Amenhotep III

“ Amenhotep II. succeeded to an empire which extended from the Sudan to the Euphrates and to the Greek Islands; and when he died he [190] left these great possessions almost intact to his son, Thutmosis IV., the grandfather of Akhnaton. It is important to notice the chronology of this period. The mummy of Thutmosis IV. has been shown by Dr Elliot Smith to be that of a man of not more than twenty-six years of age; but we know that his son Amenhotep III. was old enough to hunt lions at about the time of his father's death, and that he was already married to Queen Tiy a year later. ”

“ B.C. 1500.Amenhotep II, son of Thothmes III, again overran Nubia on a large scale, and his successor, Amenhotep III, extended the Egyptian frontier to the 4th Cataract and possibly to the Atbara, building a large temple to Ammon at Napata, which lay close to Jebel Barkal (the present Merowe) near the foot of the 4th Cataract. ”

“ He was one of the most renowned of the Egyptian monarchs, who extended his conquests far into Western Asia, and foimded the stupendous temple of Kamak at Thebes, covering its walls with inscriptions commemorating his mighty deeds, and giving long lists of the lands and peoples overcome by him. No other name occurs so frequently on monuments and remains of every kind throughout Egypt. B. 1600. Amenhotep II. B. 1566. Thothmes IY. B. 1533. Amenhotep III. Another great conqueror, who appears to have advanced the frontiers of the empire far into Ethiopia towards the equatorial regions. ”

“ Fig 197.--Bas-relief head of Seti I.
The avenues of sphinxes which this Pharaoh marshalled before the temples of Luxor and Karnak do not come to an end at fifty or a hundred yards from the gateway, but are prolonged for great distances. In one avenue, they have the human head upon the lion's body; in another, they are fashioned in the semblance of kneeling rams. Khûenaten, the revolutionary successor of Amenhotep III., far from discouraging this movement, did what he could to promote it. Never, perhaps, were Egyptian sculptors more unrestricted than by him at Tell el Amarna. ”

“ Both Amenhotep and Mohammed were so placed by the circumstances of their birth that, for each to rise to a higher degree of sovereignty than his father, it was necessary to appeal to the super-human. Although Mohammed was not, like Amenhotep, the son of a king, there was nothing, humanly speaking, greater for him than bis tribe, the Coreish, at the pinnacle of whose aristocratic eminence reigned the venerable patriarch, his grandfather, Abd-ul- Muttalib. What better replacement figure of his grandfather could be found than the god of the Hebrews, of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Moses? ”

“ It is remarkable that a religious reformation at the end of the 18th dynasty in behalf of one god, spent its special wrath upon the name of Amon. The king whose title would under ordinary circumstances have been Amenhotep IV., set up the worship of a single god whose symbol was the sun-disk; he caused the names of other gods, particularly that of Amon, to be hammered out of inscriptions even when it only occurred in proper names, as in his own, which he changed into Chut en Aten, "Glory of the Sun-disk." ”

“ The worship of Aton appears as early as the reign of Thutmose IV (ca. 1414-1406 B.C.) , who issued a commemorative scarab stating that the Pharaoh fought “with the Aton before him,” and that he campaigned abroad, “to make the foreigners to be like the (Egyptian) people, in order to serve the Aton forever.” [8]
Aton occupied an important place in the Egyptian pantheon during the reign of Akhenaton’s father, Amenhotep III. A stele of the king’s architects, Hori and Suti, describes the sun god as the deity who holds sway over all peoples and lands. ”

“ Amenhotep III. appears with figures of a negro and a Syrian bound to the sam sign on the sides of his throne, and henceforward the abasement of captives was an essential idea to Egyptians. But it should be remembered that common as the notion was in 86late times, it is originally Asiatic and not Egyptian; the king trampling on the nations and making foes a footstool are ideas not found in Egypt until the Semitic conquests of Tahutmes III., though the earliest figure of a sphinx trampling on a captive is under the XIIth dynasty. ”

“ Shafts are sunk, false passages that lead nowhere are constructed. Everything is done that human ingenuity can suggest, if only the body hidden there might never be seen or handled again. [59] [Pg 189] Nor is the silent city of the dead without its stately palaces and temples. The two colossal twin statues of Amenhotep III. sit there upon the plain, and behind them is his magnificent temple. A little farther is the Ramesseum, a great temple erected by Rameses ‘to his name,’ and to the memory of his ancestors, marvellous for size and splendour. ”

