Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [71]
As should be painfully apparent to the reader, the genealogies of the period are still being debated. Tetisheri’s royal husband may have been the first Taa, aka Senakhtenre, if there were two of them. If there was only one…Never mind. Tetisheri survived him, whoever he was; she lived to see her daughter Ahhotep marry her full brother, Sekenenre Taa. Her granddaughter, Ahmose-Nefertari, also married her brother, Ahmose. (The period certainly has a plethora of Ahmoses; I have mentioned only a few of them.) Ahmose’s queen was a great lady; in later times she and her son were worshipped as patrons of the workmen’s village of Deir el Medina.
Tetisheri was the ancestress of this line of queens. Several of them were found in the cache of royal mummies discovered in the nineteenth century, and Tetisheri may have been one of those that are not identified. It’s hard to tell what a mummy may have looked like in life, but the remains of the royal women of this period have one outstanding characteristic—a pronounced overbite. It was probably not for beauty or charm that they were remembered so long and honored so highly. Was it for their importance in the inheritance of the throne? The notion of inheritance through the female isn’t accepted nowadays. Perhaps the quality that distinguished the queens and princesses of the early Eighteenth Dynasty was that elusive thing called personality; in the next chapter we will see what happened when Tetisheri’s great-great-granddaughter decided to exert her share of the family character.
These women were the wives of kings and of soldiers; the fragile Tetisheri, while still a young woman, may have seen the mutilated body of her son borne home from the battlefield, and watched from a window of the palace as her grandson(s) marched out to war in their turn. Maybe she egged them on, as did the equally fragile and bloody-minded ladies of the Confederacy. According to a stela found at Karnak, the queen Ahhotep, wife of Sekenenre the Brave, upon one occasion had to rally the troops and put an end to rebellion. This is one of the most tantalizing references in Egyptian history; and we know nothing more about it. Historical novelists, take note.
Ahmose’s son bore a name which the Eighteenth Dynasty was to make famous—Amenhotep. Like the similar dynastic name of the Middle Kingdom, Amenemhat, it honored the patron god of Thebes. But unlike the Twelfth Dynasty kings, the new rulers did not move their capital to the north. From this time dates the rise of Thebes, whose monuments still awe the visitor.
Ahmose left his son a united Egypt, free for the first time in centuries of foreign interlopers. He also left to him, and to us, his two soldier-namesakes from El Kab. We are grateful for the legacy, since the tomb inscriptions of these men have given us much useful information. General Ahmose and Admiral Ahmose served, in all, six kings of Egypt. Both fought in Nubia under Amenhotep I, in the campaign that regained all the territory formerly held by the Twelfth Dynasty, and perhaps more. “I fought incredibly,” says the admiral modestly. He also rushed the king back to Egypt upon the news of a threatened invasion by the Libyans, a distance of two hundred miles in two days. We can say little more about Amenhotep I; he fought in Nubia, he probably fought in Asia, he built monuments. Then he died.
His successor is a more interesting character, if for no other reason than because he was the father of one of the most fabulous personalities who ever sat upon the throne of Egypt. He was a man of no mean accomplishments in his own right—Thutmose, the first to bear the second famous