Roxana Cooper Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> As Barbara Merz humorously remarks in 'Temples,
> Tombs and Hieroglyphs' Thutmose
> IV's harem creates interesting problems for
> Egyptologists - though not so far
> as we know for Thutmose!
>
> According to Merz Thutmose did have a Mittanian
> wife. He was also married to
> a 'King's Daughter' with a peculiarly
> untranslatable name and Mutemwiya who is
> not a 'King's Daughter' and so has sometimes been
> identified with the Mittanian
> Princess though there seems to be no other reason
> for this.
>
> According to 'The Complete Royal Families'
> Thutmose's wives included Iaret,
> who seems to be Merz's 'peculiarly' named queen,
> presumably a daughter of
> Amenhotep II and her husband's sister or
> half-sister. There was also a Nefertiry
> who was NOT a King's Daughter. Interestingly
> Mutemwiya only enjoys the title
> of 'King's Great Wife' during her son's reign and
> is not portrayed as queen alongside
> Thutmose IV suggesting she was a minor secondary
> wife during his lifetime - which
> also seems to have been true of Tiaa, Thutmose
> IV's mother. It makes no mention
> of the Mittanian Princess.
Exactly. Simply because the name "Mutemiwya" translates as "Mut in the barque" doesn't imply, to me or most scholars' works I've read, that she was foreign. There is a festival of Mut in Thebes in which an image of Mut is placed into a barque and rowed around in her lake near her temple in the Karnak precinct. This appears to have taken place about day 30 of 'sailing of Shesmet', in the month of Shefbedet = Ta-aabet = Coptic Tobi (approximately December, ideally). In New Kingdom texts it is referred to as the "festival of the sailing of Mut lady of Isheru." As a number of people in ancient Egypt possessed names which refer to festival activities (Ranke 1935-1977), the idea that the name "Mutemwiya"
must refer to a "foreign" princess doesn't hold up well under close inspection.
The main point is that many queens of kings in Dynasty 18 and through much of the New Kingdom, including Great Royal Wives,
do not come from brother/sister marriages, and this fact is borne out by their titles that such filiations do not exist. The whole idea for Satamun to be Amenhotep III's "half-sister" rather than her usually stated position as daughter of the same king, defies belief, IMO - particularly when using the title of /
snt nsw/,"king's sister", would have been a feather in both the cap of Satamun and Amenhotep III, had it been true.
To say simply that A III "stole" Satamun's birthright titles from her, as Mihos is saying, with no textual or archaeological proof for this statement, is simply unfounded speculation being proposed as fact.
Reference:
Ranke, H. 1935-1977.
Die ägyptischen Personennamen. (
3 Vols.) Glückstadt: J. J. Augustin.
Katherine Griffis-Greenberg
Doctoral Candidate
Oriental Institute
Doctoral Programme in Oriental Studies [Egyptology]
Oxford University
Oxford, United Kingdom