Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth

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Give to him the love of your heart like the innumerable grains of sand on the shore, the scales of fish in the river, and the strands of hair of cattle! Allow him to remain here until the swan becomes black, until the black bird becomes white, until the mountains arise and depart, until the flood flows south.

—Hymn beseeching the god Aten to bestow love and life on Akhenaten¹

MAP OF EGYPT

MAP OF WASET

MAP OF AKHET-ATEN

FAMILY TREE OF THE LATE EIGHTEENTH DYNASTY

Cast of Characters

Akhenaten (coronation name Neferkheperure) begins his reign as Amunhotep IV, ruling for a total of seventeen years, for most of them alongside his great royal wife Nefertiti.

Amun, king of the gods, whose name means Hidden One, is a creator deity and divine imperial protector of Egypt who is often syncretized with the sun god, Re.

Amunhotep III (coronation name Nebmaatre) rules for thirty-eight years and celebrates three jubilee festivals with his great royal wife Tiye.

Ankhesenamun (born Ankhesenpaaten) is the third daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti and becomes the wife of her brother Tutankhamun.

Aten, the divine solar disk, is given two cartouches during the reign of Akhenaten that identify the god as Re-Horakhty, who rejoices in the horizon in his name of light who is in the sun disk, which is later changed to Living one, Re, ruler of the two horizons, who rejoices in the horizon in his name of Re, the father, who has returned as the sun disk.

Ay, god’s father during the reign of Akhenaten, is a member of an important family from Ipu (modern Akhmim). He may be Nefertiti’s father, and, after the death of Tutankhamun, Ay becomes king of Egypt.

Kiye is the greatly beloved wife of Akhenaten and likely the mother of the princess Baketaten; her family is unknown, and she falls out of favor late in the reign of her husband.

Meritaten is the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, great royal wife of Semenkhkare, and possibly rules as King Neferneferuaten.

Neferneferuaten (coronation name Ankhetkheperure) is a female king, likely the princess Meritaten, but possibly Queen Nefertiti.

Nefertiti is the great royal wife of Akhenaten, and her cartouche often includes the epithet Neferneferuaten. She bears her husband six daughters and a son.

Semenkhkare (coronation name Ankhkheperure) is of unknown origin and likely rules for less than a year as co-regent of Akhenaten; his chief royal wife is Meritaten.

Tiye is a member of an important family from Ipu, the great royal wife of Amunhotep III, and mother of Akhenaten.

Tutankhamun (born Tutankhaten) is a son of Akhenaten and Nefertiti who marries his sister Ankhesenpaaten (later Ankhesenamun). He is king of Egypt for nine years.

Prologue

A pale and sickly young man ascends the throne of Egypt. Sheltered by his keen-witted and powerful mother, he uses his newfound authority to study an ancient religion—the cult of the sun god. His scholarly explorations in temple libraries lead him to revolt against Amun-Re, king of the gods, and the deity’s corrupt priesthood. The young king is as mentally robust as he is physically awkward and strangely proportioned. His strong and unyielding will is at odds with the brittle weakness of his spindly limbs. The young ruler quickly perceives how the priesthood, glutted with booty from the military campaigns of his pugnacious predecessors, now feeds like a bloated parasite off the body of the Egyptian people.

Only in his beautiful young wife does the king find consolation and support. Together they create a revolutionary cult of a loving and universal god, who cannot be contained within the often animal-headed and stiffly posed idols of the old religion. The royal couple devote themselves and all of Egypt’s resources to the worship of a single god who is everywhere, and yet without physical form, except for the blazing orb of the sun. The young ruler rejoices in the love that his universal solar deity bestows upon humanity, reserving his ire for the ancient gods, whose statues and reliefs the king’s devoted adherents zealously attack. The king shows his devotion to his one true father in ostentatious expressions of love for his own family, especially his daughters, doting on his ever-increasing offspring and his serenely gorgeous consort.

In a few short years, the new pharaoh presides over a kingdom ruled by peace and a higher calling, a new religion that lifts Egypt out of the animal-worshipping superstitions of yore. Where once priests stalked through temples to offer on darkened altars, now the royal family presents tables of food in vast, open courts to the solar father whose light suffuses the white-washed and roofless temples of the king’s new city. At the center of this royal court of love, basking in the light of the benevolent solar deity—whose hands literally caress the bodies of the royal family—is the world’s first individual. He is a ruler of such moral strength as to dare to challenge the conventions of an already ancient civilization, and a man of profound learning and flights of spiritual ecstasy who composes beautiful poetry in honor of his god.

