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A VARIETY of historical evidence also points to the fact that Akhenaten survived his fall from power.
Manetho’s King List
Although the memory of Akhenaten and his three successors was suppressed completely and the official king lists excluded them, placing Horemheb’s name immediately after that of Amenhotep III, in Manetho’s king list of the Eighteenth Dynasty, as it has reached us through other authors, the four kings are mentioned. It seems that, despite the official hostility at the time, folklore tales, transmitted from generation to generation, kept alive the memory of the Amarna kings until, some time before the third century BC, the story of Egypt’s history at this time was put down in writing. Of course, much confusion and distortion has affected the story in the process, and surviving Amarna monuments, such as its rock tombs and the quarry inscriptions, must have also been read and interpreted by the priests and scribes and helped in the rewriting of the story. In Manetho’s king list we find four names inserted between Amenhotep III and Horemheb:
Achencheres
Rathosis
Achencheres
Achencheres
The German philologist Wolfgang Helck was able to show1 that Achencheres was a confused derivation of Akhenaten’s name, while Rathosis is believed to be a confused form of Tutankhamun’s nomen. Why would Egyptian memory give to three of these four Amarna kings one name, that of Akhenaten? The only possible conclusion is that this was the result of two contradictory pieces of evidence: a) four different kings ruled between Amenhotep III and Horemheb, b) Akhenaten lived during the reign of the four Amarna kings and this whole period was regarded in their memory as being his own rule.
The Power Struggle
At least two events early in Akhenaten’s coregency with his father indicated strong opposition to his rule. The graffito of Amenhotep III’s Year 30 from the pyramid temple of Meidum, which would be Year 3 of Akhenaten, pointed to a rejection by some powerful factions of the king’s decision to cause ‘the male to sit upon the seat of his father’. Again, the border stela inscription of Amarna shows that, before deciding to leave Thebes and build his new city, Akhenaten had encountered some strong opposition and been the subject of verbal criticism. Certainly, he would not have left the dynasty’s capital without having been forced to do so.
A final confrontation between the throne and the priesthood was postponed simply because, after he departed from Thebes, he had nothing at all to do with the running of the country, which was left to his father, Amenhotep III. Another important factor was the complete reliance of Akhenaten on the armed forces for support. If we may take the reliefs from the tombs of the nobles at face value, then the city was virtually an armed camp. Everywhere we see processions and parades of soldiers, infantry and chariotry with their massed standards. Palaces, temples and the city borders seem to have been constantly guarded.
Akhenaten’s man in the army, as we saw earlier, was Aye, his maternal uncle, the husband of Tiy, his and Nefertiti’s nurse. As a result of this relationship, he could be regarded, according to ancient traditions, as a father figure. Aye was certainly the power behind Akhenaten’s throne from the time of the death of Amenhotep III. Aye’s origins, like those of Yuya, his father, were military. His extremely high ranks in both arms of the service, the infantry and the chariotry, show that he was in control of the army, without whose loyalty and support Akhenaten could have been overthrown in his first year as sole regent. After the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty, which was founded after the defeat and expulsion of the Hyksos invaders from the Eastern Delta, Egyptian Pharaohs had followed them into western Asia, forming the first empire of the ancient world that extended from the borders of Asia Minor and northern Iraq in the north up to a few miles north of Khartoum in the south. Egypt now had for the first time a regular army of full-time professional fighters, organized in local divisions. The victorious fighters shared war spoils as well as being rewarded by the king with gold, slaves and land. The army officers grew into a new aristocracy that, thanks to Akhenaten’s policy, became deeply involved in politics towards the end of the dynasty, as a result of which the two last kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Aye and Horemheb, as well as the two first kings of the Nineteenth, Ramses I and Seti I, came from the army and had no relationship with either the original Tuthmosside house or the priesthood.
On the other hand, as the victorious kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty came from Thebes which in the sixteenth century BC had consisted of a few scattered small towns, it had by now grown into a vast cosmopolitan city, the capital of the empire. Abundant spoils of war came to Thebes and its gods, especially to Amun, the chief Theban deity, who now achieved great authority, particularly when he was associated with Re, the old Heliopolitan god, as Amun-Re, king of the gods. Many new temples were built and that at Karnak, main centre of Amun, grew into a gigantic construction, the largest temple ever built, with large areas of agricultural land and thousands of slaves allocated to it. The priests, and those of Amun in particular, became increasingly powerful from the time of Tuthmosis III. This king was not the son of the queen, although he was the king’s son. So, in order to have him accepted as his heir, his father arranged a ceremony in Karnak where the image of Amun, carried by the god’s priests, chose young Tuthmosis to be the son of Amun, a kind of adoption by the god which ensured his right to the throne. Tuthmosis III turned out to be the mightiest of all Egyptian Pharaohs, ruling for fifty-four years and fighting many wars in Asia to consolidate the empire.
In return for their co-operation in establishing his right to the throne, Tuthmosis III showed his gratitude to Amun’s priests by giving them more power and wealth. As the king was the head of both the army and the temple, Egyptian Pharaohs exercised a balancing policy between the military and priestly powers. Although it is true that Pharaoh was regarded as a son of the god and, as such, had to be obeyed without question, he himself was also expected to abide by the country’s old beliefs and traditions. Not only did Akhenaten reject this concept of kingship: he was no longer the son of any Egyptian god. The Aten was never worshipped as a god in Egypt before the Amarna religious revolution, which has to be regarded as having its origins in the time Yuya became associated with the royal family during the reign of Tuthmosis IV. Thus Akhenaten came to be regarded as a rebel, an outlaw, and without the support of Aye and his army he would have been disposed of as soon as his father, and protector, died.
But, as we saw earlier, unlimited loyalty from the army could not reasonably be expected. After all, the officers and soldiers themselves believed in the gods whose images the king ordered them to destroy, they worshipped in the temples which they were ordered to close. A conflict arose. Aye, still the strongest man in Egypt, realized the danger – the whole Amarna family and their followers, as well as the worship of the Aten, was under threat – and that compromise was the wisest course to follow. However, Akhenaten’s belief in one God was too deep for him to accept a return to any of the former ways. Aye therefore advised him that, in his own interests, he should abdicate in favour of the young Tutankhamun and flee the country. After his departure, Aye, as Tutankhamun’s adviser, allowed the old temples to be reopened and the ancient gods of Egypt to be worshipped again alongside worship of the Aten, a compromise that increased his own power, as it enabled him to pose as the saviour of both army and temple.
The climate of the country remained uneasy, but Aye’s own position as the most powerful man in Egypt was sufficiently secure for him to appoint himself king after the death of Tutankhamun – which, as Harrison found a fracture in the bones at the back of his neck, could have been the result of assassination. In these circumstances, it is impossible to imagine, as some scholars have fancied, that Aye, Akhenaten’s most potent supporter, would have permitted a coup d’état against the king, or, for that matter, that either the king or Tutankhamun would have survived such an event: rather the departure of Akhenaten should be seen as a political compromise that allowed Amarna rule to continue.
It was only on the death of Aye himself that Horemheb, another powerful military figure, emerged to take power on behalf of the dissident Establishment and to start the campaign of destruction designed to remove all trace of Amarna rule from Egyptian history.