Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2022 - 37

son did not follow his example. Amenhotep IV elevated Aten
to a position as Egypt's sole and superior deity, denigrating
Amun and the other Theban gods, and introducing a type of
monotheism that was anathema to the Egyptians. Five years
into his reign, he changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning
" Effective of the Aten. " He also named his son Tutankhaten,
the " Living Image of Aten. "
Akhenaten slighted the powerful class of temple priests,
which put him in a very tenuous position in Egypt's capital
at Thebes, the holy city of Amun. Rather than take on the
priests in their power center, the pharaoh founded a new capital,
which he built on virgin desert around 250 miles north.
He called it Akhetaten, or " Horizon of the Aten " ; today it is
known as Amarna. In Thebes, Dazzling Aten, which had been
home to so many workers and craftspeople whose livelihood
depended on royal employment, was deserted nearly overnight.
" The people picked up, went to Amarna, and left the city as
A FOREIGN AFFAIR
T
he succession crisis that gripped
Egypt near the end of the 18th
Dynasty not only plunged the lives of
Amenhotep III's surviving family members
into turmoil, it also sealed the fate of an
Anatolian prince, Zannanza, son of the
Hittite king Suppiluliuma I (r. ca. 1370-1330
b.c.). Cuneiform tablets unearthed in the
Hittite capital of Hattusa in modern-day
Turkey called The Deeds of Suppiluliuma tell
the story of the prince's involvement in an
effort at diplomacy that went disastrously
awry. A vivid passage in this account of
Suppiluliuma I's reign records a panicked
missive written to the king by an Egyptian
royal identified as a dakhamunzu, which
seems to be a rendering of the Egyptian
term for the " king's wife. " In her letter,
the dakhamunzu tells Suppiluliuma I
that her husband, the king, is dead and
that she has no children. She needs to
remarry, and suggests a mutually beneficial
arrangement. " They say you have many
sons: Give me one of your sons, " she
writes, " to me he will be husband, but in
the land of Egypt he will be king! "
During the reign of the pharaoh
dispatched a diplomatic mission to gauge the
dakhamunzu's sincerity. Only after months
of considering the proposal did he eventually
send his son Zannanza to Egypt to be wed and
crowned pharaoh.
That delay may have been costly. According
d
d
o
se
c
Hittite tablet, The Deeds of
Suppiluliuma
to The Deeds of Suppiluliuma, Zannanza died en
route, likely having been murdered. Another
Hittite cuneiform source, The Second Plague
Prayer of Mursilis II, confirms the outlines of
the affair and states outright that Zannanza
was killed by hostile Egyptians, who would
have had ample time to organize a conspiracy
against the dakhamunzu's doomed suitor.
Some Egyptologists believe the episode
to
ro
P
th
w
c
Akhenaten, Suppiluliuma I conducted
a series of aggressive campaigns against
Egyptian client states in Syria. The fact
that Egypt and the Hittite Kingdom were engaged in a
high-stakes proxy war seems to have caused Suppiluliuma
I to harbor grave doubts about the offer, and he eventually
archaeology.org
Throne showing Tut and
Ankhesenamun
took place after the death of Akhenaten
and that the dakhamunzu in question was
his widow Nefertiti. Many others think
that Tutankhamun's widow Ankhesenamun
is the one who sought the Hittite king's
help. If Ankhesenamun is the king's wife
mentioned in The Deeds of Suppiluliuma,
perhaps she was alarmed by events in
Thebes, where the general-and eventual
pharaoh-Horemheb, who likely already
had his eye on the throne, was steadily
consolidating power. It's unknown who was
responsible for the death of Zannanza, but
many members of the Egyptian nobility,
not just Horemheb, would gladly have had
the Hittite prince assassinated rather than see a foreigner
rule over the land of the Nile.
-eric a. poWeLL
37
it was, " says Hawass. " Some even closed and boarded up their
houses, which is why the city was found completely intact. "
Archaeologists are still searching for evidence of whether
Dazzling Aten was reoccupied after Akhenaten's young son
abandoned his father's city and restored Thebes as Egypt's
capital and Amun as the supreme god. He dropped the Aten
from his name and changed it to Tutankhamun, the " Living
Image of Amun. " This did not, however, stop his eventual
successor Horemheb from trying to wipe Tutankhamun from
the historical records along with his father for their perceived
heresies, scarring the family legacy. The 18th Dynasty, which
had ruled Egypt on the strength of a single family and its
allies, finally came to an end after two and a half centuries,
but not before its members, and especially Amenhotep III,
had changed the face of Egypt forever. n
Jason Urbanus is a contributing editor at Archaeology.
http://www.archaeology.org
Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2022

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