Akhenaten's family
Biographies conventionally begin by looking at the subject's family background, childhood and formative years to find explanations for the adult's character and actions. The lack of any reliable evidcncc for Akhenaten prior to his acccssion makes this impossible to do. Nothing secure is known about Akhenaten's birth or education, and everything has to be inferred from the little that is known of other pharaohs. Also, given the separation in time, and the sorts of primary evidence that survive, not much can be said about the personal relationships in Akhenaten's family that is not speculation or pseudo-history. If it is difficult to empathise with royal families of our own time and place, it is going to be even more difficult to acccss one so far removed in every way. The main sources of evidence for Akhenaten's family are not ideologically neutral and should never be read as though they are: they are not the materials for a psychobiography. Yet biographers still insist on reconstructing Akhenaten's family dynamics and their effect on his psychological development from these sources. Donald Redford, for instance, sees Akhenaten as 'a man deemed ugly by the acccpted standards of the day, secluded in the palace in his minority, certainly close to his mother, possibly ignored by his father, outshone by his brother and sisters, unsure of himself'.30 Here we have a whole psychobiography cookcd up out of classic Freudian ingredients - possessive mother, distant authoritarian father, ctc. - and based, as we shall see, on absolutely no evidence. To imagine that this kind of history can be written about Akhenaten at all is another instance of how historians delude themselves into thinking that he is an acccssiblc figure who can be identified with and understood in modern terms.
Akhenaten and his family also seem knowable because they are the stars of Egyptian history par excellence, accorded the star treatment by biographers and Egyptologists. Amunhotep III, Tiye, Akhenaten and Nefertiti have star personae in the filmic sense, their stardom created out of a fascination with the interaction between biographical facts, personal glamour and a fabulous lifestyle. Film historians have defined stardom as primarily an image of the way stars live, and that, more than anything, lifestyle is the backdrop for the specific personalities of stars and the details and events of their lives. Also, stardom is ultimately accessible and unthreatening because it combines the special with the ordinary. '1 Popular media, especially journalism, have played such a part in creating and sustaining interest in Amunhotep III, Tiye, Akhenaten and Nefertiti that these ideas about film stars may help explain how they have been biographiscd. They arc overwhelmingly royal but at the same time oddly bourgeois, happily married couples with a well-developed domestic aesthetic - something apparently confirmed by the archaeology of their palaces at Malqata, Medinet el-Gurob and Amarna. As well as being stars, Akhenaten's parents are refracted through fictional archetypes, Orientalist cliches, iconic rulers from western history, or a mixture of all three. Amunhotep is often compared to Louis XIV of France as Egypt's 'Sun King'. This is partly because one of his favourite self-applied epithets was aten tjehen, 'the dazzling sun-disc', but also because of his long reign, the material luxury of his court and his supposed personal decadence. Biographers make Amunhotep III into a sort of indolent sultan with a 'harem' of mistresses, numerous 'bastards', and a body wrecked by a lifetime of ovcr-indulgencc: the full details of his decayed teeth, bad breath, corpulence and so on arc not spared. 5" Since Amunhotep's mummy cannot even be identified securely, all this is based on not much more than presupposition about what excessive rulers are like, with an added dash of Orientalism suitable for writing about a king of Egypt. Certainly Amunhotep III had numerous co-wives who bore him many children, but so did other pharaohs of the New Kingdom, and there is no evidence to suggest that Amunhotep was more uxorious than any of them.
In the same sort of vein, Tiye is often the heroine of a Cinderella story in which a girl of humble origins marries the heir to the throne. This also contributes to Tiye's star status, because the move from ordinariness to celebrity is a crucial component in making a star persona. Hence Redford's version of Tiye is 'a girl. . . from a village in Middle Egypt' who made an advantageous marriage.35 This has no basis in fact and is a hoary scenario of pulp fiction about ancient Egypt, such as Jane Staunton Batty's Mefert the Egyptian: A Tale of the Time of Moses (1890), in which a dancer catches the eye of the pharaoh and ends up queen. Tiye may not have been closely related to the royal family, but she was no village girl either. Her parents Yuia and Tuia were local aristocrats from the area around
Akhmim, whose titles indicate their close links to the royal court and the Thcban religious establishment. They probably had connections with the family of Amunhotcp Ill's mother, Mutemwiya, which may have helped bring about the marriage in the first place.34 After her marriage, Tiye went on to appear more prominently in official monuments than any other queen consort before her, establishing a precedent for the visual prominence of Nefertiti in Akhenaten's reign. Exceptionally, Amunhotep associated Tiye with him as ruler in official contexts: for instance, he identified her widi the boundaries of the state itself in a series of commemorative scarabs issued early in his reign. These scarabs name Tiye as senior wife and give the names of her parents (again something exceptional), adding: 'she is the wife of a mighty king whose southern boundary is as far as Karoy, whose northern boundary is as far as Naharin'/5 Naharin is the western Euphrates area, Karoy between the fourdi and fifth cataracts of the Nile in what is now northern Sudan. As Egypt's southern frontier, Karoy became symbolically important later on in the reigns of Amunhotep III and Akhenaten. Some of the earliest images of Akhenaten and his relatives appear in the temples dedicated to Amunhotep and Tiye which were built as symbols of their dominion over this liminal region (sec Figure 2.5).
Nothing is known about when Tiye gave birth to Akhenaten, or whereabouts in Egypt. It could have happened almost anywhere, because New Kingdom pharaohs and their courts were more mobile than is often imagined. Journeys up and down the country were dictated partly by the official and religious calendar, partly by the pharaoh's preferred leisure activities: a trip to the marshy Delta for fishing and fowling, out to the desert for hunting. Akhenaten could have been born at the capital citics Thebes and Memphis, or at any of die palaces or smaller royal residences around Egypt, such as Medinet el-Gurob in die Fayyum. The last residence seems to have been used during the reigns of Amunhotep III and Akhenaten, and many objects supposedly from Amarna may actually have been found at Medinet el-Gurob.It was the find-spot of a famous black wooden head supposed to be Tiye, now in the Agyptisches Museum in Berlin. Whether or not it really does represent Tiye, the head has become the definitive image of her: its strong, determined features have enabled a personality to be created for Tiye around them, although nothing is known of what she was like. The name Akhenaten was given at birth, Amunhotep 'Amun-is-content' - at oncc placed him in his father's lineage and under the protection of their family's patron god. Many Egyptians were called after the local god of their birthplace, so this choice of name could suggest that Akhenaten was born at Thebes, Amun's home territory; but royalty might not have followed such customs.