Page 319 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

L1370-1300 B.C.]
the direct successor of Amenhotep III and the reign of his father
had been wiped off the slate of history, now Horemheb was
similarly proclaimed the direct successor of Amenhotep III and

the reigns of Tukankhamon and of Ai, as well as that of Akhena-
ten, officially ceased to have occurred. Ankhesenamon found
herself relegated to the rank of princess in the royal household,
and her thirteen years as queen were regarded as though
they had never been. Horemheb’s reign was reckoned from the

death of Amenhotep thirty-two years before, and all the royal
acts and buildings of those years were assumed to have been
his. Even so, as a concession to the young ex-queen, Horemheb
contented himself with ascribing his own name above the car­

touche of Tutankhamon on the inscriptions, whereas the name
of Ai was cut out as ruthlessly as that of Akhenaten had been
thirteen years before.
The rest of her life Ankhesenamon lived in retirement. In­
deed, she had packed sufficiently of joy and sorrow, excitement

and disappointment into her first twenty-five years to fill more
than a lifetime.
From her palace in the grounds of the royal residence at

Thebes she followed the radical measures introduced by the
new dictator of Egypt to restore order and prosperity to the
country. Corruption was ruthlessly punished. Any attempt by
the army officers to profit personally from their new position of

power received short shrift. And the priests of Amon were curtly
informed that there were other gods in Egypt.
Horemheb was a northerner. And the gods of the north, Ra
and Ptah and even Set, were given places in the pantheon equal

to those of the southern gods. Rameses was appointed vizier of
the north, and Horemheb led his army south in a lightning
campaign against the Sudanese, who had taken advantage of
the troubles in Egypt to revolt, and even to invade Egypt itself.

But Horemheb did not consider the time ripe for further
adventures abroad. It was necessary first to rebuild the shattered
economy of the land. In the troubled times just past, Egypt s

foreign trade, always dependent to a dangerous extent on goods
of the luxury category, had slumped alarmingly, and a stable