The World

Amenhotep and other royal children were brought up in the Family Palace next to the main palace where the royal wives resided with the pharaoh. Marriage in Egypt was a sacred bond, based on pragmatic arrangements, but divorce was permitted and ex-wives could remarry. Most Egyptians were not polygamous, but pharaohs had multiple wives, led by the Great Royal Wife, and thousands of concubines. Foreign conquests increased the number of royal wives, their sanctuary run by an Overseer of the Family Palace, which itself adjoined the Royal Nursery where ordinary children were brought up with the princes and princesses. The key carer of a royal baby was the ‘great nurse who brought up the god’, whose own children were brought up with the family; these Children of the Nursery were likely to become ministers in adulthood.

Princesses were taught weaving, singing and reading. They were never sent abroad to marry foreign kings, as they were too superior for foreigners. Princes were taught to read first Egyptian by the Scribe of the House of the Royal Children, using pen ink on papyrus, then Babylonian cuneiform, the language of diplomacy. Their tutors and nannies were – like childhood mentors through the ages – well positioned to become trusted advisers. Princes hunted bulls, lions and elephants – and they were obsessed with horses, introduced into Egypt by the Hyksos. Out near the Geza pyramids, Prince Amenhotep – who ‘loved his horses … [was] strong-willed in breaking them in; he raised horses without equal’ – practised shooting his bow and then went hunting: ‘His Majesty appeared again in the chariots. The number of wild bulls he took: 40.’ Hunting was always training for war: the spearhead of his army was a fifty-strong corps of chariots, each manned by a team of three, an officer with a composite bow, a driver and a guard with a shield.

As pharaoh, the horse-crazy marksman Amenhotep II expanded his domain eastwards towards Iraq, while in the Mediterranean Egypt traded with the Mycenaean peoples of Arzawa (Greece) and Alashiya (Cyprus). In 1424, after crushing local kings at Kadesh (Syria), he killed seven of them personally and hung their corpses upside down. Troops were rewarded by the tally of penises and hands heaped at the feet of pharaohs or skewered on spears like kebabs. Amenhotep II returned after one Syrian expedition with three-quarters of a ton of gold, fifty-four tons of silver, 210 horses, 300 chariots and 90,000 prisoners. Only the best was ever good enough for the sardonic, exacting Amenhotep II,^* pharaoh for twenty-six years, who said: ‘If you lack a gold battleaxe inlaid with bronze, why make do with a wooden club?’

Not everyone could be so ferociously macho: his grandson Amenhotep III was more fixated on a religious vision that changed Egypt, a vision he shared with one remarkable woman. To call it a love match would be an understatement.

MISTRESS OF EGYPT: GOLD, WIVES AND DIPLOMACY

When he was a teenager, Amenhotep III married Tiye, aged thirteen, who became the most prominent wife in Egyptian history. She was not his sister but the daughter of a cavalry officer. Great Royal Wife Tiye was tiny, four foot nine, with long hair, still lustrous on her mummy, and her portraits show her beauty. Married for thirty-five years, the couple had nine children together.

Amenhotep promoted the state religion in processions of barques and statues, and ever more gigantist temples where his inscriptions described how Amun-Ra himself had crept into the bedchamber of the Great Wife: ‘She awoke because of the god’s scent and cried out with pleasure.’ And the god announced, ‘Amenhotep is the name of the child I have placed in your womb.’ Amenhotep III was himself a god and Tiye was his divine partner, enthroned beside him on colossal statues, known to the ancients as the Colossi of Memnon. Presented as the equal of her husband, Tiye corresponded with foreign monarchs from the Greeks of Arzawa to Babylon. ‘Tiye knows all the words I spoke with your father Amenhotep,’ wrote King Tushrata of Mitanni to their son, suggesting, ‘Enquire carefully of Tiye.’ He even wrote directly to the ‘Mistress of Egypt’.^*

Tiye was a female potentate, but the next queen, Nefertiti, would be even more powerful and her husband, Amenhotep IV, was not like anyone else: if the portraits of the couple are accurate they were an extraordinary pair and their eccentricities would almost destroy the empire.

 

 

* Archaeologists have not: they identify the start of history as the point when writing was invented.

* In the Andes, in 7000 BC, a female teenaged warrior was found buried with her spear; out of twenty-seven buried hunters discovered in south America from this period, eleven were female. Women may have led and fought as well as nurtured and nursed, or the burials could be merely ritualistic.