The Long Coregency Revisited: Architectural and Iconographic Conundra in the Tomb of Kheruef
By Peter F. Dorman, Associate Professor of Egyptology.
The Oriental Institute, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago.
(The following article is a preprint of a contribution to a volume of essays in Memory of William Murnane. The projected title of the book is: "Causing his Name to Live: Studies in Egyptian History and Epigraphy in Memory of William J. Murnane". Editors: Peter Brand and Jacobus van Dijk.)
A generation of young scholars has been introduced to the complex issue of Egyptian coregencies through Bill Murnane's seminal dissertation on the topic, published by the Oriental Institute in 1977. Of all the coregencies discussed by Murnane, none has been debated with more passion than the one alleged between Amenhotep III and his son. The long coregency of ten or eleven years is far more than a chronological quibble: it has serious implications for the structure of royal administration, the determination of foreign relations, the management of economic resources, the promulgation of art styles, the coexistence of apparently conflicting religious cults, and the reconstruction of the genealogy of the royal family at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. This present revisitation of a subject that Bill Murnane himself addressed several times is affectionately dedicated to his memory, in admiration of his scholarship and out of gratitude for his unfailing personal generosity-and with the hope that he would have found the argument of interest.
