The World

* On the base of one of the three pairs of obelisks, which Senenmut chose and transported from Aswan, she inscribed her rationale for accession: ‘I have done this with a love for my father Amun … I call this to the attention of people who live in the future who shall consider this monument that I made for my father … He [Amun] will say, “How like her it is, loyal to her father!” For I am his daughter.’ No daughter has ever loved a father so splendidly. But her masterpiece was Dkjeser Djeseru, Holy of Holies, her mortuary temple, a complex of terraces cut into the rock face.

* It is rare to hear the actual voice of a pharaoh. Amenhotep II witheringly mocked the louche entourage of his Nubian viceroy: ‘You, in faraway Nubia, a charioteering hero who brought booty from every foreign country, are now master of a wife from Babylon, a servant girl from Byblos [Lebanon], a young girl from Alalakh, a hag from Arapkha. These Syrians are worthless – what are they good for?’ When the viceroy was too trusting of his Nubian subjects, he was told: ‘Don’t trust the Nubians, beware their people and witchcraft. Beware that servant whom you’ve promoted …’

* Some 380 letters discovered in the House of the Pharaonic Correspondence in the city of Akhetaten reveal the fascinating correspondence, written in Babylonian in cuneiform, with the powers of west Asia. The Great Kings of the time gloried in their membership of the club of world arbiters – rather like today’s G7 – who called each other ‘brother’. Like today, all were very touchy about their status. Egypt and Hatti were the leading powers.

Houses of Hattusa and Rameses

SUN MANIA: NEFERTITI AND THE KING OF HATTI

The new pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, had a strange slit-eyed, angular face with an elongated head and extended torso with androgynous breasts, a potbelly and short legs – or at least was shown this way. Nefertiti, who may have been his first cousin, Tiye’s niece, appeared as his equal everywhere – even in an inscription of her killing foreign prisoners on the royal barge. Nefertiti’s beauty was striking, but here too there was a kink: her statues suggest an elongated skull. Did this new fashion in royal statues express Amenhotep’s divinity or was he presenting his bizarre looks as evidence of divinity?

The cone-headed pharaoh was absorbed by religious matters, as Egyptian power in Syria was being challenged by a rising empire: an aggressive and gifted warrior, Suppiluliuma, was the king of Hatti, whose people were superb charioteers descended from Aryan invaders and who now ruled from the Aegean to the Euphrates. Suppiluliuma, scion of the greatest dynasty of the time, that ruled for almost 500 years, had crushed Greek kingdoms in the west; now he tested Egyptian power by taking Kadesh in northern Syria.

The pharaoh failed to get Kadesh back, but the wars had unleashed hordes of Habiru^* – brigands – who attacked Egyptian allies in Canaan. ‘I’m at war … Send archers!’ begged Abdi-Heba, king of a small beleaguered fortress. ‘If no archers, the king will have no lands.’ The fortress was Jerusalem, making its first appearance in history.

As the Hattians advanced into Canaan and the Habiru marauded, Amenhotep IV launched a religious revolution. He embraced one sun god, Aten, and changed his own name to Akhenaten – Effective for Aten; Nefertiti became Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti – Beauteous are the Joys of Aten (and everyone else had to change their names from Amun to Akhen too). Then he founded a new capital, Akhetaten – Horizon of Aten – between Memphis, the ancient capital, and Thebes.^* The new theology, known sinisterly as the Teaching, downgraded not just Amun but all the other gods popular with the elite and the people, to elevate one god, an idea that may have influenced the writers of the Bible and the religions to come. Even the word ‘gods’ was changed to its singular form. The divine partnership of Akhenaten and Nefertiti had a cosy intimacy to it: illuminated and joined by the rays of the divine sun, they appeared in engravings with three children on their laps. It was the first appearance of a nuclear family as a political–religious statement.

In 1342, the royal family, starred in a spectacular jubilee ‘seated upon the great palanquin of electrum to receive the tribute of Syria and Kush, the West and the East … even the islands in the midst of the sea [the Greeks], presenting tribute’. The foreigners were unimpressed by this sun cult: ‘Why,’ wrote King Ashuruballit of Assyria, ‘should my messengers be made to stay constantly outside to die under the sun?’ The sun was about to lose its dazzle, and its eclipse would bring the most famous of all pharaohs to the throne.

TRANSITIONING: THE MALE NEFERTITI, TUTANKHAMUN’S WIFE AND THE PRINCE OF HATTI