Amenhotep III (Ancient Egyptian: jmn-ḥtp(.w), Amānəḥūtpū pronounced [ʔaˈmaːnəʔ ˈħutpu], “Amun is Satisfied”; Hellenized as Amenophis III), also known as Amenhotep the Magnificent or Amenhotep the Great, was the ninth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. According to different authors, he ruled Egypt from June 1386 to 1349 BC, or from June 1388 BC to December 1351 BC/1350 BC, after his father Thutmose IV died. Amenhotep was Thutmose’s son by a minor wife, Mutemwiya.
His reign was a period of unprecedented prosperity and splendour when Egypt reached the peak of its artistic and international power. When he died in the 38th or 39th year of his reign, he was succeeded by his son Amenhotep IV, who later changed his name to Akhenaten.
Family of Amenhotep III
Amenhotep was the son of Thutmose IV and his minor wife Mutemwiya. He was born probably around 1401 BC. Later in his life, Amenhotep commissioned the depiction of his divine birth to be displayed at Luxor Temple. Amenhotep claimed that his true father was the god Amun, who had taken the form of Thutmose IV to father a child with Mutemwiya.
In Regnal Year 2, Amenhotep married Tiye, the daughter of Yuya and Thuya. Tiye was the Great Royal Wife throughout Amenhotep’s reign. Many commemorative scarabs were commissioned and distributed during Amenhotep’s reign. On the “marriage scarabs,” Amenhotep affirmed his divine power and the legitimacy of his wife. With Tiye, Amenhotep fathered at least two sons, Crown Prince Thutmose and Amenhotep IV (later called Akhenaten). In addition, several daughters are frequently credited to the couple: Sitamun, Henuttaneb, Iset, Nebetah, and Beketaten. Most daughters often appear on statues and reliefs from Amenhotep’s reign. However, Nebetah is attested only once on a colossal limestone group of statues from Medinet Habu, and Beketaten only appears in Amarna.
One of Amenhotep’s many commemorative “marriage scarabs” affirms the king’s divine power and the legitimacy of his wife, Tiye. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Amenhotep is sometimes credited as the father of Smenkhkare or Tutankhamun, with varying proposals for their mothers, but these theories are not as accepted as his other known children.
Genetic analysis has confirmed he is the father of both the KV55 mummy, identified in the study as Akhenaten and “The Younger Lady”, sibling parents of his grandson, Tutankhamun. A more recent study, published in 2020, traced the family lineage via Y-chromosomes and mtDNA. Although only a partial profile was obtained, he shares his YDNA haplogroup, R1b, with his son and grandson, upholding the family tree outlined in the earlier study. However, the specific clade of R1b was not determined.
In addition to Tiye, Amenhotep had several other wives. In Regnal Year 10, Amenhotep married Gilukhepa, the daughter of Shuttarna II of Mitanni. He later married Tadukhepa, daughter of Tushratta of Mitanni, in or around Regnal Year 36 of his reign. Other wives, whose names are unknown, included: a daughter of Kurigalzu, king of Babylon; a daughter of Kadashman-Enlil, king of Babylon; a daughter of Tarhundaradu, ruler of Arzawa; and a daughter of the ruler of Ammia (modern-day Syria).
Although shunned by ordinary Egyptians, incest was not uncommon among royalty. Finally, he followed tradition and married at least two of his daughters, Sitamun and Iset, in the last decade of his reign. Jar-label inscriptions from Regnal Year 30 indicate that Sitamun was elevated to Great Royal Wife by that time. A sculpture restored by Amenhotep for his grandfather, Amenhotep II, shows Sitamun with a young prince beside her. This has led to theories that Sitamun was the mother of Smekhkare and Tutankhamun.
Life and reign
Amenhotep probably became pharaoh between the ages of 6 and 12. While it is likely that a regent would have ruled until he came of age, none is attested to in the surviving records. In Regnal Year 11, Amenhotep commanded the construction of an artificial lake at Tiye’s hometown of Djakaru. He then celebrated a Festival of Opening the Lake in the third month of Inundation, day sixteen, and rowed the royal barge Aten-tjehen on the lake. This event was commemorated on at least eleven commemorative scarabs.
