Egypt

In the eighteenth dynasty other royal women had achieved great power, including Queen Hatshepsut (1473– 1458 BC), who had enjoyed the full support of the Amun priesthood in crowning herself; Queen Tiy, consort of Egypt’s own Sun King, Amenhotep III; and, most famously, Nefertiti (c.1380–1340 BC), principal wife of Akhenaten, whose story is told in Nefertiti: The Book of the Dead. But perhaps, due to her youth, relative inexperience of power, and lack of a stable royal marriage and heirs, Ankhesenamun’s position at this moment was much more vulnerable.

Egypt in the eighteenth dynasty was the greatest power of the Ancient Near East, and the Hittites were their most confrontational enemy. But after the later collapse of their empire, the Hittites disappeared from history, and not until the late twentieth century did they become the focus of archaeological and historical research. Kingship was hereditary, and the king, addressed as ‘My Sun’, acted as high priest for the kingdom. Among his responsibilities were the supervision of annual festivals and the maintenance of the sanctuaries and temples.

Hattusa, the fortified capital of the Hittite homeland, was in central Anatolia (modern Turkey); through the might of their armies (a mixture of professionals, men answering the call of feudal obligation, and mercenary troops), and their control of vassal states and territories, they conquered northern Syria and extended their empire so that it stretched from the Aegean coast of Anatolia as far as Babylon. By the time of the setting of this novel, they had established themselves as one of the key players on the international stage. King Suppiluliuma I (c.1380- c.1346 BC) was one of the great warrior kings, who corresponded on equal terms with the other kings of the Ancient Near East. But the astonishing success of the Hittite expansion brought them into direct conflict with Egypt.

At the time this novel takes place, the Egyptians and the Hittites had been at war for years. At stake was control of Syria, the crossroads for all the commerce of the Ancient Near East. From the great port of Ugarit, goods from all over the eastern Mediterranean-cedar, grain, gold, silver, lapis lazuli, tin, horses, etc.-would arrive to be sold and distributed via a network of trade routes that stretched south to Egypt, east to Babylon and north-east to Mittani. So Syria was vital for commerce, but it was also strategically indispensable, and the great empires warred and negotiated with each other for influence and dominance over it.

Egypt had long controlled southern and central Syrian territories, which were a source of great profit and political prestige. But Suppiluliuma, in a series of what must have been daring military campaigns, quickly took control of the northern kingdoms and cities of the region from the empire of Mittani. The status quo was threatened, and the region became politically volatile. (It is not hard to recognize the parallels with today’s Middle East.) Characters such as Aziru of Amurru, as historically attested, grasped the opportunity to forge alliances that suited their ambitions, and to extend their own territories.

So Ankhesenamun’s letter to Suppiluliuma requesting him to send her a son to marry was unprecedented, and came at a time of escalating conflict between the two superpowers. Suppiluliuma was, understandably, very suspicious of her request. According to the annals, he sent a high official to Egypt to investigate. And the following spring, the high official (the Ambassador Hattusa in this novel) returned with a representative of the Egyptian court (Nakht, in the novel) with a further letter:

Why did you say ‘they deceive me’ in that way? Had I a son, would I have written about my own and my country’s shame to a foreign land? You did not believe me and have said as much to me. He who was my husband has died. A son I have not. Never shall I take a servant of mine and make him my husband. I have written to no other country, only to you have I written. They say your sons are many: so give me one son of yours. To me he will be husband, but in Egypt he will be King.

According to the annals, Suppiluliuma remained suspicious:

You keep asking me for a son of mine as if it were my duty. He will in some way become a hostage, but King you will not make him.

But we know that, after further negotiations, a deal was agreed, and his son Zannanza was sent back to Egypt. But then, disaster struck, for Zannanza was murdered on the journey. The Hittites blamed the Egyptians, of course:

When Suppiluliuma heard of the slaying of Zannanza, he began to lament for Zannanza, and to the Gods he spoke thus: ‘Oh Gods! I did no evil, yet the people of Egypt did this to me, and they also attacked the frontier of my country.’