A ruler of ravenous sexual appetites and a tyrannical disposition becomes ruler of Egypt. Never as intelligent or as accomplished as his siblings, the king has been warped by the neglect of his father and the domineering personality of his mother. As pharaoh, he closes the temples of Egypt, the very lifeblood of a country whose economy depends on the fields, flocks, and workshops associated with the massive complexes. Following the luxurious reign of his father, and with an obsessive focus on his own divinity, the new ruler plunges Egypt into nearly two decades of darkness and tumult.

The officials in his bureaucracy are loyal to him alone. In their abject groveling, they manipulate the misshapen heretic who controls Egypt with an iron fist. The king and his court revel in the delights of the flesh, gorging themselves on daily banquets, reclining languidly in painted chambers, their sense of time all but erased by the unending cycle of slothful indulgence. The incestuous desire of the king begets two daughters who are simultaneously his granddaughters. One daughter-wife dies in childbirth—herself barely beyond childhood, brought low by her father’s twisted impulses. The population of Egypt—outside of the small group of obsequious courtiers—have never witnessed a time so full of misery.

Histories of ancient Egypt often begin with the establishment of a single government over the Nile Valley and end three millennia later with Roman subjugation. Between King Narmer’s unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 BCE and the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BCE, not all who ruled in the valley of the Nile were pious monarchs, nor did all give full rein to personal whim and desire. The two sketches of rule appearing above could well illuminate the extreme points to which the pendulum of Egyptian kingship might have swung. Among the portraits of Egypt’s rulers, in the great gallery of three thousand years of history, most would probably fit somewhere between the two described above. Peering into the faces of ancient Egypt’s rulers, we seek evidence for how people, power, and tradition interact. One might even attempt a psychology of the individual rulers themselves.

In November 1912, Sigmund Freud, founder of modern psychoanalysis, met in Munich with five of his colleagues to discuss the possibility of establishing a new journal for their growing field of study. During a luncheon, they turned their attention to an Egyptian ruler whose reign had just been the topic of an important study by Karl Abraham, a respected member of Freud’s circle. Though Freud disagreed with Abraham’s assessment of this ancient ruler as a neurotic, he was excited by the application of his new field of study to the problems of Egyptian history. Freud and Abraham agreed that the ancient ruler’s animosity toward his royal father had influenced the erasure and destruction of many inscriptions, including those of the ruler’s own progenitor.

Carl Jung, a young colleague with whom Freud felt he had a close relationship, strongly objected to Freud’s and Abraham’s understanding of the ancient monarch. Jung observed that the name of a god in the father’s name, not the father’s name as such, was the object of the younger ruler’s iconoclasm. The Egyptian king bore no animosity toward his father. But so pleased was Freud that psychoanalysis had helped—in his opinion—to interpret a puzzle from ancient history, and so intense was his father-son bond with Jung, that the argument was literally too much to bear. Freud slid to the floor in a faint.

The Egyptian ruler at the root of Jung’s disagreement with Freud is one and the same man as the subject of both reconstructions above: Akhenaten, who, with Queen Nefertiti, ruled Egypt for the seventeen years from 1352 to 1336 BCE. Akhenaten has achieved fame as the world’s first individual, as the world’s first monotheist, and as the father of Tutankhamun, whose golden treasure has become synonymous with ancient Egypt. Radically different accounts have been written of the lives of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. The queen’s face is perhaps more famous than nearly any other from the ancient world. But what can we really say about two people who lived 3,350 years ago?

The ancient Egyptians wrote neither personal diaries nor biographies, in the modern sense, so we cannot read the private thoughts of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. No ancient narrative of their rule has come down to us, and the ancient Egyptians do not appear to have written historical texts that covered a broad sweep of time. We can, however, experience the objects and places that were part of the royal couple’s lives and read speeches that Akhenaten made, hymns the king and queen recited, and records of historical events over which they presided. We can study the art and inscriptions of their reign, visit the tombs of their highest officials, and even walk through their palaces and the homes of artists, workmen, and soldiers who served them.

