Page 309 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

And she never saw the city o£ Akhetaten again. In Thebes she and
her husband were met by Ai, who now in some remarkable way
was a priest of the forbidden god Amon, and the same day her

husband was declared pharaoh of both Egypts and she his
divine wife. But in the declaration her husband was called
Tutankhamon and she Ankhesenamon.
On the day of their proclamation the king and queen of

Egypt, aged eleven and twelve, wandered hand in hand through
the immense ancient palace of their ancestors, which they had
never seen before, among the gangs of slaves busy sweeping and

shoveling out the accumulated sand of fifteen years, and the
masons and painters and carpenters repairing the damage which
had been allowed to accumulate after the royal household had

moved forever to their desert utopia. In the bewildering change
in their circumstances only two things remained the same; they
were together, as they had been all their childhood, and they

were still, it seemed, divine, whatever name men used for the
god who lent them divinity.
Nefertiti did not come to Thebes. Ankhesenamon never
learned what part, if any, her mother had had in her father’s

death (it was not a matter into which she wished to inquire too
deeply), but in the revolution that followed his death Nefertiti

held fast to the worship of Aten and insured that Akhenaten
received the burial which he had desired, in the rock-cut tomb
in the hills towards the sunrise. And in the years that followed,
as the royal household and the craftsmen and artisans and butch­

ers and bakers moved away from the dying and accursed city
of Akhetaten, Nefertiti remained with her priests and retainers

in the House of Aten.
In Thebes no one was in any doubt that the real ruler was
the priest Ai. He it was who held the seal and who instructed
Tutankhamon in the responses he was to make. It was he who

ordered the completion of the great temple of Amon which
Amenhotep HI had commenced, and he who formulated the

that was to wine out the name of Akhenaten from the
pages of history. Everywhere his name was to be erased and his
deeds ignored—with the result that Tutankhamon was officially