EGYPTIAN
Bookshelf Dodson Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter-Reformation
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Aidan Dodson, Amarna Sunset. Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter-Refor mation. AUC Press, 2009 (ISBN 978 977 416 304 3). £22.50. When Amarna Sunset went to press, presumably in 2008 or early 2009 at the very latest, the manuscript would have presented the ideas Aidan Dodson, one of the most productive Egyptologists working on the Amarna Period, then held about the actors and events of the Amarna age. With refreshing candor, he informs his readers (p.xxi) that new evidence has led him to alter some of the ideas he had long espoused. These are conveniently summarized on pp.142-57 of The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt, (2004/2005), which he co-authored with his wife Dyan Hilton. (Readers must have that book to hand in any case, in order to decode the system employed in Amarna Sunset to distinguish individuals who share the same name.) With barely a mention of the kings preceding Amenhotep III who himself merits but a few paragraphs, Aidan plunges forward after only ten pages to the famous durbar of Akhenaten’s Year 12, immortalized on the walls of two non-royal tombs at Tell el-Amarna. The main new thesis of the book follows, viz. that shortly after this event, Akhenaten’s coregent Smenkhkare (possibly his elder son in Complete Royal Families; now his younger brother) died (victim of the plague?) and Nefertiti then stepped into his sandals and donned a pharaoh’s crowns. Aidan would identify her as the mother of Prince Tutankhaten (mentioned as a possibility in Complete Royal Families) with whom she also ruled initially when the prince ascended the throne immediately on the death of his father Akhenaten. Nefertiti, then died, or was deposed, soon after Year 3 of her coregency with Tutankhaten whose name was altered to Tutankhamun. In Complete Royal Families Nefertiti’s supposed disappearance in Akhenaten’s Year 13 was considered ‘more likely’ to be indicative of her death than of her becoming ‘King’ Neferneferuaten. Aidan initially published this new scenario in KMT, 20:3 (2009), pp.41-49, there described as an abridged version of a chapter in the forthcoming book. In fact, that article has more detailed, conventional endnotes than the respective paragraphs in Amarna Sunset. A keystone of the analysis is the interpretation of the scenes on two contiguous walls in the tomb of Meryre II. The decoration of the tomb is far from finished, but then none of the tombs at Amarna are finished, and in fact, this is regularly the case in the cemeteries of western Thebes and Memphis. Aidan focuses his attention on the depiction of the durbar of Year 12 on the east wall and the adjoining scene at the east end of the north wall where the poorly preserved ‘rough ink sketch’ depicted the tomb owner rewarded by a king and queen once labeled, respectively, Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare-Djeserkheperu and Meritaten. Since Aidan contends that the proximity of these tableaux means that the ‘events’ depicted were contemporaneous, he concludes that Akhenaten and Smenkhkare
ARCHAEOLOGY
AmArnA SunSet Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter-Reformation
Aidan Dodson
were coregents beginning in Akhenaten’s Year 12 at the latest. The two scenes could have been laid out at the same time. But why necessarily shortly after the durbar took place, instead of five years later, after Akenaten’s death and Smenkhkare’s accession? It is equally possible that the scene featuring the younger couple awarding the tomb owner was indeed only laid out and work begun on carving it five years after the durbar scene was finished, to complement the analogous scene of Akhenaten awarding Meryra II on the west end of the south wall. It is just as speculative to suppose that the durbar was included in the tomb’s decoration immediately after it took place as to presume that a princess was depicted in a tomb immediately after she was born or that the number of princesses shown in a tomb can date it. Egyptologists have long recognized the unreliability of such criteria. Aidan abandons the idea that the baby shown in the arms of a nurse in rooms α and γ of the Royal Tomb is perhaps Tutankhaten (as in Complete Royal Families), accepting instead Jacobus van Dijk’s recent suggestion that the infant alludes to the rebirth of Maketaten, although this proposal is at odds with what is known about conceptions of the afterlife in any pharaonic era. On the other hand, he continues to maintain that the ‘Zananza affair’ took place after the death of Tutankhamun rather than that of Akhenaten. Apparently Jared Miller’s article ‘Amarna Age Chronology’, Altorientalische Forschungen 34, 2007, 252-93, with new evidence in favour of the latter scenario (not to mention subsequent rejoinders from specialists in the opposing camp) appeared too late for him to comment on it. Turning to Horemheb, Aidan confronts the problem of the length of his reign after the discovery, during the recent re-clearance of his royal tomb (KV 57), of numerous wine amphorae dockets citing Years 13 and 14. He suggests that those describing the vintage quality as ‘ordinary’ or ‘good’ favour the 35
