Haremhab, The General Who Became King at the Met
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The ambitious successor of Pharaoh Tutankhamun (r. 1332-1323 B.C.) is the subject of Haremhab, The General Who Became King, opening November 10, 2010 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. This landmark exhibition’s objects are drawn entirely from the institution’s collection of Egyptian art.
Haremhab (r. 1332-1309 B.C.) was the resourceful commander-in-chief of the boy-king Tutankhamun’s army. This last pharaoh of the glorious 18th Dynasty organized successful military campaigns at Egypt’s southern border with Nubia and in the Levant. As a lawgiver, he secured civilians’ rights and restricted the army’s power. A commemorative stela (stone monument) on display illustrates priests carrying the shrine of Amun, the oracular deity responsible for sanctioning Haremhab’s kingship. Its narrative signifies Egypt’s return to religious orthodoxy following the Amarna interlude.
The exhibition compares the artistic style of General Haremhab’s abandoned tomb in the necropolis (cemetery) at Saqqara with contemporary funerary works. Early 20th-century facsimile paintings reproduce the interior of his grand royal burial site in the Valley of the Kings. There he attempted to obliterate the memory of the heretical ruler Akhenaten (r. 1353-1336 B.C.), Tutankhamun’s father, by using talatat or blocks from the disgraced pharaoh’s dismantled temple at Thebes in his tomb’s construction. Having done so, he inadvertently preserved fragmentary evidence of the earlier king’s short-lived experiment in solar monotheism.
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