been in Amarna for much of Akhenaten's reign. We know, from correspondences sent by Kadashman-Enlil I of Babylonia, that some of the letters were received in the early Amarna period, as Kadashman-Enlil I was succeeded by Burnaburiash II by the later period. We also know that the letters were being received until the very end of Akhenaten's reign, as one of them is addressed to Tutankhamun. Consequently, they are a good cross-section, if not a complete dossier, of the dispatches received. As the letters identifying the pharaoh to whom they are written include ten addressing Akhenaten, exactly the same number as address Amonhotep, it would statistically suggest that the unaddressed letters could equally be divided between them, from which we can infer that Amonhotep was in the city for many years.

With the balance of evidence on the side of a long co-regency, the remaining question is how long did Amonhotep live? Evidence for this was actually found at Amarna as early as the 1920s, when Pendlebury uncovered two fragments of pottery wine jars with dockets dated as the years 28 and 30. The dockets,
he reasoned, must have been written in the reign of Amonhotep III who is the only king of the period to have enjoyed such a long rule. He concluded that, as wine is presumed not to keep much longer than around four years in permeable pottery in such a hot climate, the earliest that the year 28 could have been was the year 2 of Akhenaten's reign, four years before Amarna began to be occupied by the official classes. As the highest known dating of Amonhotep's reign, found on inscribed clay dockets from Amonhotep's Malakata palace at Thebes, is the year 38, it is generally accepted that he died in this his thirty-eighth year as king. If Pendlebury is right, and the year 28 of Amonhotep's reign corresponds within the year 2 of Akhenaten's reign, then the year 38 – the year Amonhotep died – is the year 12 of Akhenaten's reign.

Cyril Aldred sees evidence of Amonhotep's death around the year 12 of Akhenaten's reign in scenes in the tombs of Huya and the harem overseer Meryre. In both these tombs there are scenes which appear nowhere else during the reign, and so evidently depict a one-off event. Dated as the year 12, they show a large concourse of representatives from vassal states and the great powers in Asia and Africa coming to Amarna bearing gifts for the pharaoh and receiving his blessing. The uniqueness of the episode suggests more than a simple jubilee, rather, Aldred suggests, a ceremonial event to mark Akhenaten's sole accession to the throne after the recent death of his father.

As Amonhotep would seem to have been alive when Tutankhamun was born, around the year 9 or 10 of Akhenaten's reign, Amonhotep could well have been his father as the young king claimed. Amonhotep certainly seems to have been young enough. When he came to power Akhenaten must have been of adult age, as he was almost immediately capable of establishing his new religion. Going by a number of colossal statues of him
excavated from the site of the Aten temple at East Karnak between 1926 and 1932 (now in the Cairo Museum), which were made in the earliest years of his reign, he seems to have been about twenty at the time. If Amonhotep sired Akhenaten when he was in his teens (as is generally thought), then he would have been somewhere between thirty-five and forty when Akhenaten came to the throne, and so between forty-five and fifty in the year 12 when he may have died. Accordingly, he was still capable of fathering Tutankhamun a couple of years earlier.

If Tutankhamun was Amonhotep's son – and there now seems little reason to doubt it – the next question concerns his mother. We have already seen how forensic analysis has revealed that Tutankhamun was almost certainly Smenkhkare's brother. If Tutankhamun was Amonhotep's son, it would follow that Smenkhkare was too, or he would presumably not have been made pharaoh ahead of Tutankhamun. It is possible, therefore, that Tutankhamun was a younger son of Nefertiti's sister Mutnodjme, the suggested mother of Smenkhkare. Amonhotep had a large, and ever increasing number of women in his harem, including two of his own daughters – Isis and Sitamun – and a number of foreign princesses, one of whom could have been Mutnodjme. As we have seen, she certainly had at least one child, and the identity of the father is unknown. However, the most likely candidate for Tutankhamun's mother is Amonhotep's chief wife, Queen Tiye.

Like his predecessor Akhenaten, Tutankhamun seems to have been an emotional young man with strong affections for his family. His tomb is filled with keepsakes and heirlooms to 'remind' him of his relations, including such items as shawls, fans, trinket boxes, sequins and scarabs. There are a number belonging to Akhenaten and Amonhotep III, and on the female side, to Meritaten, Nefernefruaten and Meketaten. Items belonging
to Nefertiti, Kiya and Mutnodjme, however, are almost completely absent, except where they have been re-inscribed with someone else's name, such as Meritaten. This would seem very strange if one of them was his mother. In fact, the most personal of all the heirlooms belonged to Queen Tiye: a miniature coffin-shaped box, inscribed with her name and containing a plaited lock of her auburn hair. As Meritaten, Meketaten and Nefernefruaten were all seemingly too young to have been his mother, and from the contents of the tomb alone, this only leaves Tiye as a possible contender. We know she lived until after his birth; but was she too old for Tutankhamun to have been her son?

