1 —The Coronation

The boy stood barefoot and almost naked in front of the gigantic cedar doors of Amun's temple – a simple kilt of fine white linen his only garment. Behind him were the most important priests and dignitaries of the Two Lands. He knew they were there. He could feel the pressure of their determination that he would be the king they had waited for since his grandfather Neb-maat-Ra, Amenhotep III, Great Bull of the Two Lands, had stepped into the solar boat and gone to join his ancestors in the Land of the Ever Living.

He was frightened. When this door opened he would no longer be Prince Tutankhaten, free to roam the palaces of his father and his grandfather, free to swim in the lakes with his sisters, play with other children, say what he liked. He would be Pharaoh, with all the world dependent on his every whim, his every word. He would wear clothes stiff with gold and jewels and would have to move with dignity. No longer would he chase his friends through the garden and throw stones at the birds. When these great doors opened he would enter a prison from which there was no escape. He would have to endure endless boring ceremonies; mouth again and again the words he had been taught; perform monotonous rituals; listen to the lengthy sacred texts endlessly intoned. He would be expected to know everything, see everything, be everything. He would be the sole conveyor of the gods' power to earth.

As the only surviving son of the king among many daughters he knew he would have to take on this role one day. His mother Kia, for one, had never let him forget it. But when he had been learning to be a pharaoh he had looked on the lessons as elaborate games, remote from reality. Reality was the fun he had with his sisters and his friends. The hot, closed rooms of the House of Life where he was trained and instructed in the skills and knowledge he would need as Pharaoh he had endured as best he could, only waiting for the hour of release. His heart skipped a beat. If only he had paid more attention. But even if he had – no one expected him to inherit the throne at the age of nine. No one had prepared him for this.

He knew Ay was close behind him – Master of Chariots, Companion of the Great King, Vizier in charge of all things under the King. Ay who had been powerful in his grandfather's court and because of this had not disappeared with all the rest who had been close to his father.

Everything had happened so quickly – his father's death; Nefertiti, the Great Royal Wife, taking the throne; the murder of his uncle Djehuti-kheper-Ra whom he had liked and trusted; and, most frightening of all, the violent disorder in his father's capital, Akhetaten, in which so many of his family and friends had perished. He shuddered to think of what it must have been like for the beautiful Nefertiti and his beloved sister Merytaten when the mobs turned on them and beat them to death. How could such things happen? General Horemheb said it was because his father had destroyed the rule of Maat, of Order and Justice, in the Two Lands by turning against the old gods who had kept the country in peace since the ancient days. "See," he said, "what happens when the common people have no gods to respect and obey; when they have only themselves to consider." But his father had not left the country without gods. There was the Aten, the greatest god of all, who held the whole earth in its care.

The young prince had not seen the ugly massacre at Akhetaten, nor General Horemheb's fierce vengeance on those who perpetrated it, because he had been safe with his sisters on his grandfather's estates at Per-hay, near Waset. But he had witnessed the confusion that followed and seen a distraught Kia at one moment preparing for them to flee, and at the next, grooming him to be King.

Big men with dark faces came and went. His sister Ankhesenpaaten listened impassively to what they had to say and dismissed them from her presence.

Then one night his younger sisters, his greatest friends, Nefernefruaten, Neferneferure and Setepenre, disappeared like so many other people he had known. Only Ankhesenpaaten and his mother remained.

He had never been close to Ankhesenpaaten. She was older than him, and never seemed to evince the joy of living the other daughters of Nefertiti did. Now it seemed she was to be his Queen, his Great Royal Wife. Because his mother was not royal, his sister Ankhesenpaaten, daughter of both Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and indeed carrying extra status by having been married to the king, her father, would give his claim to the throne unshakeable legitimacy.

General Horemheb stepped forward and placed a huge and heavy stone-headed mace in his hands. He knew what he had to do and did it.