Who were Akhenaten and Nefertiti? Why did they change the religion of ancient Egypt? How did they go about this grand project? By investigating the monuments and texts of the royal couple and their immediate predecessors and successors, and through a search for parallels to the statements and actions of Akhenaten, we provide some answers to these questions in these pages.

Akhenaten’s life has been used and abused in the modern world. In often mutually contradictory books spanning a century, and all titled Akhenaten—in various spellings and with a variety of subtitles—we see extreme interpretations: the king’s teachings of peace and love are as close to those of Jesus as any pagan belief could be, or the king’s actions are expressions of the ultimate physical and mental corruption; Akhenaten is either the perfect father or an incestuous pedophile, either a messianic prophet of monotheism or a totalitarian ruler who cast off all controlling checks to his power. For Freud, Akhenaten was a chance to prove the validity of the Oedipal complex, and in the psychoanalyst’s final book, even Moses became an Egyptian follower of Akhenaten’s creed. On one point all agree: Akhenaten and Nefertiti are uniquely important figures of Egypt’s ancient and enduringly popular civilization.

Akhenaten and Nefertiti lived during the Eighteenth Dynasty, the first of the three dynasties of the New Kingdom (1550–1069 BCE). Two thousand years of Egyptian history preceded them, and many glorious monuments were yet to come. Egypt became an international power under the leadership of early Eighteenth Dynasty kings, and the immediate predecessors of Akhenaten and Nefertiti inherited a stable and expansive empire. To the northeast, Egypt’s authority reached the banks of the Euphrates, while to the south, Egyptian control extended far into Nubia. Splendid new temples graced cities throughout Egypt, and in the Valley of the Kings, royal artisans hewed large, elaborately decorated tombs for their sovereigns.

Coming to the throne around 1390 BCE, Akhenaten’s father, Amunhotep III, presided over a golden age, with Egypt’s power unrivaled abroad and its wealth bountiful at home. Amunhotep III’s chief wife, Tiye, was a remarkable queen, and together the royal couple took pageantry to new heights. Observing these events was a prince, named Amunhotep like his father. After thirty-eight years on the throne, Amunhotep III joined with the sun god in heaven, and the prince became pharaoh. From the first year of his reign, Amunhotep IV forged a new path, ultimately replacing the worship of Egypt’s many gods with devotion to a unique solar deity, Aten. Amunhotep later abandoned his birth name, rechristening himself Akhenaten, He who is effective for Aten. Ruling alongside her husband was Nefertiti, a queen whose prominence overshadows nearly all other pharaohs’ wives.

This is the story of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, their religious beliefs, their historical achievements, and their vision for Egypt—how, together, the king and queen ruled as gods on earth. Amunhotep III and Tiye provide the starting point for our narrative, as their actions presaged many of the most seemingly unusual events during the reign of their successors. Without the deification of his parents, Akhenaten would not have achieved his own divine status so quickly, nor would he have been able to elevate Nefertiti to the level of a goddess.

These two couples—Amunhotep III and Tiye, Akhenaten and Nefertiti—transformed ancient Egypt. Over three millennia later, what survives of their remarkable reigns spans the continuum from colossal statues to sadly broken inscriptions. We might have a wonderfully preserved temple to illuminate one part of this history, but for another, an ink scrawl on a shard of pottery. Only by casting our net beyond the half century of the two couples at the heart of our narrative can we truly bring the past to life.

Each of the following chapters opens with a scene from the lives and times of our historical characters. These are not wholly imagined events but a tapestry woven from multiple sources: objects of daily life; elaborate paintings, reliefs, and statuary; hieroglyphic texts and hieratic papyri. Much of the dialogue in these scenes directly quotes from ancient texts or includes statements in keeping with the known sources. Each setting—be it a temple, palace, or private home—is based on an archaeological site, and each object within the scenes is based on a real artifact or something depicted in a work of art or described textually. Most of the people in the reconstructions are historically attested individuals, and for minor characters, like artists’ assistants or scribes, we have at times provided common New Kingdom names to bring them to life. For events that occurred on a recorded ancient date, a modern approximation is also provided.

