Search Results - Amenmesse

It is likely that he was not Merneptah's intended heir. Some scholars such as Kenneth Kitchen and Jürgen von Beckerath follow the traditional view that Amenmesse usurped the throne from Seti-Merneptah, Merneptah's son and Crown Prince who should have been next in line to the royal succession. It is unclear why this should have happened. Kitchen has written that Amenmesse may have taken advantage of a momentary weakness of Seti-Merneptah or seized power while the crown prince was away in Asia. Seti-Merneptah was most likely the same man as king Seti II, whose reign was traditionally thought to have followed upon Amenmesse's reign. The cartouches of Seti II's tomb in Upper Egypt were deliberately erased and then repainted, suggesting that Seti's rule in Upper Egypt was temporarily interrupted by agents of his half-brother. Confusion generally clouds Amenmesse's reign and location within the Egyptian 19th Dynasty. However, an increasing number of Egyptologists today such as Rolf Krauss and Aidan Dodson maintain that Seti II was in fact the immediate successor of Merneptah "without any intervening rule by Amenmesse."^[8] Under this scenario, Amenmesse did not succeed Merneptah on the throne of Egypt and was rather a rival king who usurped power sometime during Years 2 to 4 of Seti II's reign in Upper Egypt and Nubia where his authority is monumentally attested.^[9] Amenmesse was documented in power at Thebes during his third and fourth year(and perhaps earlier in Nubia) where Seti II's Year 3 and Year 4 are noticeably unaccounted for.^[10] The treatment of Amenmesse as a rival king also best explains the pattern of destruction to Seti II's tomb which was initially ransacked and later restored again by Seti II's officials. This implies that the respective reigns of Amenmesse and Seti II were parallel to one another; Seti II must have initially controlled Thebes in his first and second years during which time his tomb was excavated and partly decorated. Then Seti was ousted from power in Upper Egypt by Amenmesse whose agents desecrated Seti II's tomb. Seti would finally defeat his rival Amenmesse and return to Thebes in triumph whereupon he ordered the restoration of his damaged tomb.

Rolf Krauss, followed by Aidan Dodson, suggests that Amenmesse was once a Kushite Viceroy called Messuwy.^[11] In particular, two representations of Messuwy on the temple of Amida allegedly shows that a royal uraeus had been added to his brows in a way consistent with other pharaohs such as Horemheb, Merenptah and some of the sons of Rameses III. Also an inscription at the temple of Amada also calls him "the king's son himself" but this may be merely a figure of speech to emphasize Messuwy's high stature as Viceroy under Merneptah. However, Frank Yurco notes that various depictions of Messuwy in several Nubian temples were never deliberately defaced by Seti II's agents compared to the damnatio memoriae meted out to all depictions of another Viceroy of Kush, Kha-em-ter, who had served as Amenmesse's Vizier.^[12] This strongly implies that Seti II held no grudge against Messuwy which would be improbable if Messuwy was indeed Amenmesse.^[13] Yurco also observes that the only objects from Messuwy's tomb which identified a Pharaoh all named only Merneptah, Seti II's father which leads to the conclusion that Messuwy died and was buried in his tomb at Aniba, Nubia during Merneptah's reign, and could not be Amenmesse.^[14]

There has also been a suggestion that the story of the "Tale of Two Brothers", first attested during the reign of Seti II, may contain a veiled reference to the struggle between Amenmesse and Seti II.