* Amenôthes II. mentions tribute from Mitanni on one of the
columns which he decorated at Karnak, in the Hall of the
Caryatides, close to the pillars finished by his
predecessors.
** The cartouches on the pedestal of the throne of Amenôthes
IL, in the tomb of one of his officers at Sheîkh-Abd-el-
Qûrneh, represent—together with the inhabitants of the
Oasis, Libya, and Kush—the Kefatiû, the people of Naharaim,
and the Upper Lotanû, that is to say, the entire dominion of
Thûtmosis III., besides the people of Manûs, probably
Mallos, in the Cilician plain.
This one campaign, which lasted three or four months, secured a lasting peace in the north, but in the south a disturbance again broke out among the Barbarians of the Upper Nile. Amenôthes suppressed it, and, in order to prevent a repetition of it, was guilty of an act of cruel severity quite in accordance with the manners of the time. He had taken prisoner seven chiefs in the country of Tikhisa, and had brought them, chained, in triumph to Thebes, on the forecastle of his ship. He sacrificed six of them himself before Amon, and exposed their heads and hands on the façade of the temple of Karnak; the seventh was subjected to a similar fate at Napata at the beginning of his third year, and thenceforth the sheîkhs of Kush thought twice before defying the authority of the Pharaoh.*
* In an inscription in the temple of Amada, it is there said
that the king offered this sacrifice on his return from his
first expedition into Asia, and for this reason I have
connected the facts thus related with those known to us
through the stele of Karnak.
Amenôthes’reign was a short one, lasting ten years at most, and the end of it seems to have been darkened by the open or secret rivalries which the question of the succession usually stirred up among the kings’ sons. The king had daughters only by his marriage with one of his full sisters, who like himself possessed all the rights of sovereignty; those of his sons who did not die young were the children of princesses of inferior rank or of concubines, and it was a subject of anxiety among these princes which of them would be chosen to inherit the crown and be united in marriage with the king’s heiresses, Khûît and Mûtemûaû.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the photograph taken in 1887 by
Émil Brugsch-Bey
