Page 322 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[1370-1300 B-c-] The philosoPher Kin& 269

Inundation, seedtime, and harvest marked the passage of the
seasons—and the years.
As the years went by, Ankhesenamon realized that the
Eighteenth Dynasty was drawing quietly to a close. Both Horem­

heb and his queen were of the generation of her father. The
queen could expect no children, and only through her royal and
divine blood could the dynasty have continued. To the line which
Amose had founded a quarter of a millennium ago, to the family

which had liberated Egypt from the Hyksos, to the proud suc­
cession of Thothmeses and Amenhoteps—there was no generation
to follow. In momentary periods of melancholy the princess re­
membered her two dead babies.
Horemheb, too, looked to the succession. But he was not of
the divine blood. For him there was no mystique, but merely

policy, in the blood of the gods. He had himself proved that the
throne of the pharaohs belonged to him who was strong enough
to take and hold it. And he was an ex-general, used to a chain
of command which required no accident of birth to justify it.

Horemheb had come to power with the support of the officers
of the general staff, and it was the corps of officers which kept
law and order throughout the land and held the frontiers secure.
It was natural for him to choose as his successor his chief of staff,
Rameses. As he grew older, he associated Rameses officially with

his rule. For though Rameses was no younger than Horemheb,
he had a son, Seti, who was of a caliber to bear the opening
generation of a Nineteenth Dynasty.

Twenty-seven peaceful years went by before Horemheb, in
his seventies, died. And Rameses, by now an old and feeble man,
survived his old commander barely long enough to take up the
crook and flail and assume the double crown. After a single year,
in 1317 b.c., Seti succeeded his father. Princess Ankhesenamon,

now fifty-three, felt herself the forgotten relic of an age that was
past, and could herself scarcely credit that she was the same
person who as a young girl had ruled with Tutankhamon thirty
years before.

As the years went on, she lived more and more in the past.
To her dowager palace in Thebes came little news. Though
Thebes was still officially the capital, Seti came of a northern

T