From other scarabs, Amenhotep is known to have killed either 102 or 110 lions in the first ten years of his reign.
The official account of Amenhotep’s military victory emphasizes his martial prowess with period-typical hyperbole. In Regnal Year Five, he led a victorious campaign against a rebellion in Kush. This victory was commemorated by three rock-carved stelae found near Aswan and Saï in Nubia. Despite the martial prowess Amenhotep displayed during the hunt, he is known to have participated in only one military incident.
Court of Amenhotep III
There is a significant attestation for the court officials who served during Amenhotep’s reign, primarily through discovering their tombs in the Theban Necropolis. Among these court officials were the viziers Ramose, Amenhotep, Aperel, and Ptahmose. Other officials included the treasurers Ptahmose and Merire; the high stewards, Amenemhat Surer and Amenhotep (Huy); and the Viceroy of Kush, Merimose.
Amenhotep, son of Hapu, held many offices during the reign of Amenhotep, the pharaoh, but is best known for receiving the right to build his mortuary temple behind that of the King. Amenhotep, son of Hapu, was deified after his death and was one of the few non-royals to be worshipped in such a manner.
Malkata Palace
The palace of Malkata was built in the 14th century BC, and its ancient name was Per-Hay, “House of Rejoicing”. Initially, the palace was known as the Palace of the Dazzling Aten. Built primarily out of mud-brick, it was Amenhotep’s residence throughout most of the later part of his reign. Construction began around Regnal Year 11 and continued until the King moved to the palace permanently around Regnal Year 29. Once completed, it was the largest royal residence in Egypt.
Sed Festivals
Amenhotep celebrated three Sed Festivals in Regnal Years 30, 34, and 37, each at Malkata palace in Western Thebes. A temple of Amun and a festival hall were built especially for the celebrations. The Sed Festival was a tradition dating to the Old Kingdom, consisting of tests demonstrating the pharaoh’s fitness for continuing as ruler of Egypt. Based on indications left by Queen Tiye’s steward Khenruef, the Festival may have lasted two to eight months.
Amenhotep wanted his Sed Festivals to be far more spectacular than those of the past. He appointed Amenhotep, son of Hapu, to plan the ceremony, potentially because he was one of the few courtiers still alive to have served at the last Sed Festival, held for Amenhotep II. In preparation for the first Sed Festival, Amenhotep, son of Hapu, enlisted scribes to gather information from records and inscriptions; most descriptions were found in ancient funerary temples. In addition to the rituals, they collected descriptions of costumes worn at previous festivals.
Temples were built, and statues were also erected up and down the Nile. Craftsmen and jewellers created ornaments commentating the event, including jewellery, decorations, and stelae. The scribe Nebmerutef coordinated every step of the event. He directed Amenhotep to use his mace to knock on the temple doors. Beside him, Amenhotep-Hapu mirrored his effort like a royal shadow. Queen Tiye and the royal daughters followed the King. When moving to another venue, the banner of the jackal god Wepwawet, “Opener of Ways”, preceded the King. The King changed his costume at each significant activity of the celebration.
One of the major highlights of the Festival was the King’s dual coronation. He was crowned separately for Upper and Lower Egypt. Amenhotep wore the white crown for Upper Egypt but changed to the red crown for the Lower Egypt coronation.
After the Sed Festival, Amenhotep transcended from being a near-god to one divine. The King may have later travelled across Egypt following the Festival, potentially reenacting the ceremony for different audiences. Few Egyptian kings lived long enough for their celebration. Those who survived used the celebration as the affirmation of transition to divinity.
International Relations
Diplomatic correspondence from Amenhotep’s reign is partially preserved in the Amarna Letters, a collection of documents found near the city of Amarna. The letters come from the rulers of Assyria, Mitanni, Babylon, Hatti, and other states, typically including requests by those rulers for gold and other gifts from Amenhotep. The letters cover the period from Year 30 of Amenhotep until at least the end of Akhenaten’s reign. In Amarna Letter EA 4, Amenhotep is quoted by the Babylonian king Kadashman-Enlil I in firmly rejecting the latter’s entreaty to marry one of this pharaoh’s daughters:
From time immemorial, no daughter of the king of Egy[pt] is given to anyone.