“ While the Pharaoh was theoretically the head of church and state—god and king in Egypt—in practice he might find himself frustrated at every turn by religious, civil, and military bureaucracies.
From the campaigns of Thutmose III until late in the reign of Amenhotep III (ca. 1360 B.C.) the Egyptian Empire seems to have functioned with maximum efficiency. The riches of Nubia, Crete, western Asia, and even distant Mycenae poured into Thebes, the Egyptian capital. A Mitannian princess graced the harem of Thutmose IV (1414-1406 B.C.) . ”

“ The details of the dresses, the architecture, and the utensils, are all in accord with the period of each tale. In the tale of Setnau two different styles are introduced. Ahura is probably of the time of Amenhotep III., whereas Setnau is a son of Ramessu II.; and the change of fashion between the two different dynasties has been followed as distinctive of the two persons, one a ka or double of the deceased, the other a living man. To the reader who starts with the current idea that all Egyptians were alike, this continual change from one period to another may seem almost fanciful. ”

“ The use of a copper frame round the inserted eye in Old Kingdom statues makes it uncertain how far the lachrymal fossa was intended to appear. But the statues of a single material show a small fossa in most cases, such as Khafra, Dadefra, the (so-called) wife of the Sheykh, and Sebekhotep III. In later work there is no fossa, but only an angle, as in Tahutmes III, Amenhotep III, Amenhotep son of Hapi, and other instances to the end of the dynasties. But a slight fossa is shown in Akhenaten and his family, and in [38] Ramessu II ”

“ Thus his Majesty deigned to make very great monuments. Never occurred the like since the creation of the world. The Temple of Amenhotep III upon the West Bank of Thebes (lines 3-10) . He made them |3 as his monument for his father Amen, the Lord of Karnak, making him a glorious house of the gods in the west of Thebes, a fortress of Eternity for eternity, of beautiful light-coloured sandstone, adorned (?) all over with gold ”

“ So far, Queen Taia succeeded in introducing her religion into Egypt while her husband was alive. At his death she found herself regent for her son, or, at any rate, associated with him upon the throne, and saw that a fresh opportunity for pushing her religious views offered itself. Amenhotep IV. was of a most extraordinary physique and physiognomy. His appearance was rather that of a woman than of a man; he had a slanting forehead, a long aquiline nose, a flexible projecting mouth, and a strongly developed chin. ”

“ It is evident, therefore, that the great mass of Alexander’s subjects, whether Asiatics, Egyptians or Greeks, would require something more than the sublime theorizing of the philosophers before their religious ideas could be turned in the direction of monotheism. Nine hundred years before, Amenhotep IV of Egypt had indeed been led by his adoration of the material sun to put forward a religious reform which had as its principal feature the proclaiming abroad that there was only one God, in whose sight all mankind was equal ”

“ Detail was almost impossible, and it was a mistake to use a good building stone for the wrong purpose of fine carving. In early times this stone was never used, except locally in its own region. The XIIth dynasty rarely used it, but by the middle of the XVIIIth it became general, and it was the main stone of the XIXth dynasty in Upper Egypt. Its use, however, [28] does not come down to Middle or Lower Egypt. The long avenue of sphinxes at Thebes are the most familiar sculpture in this material, and similar figures were also placed by Amenhotep III in his temple on the Western bank. ”

“ Two and a half hours of happiness unalloyed did I spend at that shiny, leather-clad desk, guiding my nimble pen across the pages of the notebook. It introduced me to a new world—a world in which love and learning, sweet intimacy and crusted archeology, were mingled into the oddest, most whimsical and most delicious confection that the mind of man can conceive. Hitherto, these recondite histories had been far beyond my ken. Of the wonderful heretic, Amenhotep the Fourth, I had already heard—at the most he had been a mere name; the Hittites a mythical race of undetermined habitat ”

