Very little is known of the character of Thothmes IV., and nothing which bears upon that of his grandson Akhnaton is to be ascertained. Although of feeble health and unmanly physique, he was a fond upholder of the martial dignity of Egypt. He delighted to honour the memory of those Pharaohs of the past who had achieved the greatest fame as warriors. Thus he restored the monuments of Thothmes III., of Aahmes I., and of Senusert III.,[10] the three greatest military leaders of Egyptian history. As a decoration for his chariot there were scenes representing him trampling upon his foes; and when he died many weapons of war were buried with him. Of Queen Mutemua’s character nothing is known; and the attention of the reader may at once be carried on to Akhnaton’s maternal grandparents, the father and mother of Queen Tiy.
5. YUAA AND TUAU.
Somewhere about the year 1470 B.C., while the great Thothmes III. was campaigning in Syria, the child was born who was destined to become the grandfather of the most remarkable of all the Pharaohs of Egypt. Neither the names of the parents nor the place of birth are known; and the reader will presently find that it is not easy to say whether the child was an Egyptian or a foreigner. His name is written Aau, Aay, Aai, Ayu, A-aa, Yaa, Yau, and most commonly Yuaa; and this variety of spelling seems rather to indicate that its pronunciation, being foreign, did not permit of a correct rendering in Egyptian letters. He must have been some twenty years of age when Thothmes III. died; and thus it is quite possible that he was one of those Syrian princes whom the Pharaoh brought back to Egypt from the courts of Asia to be educated in the Egyptian manner. Some of these hostages who were not direct heirs to Syrian thrones may have taken up their permanent residence on the banks of the Nile, where it is certain that a fair number of their countrymen were settled for business and other purposes. During the reign of Amonhotep II., Yuaa must have passed the prime years of his life, and at that king’s death he had probably reached about the forty-fifth year of his age. He had married a woman called by the common Egyptian name of Tuau, regarding whose nationality there is, therefore, not much question. Two children were born of the marriage, the first a boy who was named Aanen, and the second a girl named Tiy, who later became the great queen. Tiy was probably a little girl some two years old when Thothmes IV. came to the throne, and as her parents both held appointments at court, she must have presently received those first impressions of royal luxury which influenced her childhood and her whole life.
Tuau, grandmother of Akhnaton.
At this time Yuaa held the sacerdotal office of Priest of Min, one of the most ancient of the Egyptian gods. Min, who had many of the characteristics of, and was later identified with, the Greek Pan, was worshipped at three or four cities of Upper Egypt, and throughout the Eastern Desert to the Red Sea coast. He was the god of fecundity, fertility, generation, reproduction, and the like, in the human, animal, and vegetable worlds. In his form of Min-Ra he was a god of the sun, whose fertilising rays made pregnant the whole earth. He was more noble than the Greek Pan, and represented the pristine desires of lawful reproduction in the family, rather than the erotic instincts for which the Greek god was famous. Were one to compare him with any of the gods of the countries neighbouring to Egypt, he would be found to have as much likeness to the above-mentioned Adonis, who in North Syria was a god of vegetation, as to any other deity. This fact offers food for some thought, for if Yuaa was a foreigner, hailing, as may be supposed, from Syria, there would have been no Egyptian god, except Atum, to whose service he would have attached himself so readily as to that of Min. Although a tribal god, Min was not essentially the protector and upholder of Egyptian rights and Egyptian prejudices. He was, in one form or another, universal; and he must have appealed to the sense and the senses of Syrian and Egyptian alike.
At this time, as we have seen, the priests of Amon, whose wealth had brought corruption in its train, were under the cloud of royal displeasure, and the court was beginning to display a desire to rid itself of an influence which was daily becoming less exalted. It may be that Yuaa, upholding the doctrines of Min and of Adonis, had some connection with this movement, for he was now a personage of considerable importance at the palace. He may have already held the title of Prince or Duke, by which he is called in his funeral inscriptions; and one may suppose that he was a favourite of the young king, Thothmes IV., and of his wife, Queen Mutemua, whose blood was soon to unite with his own in the person of Akhnaton. When Thothmes IV. died at the age of twenty-six, and his son Amonhotep III., a boy of twelve years of age, came to the throne, Yuaa was a man of over fifty, and his little daughter Tiy was a girl of marriageable age according to Egyptian ideas, being about ten years old.[11]
Chest belonging to Yuaa.