As a child Amenhotep III (Amenofi) knew tha one day he would have become a king, but he couldn’t imagine that this would have happened when he was eight years old. According to some historians, in fact, it’s at this age that the young king inherited his father’s Tuthmosi IV scepter, beginning one of the most great periods of the whole history of Ancient Egypt.
The glorious XVIII dynasty enjoyed greatness and exceptional luxury under this man of a rare personality that from 1387 to 1348 BC, created great works in the land of the Nile.
Amenhotep III has been defined by historian critics as “ The Sun King in Egypt” for two good reasons.
The first because of his epithet, because he was called “ the shining disk of the Sun of Egypt”. This has suggested to the French archaeologists a resemblance with the great “Sun King” the French Luigi XIV who, in 1643, remembered the Egyptian sovereign for the greatness and the pomp he showed at court.
Amenhotep III, considering his young age when he ascended the throne, had to entrust the monarchy to his mother Mutemuya. The woman had given birth to the heir in Tebe, but the young king had lived for a long time, precisely until his twenty-ninth year of reign, in Menfi, where the young candidates to the throne received the necessary education to govern the Country.
Then, maybe after a pestilence, the pharaoh decided to move with the court and the family to the capital Tebe that, thanks to the sovereign’s presence, became a dream city, with many sumptuous monuments, that with their great sizes emphasized its importance and prestige, in and outside the empire.
The ruins today let us imagine and rebuild the splendor of once: between the Nile and its palm groves, among the green fields and the desert sand, great palaces dominated, that were accurately furnished and immersed in the heart of luxuriant gardens, of rich vegetation and with little artificial lakes.
In this scenery the king lived happy moments with his loving partner, the queen Tiye, that he married the second year of his reign when he was still a boy. This woman, that received the title of the “Great Royal Bride”, had a great influence on the empire and survived her husband continuing to follow the fate of the Egyptian people even when her son Akhenaton ascended the throne.
The portraits show a women with sensual and rather pronounced features (probably for a possible Nubian origin of the queen), the full lips in the portraits of her youth and the thin lips in the senile ones, emphasize a strong and determined personality, while the great black eyes are vivacious and deep.
Tiye was particularly worshipped by Amenhotep III, who wanted that his wife should be represented beside him on, relief on the monuments and in the statues of couples, sometimes, of their real size. To emphasize the royal and divine role of the couple, the pharaoh ordered to build in Soleb, in Upper Nubia, a temple dedicated to his personal cult and in the near Seddenga, one dedicated to the cult for his wife, as a personification of the goddess Hathor.
The first is the most important Egyptian monument kept in Upper Nubia and the second, unfortunately collapsed and the beautifully decorated bricks have to still be restored, and was called “Tiye’s House”.
In the light of such a demonstration of love, those impassioned and with fantasy have imagined that the royal wedding was the result of a romantic love story between a king and a modest subject. Tiye really didn’t have royal origins but she wasn’t neither the last of the girls in Tebe.
She was Yuya’s daughter, an important dignitary in Akhmin – the city of God Min- who possessed many properties and was superintendent of the armaments and who, moreover, had as his wife, a woman called Thuya, the priestess in the temple of god Min, who could approach to the kingìs court, and one of his sons, Aanen, was a priest in Amon. Yuya was also the director in the royal and official stables of His Highness and, in years, he acquired the name of “Father of God”, a title that is hard to understand and probably given to him because of his role as the king’s father-in-law and maybe also for the one as Ay’s father, the pharaoh who governed Egypt after Tutankhamon’s short reign.
Amenhotep’s III wedding was, so, dictated by a pure feeling of sincere love, but destined to have good effects on the stability of the monarchy. Amenhotep’s III reign was in prevalence peaceful, the army was busy only in a rebellion in Nubia in the fifth year of reign and in a second expedition at the end of the monarchy. The relations with the States near the east were limited to prolific diplomatic contacts that were possible thanks to a thick correspondence established by Amenhotep III and after continued by Akhenaton and Tutankhamon, with the sovereigns of the people in the east. Amenhotep III knew how to govern a great empire, and was strong and confident by the military undertakings of his predecessors. For this reason he didn’t think it was necessary to send the army in those territories that had already known the power of the Egyptian army. Those who the pharaoh called “brothers”, the Asiatic kings, stayed peacefully in their territories but began to prepare a new attack silently. The only thing that Amenhotep III considered right to do, was a political wedding, marrying Gilughepa, the king’s of the Mitanni, daughter.
Other than the foreign politics the king was busy also with the inner one, dedicating himself in realizing works for peace, for which he had the best artists of the empire; among these his namesake Amenhotep, Hapu’s son, the chief of  the royal architects and native of the Delta, distinguished himself.
This man, born around 1430 BC created the project to build the temple in Luxor and followed the works in Soleb and Seddenga. He died suddenly in his eighties and after his death he was deified to honor his wisdom. His name is put beside those of two great architects of the Egyptian history, Imothep (III Dynasty) and Senenmut (XVIII Dynasty).
Amenhotep III and his faithful architect have left monuments that today we have the fortune to be able to visit. Above all the great temple in Luxor, destination for tourists from all over the world, of which it is possible to admire the beautiful court, among the most beautiful in art history, surrounded by a double line of 62 columns and preceded by another gigantic monumental colonnade.
The temple was the southern “opet” (or harem) of the god Amon, where the divinity went once a year to visit his bride.
An inscription on the outside of the building had the following king’s words:
“ I have built Amon’s temple with beautiful white stone, I have made the shutters of the doors in acacia wood, encrusted with gold and with bronze hinges; the name Amon is inlaid in precious stones”.
From these short sentences we can understand the aesthetic level and the refinement that the king wanted for his monuments.
To join this new area dedicated to god Amon with the older one in Karnak the sovereign ordered to prepare a street today called the Sphinxes Avenue.
In western Tebe, precisely in Malkatta, instead, he ordered to build the royal residence in front of which he wanted an artificial dock. The king moved here with his court and spent years in parties and hunting beats. Today, of the great excavation of the dock, only some traces are left and there are the ruins of the palace but the archaeologists have been able to reconstruct the plan and save some beautifully decorated pavements.
Always in western Tebe, Amenhotep III ordered to build his funeral temple, of which two great statues survive, known as the “Colossal of Memnone”, that alone give the idea of how the entire building must have been, of which it is possible to see a few rests of the back part.
In this enchanting area the king celebrated three Sed feasts. The first goes back to the thirtieth year of reign, the other two to the thirty-forth and the thirty-seventh. The first of these holy recurrences was celebrated in many places with ceremonies that went from Tebe to Soleb in Upper Nubia, up to the city of Bubatis in the Delta of the Nile.
The whole empire resounded with solemn celebrations in Amenhotep’s III honor and the echo of this pomp reached the Asiatic brothers.

 

The sovereign's sphinx Amenothep III bidder to the gods

Cruet with the ninth of Amenofi III and Teye