Horemheb
Pharaoh of Egypt, 18th Dynasty
1360 BCE to 1292 BCE
Horemheb (sometimes spelled Horemhab or Haremhab and meaning Horus is in Jubilation) is the last Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty from 1319 BCE to late 1292 BCE, although he was not related to the preceding royal family and is believed to have been of common birth.
Before he became pharaoh, Horemheb was the commander in chief of the army under the reigns of Tutankamun and Ay.
After his accession to the throne he reformed the state and it was under his reign that official action against the preceding Amarna rulers began.
Horemheb demolishes monuments of Akhenaten, reusing their remains in his own building projects, and usurps monuments of Tutankhamun and Ay.
Horemheb presumably remains childless and he appoints his vizier Paramesse as his successor, who will assume the throne as Ramesses I.
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Horemheb, Tutankhamen’s general, repels Hittite incursions on the Egyptian empire in northern Syria.
Tutankhamen, apparently once an active leader of his troops but weakened by a virulent strain of malaria and degenerative bone disease, dies at the age of nineteen or so of infection resulting from a leg fracture.
He is succeeded by his vizier Ay, who marries Tutankhamen's widow and appropriates the king's tomb for himself.
The young king is buried, with linen gloves and numerous pieces of fine gold jewelry embedded with precious stones, at Thebes in the Valley of the Kings; a curse reading "Death comes on swift wings to he who opens this tomb," is inscribed on the tomb’s doorway.
His rich tomb furnishings include a gold sarcophagus with a (now-famous) gold and lapis lazuli funerary mask.
Among the burial items are an iron dagger with a golden hilt.
Also entombed with Tutankhamen is an example of the earliest known military game, alquerque, a two-player game played on a board marked with five diagonal lines.
Each player has twelve pieces and can move them onto vacant intersections or capture an enemy piece by jumping over it to an unoccupied point.
Two relief sets of battle-themed carvings from Tutankhamen's mortuary temple survive, one depicting a Nubian campaign and one larger group that shows the king in a chariot leading the Egyptian forces against a Syrian-style citadel.
Other blocks in the second series depict Tutankhamen receiving prisoners, booty, and the severed hands of the enemy dead, strung on spears: a detail unique in Egyptian art, which, at this time, stresses truthfulness in representation.
Therefore, Tutankhamen’s presence in these scenes indicates the likelihood that he actually participated in these campaigns.
Ay dies in 1323 or 1320; Horemheb succeeds him as pharaoh.
Horemheb, upon his accession to the throne in about 1320 BCE, had initiated a comprehensive series of internal reforms meant to curb the gross abuses of power and privileges that had begun under Akhenaten's reign, due to the overcentralization of state power and privileges in the hands of a few officials.
He "appointed judges and regional tribunes…reintroduced local religious authorities" and divided legal power "between Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt" between "the Viziers of Thebes and Memphis respectively.”
These deeds are recorded in a stela which the king had erected at the foot of his Tenth Pylon at Karnak.
Sometimes called The Great Edict of Horemheb, it is a copy of the actual text of the king's decree to reestablish order to the Two Lands and curb abuses of state authority.
The stela's creation and prominent location emphasizes the great importance which Horemheb placed upon domestic reform.
Horemheb also reformed the Army and reorganized the Deir el-Medinah workforce in his Seventh Year while Horemheb's official, Maya, renewed the tomb of Thutmose IV, which had been disturbed by tomb robbers in his Eighth Year.
Egypt's power and confidence has once again been restored under Horemheb after the chaos of the Amarna period.
Horemheb is a prolific builder: in his lifetime, he builds numerous temples and buildings throughout Egypt.
He constructs the Second, Ninth and Tenth Pylons of the Great Hypostyle Hall in the Temple at Karnak, using recycled talatat blocks from Akhenaten's own monuments as building material for the first two Pylons.
Horemheb, the last pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty, apparently chooses a commander of his army to succeed him to the throne.
upon Horemheb’s death in 1292 BCE, Ramesses I inaugurates the Nineteenth dynasty.
Ramesses, who plans and begins construction on the colonnaded hall in the temple at Karnak, reigns for little more than a year before dying in 1290 BCE; his son succeeds him as Seti I.