“ At the base "... all foreign (?) lands, all men (rekhyt) , all beings (ḥnememet) , Nehreni, the vile Kush, the Upper and Lower Rethenu, are at the feet of this good god like Ra in eternity."
47. Plates XI, XII, Great Stele of Amenhotep III. At the top is the solar disc with wings and uraei, and on either side "The god of Edfu (Horus) , the great god, lord of heaven." Between the uraei is the cartouche of Neb-maat-ra. Down the middle is "Restoring of the monument made by the king of Upper and Lower Egypt Men-maat-ra (Sety I) for his father Amen-ra king of all gods." ”

“ Fielding brought Mustapha Kali to Abdallah in time to die there, and buried him with his fathers; and Dicky stayed behind to cleanse Kalamoun with perchloride and limewash.
The story went abroad and travelled fast, and the words of Mustapha Kali, oft repeated, became as the speech of a holy man; and the people no longer hid their dead, but brought them to the Amenhotep. ”

“ Grandson of General Amenemheb, fellow-soldier of the great Tutmose the Third, the Conqueror, he had covered himself with glory in the different campaigns he led against the wild tribes of Kush and the Sinai nomads. He had been promoted to the rank of Vizier under King Amenhotep the Third, Akhnaton's father, and the people were fond of him and called him 'a just man.' He would have given his life for the king, but he regarded the new faith in Aton and the betrayal of the old gods as madness and disaster. ”

“ Merira led Tuta by the hand to the armchair and making him sit in it, said:
"The high priest of God on high, Amon-Ra, the king over all other gods, the prophet of all the gods of the south and the north, the great seer of the sky, Urma Ptamose, commanded me, on his death-bed, to elect king of all the earth Tutankhamon, the son of King Nebmaar Amenhotep, the son of Horus. Do you all agree, men and brethren?"
"We agree. Long live Tutankhamon, King of Egypt!" ”

“ Tutankhaton had spread a rumour that he was the son of King Amenhotep IV, Akhnaton's father. Tuta's mother, Meritra, was one of the king's concubines for a day—he had numbers of such. Gossips said, however, that Tuta's father was not the king, but the king's namesake, Amenhotep, the chief of the Surveying Office. ”

“ Unfortunately the international tensions of the day were such that Egypt needed a warrior rather than a philosopher king. The idealism of Amenhotep IV was largely lost on his own generation, and entirely lost on the generation that followed him.
Nofretete was devoted both to her husband and to the religious reforms to which he dedicated his life. She bore him six daughters and appears to have been her husband’s constant companion and confidant. Nofretete was, understandably, a favored subject in Amarna art. ”

“ As Amenhotep cast out Amon, the god of his father, and transferred his reverence to Aton on whom he conferred a might and majesty hitherto unknown to the gods of Egypt, so Mohammed cast out the gods of his father, Al-lat, Al-Uzza and Manah, who were worshipped as angels under femalenames, and preached the worship of the Jevohah of the Hebrews, modified to fit the demands of his phantasy. Thus:
"They do not call besides Him on any thing but inanimate objects, and they do not call on any thing but a devil devoid of all good," (Koran, Chapter IV, v. 117) and again ”

“ Amenhotep, like all the other Pharaohs, was anxious to protect his treasure from thieves, and he commanded his cleverest architects to design a palace in which people who went inside without permission might wander for ever without finding their way out again. ”

“ The treasurer of a church, a fine man, who had a brother, a missionary in Siam, said to me, “Pastor, it is very unfortunate that the government should have issued this three-cent piece, because when we had nothing smaller than a five-cent scrip, people put that into the collection, but now, that we have got something so small as a three-cent nickel, our collections will fall off two-fifths!”
(1224)
GIVING THROUGH LOVE
Queen Tyi was a woman of marked ability, the consort of King Amenhotep III, who ruled in Egypt from 1414 to 1379 B.C. Recently Egyptologists discovered her shrine in Thebes. ”

“ The three hollows at the top are apparently for two ears, and perhaps the sign of a hide; it seems as if some inlaid objects had been inserted, of glass or metal.
A portion of an altar (Pl. I, 4) of sandstone dedicated by a chief priest of Tahutmes III named Ra, was found in the temple ruins of Amenhotep II. This priest was the husband of the nurse of Amenhotep II, and his tomb is one of the finest in Qurneh, published partly in Lepsius "Denkmaler" III, 62, and Prisse "Art," where the glass and stone vases are figured. ”