Horemheb

Horemheb was an army commander under Tutankhamun who became king after Ay, closing the Eighteenth Dynasty. His reign length is disputed: this timeline follows a longer chronology, while evidence from wine-jar labels in KV57 has supported a shorter reign. His successor became Ramesses I, founder of the Nineteenth Dynasty.

He put the state back together after Amarna, and he did it partly by removing the record of it: the reigns of Akhenaten, of the short-lived rulers after him, of Tutankhamun and of Ay were treated as though they had not happened, their monuments usurped or dismantled and their years absorbed into his own. At Karnak he demolished Akhenaten’s Aten temples and packed the blocks into the pylons (a monumental gateway formed by two massive towers) he was building — which is why we still have them. And he wrote a long decree, cut on a stela at Karnak, against corrupt officials and soldiers extorting from the poor, with specific penalties.

The temple administration was restored and re-staffed, the priesthoods refounded, and the legal decree issued. At Karnak he built the Second Pylon on the main axis and the Ninth and Tenth Pylons on the southern one, all three filled with Amarna talatat (a small standardised sandstone block, sized for one man to carry, from Akhenaten’s Theban temples). At Luxor Temple he completed and re-inscribed the Great Colonnade, replacing Tutankhamun’s cartouches (an oval frame containing a royal name) in the Opet procession with his own. He took over Ay’s unfinished mortuary temple (a temple for royal commemoration and divine worship, active during a king’s life and after death) on the west bank and enlarged it.

He had already had a fine tomb built for himself at Saqqara while he was a general; on becoming king he abandoned it and had KV57 cut in the Valley of the Kings instead. That royal tomb is significant for a different reason: it was left unfinished, and its walls show the decoration at every stage from red grid lines to finished painted relief.

At Karnak: the Second Pylon and the Ninth and Tenth Pylons, built around a core of Akhenaten’s dismantled blocks. At Luxor Temple: the completion of the Great Colonnade and the re-inscription of its Opet reliefs. On the west bank: the completion and enlargement of Ay’s mortuary temple. And KV57 in the Valley of the Kings.

Two places tell the story together. Walk the southern axis at Karnak through the Ninth and Tenth Pylons — the buildings are his and their insides are Akhenaten’s. Then stand in the Great Colonnade at Luxor Temple and look at the cartouches above the Opet procession: the scenes were carved for Tutankhamun and the names on them are Horemheb’s. In the Luxor Museum there is a statue of him from the 1989 cachette, kneeling before the god Atum, in near-perfect condition.