Our bibliographic essays collect the sources that we have used for the reconstructions—look there if you want to know where to find the ceiling painting with pigeons, a scene of a drunken partygoer vomiting, images of Akhenaten’s chariot horses and bodyguard, the remains of the house that may have belonged to the sculptor Thutmose, or the letter where the Assyrian king laments of envoys dying in the sun. Missing from this great diversity of sources is any certain hint of Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s personalities, so here and there we have taken the small liberty of providing the royal couple with personal quirks. The bibliographic essays also provide basic references and background readings for each historical event, religious concept, work of art, and ancient site that we discuss. Endnotes provide citations to the hieroglyphic or hieratic texts that we quote, and all translations of ancient Egyptian texts are our own.

Occasionally, we enter the narrative as Egyptologists to reveal how the ancient sites and museums can be experienced now by visitors and how we acquire the information that enables us to write this history. We take you along as we puzzle out the translation of a key verb in a damaged inscription and collect passages from texts that explain what it was like to live under the rule of sovereigns who styled themselves as divine beings. These vignettes of our research and travels take place over the course of a typical year, which is divided between teaching responsibilities at home in Connecticut and fieldwork in Egypt.

Akhenaten has been called a heretic, a false prophet, and an incestuous tyrant by some, and a loving, compassionate, peaceful precursor to Moses and Jesus by others. Nefertiti remains even more mysterious, her historical reality eternally obscured by the beauty and fame of her painted bust now in Berlin. Perhaps Akhenaten really was a megalomaniac; perhaps Nefertiti really was the most beautiful woman in the world. But without proof for these assumptions, they only take us further away from the real—and immensely richer and more fascinating—lives of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. We have sought to write their biographies in such a way that the king and queen would recognize themselves in these pages.

Trying to understand Akhenaten and Nefertiti must entail placing them within their own history and culture—we do not have to sympathize with Akhenaten and Nefertiti to be sympathetic toward them. The ancient Egyptians believed that to be remembered was to attain immortality. When Akhenaten and Nefertiti lived, the pyramids of Giza were already over a thousand years old, and they had every reason to expect that their own monuments would be standing millennia after their death. Despite later pharaohs’ attempts to erase Akhenaten and Nefertiti from history, the royal couple’s desire for immortality has in the end been fulfilled. We hope that you find their stories as compelling as we do, for the ancient Egyptians understood that we all have a part to play in preserving the memories of those who have come before.

I

THE PARENTS

AMUNHOTEP III AND TIYE

1

A Divine Conception

His eyes roam over the contents of the bedchamber, illuminated by moonlight through a window high in one wall. In a corner of the room, an inlaid wooden box on tall legs holds the wig of closely plaited human hair that the royal woman wore earlier in the day; it rests beside other, equally elaborate coiffures. In another corner, wooden stands support large jars, their whitewashed surfaces highlighting blue painted garlands of lotus buds encircling the vessels. Through a curtain of gauzy linen draped over a gilded canopy near the middle of the room, he glimpses Mutemwia, a sheer linen sheet barely concealing the queen’s form nestled on an ebony bed, its four supports shaped like the legs and paws of a lion.

Mutemwia stirs, lifting her head from the gilded wooden support positioned next to the mattress. A sliver of light illuminates a flock of pigeons flying above her, the painter having captured the moment their pale blue outstretched wings overlapped. Pulling back the curtain, Mutemwia sees her husband, Prince Thutmose. An all-pervasive aroma of myrrh and incense, the odors of the land of the gods, overpowers her senses. Now fully awake, Mutemwia realizes that the figure standing before her is not her husband or any man. This is Amun-Re, king of the gods.

Shedding his outward form of Prince Thutmose, the god moves toward the queen, gold skin shining as though casting its own light. What the queen sees is a figure that seems to have walked off the walls of the temples she frequents. Amun-Re wears a white, pleated kilt, its straight hem falling to his knees. A cuirass covers his chest, its overlapping pieces of turquoise, lapis lazuli, and carnelian set in gold frames shaped like the feathers of a divine falcon. The brilliant red and blues of the god’s armor match the jeweled bands of his broad collar and bracelets on his wrists. A deep blue lapis lazuli beard juts from his chin, its prominence balanced by a crown topped with two tall ostrich plumes.

