Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [112]
In the south the situation was equally desperate, although the attackers were different—fierce desert raiders called the Habiru.
These people have interested historians because of the etymological similarity between their name and that of the Hebrews. That’s probably all it is, an etymological similarity; the Habiru were not a civilized people, as Egypt and Hatti were civilized, but they were ferocious fighters, and the fortresses of Palestine, weakened by years of neglect under Amenhotep III, fell to them like wheat under the sickle. And again there was no help from Akhenaton!
“If no troops come in this year,” wrote Abdu-Heba, Egyptian deputy in Jerusalem, “the whole territory of my lord the king will perish. If there are no troops in this year, let the king send his officer to fetch me and my brothers, that we may die with my lord the king.”
We do not know whether Abdu-Heba gained the safety of Egypt or died in the ruins of his city; but Jerusalem fell, and Megiddo fell, and the southern half of Egypt’s Asiatic empire collapsed, as the northern half had done under the hammering of Aziru.
The historian cannot help but ask, at this point: What sort of man was Akhenaton, that he could see his empire crumbling into sand without lifting a finger to save it? If he was the idealist and pacifist that some Egyptologists believed him to have been, how could he watch unmoved the slaughter of his subjects and the betrayal of those faithful to him?
The once-accepted answer, that Akhenaton was a dreamy pacifist more concerned with his god than his country, was always too simplistic. The true facts about the warfare in Syria may never have reached him. The workings of a complex bureaucracy such as Akhenaton’s Bureau of Foreign Affairs are in themselves an excellent screen for truth, and there seem to have been traitors in the home office itself. I find it hard to accept the theory of a “let’s wait and see” attitude on the part of Akhenaton and his father; after a certain point one or the other ought to have seen enough. Perhaps Akhenaton did. Some of the letters speak of Egyptian troops being sent to certain cities, but there is no actual evidence that Akhenaton himself went to war. Since most of the letters can be dated only by internal evidence, there is still disagreement as to who was doing what to whom, and when.
Here’s where we get to the cursed coregency question, as I am sometimes inclined to call it. It’s one of the liveliest debates among scholars of this period. Some of them believe that Akhenaton was made coruler with his father somewhere around the latter’s year twenty-five. Thus all the revolutionary activities I have described took place while Amenhotep III was still on the throne, honoring the same Amon-Re whom his son was attacking, preparing his conventional tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and continuing the conventional activities of an Egyptian ruler. The evidence for and against this belief are too complicated to go into here, and definitive proof is still lacking. One of the points made by the long coregency school is that in his twelfth year Akhenaton’s mother, Queen Tiye, paid a visit of state to Tell el Amarna. Was the death of her husband the occasion for this visit? Did she live thereafter at Amarna? Did she drop a few words of wisdom into the ears of her son, warning him that trouble was brewing? They are reasonable questions, but we don’t know the answers.
At about this time or shortly thereafter Nefertiti disappears from the scene. Her name means, appropriately, “the beautiful woman has come.” In the early days of their marriage Akhenaton spared no pains to show his love for her. Although she was probably a commoner like her mother-in-law, Tiye, her husband composed a royal titulary for her and gave her the additional name Neferneferuaton, “beautiful