Amenhotep’s refusal to allow one of his daughters to be married to the Babylonian monarch may indeed be connected with Egyptian traditional royal practices that could provide a claim upon the throne through marriage to a royal princess, or it could be viewed as a wise attempt on his part to enhance Egypt’s prestige over those of her neighbours in the international world. Despite the refusal for his daughters to be married off to other kings, Amenhotep married several foreign princesses.
The Amarna Letters also reference the exchange between Amenhotep and the Mitanni King Tushratta of the statue of a healing goddess, Ishtar of Nineveh, late in Amenhotep’s reign. Scholars generally assumed that Amenhotep requested the statue’s sojourn to Egypt to cure him of his ailments, including painful tooth abscesses. However, William L. Moran’s analysis of Amarna Letter EA 23, relating to the dispatch of the statue to Thebes, discounts this theory.
The arrival of the statue is known to have coincided with Amenhotep’s marriage with Tadukhepa, Tushratta’s daughter, in the pharaoh’s 36th year; letter EA 23’s arrival in Egypt is dated to “regnal year 36, the fourth month of winter, day 1” of his reign. Furthermore, Tushratta never mentions in EA 23 that the statue’s dispatch was meant to heal Amenhotep of his disorders. Instead, Tushratta writes in part:
. . . Thus Šauška of Nineveh, mistress of all lands: “I wish to go to Egypt, a country that I love, and then return.” Now I herewith send her, and she is on her way. Now, in the time, too, of my father,…[she] went to this country, and just as earlier she dwelt there, and they honoured her, may my brother now honour her ten times more than before. May my brother honour her, [then] at [his] pleasure let her go so that she may come back. May Šauška (i.e., Ishtar), the mistress of heaven, protect us, my brother and me, for 100,000 years, and may our mistress grant both of us great joy. And let us act as friends. Is Šauška for me alone my god[dess], and my brother not his god[dess].
Moran explained the visit of the statue might be to heal the king but that it is more likely that it was sent in connection with the solemnities of the marriage of Tadukhepa to Amenhotep. The likeliest explanation is that the statue was sent to Egypt “to shed her blessings on the wedding of Amenhotep and Tadukhepa, as she had been sent previously for Amenhotep and Gilukhepa.” further, Moran argues that the contents of Amarna Letter EA 21 support this claim, wherein Tushratta asks the gods, including Ishtar, for their blessing of the marriage.
Succession
Thutmose, the eldest son of Amenhotep with his wife Tiye, spent at least part of his life as the Crown Prince. However, Thutmose predeceased his father, and Amenhotep was ultimately succeeded by his second son, also named Amenhotep.
Proposed coregency with Akhenaten
It has long been theorized that Amenhotep III shared a coregency with his son and successor, Amenhotep IV (later called Akhenaten). Whether this remains true is unclear. Writing in 1998, Lawrence Berman claimed that proponents of the coregency theory tended to be art historians while historians remained unconvinced.
Eric Cline, Nicholas Reeves, Peter Dorman, and other scholars argue strongly against establishing a long coregency between the two rulers and in favour of either no coregency or one lasting at most two years. Donald B. Redford, William J. Murnane, Alan Gardiner, and Lawrence Berman contest the view of any coregency whatsoever between Akhenaten and his father.
Evidence against a coregency includes Amarna Letter EA 27, dated to Regnal Year 2 of Amenhotep IV. The letter’s subject involves a complaint from the Mitannian king Tushratta, claiming that Amenhotep IV did not honour his father’s promise to send Tushratta gold statues as part of the marriage arrangement between Tadukhepa and Amenhotep III. This correspondence implies that if any coregency occurred between Amenhotep and Akhenaten, it lasted no more than a year.
However, in February 2014, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities announced that findings from the tomb of Vizier Amenhotep-Huy gave “conclusive evidence” of a coregency that lasted at least eight years. In the tomb, the cartouches of the two pharaohs were carved side by side. However, this conclusion has since been called into question by other egyptologists, according to whom the inscription means only that construction on Amenhotep-Huy’s tomb started during Amenhotep III’s reign and ended under Akhenaten’s. Amenhotep-Huy thus wanted to pay his respects to both rulers.