And in the end, what Ankhesenamun might have intended as a radical solution to the problem of her succession, and an attempt to forge a peace treaty through marriage between the two empires, actually raised the stakes of the conflict, and would eventually lead to one of the most famous confrontations of the Ancient World, the Battle of Qadesh, in 1274 BC.

The dramatic geopolitics of the region-and the sophisticated diplomatic methods of the time-make up the historical panorama of this novel; and I hope the resonances for our modern world, with today’s great powers vying for influence for commercial and political reasons in the Middle East, are part of the pleasure of the story. I’ve drawn on the best available historical and archaeological evidence to reconstruct both the daily world and the drama of high politics in Egypt, Syria and Hatti; and through the eyes and mind of Rahotep, Seeker of Mysteries, I have imagined my way into the events as they might have been experienced by the key players. Above all, I have attempted to tell the story behind Ankhesenamun’s mysterious letters, and to solve the twin mysteries of what might have compelled her to resort to such desperate measures, and of who killed Zannanza, and how, and why.

There is no evidence, other than the Hittite annals, for what happened on that return journey to Egypt. However, the Apiru (or Habiru in some translations) are well-attested in Egyptian, Hittite and Mittanian sources. Inanna (known in Akkadian as Ishtar) was the Sumerian goddess of love, fertility and war. She is stunningly depicted in the British Museum’s Queen of the Night relief (also known as the Burney Relief), winged, with taloned feet and a headdress of horns topped by a disc, her hands raised to the viewer. (You can see the life, head and heart lines on her palms.) She is holding rod-and-ring symbols. (These appear frequently; what they symbolize is uncertain, but they were only ever held by gods.) She is also attended by lions and owls, standing upon a range of stylized mountains. Her symbol was an eight-pointed star, which in the novel becomes the sign of the Army of Chaos. ‘She stirs confusion and chaos against those who are disobedient to her, speeding carnage and inciting the devastating flood, clothed in terrifying radiance,’ according to the ‘Hymn to Inanna’.

My character has borrowed the name and the powers of her goddess. For her, opium is both a commodity and something sacred. Of course psychotropic drugs, especially hallucinogens, have been used for religious and shamanic purposes from prehistoric times. ‘Soma’ was a ritual drink of great importance among the early Indo- Iranians, for whom it had the status of a god. There is wide evidence for the cultivation and ritual use of opium throughout the Ancient World-in Neolithic settlements in western Europe, and then in Mesopotamia where the Sumerians called it the ‘joy plant’. The Assyrians and Babylonians also collected ‘poppy juice’. The Ancient Egyptians used mandrake (a fruit) and the lotus (blue water lily) for medicinal narcotic purposes, although it must be said that any exact identification of opium within the herbals and medical papyri is problematic. One likely reference appears in the Ebers Papyrus as a ‘remedy for driving out much crying [in children]’. Base ring juglets, which were shaped to resemble an inverted poppy seed-pod, were probably used to import opium juice from Cyprus. It has also been proposed that opium and lotus flowers were mixed with wine for recreational as well as religious use, because the effective alkaloids were soluble in alcohol. In the novel, the ‘lost valley’ of the Army of Chaos is based on the Beqaa valley, where the production of wine and opium, and the rule of tribal militias, remain as active today as they were in the Late Bronze Age.

Alas, there is no other evidence at the time of writing to suggest what might have happened to Ankhesenamun after the murder of Zannanza. Horemheb (1323–1295 BC) succeeded Ay on the throne of Egypt, and she disappears completely from the historical record. And with her vanishing the great eighteenth dynasty of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, of Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamun, also came to an end; Horemheb, in the iconoclastic custom of new kings, dismantled their temples and usurped their monuments. And then he adopted as his heir a military officer from the delta (Horemheb’s own home), who would found a new dynasty: the Ramesside, which would comprise eleven rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties.

Ankhesenamun’s tomb and mummy have never been found. She was neither named nor depicted in Tutankhamun’s tomb, and despite the custom of burying personal items belonging to the Great Royal Wife in the tomb, nothing of hers was found there. The very absence of such things is significant. Similarly, as Ay’s Great Royal Wife, she should have been depicted in Ay’s tomb; but its walls are decorated with images of another wife, Tiy.