idea that their amphorae represent a ‘bulk purchase’ for ‘pre-positioning’ in the tomb well in advance of the burial. While admitting somewhat cryptically that the problem of the Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb andlength the Egyptian Counter-Reformation of Horemheb’s reign ‘thus remains nothissusceptible to a definitive conclusion’, he new study, drawing on the latest research, tells the story of the clearly favours one of nearly three decades. decline and fall of the pharaoh Akhenaten’s religious revolution in the The many references (author’s name + date . Beginning at the fourteenth century regime’s high-point in his Year 12, it traces of publication) are numbered by chapter and the subsequent collapse that saw the deaths of many of the king’s loved ones, relegated to the end of the book. They are his attempts to guarantee the revolution through co-rulers, and the last frenzied even more concise than usual for this type assault on the god Amun. The book then outlines the events of of reference; sometimes it is not possible the subsequent five decades that saw the extinction of the royal line, an attempt to to determine whether the author cited place a foreigner on Egypt’s throne, and thesupports accession of three army in turn. orofficers disagrees with Aidan. The book Among its conclusions are that the mother of Tutankhamun was none with other than four appendices and there concludes Nefertiti, and that the queen was jointis an 24 page bibliography. It has pharaoh in turnextensive with both her husband Akhenaten and her son. As such, she was many monochrome illustrations, but the small herself instrumental in beginning the return to orthodoxy, undoing her erstformat doesbeforenot really do them justice. while husband’s life-work her own mysterious disappearance. Any study may become out-dated shortly after publication or even while still in press when new information becomes available. This is especially true for studies dealing with the Amarna Period, a prime example being the uproar occasioned by the publication by Zahi Hawass et al., in Journal of the American Medical Assn. 303:7 (Feb. 17, 2010), pp.63847, of the results of DNA and CT scan analyses conducted on the mummies of Tutankhamun and his relatives, just after Aidan’s book was distributed. Probably he is already at work revising his views to accommodate or, more likely, to refute the conclusions reached. Let me conclude by paraphrasing a remark in Miller’s article which is equally applicable to the entire period from the death of Akhenaten to the accession of Horemheb: none of the proposed reconstructions of events can accommodate neatly all the evidence currently available. MARIANNE EATON-KRAUSS
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Dieter Arnold, The Monuments of Egypt, an A-Z companion to ancient Egyptian architecture. I B Taurus, 2009 (ISBN 978 1 84885 042 2). Price £14.99. This book is a smaller, paperback version of Dieter Arnold’s The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egyptian Architecture, published in 2003, which was itself an updated translation of his Lexikon der ägyptischen Baukunst. Why either the publisher or editors, who also edited the 2003 version, chose to change the title completely is unknown but the change is unfortunate as it could mislead readers into thinking that this is a new book on Egyptian architecture, written by an authority on the subject. In fact, neither the layout nor the content of this book appear to differ from Arnold’s 2003 work. The editors’ notes in both books are identical, as is the bibliography, and as are the entries examined by this reviewer. The work, which presents its information in the form of alphabetically arranged subject entries, provides a useful starting-point for a general reader interested in the subject. This usefulness, however, is diminished, depending on the subject in question, by the fact that the original English version of the book was published in 2003. According to the editors’ notes in both versions this was the last time the information within the work was updated by