Later life
Amenhotep’s greatest attested regnal date is Year 38, which appears on wine jar-label dockets from Malkata. He may have lived briefly into an unrecorded Year 39 and died before the wine harvest of that year. Reliefs from the wall of the temple of Soleb in Nubia and scenes from the Theban tomb of Kheruef, Steward of the King’s Great Wife, Tiye, depict Amenhotep as a visibly weak and sick figure. Scientists believe that in his final years, he had arthritis and became obese. Further, a forensic examination of his mummy shows that he was probably in constant pain during his last years owing to his worn and cavity-pitted teeth. A study of his mummy by the Australian anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith concluded that the pharaoh had died between 40 and 50 years.
He was survived by at least one child, his successor, Amenhotep IV, and his wife, Tiye. She is known to have outlived him by at least twelve years, as she is mentioned in several Amarna letters that are dated from her son’s reign as well as depicted at a dinner table with Akhenaten and his royal family in scenes from the tomb of Huya, which were made during Year 9 and Year 12 of her son’s reign.
Foreign leaders communicated their grief at the pharaoh’s death, with Tushratta saying:
When I heard that my brother Nimmureya had gone to his fate on that day, I sat down and wept. On that day, I took no food; I took no water.
Amenhotep was buried in the Western Valley of the Kings in Tomb WV22. Sometime during the Third Intermediate Period, his mummy was moved from this tomb and was placed in a side chamber of KV35 along with several other pharaohs of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, where it lay until Victor Loret discovered it in 1898.
Mummy and burial
For the 18th Dynasty, the mummy shows hefty use of subcutaneous stuffing to make the mummy look more lifelike. Amenhotep was buried in the Valley of the Kings outside of Thebes, in the tomb labelled WV 22. The tomb is the largest in the West Valley of the Kings and includes two side chambers for his Great Royal Wives, Tiye and Sitamun. However, it does not seem as if either woman was buried there. Amenhotep’s mummy was later moved during the reign of Smendes. In the present day, Amenhotep’s mummy has the inventory number CG 61074.
In 1980, James Harris and Edward F. Wente conducted X-ray examinations of the New Kingdom Pharaoh’s crania and skeletal remains, which included the mummified remains of Amenhotep III. The authors determined that the royal mummies of the 18th Dynasty bore strong similarities to contemporary Nubians with slight differences.
In April 2021, his mummy was moved from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, along with those of 17 other kings and four queens, in an event termed the Pharaohs’ Golden Parade.
Monuments and legacy
Amenhotep has the distinction of having the most surviving statues of any Egyptian pharaoh, with over 250 of his figures having been discovered and identified. Since these statues span his entire life, they provide a series of portraits covering the whole length of his reign.
When Amenhotep died, he left behind a country at the very height of its power and influence, commanding immense respect in the international world; however, he also bequeathed an Egypt wedded to its traditional political and religious certainties under the Amun priesthood.
The resulting upheavals from his son Akhenaten’s reforming zeal shook these old certainties to their foundations. They brought forth the central question of whether a pharaoh was more potent than the existing domestic order as represented by the Amun priests and their numerous temple estates. Akhenaten even moved the capital away from the city of Thebes to break the influence of that mighty temple and assert his own preferred choice of deities, the Aten. Akhenaten moved the Egyptian capital to the site known today as Amarna (though initially known as Akhetaten, ‘Horizon of Aten’) and eventually suppressed the worship of Amun.
Amenhotep was built extensively at the temple of Karnak, including the Luxor temple, which consisted of two pylons, a colonnade behind the new temple entrance, and a new temple to the goddess Ma’at. Amenhotep dismantled the Fourth Pylon of the Temple of Amun at Karnak to construct a new pylon — the Third Pylon — and created a new entrance to this structure, where he erected two columns with open papyrus capitals down the centre of this newly formed forecourt. The forecourt between the Third and Fourth Pylons, sometimes called an obelisk court, was also decorated with scenes of the sacred barque of the deities Amun, Mut, and Khonsu being carried in funerary boats. The king also started work on the Tenth Pylon at the Temple of Amun. Amenhotep’s first recorded act as king — in his Years 1 and 2 — was to open new limestone quarries at Tura, just south of Cairo and at Dayr al-Barsha in Middle Egypt to herald his great building projects. He oversaw the construction of another temple to Ma’at at Luxor and virtually covered Nubia with numerous monuments.