He lifted it with all the strength in his thin arms and struck the door – once, twice, three times. The sound brought a chill to his heart as the immense panels of cedar, heavily laden with inscriptions and images in bronze, gold and silver rolled slowly back. He entered the sacred precincts – a minute figure overshadowed by the huge statues of his ancestors, by gigantic columns, by the tall priests who came forward to meet him, clad in stiff ceremonial garments, wearing the masks of the gods – the very gods his father had taught him were evil and had banished from the Two Lands. He looked at them uneasily. What was he to believe? Ay and Horemheb, who now seemed to hold the power in the Two Lands since Nefertiti's death, assured him that his father had been insane and the country was in danger because the old gods had been mocked and driven out. They quoted instance after instance of how the Two Lands had suffered under his father. He was told that it was his responsibility to restore them to their rightful places and to rescue from destruction the kingdom he had inherited.

The figures before him looked both ridiculous and menacing. Men with animal masks.

"They are just pretending," he told himself, and repeated it several times as they drew nearer. Horus with the head of a falcon, Lord of the Sky, representing divine kingship, the sacred son of sacred parents; Anubis, god of the Tomb, with the head of a jackal to remind us that through the jackal's gut the dead are recycled into life; Khnum who fashions life on a potter's wheel, wearing the head of a ram; Set, the god of storms, the dangerous god, with the head of an animal no one can name; Sobek, the crocodile . . . All these and more gathered round him and led him forward. The boy was frightened. His father had impressed on him that there was only one true god and that could not be represented by anything on this earth.

"Only the globe of the sun and the sun's rays can give you an idea of his glory," he had said. "Only the Aten that shines on all the world at one moment can even begin to show you what lies in his heart."

He had witnessed his father and his father's servants smashing the statues of the other gods and yet no retribution had fallen on them. Or had it?

Tutankhaten frowned, remembering his father's sudden death and what had happened afterwards. For a while Nefertiti had ruled in his father's place. Nefertiti, the beautiful one, whom his mother loathed. Nefertiti, the proud, who watched him sometimes with the cold eyes of a cobra. He could not know, young as he was, that there was a struggle going on for power in the Two Lands, and the faction against his father Akhenaten, was working secretly to overthrow him and place his son on the throne. For a while, his father's friend, some said his brother, Djehuti-kheper-Ra, had looked as though he would rule Khemet. But he had been found dead in an alley. Nearly everyone he knew was either dead or had gone away. He was thankful for Ay, his father's and his grandfather's confidant, for giving some sense of continuity, some feeling of familiarity and security. He glanced briefly over his shoulder at Ay for guidance, momentarily forgetting what he must do next. Ay nodded him forward.

The priest with the mask of Horus took his hand and led him to a second door, twenty cubits high and fashioned from fine white limestone. Beside it was a colossal statue of one of his ancestors, Aa-kheper-ka-Ra, Djehuti-mes I.

Then a priest garbed as the god Atum, the creator of physical form, took his other hand. The door ground open slowly and the young prince entered the "hall of purification". He stepped into a shallow crystal bowl of sacred water and four priests, each at one of the four cardinal points of the world – north, south, east and west – poured purifying water over him from four slender crystal vials. He felt the cool liquid on his skin and he shivered. There was no going back now. No pharaoh had ever ceased to be pharaoh while he lived.

Did he imagine it or did the statues that surrounded him, the carved images on the walls, suddenly seem different? Were their stone eyes seeing him? He felt his flesh goose-pimple and lowered his eyes at once to the paved floor. Blindly he followed where he was led.

The next hall was called "the house of the king" and was where the coronation ceremony itself would take place.

There had been a ceremony at Akhetaten in a coronation hall hastily erected for the purpose. But Ay and General Horemheb had said that that was not enough. All the gods of Khemet must declare him King, not only the Aten. The great temples at Ipet-Esut and Ipet-Resut had been partially restored for the purpose. Tutankhaten, if he had not been concentrating so hard on the floor at his feet, would have noticed that many of the reliefs of the gods were still chipped and scratched out and some walls were still smoke-blackened, the vivid colours of surface paint peeled and flaked.

His heart was beating uncomfortably fast as he passed between the papyriform columns and the two magnificent golden obelisks. Huge Osiriform statues of Djehuti-mes III and IV towered over him. He entered the chapel of the north, the "house of flame", and the chapel of the south, the "great house". The gods of the north and south crowded round him, encircling him, chanting the ancient, sacred (and largely unintelligible) words of the coronation ceremony.

Copyright © 1990, 2000, Moyra Caldecott.