The mummy thought to be Queen Tiye was found in the tomb of Amonhotep II in 1898, as part of the cache stored there for safety around 1000
BC
(see Chapter One). When Elliot Smith (the professor of anatomy who examined the Tomb 55 mummy) was called in to examine the remains he dubbed her 'the elder woman', to distinguish her from a younger woman found in the same tomb. She appeared to be middle aged, although she had long, lustrous brown hair with no traces of grey. She was tentatively identified as Queen Tiye because of cranial similarities with the mummy of Tiye's mother Tuya, after her tomb was discovered in 1905 by the English Egyptologist James Quibell. The identification was apparently verified in the 1980s by a team of specialists from the Universities of Alexandria and Michigan employing modern scientific techniques. An electron probe was used to compare a clipping of the mummy's hair with a sample of Tiye's hair from Tutankhamun's tomb, the results indicating that the mummy was indeed Queen Tiye. Such probes are said to provide an exact analysis of the chemical constituents in hair which are as unique as fingerprints. However, the accuracy of these findings has more recently been
questioned, and at present the case remains open. The Alexandria-Michigan team assign an age of around thirty-five to the mummy, which would seem to have been too young for a woman who had a son – Akhenaten – who was around thirty-four when she died. The identity of the 'elder woman' aside, however, Tiye may have been as young as forty-eight when she died, which would mean that she could have conceived Tutankhamun five or six years earlier.

What, therefore, was Tutankhamun's precise relationship to Smenkhkare? Who was Smenkhkare's mother? Was it Mutnodjme, as we have theorized? Of one thing we can be fairly sure: it was not Queen Tiye. As we have seen, the royal children do not seem to accompany their parents at official functions until the age of around five. As Tiye appears to have been dead by the year 14 of Akhenaten's reign, we should not expect to see Tutankhamun pictured with her as he would only just have reached that age. However, the same cannot be said of Smenkhkare. Unlike Mutnodjme, who is not pictured officially attending important celebrations, Tiye does appear in the tomb reliefs at important events which take place between the years 9 and 12. For example, we see her at the induction to her personal
Maru
temple (shown in Huya's tomb) and in the great festival of the year 12 (shown in the tombs of Huya and Meryre). Here she is shown accompanied by her daughter Beketaten, so if she had a son of Smenkhkare's age – around fifteen – he would surely also have been in attendance. For this reason we must find another mother for Smenkhkare. As Kiya is also only shown with a daughter, but Mutnodjme appears to be accompanied by sons – and at the right time for one of them to have been Smenkhkare (see Chapter Four) – Mutnodjme is still by far the best bet.

Until there is positive evidence one way or the other, therefore, the most likely identity of Tutankhamun is that he
was Smenkhkare's half-brother, both being sons of Amonhotep III, and that his mother was Queen Tiye, making him the full brother of Akhenaten.

Tutankhamun's death in the ninth year of his reign is yet another of the mysteries surrounding the young king. Forensic analysis of the mummy has shown there to have been a small sliver of bone within the upper cranial cavity, suggesting that he died as a result of a blow to the head, but whether this was due to a fall, perhaps from a chariot, or evidence of assassination, is difficult to say. There is certainly evidence that the clouds were gathering for the followers of the Aten religion.

Tutankhamun died without an heir, leaving the country in a precarious situation. How his queen tried to remedy the predicament is unprecedented in the history of Egypt. What happened is known not from Egyptian sources but from Hittite records excavated from their capital city at Hattusas – modern Boghazkoy – in Turkey. Here we are told of a remarkable incident. Evidently, once Tutankhamun was dead, a queen, presumably Ankhesenpaaten, wrote to the Hittite king, Suppiluliumas I, asking him to send one of his sons to Egypt so that she could marry him and make him the next pharaoh. This was an extraordinary request and aroused the suspicion of the Hittite king. He dispatched a chamberlain to the court at Memphis, and when he returned, satisfied that the request was genuine, the king sent his son Prince Zannanza to marry the queen. However, on their way the party were ambushed and the prince was murdered. In revenge, Suppiluliumas attacked the Egyptians in the Lebanon, and hostilities continued between the two empires for some years.

What prompted the queen to side with Egypt's long-standing enemy is a complete mystery, but clearly shows that she was more afraid of opposition within her own country than she was
of foreign aggression. The Hittites were probably her only hope, for Egypt's old allies the Mittani had been invaded by the Hittites during Akhenaten's reign, while the Minoan empire had seemingly collapsed in circumstances we shall investigate later. Was Ankhesenpaaten acting alone, or was she acting under the guidance of Ay? Was he or someone else responsible for Zannanza's murder?

We know, from Tutankhamun's tomb, that by the time of the young king's burial Ay had appointed himself heir apparent. He is depicted wearing the blue crown of a king and, officiating at the funeral, had adopted the traditional role of the heir. We also know that Ay married Ankhesenpaaten to legitimate his rule, as evidenced by the bezel of a blue glass finger-ring, now in the Berlin Museum, which carried the cartouches of Ankhesenpaaten and Ay side by side: the usual way of indicating wedlock. (His previous wife Tey was seemingly dead by this time.)