CHAPTER I

The King and the Queen

A few preliminary words about Tut•ankh•Amen. the king whose name the whole world knows, and who in that sense probably needs an introduction less than anyone in history. He was the son-in-law, as everyone knows, of that most written-about, and probably most overrated, of all the Egyptian Pharaohs, the heretic king Akh•en•Aten. Of his parentage we know nothing. He may have been of the blood royal and had some indirect claim to the throne on his own account. He may on the other hand have been a mere commoner. The point is immaterial, for, by his marriage to a king’s daughter, he at once, by Egyptian law of succession, became a potential heir to the throne. A hazardous and uncomfortable position it must have been to fill at this particular stage of his country’s history. Abroad, the Empire founded in the fifteenth century B.C. by Thothmes III, and held, with difficulty it is true, but still held, by succeeding monarchs, had crumpled up like a pricked balloon. At home dissatisfaction was rife. The priests of the ancient faith, who had seen their gods flouted and their very livelihood compromised, were straining at the leash, only waiting the most convenient moment to slip it altogether: The soldier class, condemned to a mortified inaction, were seething with discontent, and apt for any form of excitement : the foreignharim element, women who had been introduced into the Court and into the families of soldiers in such large numbers since the wars of conquest, were now, at a time of weakness, a sure and certain focus of intrigue: the manufacturers and merchants, as foreign trade declined and home credit was diverted to a local and extremely circumscribed area, were rapidly becoming sullen and discontented: the common populace, intolerant of change, grieving, many of them, at the loss of their old familiar gods, and ready enough to attribute any loss, deprivation, or misfortune, to the jealous intervention of these offended deities, were changing slowly from bewilderment to active resentment at the new heaven and new earth that had been decreed for them. And through it all Akh•en•Aten, Gallio of Gallios, dreamt his life away at Tell el Amarna.

The question of a successor was a vital one for the whole country, and we may be sure that intrigue was rampant. Of male heirs there was none, and interest centres on a group of little girls, the eldest of whom could not have been more titan fifteen at the time of her father’s death. Young as she was, this eldest princess, Mert•Aten by name, bad already been married some little while, for in the last year or two of Akh•en•Aten’s reign we find her husband associated with him as co-regent, a vain attempt to avert the crisis which even the arch-dreamer Akh•en•Aten mast have felt to be inevitable. Her taste of queenship was but a short one, for Smenkh•ka•Re, her husband, died within a short while of Akh•en•Aten. He may even, as evidence in this tomb seems to show, have predeceased him, and it is quite possible that he met his death at the hands of a rival faction. In any case he disappears, and his wife with him, and the throne was open to the next claimant