Amenhotep III

The reign of Amenhotep III (d. c. 1353 BC) is conventionally treated as the apogee of the 18th Dynasty, nearly four decades in which Egypt was wealthy, secure, and diplomatically dominant. A great-grandson of Thutmose III, he was the son of Thutmose IV and Queen Mutemwiya and came to the throne as a youth around 1390 BC. Early in the reign he married Tiye, the daughter of the non-royal officials Yuya and Thuya, and announced the marriage on a series of commemorative scarabs circulated throughout the empire — an unusual gesture toward a queen who would remain unusually prominent.

Military action was largely unnecessary; apart from a Nubian campaign, Amenhotep III governed by wealth and negotiation. The Amarna letters, the diplomatic archive found at his son's later capital, document his correspondence with the kings of Babylon, Mitanni, and other powers, marked by exchanges of gifts, gold, and royal brides. Foreign princesses entered his harem, but Tiye kept the position of Great Royal Wife throughout.

His building program was on a scale Egypt had rarely seen. He raised the temple of Luxor in large part, added massively at Karnak, built the sprawling palace complex of Malkata on the Theban west bank with its artificial harbor, and commissioned hundreds of granite statues of the goddess Sekhmet. His mortuary temple was the largest ever constructed in Egypt; little survives above ground except the two seated quartzite colossi at its entrance, known since Greek times as the Colossi of Memnon. In his final decade he celebrated three sed festivals of royal renewal, accompanied by an intensified emphasis on the king's divinity and on solar cult.

He died around 1353 BC and was buried in the western Valley of the Kings; a mummy from the KV35 cache is generally identified as his. The succession passed to his son by Tiye, Amenhotep IV, who as Akhenaten would dismantle much of the religious order his father had so lavishly endowed. Whether father and son shared a co-regency is a long-standing dispute that remains unresolved.