Khûniatonû left no son to succeed him; two of his sons-in-law successively occupied the throne—Sâakerî, who had married his eldest daughter Marîtatonû, and Tûtankhamon, the husband of Ankhnasaton. The first had been associated in the sovereignty by his father-in-law;* he showed himself a zealous partisan of the “Disk,” and he continued to reside in the new capital during the few years of his sole reign.** The second son-in-law was a son of Amenôthes III., probably by a concubine. He returned to the religion of Amon, and his wife, abjuring the creed of her father, changed her name from Ankhnasaton to that of Ankhnasamon. Her husband abandoned Khûitatonû*** at the end of two or three years, and after his departure the town fell into decadence as quickly as it had arisen. The streets were unfrequented, the palaces and temples stood empty, the tombs remained unfinished and unoccupied, and its patron god returned to his former state, and was relegated to the third or fourth rank in the Egyptian Pantheon.
* He and his wife are represented by the side of Khûniatonû,
with the protocol and the attributes of royalty. Pétrie
assigns to this double reign those minor objects on which
the king’s prenomen Ankhkhopîrûri is followed by the epithet
beloved of Uânirâ, which formed part of the name of
Khûniatonû.
** Pétrie thinks, on the testimony of the lists of Manetho,
which give twelve years to Akenkheres, daughter of Horos,
that Sâakerî reigned twelve years, and only two or three
years as sole monarch without his father-in-law. I think
these two or three years a probable maximum length of his
reign, whatever may be the value we should here assign to
the lists of Manetho.
*** Pétrie, judging from the number of minor objects which
he has found in his excavations at Tel el-Amarna, believes
that he can fix the length of Tûtankhamon’s sojourn at
Khûîtatonû at six years, and that of his whole reign at nine
years.
The town struggled for a short time against its adverse fate, which was no doubt retarded owing to the various industries founded in it by Khûniatonû, the manufactories of enamel and coloured glass requiring the presence of many workmen; but the latter emigrated ere long to Thebes or the neighbouring city of Hermopolis, and the “Horizon of Atonû” disappeared from the list of nomes, leaving of what might have been the capital of the Egyptian empire, merely a mound of crumbling bricks with two or three fellahîn villages scattered on the eastern bank of the Nile.*
* Pétrie thinks that the temples and palaces were
systematically destroyed by Harmhabî, and the ruins used by
him in the buildings which he erected at different places in
Egypt. But there is no need for this theory: the beauty of
the limestone which Khûniatonû had used sufficiently
accounts for the rapid disappearance of the deserted
edifices.
Thebes, whose influence and population had meanwhile never lessened, resumed her supremacy undisturbed. If, out of respect for the past, Tûtankhamon continued the decoration of the temple of Atonû at Karnak, he placed in every other locality the name and figure of Amon; a little stucco spread over the parts which had been mutilated, enabled the outlines to be restored to their original purity, and the alteration was rendered invisible by a few coats of colour. Tûtankhamon was succeeded by the divine father Aï, whom Khûniatonû had assigned as husband to one of his relatives named Tîi, so called after the widow of Amenôthes III. Aï laboured no less diligently than his predecessor to keep up the traditions which had been temporarily interrupted. He had been a faithful worshipper of the Disk, and had given orders for the construction of two funerary chapels for himself in the mountain-side above Tel el-Amarna, the paintings in which indicate a complete adherence to the faith of the reigning king. But on becoming Pharaoh, he was proportionally zealous in his submission to the gods of Thebes, and in order to mark more fully his return to the ancient belief, he chose for his royal burying-place a site close to that in which rested the body of Amenôthes III.*
* The first tomb seems to have been dug before his marriage,
at the time when he had no definite ambitions; the second
was prepared for him and his wife Tîi.
His sarcophagus, a large oblong of carved rose granite, still lies open and broken on the spot.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after the drawing of Prisse d’Avenues.