The Story of Tutankhamun by Garry J. Shaw;

Author:Garry J. Shaw;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-10-12T10:11:52+00:00

The Destruction of Tutankhamun and Aye

Though Horemheb had lived through the reigns of Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Aye, he no longer regarded them as true kings, worthy of being remembered. It was better for Egypt to bury their memory, he decided. Wherever his artisans travelled in Egypt, they usurped monuments, chiselling out the names of his immediate predecessors and replacing them with his own. Not only would this cause later generations to forget that they had ever lived, but the removal of their names meant obliteration from existence. If Horemheb had succeeded in his mission, he would have caused these pharaohs to vanish from the afterlife – a second death from which there was no return. Even for a general accustomed to the brutality of war, this was rather extreme.

During this campaign of destruction, Horemheb’s men entered Aye’s tomb and hacked away the images of Aye and Tiye, along with their names. They pushed off his sarcophagus lid, and perhaps even robbed some of his grave goods and destroyed his mummy.27 Horemheb then completed work on Aye’s mortuary temple, but replaced all of the names with his own.28 At Karnak, the target was Tutankhamun’s Restoration Stele, on which every reference to the boy king was changed into Horemheb, making it appear that he was responsible for the return to tradition after Akhenaten. His men removed two carvings of Ankhesenamun too, leaving Horemheb standing alone in the presence of the gods.29 At nearby Luxor Temple, scaffolding was re-erected so workmen could remove Tutankhamun’s names from his grand carvings of the Opet Festival in the Colonnade Hall.30 Across Egypt, Horemheb usurped Tutankhamun’s newly-crafted statues, something that Aye had not done;31 perhaps Aye had a higher level of respect for the young king.

The one place that Horemheb’s vandals couldn’t reach was Tutankhamun’s tomb. Horemheb and the artisans of Deir el-Medina knew its location, of course, but with it cut off from the world beneath a hard layer of flood debris, it would have taken them an impressive amount of effort to break through the ground to reach its entrance – effort that the workmen clearly had no interest in expending.

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