… including a small temple with a colonnade (dedicated to Thutmose III) at Elephantine, a rock temple dedicated to Amun, “Lord of the Ways” at Wadi es-Sebuam, and the temple of Horus of Miam at Aniba … other temples at Kawa and Sesebi.
His enormous mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile was, in its day, the largest religious complex in Thebes, but unfortunately, the king chose to build it too close to the floodplain, and less than two hundred years later, it stood in ruins. Merneptah and later pharaohs purloined much of the masonry for their construction projects. The Colossi of Memnon — two massive stone statues, 18 m (59 ft) high, of Amenhotep that stood at the gateway of his mortuary temple — were the only elements of the complex that remained standing. Amenhotep also built the Third Pylon at Karnak and erected 600 statues of the goddess Sekhmet in the Temple of Mut, south of Karnak. Some of the most magnificent statues of New Kingdom Egypt date to his reign, “such as the two outstanding couchant rose granite lions originally set before the temple at Soleb in Nubia,” as well as an extensive series of royal sculptures.
Several beautiful black granite seated statues of Amenhotep wearing the nemes headdress have come from excavations behind the Colossi of Memnon and Tanis in the Delta. In 2014, two giant statues of Amenhotep that were toppled by an earthquake in 1200 BC were reconstructed from more than 200 fragments and re-erected at the northern gate of the king’s funerary temple.
One of the most stunning finds of royal statues dating to his reign was made as recently as 1989 in the courtyard of Amenhotep’s colonnade of the Temple of Luxor, where a cache of statues was found, including a 6 feet (1.8 m)-high pink quartzite statue of the king wearing the Double Crown found in near-perfect condition. It was mounted on a sledge and may have been a cult statue. The only damage it had sustained was that the name of the god Amun had been hacked out wherever it appeared in the pharaoh’s cartouche, clearly done as part of the systematic effort to eliminate any mention of this god during the reign of his successor, Akhenaten.
In 2021, excavations revealed a settlement near Amenhotep’s mortuary temple, called the Dazzling Aten, which is believed to have been built by Amenhotep. It is presumed to have housed artisans and labourers working on royal monuments and projects at Thebes, as well as in the ancillary industries needed to support such an administrative and skilled-worker population, and had its bakery and cemetery.
One of the king’s most popular epithets was Aten-tjehen which means “the Dazzling Sun Disk”; it appears in his titulary at Luxor temple and, more frequently, was used as the name for one of his palaces as well as the Year 11 royal barge, and denotes a company of men in Amenhotep’s army. A Sed Festival Stela of Amenhotep III was taken from Egypt to Europe by an art dealer. It is now believed to be in the United States but not on public display. In Europe, Dr Eric Cassirer at one time owned the stela. The dimensions of the white alabaster stela are ten × 9 cm (3.94 × 3.54 in), but only the upper half of the stela survived. It was shaped like a temple pylon, gradually narrowing near the top.
Cassirer suggests Akhenaten, Amenhotep’s son and successor, was responsible for defacing the king’s name on the stela. Akhenaten detested his royal family name so much that he changed his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten; he vandalized any reference to the god Amun since he had chosen to worship another god, the Aten. Other gods displayed on the stela, Re and Ma’at, showed no sign of vandalism.
The stela is believed to have been displayed prominently in Akhenaten’s new capital city of Akhetaten (current day Amarna). With the royal name and Amun references removed, it probably had a prominent place in a temple or palace of Akhenaten. Akhenaten could display the stela without reminders of his old family name or the false god Amun, yet celebrate his father’s achievement.
Another striking characteristic of Amenhotep’s reign is the series of over 200 large commemorative stone scarabs discovered over a large geographic area ranging from Syria (Ras Shamra) to Soleb in Nubia. Similarly, five other scarabs state that his wife Gilukhepa of Mitanni arrived in Egypt with an entourage of 317 women. She was the first of many such princesses who would enter the pharaoh’s household.
