3. THE POWER OF QUEEN TIY.
In Amonhotep III. one may see the lazy, speculative Oriental, too opinionated and too vain to bear with the stiff routine of his fathers, and yet too lacking in energy to formulate a new religion. On the other hand, there is every reason to suppose that Queen Tiy possessed the ability to impress the claims of the new thought upon her husband’s mind, and gradually to turn his eyes, and those of the court, away from the sombre worship of Amon, “the unknown god,” into the direction of the brilliant cult of the sun. Those who have travelled in Egypt will realise how completely the land is dominated by the sun. The blue skies, the shining rocks, the golden desert, the verdant fields, all seem to cry out for joy of the sunshine. The extraordinary energy which one may feel in Egypt at sunrise, and the deep melancholy which sometimes accompanies the red nightfall, must have been felt by Tiy also in her palace at Thebes.
As the years passed the power and influence of Queen Tiy increased; and now that she had borne a son to the king there was added to her great position as royal wife the equally great rôle of royal mother. Never before had a queen been so freely represented on all the king’s monuments, nor had so fine a series of titles been given before to the wife of a Pharaoh. At Sedênga, far up in the Sudan, her husband erected a temple for her; and in distant Sinai a beautiful portrait head of her was recently found. All visitors to Thebes have seen her figures by the side of the legs of the two great colossi at the edge of the Western Desert; and the huge statues of herself and her husband, now in the Cairo Museum, will have been seen by those who have visited that collection. Of Grilukhipa,[16] however, and the king’s other wives, one hears nothing at all: Queen Tiy relegated them to the background almost before their marriage ceremonies were over.
By the time that Amonhotep III. had reigned for thirty years or so, he had ceased to give much attention to state affairs, and the power had almost entirely passed into the capable hands of Tiy. Already an influence, which we may presume to have been to a large extent hers, was being felt in many directions: Ra-Horakhti and Aton were being brought into the foreground, a tone of thought which can hardly be regarded as purely Egyptian was being developed, the art was undergoing modifications and had risen to a pitch of excellence never attained before or after. The exquisite low-reliefs of the end of the reign of Amonhotep III.—for example, those to be seen at Thebes in the tombs of Khaemhat and Rames,[17] both of which are definitely dated to the close of the reign—stir one almost as do the works of the early Florentine masters. There is an elusive grace in the dainty figures there sculptured, which, through another medium and under other laws of convention, cause them to appeal with the same force of indefinable sweetness as do the figures in the works of Filipino Lippi and Botticelli. In the mass of Egyptian painting and sculpture of secondary importance such gems as these have been overlooked and have not been appreciated by the public; but the present writer ventures to think that some day they will set the heart of all art-lovers dancing as danced those of Queen Tiy’s great masters.
The court in which the little prince passed his earliest years was more brilliant than ever it had been before, and Queen Tiy presided over scenes of indescribable splendour. Amonhotep III. has been truly called “the Magnificent”; and at no period, save that of Thothmes III., were the royal treasuries so full or the nobles so wealthy. Out of a pageant of festivities, from amidst the noise of song and laughter, the little sad-eyed prince first emerges on to the stage of history, led by the hand of Queen Tiy; but as he appears before us, above the clink of the golden wine-bowls, above the sound of the timbrels, one seems to hear the lilt of a more simple song, and the peaceful singing of a lark.