Mutemwia rejoices in the perfection of the gold-skinned god, love courses through her limbs, and the god’s aroma inundates the entire palace. Suddenly, the walls of the chamber no longer exist as two goddesses lift Mutemwia and Amun-Re above the earthly realm and set them upon the firmament of heaven. Amun-Re raises an ankh, the symbol of life, up to the queen’s nose and reveals to her the purpose of his nocturnal visit: Amunhotep, ruler of Waset, is the name of this child that I have placed in your womb. He shall rule as a mighty king over this entire land! My power be to him! My strength be to him!¹ The third Egyptian king to bear the name Amunhotep, Amun is content, had just been conceived.

LUXOR, EGYPT

Through the Airbus A220’s small windows we see the rays of the setting sun transform the Nile into a ribbon of light. Our EgyptAir flight is making its descent into Luxor International Airport, after a three-hundred-mile flight south from Cairo. Soon the aircraft, bearing the sleek falcon-headed logo of the god Horus on its stabilizer, will taxi along the runway at the desert edge. The bustling modern city of Luxor is the latest in a line of urban incarnations that have existed in roughly this same location for over four and a half millennia. Called Waset by the ancient Egyptians and Thebes by the Greeks, this was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, a status appropriate to the meaning of its Egyptian name: She Who Holds Dominion.

The Nile divided Waset into eastern and western halves, and seen from above, some of the city’s ancient monuments are still easily recognizable. The houses and palaces of ancient Waset, built predominantly of mud brick, are, for the most part, buried beneath modern buildings, streets, and fields, thousands of years of history resting unseen below the feet of Luxor’s inhabitants. But the great stone temples still stand, many battered, some nearly as complete as when they were first erected, gloriously defying the omnivorous fangs of time.

Within one of those temples, today given the name Luxor, like its eponymous city, King Amunhotep III recorded how his mother, Queen Mutemwia, was impregnated by the god Amun-Re. The conception of Amunhotep III, Akhenaten’s father, is an appropriate starting point for the lives of both Akhenaten and Nefertiti. The mythical presentation of this event says much about the divinity of the king, the role of royal women, and Amun-Re’s position at the pinnacle of the pantheon.

The city’s modern airport lies northeast of the ancient settlement, near dry, desert canyons through which caravans once passed. We exit the arrival hall and meet Abdu Abdullah Hassan, one of our oldest friends, whose expertise in the logistics of archaeological expeditions has been essential to our work for decades. This is the start of the winter portion of our field season, a roughly monthlong period in which we and our colleagues will record ancient rock art and inscriptions, some nearly six thousand years old, excavate desert settlements constructed a comparatively recent fifteen hundred years ago, and record ancient caravan routes.

We load our baggage into one of our old Series III Land Rovers, and soon we are driving along a road heading roughly west, toward the Nile, as the afterglow recedes and true night begins. Just before reaching the river, we turn south and pass several long and broad excavations exposing considerable remains of an ancient processional route, paved with large stone blocks and lined on each side by seemingly endless rows of sphinxes that linked Karnak Temple to the north with Luxor Temple in the south.

The monumental entrance of Luxor Temple is a prominent element of the skyline. The two towers of the pylon gateway rise nearly eighty feet, providing a stony backdrop to colossal statues, themselves forty feet from sole to crown. At night, a spotlight illuminates a single obelisk in front of the eastern tower of the pylon, a monolith eighty-two feet tall. The hieroglyphs are so crisply carved into the granite that in the artificial light they look as if they were cut by laser rather than bronze chisels. Since 1831, this obelisk has been a widow, its mate now the centerpiece of the Place de la Concorde in Paris, proclaiming—like many of its fellows, from Istanbul to New York—the glories of ancient Egypt to lands far beyond the knowledge of the pharaohs.

A walk through Luxor Temple is a journey back in time in more ways than one. To the temple’s ancient founders, this sacred building was Ipat-resyt, the Southern Private Quarters, which was also the companion of a northern Ipat in Iunu, the city of the sun god Re (now part of modern-day Cairo). The sphinxes of the processional avenue connecting Karnak Temple (ancient Ipet-sout, Choice of Places) with Luxor Temple are a bit younger than 400 BCE. The pylon façade of Ipat-resyt and the temple’s first open court were erected approximately nine centuries earlier than those long lines of sphinxes. We walk across the court toward the south end of the column and statue-edged space, where two additional seated colossi of the long-lived pharaoh Ramesses II rear up on either side of the damaged, once soaring, and still imposing portal to a long hall.

