The King's Man (60 page)

EPILOGUE

AMUNHOTEP SON OF HAPU
lived well into his eighties. He had declared that he would reach the age of 110, a purely symbolic number, although given his longevity he may well have meant the figure literally. During his life he was responsible for a staggering amount of work throughout Egypt on behalf of the gods and his King. He oversaw the construction of Amunhotep the Third’s funerary temple on the west bank of the Nile, an edifice estimated to have covered over 4,200,000 square feet. With floors of silver, doors of electrum, and gold throughout, it was larger than the temple of Ipet-isut (Karnak) itself. It was erected so that only the inmost shrine remained dry during the annual flood. Unfortunately, due to earthquakes, later plundering, and the weak foundations of the pylons and columns, nothing remains of it but the two huge statues known as the Colossi of Memnon. Standing seventy-five feet tall, they are of a seated Amunhotep the Third accompanied by a much smaller effigy of Tiye on the southern statue and with his mother Mutemwia beside him on the northern one. On the base of one of the colossi Huy records, “I have established the statue in this great temple that it might endure as long as the heavens. You are my witnesses, you who shall come later.” One of the statues was reputed to have “sung” at dawn. This phenomenon drew a steady stream of ancient tourists, including the Roman emperor Hadrian. The music ceased when an attempt was made to repair the image. It’s assumed that when a crack in the sandstone was struck by the rising sun, the rock expanded and produced a sound.

Under Huy and their father Kha, the twins Hori and Suti laboured to complete their major work at Ipet-isut, Amun’s home, and in the twenty-ninth year of Amunhotep’s reign it was finished and the temple was dedicated. Men, the stonemason and sculptor, obeyed the commission to construct two quartzite likenesses of the King to be set up at Ipet-isut. They towered seventy feet into the air above one of the pylons on the south side of the temple. Only a pair of feet remain. A series of statues of the King as Osiris, each twenty-five feet high, were ranked on either side of the Nile along the east and west banks. Amunhotep’s beautiful temple to celebrate his own divine birth at Luxor (the southern Apt) was not finished until after Huy’s death.

In Year 26 of the King, a temple to Horus was begun at Hebenu, close to Thoth’s great home at Khmun. A temple to Mut, Amun’s consort, had been started the year before in the southwest area of Ipet-isut. It was surrounded on three sides by a horseshoe-shaped sacred lake, linked to Amun’s temple by an avenue of sphinxes, and more than six hundred black basalt statues of the goddess Sekhmet stood around it. These are just a few examples of the steady building and beautifying that took place throughout Amunhotep the Third’s reign.

In Year 17, Huy was granted permission to begin his own funerary temple just behind that of Amunhotep and in the company of other great Kings below the cliffs that conceal the famous Valley of Kings. It was a singular honour. Amunhotep himself richly endowed it in perpetuity. Huy added his own curse on anyone in the future who might allow the endowment to fall into decay or steal any of the male and female slaves cultivating its fields. The temple was completed in Year 31.

In the King’s twentieth year on the throne, Huy began the research and planning that would culminate with Amunhotep’s first heb sed festival in May (Epophi) of his thirtieth year. The most complete record of this major event dates back to the Twelfth Dynasty. Not only did the rites themselves have to be perfect, but there were shrines to be built and statues of the King to be set up throughout Egypt. The ceremonies took place at the ancient capital of Mennofer. Amunhotep bestowed the honorary, and temporary, titles of “festival leader” and “hereditary Prince in the offices of the sed festival” upon Huy. In painted fragments from Huy’s temple, he is depicted wearing a decorated headband commemorating the occasion. In that same Year 30, Egypt enjoyed an enormous agricultural harvest from Kush in the south to Naharin in the east. A delighted King showered rewards on all his Treasury officials. At this time he renamed the Palace of the Dazzling Aten; it became the House of Rejoicing. However, the worship of the Aten, once a cult adhered to almost exclusively by a handful of Egypt’s aristocrats and those of Amunhotep’s foreign wives who revered the sun, began to be even more firmly established, thus paving the way for Akhenaten’s disastrous reign. Amunhotep held three more heb seds in the following three years.

Amunhotep the Third has rightly been called “The Magnificent.” Under him, Egypt became an empire. Gold poured into the country from Kush, far to the south, and trade with conquered and satellite nations was brisk. Egypt basked in over thirty years of increasing wealth and power. More statues were erected throughout that time than at any other period in Egypt’s history. The art of embalming reached its highest degree of skill. Indeed, the mummy of Yuya, Tiye’s father, who died in Amunhotep’s twentieth year on the throne, is regarded as the most expertly preserved. Thuyu, Tiye’s mother, died soon after her husband. Her mummy is also proof of the embalmers’ skill. Yet representations of the King in later life show him as overweight beneath the drape of the loose female linens he began to prefer. There is an air of listlessness about him, a jaded boredom, as though being the most significant ruler in the world and able to have everything he desired had left him empty. He died in Year 38 of his reign at an age somewhere in his early fifties.

His son Thothmes had predeceased him by almost ten years, leaving no Hawk-in-the-Nest but his much younger brother Amunhotep. This Prince eventually inherited his father’s glorious legacy, an Egypt bursting with vigour, prosperity, and influence. In a scant seventeen years he became a fanatical heretic, changed his name to Akhenaten in honour of his god, closed all temples but those of the Aten, lost most of the empire, plunged the country into poverty, and brought Egypt to the brink of invasion. (I have told his story in my novel
The Twelfth Transforming
.)

Queen Mutemwia was in her sixties when she died in her son’s thirty-second year on the throne. He had loaded her with titles, and tells us that “Everything she commanded was done.”

As for Huy, he died rich and highly respected in the King’s Year 34. The previous year, the King had ordered two statues of Huy to be placed along the processional route through Ipet-isut, near the ninth pylon, thus inviting Amun himself to regard Huy as a god. On the statues, Huy made Amun’s worshippers aware that they could bring their prayers and libations to him and he would take their petitions directly to Amun. He had been named by the King to do so. Amunhotep must have grieved deeply for the loss of the friend he had loved and trusted. Over the following centuries Huy gradually attained true godhead by healing the sick, and particularly the blind, who came to pray to him. He may have lost his own sight before he died.

Tiye’s younger brother Anen died in the same year. Anen’s great friend Ramose, Huy’s younger nephew, finished Anen’s tomb at his own expense. Ramose became Mayor of Weset at this time. Huy’s other nephew, the harsh Amunhotep-Huy, did not long survive his uncle. He was in his fifties when he died in the year following Huy’s death. The Empress Tiye lived on well into the reign of her second son.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

MANY THANKS
to my researcher Bernard Ramanauskas, whose diligence and insight into what remains of both the Book of Thoth and the heb sed festival have been invaluable in the creating of this trilogy.