4. AKHNATON’S MARRIAGE.
During the last years of his reign the Pharaoh, although well under fifty years of age,[18] seems to have suffered from permanent ill-health. On two occasions the King of Mitanni sent to Egypt a miracle-working statuette of the goddess Ishtar, apparently in the hope that Amonhotep might be cured of his illness by it. It is probable that the king had never been a very strong man. Having been born when his father—himself extremely delicate—was but a child, he had had little chance of enjoying a robust middle age, and he passed on to his children this inherent weakness. One hears no more of his daughters,[19] whom we have seen mourning for their grandparents Yuaa and Tuau, and there is some likelihood that they died young. The little Prince Amonhotep was already developing constitutional weaknesses which rendered his life very precarious. His skull was misshapen, and he must have been subject to occasional epileptic fits. And now Queen Tiy gave birth to a daughter, who was named Baketaton in honour of the new god, and who seems to have lived less than a score of years, since nothing more is heard of her after her twelfth or thirteenth year.
Amonhotep III.
As Amonhotep, at the age of forty-eight or forty-nine, felt his end approaching, he seems to have shown considerable anxiety in regard to the succession. Here was his only son—now a boy of ten or eleven years of age—in so sad a state of health that he could not be expected to live to manhood, and in the event of his death the throne would be without an occupant in the direct line. Obviously it was necessary that he should be married as soon as possible, in order that he might become a father as early as that was naturally possible. Amonhotep III. himself had been married to Tiy when he was about twelve years of age, and his father Thothmes IV. had likewise been married at that early age.[20] The little Prince Amonhotep should, therefore, also be given a wife at once; and the Pharaoh now began to look around for a suitable consort for him. He had heard that Dushratta, King of Mitanni, had a small daughter who was said to be a comely maiden; but it appears that she was only eight or nine years of age,[21] and therefore could not be expected to provide an heir for at least another four years. Nevertheless there were many political reasons for proposing the union. Mitanni was, as we have seen, the buffer state between the Pharaoh’s Syrian possessions and the lands of the Hittites and of the Mesopotamians. Thothmes IV. had asked a bride from Mitanni, and Amonhotep III. himself had obtained Gilukhipa from thence, if not Queen Tiy also: both these being probably political matches, designed for the welfare of the Syrian empire. The Pharaoh therefore decided upon this marriage for his sickly son, and sent an embassy to Dushratta to negotiate the union between these two children.
The reply of Dushratta has, fortunately, been preserved to us. The Mitannian king acknowledges the arrival of the envoy, and is much rejoiced at this further binding together of the two countries. In a subsequent letter it is evident that the princess has already been sent to Egypt, and we are led to suppose that Prince Amonhotep has at once been married to her. The little princess was named Tadukhipa, but on her arrival in Egypt she was renamed Nefertiti. Her age, as mentioned above, is apparent from the fact that, although in after life she gave birth to children at very regular intervals, her first child was not born until nearly five years after her marriage.[22] So young was she that she did not at once cohabit with the prince, but was put under the care of a certain lady of the court named Ty, the wife of a noble of the name of Ay, who afterwards usurped the throne. This lady Ty called herself in later years “great nurse and nourisher of the Queen,” and Ay always called himself the king’s father-in-law (neter at). It would thus seem that they had become the actual foster-parents of the little Syrian girl. It was not at all unusual in Egypt for a child to be adopted thus; and it is a curious fact that if a woman gave the breast to a child of any age but for a moment, or if a man placed his finger in the child’s mouth, a formal adoption was considered to have been made.[23]
The court had hardly settled down after the celebration of the marriage of Amonhotep and Tadukhipa-Nefertiti, when it was thrown into mourning by the death of Amonhotep “the Magnificent,” which occurred in the thirty-sixth year of his reign. Queen Tiy at once assumed control of state affairs, on behalf of her barely eleven-year-old son, who as Amonhotep IV. now ascended the throne of the Pharaohs.