Amunhotep III began construction on this, the Colonnade Hall, near the end of his reign but did not live to see its walls fully decorated, a task mostly completed by his grandson Tutankhamun. Carved along the walls are priests carrying on their shoulders the gilded and bejeweled boats of the gods; lines of soldiers hauling on great ropes, singing hymns in praise of the king as they tow the great riverine barges of the gods; women performing acrobatic dances, butchers rushing to and fro with their offerings, and priestly assistants pouring libations of wine, the makings for endless divine repasts. In the relative silence of the temple on this cool winter night, the sounds of the raucous celebrations seem almost audible, the ancient hymns just at the edge of one’s hearing.

The Colonnade Hall leads south to another open court lined with dozens of elegant columns, in the form of papyrus bundles, which enhance the court’s spacious proportions. The name of one king is now visible everywhere: Amunhotep III. The grandeur of the Colonnade Hall and the wide court then give way to the smaller courts and rooms that form the inner portion of the temple. What was once a door leading to the rear portion of the temple was closed by a curved niche when the Romans incorporated the temple into a fortress, transforming the room into an imperial shrine. Roman emperors were now kings of Egypt, but Luxor Temple remained, as it had for over fifteen centuries, the place where rituals confirmed a pharaoh’s status as son of Amun.

We pass through a narrow opening cut relatively recently into the niche that once held the standards of the legions. In front of us is the central bark shrine of Amun, the place where the statue of the god in its ceremonial boat would rest and the focus of constant offerings of giant bouquets, wine and water, vegetables of every variety, and the choicest cuts of meat. Instead of continuing through the bark shrine, we walk through a doorway to the left, take another left turn, and enter the goal of our visit to the temple, the room in which Amunhotep III recorded his own divine conception.

Originally, the shallow raised-relief decoration was painted in brilliant blues and bright yellows, deep reds and greens, all set against a light bluish gray background. Those colors have all but disappeared, but the reliefs still reveal a scene-by-scene exposition of Amunhotep’s divine heritage. In the middle of the wall, at nearly eye level, is the pivotal moment when Amun impregnates the queen, as the hieroglyphs say: The majesty of this god did everything which he pleased with her.²

Between the hieroglyphic captions is a large carving of Amun and Mutemwia on the night of the conception. Held aloft by two goddesses, the god and queen face one another, sitting upon a thin rectangle. This is not a piece of furniture or indeed any physical object, but a hieroglyph that writes the word heaven, a simple shape that catapults the encounter into a celestial sphere.

The only overt expression of intimacy between the god and the queen is that they hold hands, Amun’s fingers just touching Mutemwia’s upturned palm. But an ancient Egyptian would have noted the erotic overtones of Amun’s legs overlapping those of Mutemwia, how she cups the god’s elbow with her free hand, and how he holds to her nose the hieroglyph for life, the ankh sign. In combination with the explicit description in the hieroglyphic text, the sexual nature of the scene is obvious.

The caption states that the bedchamber in which we are to imagine the king’s divine conception taking place is located inside the palace, although where in Egypt that might be is left unsaid. Pharaohs possessed multiple palaces, their stays dictated by the demands of state and religion. The night upon which Prince Thutmose, later to become the fourth king of that name, conceived his heir was only documented after Amunhotep III became king. We can merely guess, then, about the timing of the night in question or the location of the royal bedchamber. If Mutemwia traveled with her husband on his hunting and sporting trips in the north, they could have spent their nights at a small palace nestled near the pyramids of Giza (ancient Rosetau), or in the larger palace at Men-nefer (Greek Memphis) ten miles distant. Three hundred miles to the south, Waset boasted several palaces, royal residences occupied during the annual festivals of Amun’s journeys between the city’s temples.

The conception of Amunhotep III: Mutemwia and Amun are lifted into heaven by two goddesses. (Drawing of a scene in the divine birth chamber, Luxor Temple)

Thutmose IV and Mutemwia might instead have conceived the future Amunhotep III in another palace located sixty miles south of modern-day Cairo, in a fertile basin known as the Fayum, where a branch of the Nile feeds a large lake. The Fayum was a favorite royal hunting ground, and a palace graced the idyllic countryside. Merwer, named for the great canal near which it lay, was specifically a residence for female members of the royal family. Women and palaces immediately conjure the harem, the forbidden area of the Ottoman palace where wives and consorts were strictly secluded, eunuchs their intermediaries to the outside world. Unfortunately, despite abundant evidence that Egypt had no such institution—including the absence of eunuchs as a court rank or professional group—the term is often applied to ancient Egypt, distorting our understanding of what it meant to be a pharaoh or a queen.

