Tutankhamen by Joyce Tyldesley Read Free Book Online Page A

empty. While one is almost universally recognised as Akhenaten, the other has been variously identified as Smenkhkare, Nefertiti or Amenhotep III. Whatever their relationship, Smenkhkare was closely associated with Akhenaten as his co-regent. Like Akhenaten, he had ruled and died at Amarna and, while he was occasionally mentioned outside that city, he had almost certainly been buried in the Amarna royal tomb. It was therefore highly unlikely that his tomb would be discovered at Thebes.
    Writing in 1917, for a non-specialist readership, the Reverend James Baikie, author of many popular books on Egypt and the Near East, told all that was known of Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen:
    [Akhenaten]… While he had six daughters, he had no son to succeed him. He had, indeed, married some of his daughters to powerful nobles, and towards the end of his reign he associated with himself on the throne the husband of Mery-aten, his eldest daughter, a noble named Smenkhara [sic]…
    His successor, Smenkhkara, enjoyed only a brief lease of power, and practically nothing is known of his reign. In turn he was succeeded by Tutankhaten who had married Akhenaten’s third daughter Ank-s-en-pa-aten…
    Tutankhamen seems to have made some attempt to regain a little of the old ascendancy in Syria; but no details are known of an effort which can scarcely have been very successful. The Great Eighteenth Dynasty dribbled miserably to a close in the person of the Divine Father Ay … 5
    Five years later, E. Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptology at the British Museum, was able to summarise Tutankhamen’s life and reign in just six sentences:
    Our knowledge of the life and times of this king is small. His reign cannot have lasted more than six years; but he is extremely important
as showing that during his reign the famous heresy of the disc worshippers came to an end. He married a daughter of Amenhotep IV, now better know perhaps as Akhenaten… Tutankhamen succeeded to the throne of Egypt through his marriage with the daughter of Amenhotep IV, but very soon after he began to reign he saw that the cult of the Aten was doomed and he promptly eliminated the name of Aten from his own name and from that of his wife, and moved his capital from Tall-al-Amarnah back to Thebes. Here he at once proceeded to undo the evil which his father-in-law had perpetuated in the city. In a very short time the city at Akhuenaten (Tall-al-Amarnah) was deserted by the inhabitants, and fell into ruin, and the old cult of Amen was set upon a firmer basis in Egypt than before, if possible, by Tutankhamen. 6
    Tutankhamen was understood to have been Akhenaten’s son-in-law. However, while he, too, had lived at Amarna, many of his monuments and texts had been discovered at Thebes. There had been a handful of finds at Memphis, Abydos and Gurob, and his name had even been mentioned outside Egypt, in Nubia and Palestine. Tutankhamen, unlike Smenkhkare, was not purely an Amarna king. The ‘Restoration Stela’ – a large carved stone slab originally erected to stand before the third Pylon, or gateway, of the Karnak temple – confirmed this. Its thirty lines of text told how Tutankhamen worked to restore Egypt and her traditional gods after the tribulations of the Amarna Period:
    The good ruler; who does things beneficial to his Father and all the gods, he has made that which was in ruins to flourish as a monument of eternal age; he has suppressed wrongdoing throughout the Two Lands; Truth is established, [he causes] falsehood to be the abomination of the land… Now when His Majesty arose as king, the temples of the gods and goddesses, beginning from Elephantine [down] to the
marshes of the Delta, had fallen into neglect, their shrines had fallen into desolation and become tracts overgrown with weeds, their sanctuaries were as if they had never been, their halls were a trodden path. The land was in confusion, the gods forsook this land. If an [army? was]