BALTIMORE – In life, King Tut’s grandmother was a powerful woman in ancient Egypt. But after death, a monument to her met an undignified end.
A Johns Hopkins University archaeological team found a life-sized statue believed to represent Queen Tiye buried face down under the floor of the sprawling Karnak Temple site in Luxor, the ancient Egyptian royal city.
The statue, which dates to between 1391 and 1352 B.C., was found under the platform of a temple of the goddess Mut, which dates to about 700 B.C. It appears to have been tossed in with rubble used to fill in the floor during that temple’s later expansion, said Betsy Bryan, a professor of Egyptian art and archaeology at Johns Hopkins, www.jhu.edu, in Baltimore.
“The reason for using the statue as construction material, however, remains unknown,” Bryan said in an e-mail from Egypt.
During her lifetime, the queen was treated with much more respect. Tiye, also known as Ti, was the first queen of Egypt to have her name appear on official acts alongside that of her husband, the pharaoh Amenhotep III, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities noted when it announced the discovery last week.
“Some indications, such as her own portraits in art, suggest that Tiye may have ruled briefly after her husband’s death, but this is uncertain,” Bryan said.
Then her son, dubbed the heretic king, rocked the royal boat so severely that his statues were not just buried but defaced.
Amenhotep IV rejected the god Amen in favor of the sun disk Aten and changed his name to Akhenaten. He is often considered the first pharaoh to advocate monotheism.
The disposal of Tiye’s statue may have been just a matter of making room for newer works, Brand said. “When they were refurbishing buildings, they had no compunction about taking statues of a predecessor and burying them,” he said.
Associated Press
This statue of Queen Tiye dates to between 1391 B.C. and 1352 B.C.
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