Rather than a place for the sexual control of royal women, the palace at Merwer was indicative of those women’s economic power. The queen owned vast estates and oversaw an administration, land holdings, and numerous employees. During the lifetime of Thutmose IV, Mutemwia was not the chief queen, in ancient Egyptian the king’s great wife, and that title would be bestowed upon her only retrospectively by her son, Amunhotep III.

Standing within the chamber of the divine birth at Luxor Temple, we see Mutemwia, swept up into the company of gods and goddesses. After Amun-Re impregnates her, he consults with the ram-headed god Khnum, who carries out the physical act of creation. Khnum fashions the newly conceived Amunhotep III with the aid of the potter’s wheel, a lump of clay becoming the future king, more perfect even than all the gods.

As Khnum sits at his wheel, we see the results of his labor: two identical boys, their youth marked by their nudity and their hairstyle—each has a single braided lock of hair. One is the physical body of the child who will become Amunhotep III, while the other is the future king’s ka-spirit. The ka-spirit is one of several components of an individual that transcended the corporeal world. Ka is written in hieroglyphs with a pair of arms opened as if about to embrace, and the spiritual force of the ka was believed to be transmitted from father to child. The king possessed a special ka-spirit, a soul that was the essence of kingship, bestowed by the god Amun himself.

Khnum intones over the images of the young king and his ka-spirit the majestic fate of the future Amunhotep III: You will be the king of the Black Land, ruler of the Red Land!³ The Black Land, kemet, was an ancient name for Nilotic Egypt, the strip of rich black soil deposited on the banks of the Nile during the annual flood. The Red Land, desheret, encompassed the high desert plateau east and west of the river, through which the Nile Valley was cut. The desolate stretches of sand and rock were to some extent natural barriers protecting the Nile Valley. Just as importantly, they were the sources of Egypt’s vast mineral wealth and regions of busy trade routes. The Black Land made Egypt abound in food, but the Red Land made it rich in gold, stones, ostrich feathers, leopard skins, incense, and a myriad of other goods. Khnum’s pronouncement predicts Amunhotep’s reign over a land well fed and replete with splendid monuments, a land at peace in its verdant heaven on earth, and in control of its desert territories.

Then it is time for Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing, to announce Amun’s satisfaction with Queen Mutemwia, whose womb now holds the future king of Egypt. The temple reliefs show the queen’s changed body: Mutemwia’s belly swells, ever so slightly, with child. This is one of only a handful of depictions of normal human pregnancy from three thousand years of ancient Egyptian art. For the birth itself, Mutemwia sits enthroned, surrounded by more than two dozen deities. Goddesses grasp her outstretched arms, a clue that Mutemwia is not simply sitting but giving birth. In actuality, the queen, like most ancient Egyptian women, probably would have squatted atop four decorated bricks as she delivered her son.

After the successful birth, the prince is presented to Amun, who reaches out to embrace his son. The arms of Amun mimic the arms of the hieroglyph ka, and indeed, just behind the infant Amunhotep is his own ka-spirit, his twin, held in the arms of falcon-headed Horus, the divine template for the pharaoh on earth. Each boy sucks his index finger (rather than his thumb), a habit apparently so common among Egyptian youngsters that it early became a defining aspect of the hieroglyph for child.

The twin children are here a visual conceit, signaling Amunhotep’s possession of the royal ka-spirit. At this moment the child and his ka have already become one, destined to rule over Egypt, as Amun proclaims:

My son of my body, my beloved, Nebmaatre, whom I made as one flesh with me in the palace! I have given to you all life and dominion, with the result that you have (already) appeared in glory as king of Upper and Lower Egypt upon the throne of Horus. May your heart be joyous, together with (that of) your ka-spirit, like Re!⁴

The text makes clear that the king, here called by his coronation name Nebmaatre, is one flesh with the god, literally Amun’s earthly incarnation. The sacred and sexual union of Amun and the queen has implanted in her womb both that physical form of Egypt’s next ruler and the