Horemheb also usurped and enlarged Ay's mortuary temple at Medinet Habu for his own use and erased Ay's titulary on the back of a 17 foot colossal statue by carving his own titulary in its place.

" The lack of dated inscriptions for Horemheb after his Year 14 also explains the unfinished state of Horemheb's royal KV57 tomb --" a fact not taken into account by any of those defending a long reign 26 or 27 years.

* Horemheb is also a minor character in the Japanese graphic novel, Red River centered around ancient Anatolia and ancient Egypt.

* Horemheb was also a major character in Mika Waltari's historical fiction international bestseller, Sinuhe, The Egyptian.

' Records and monuments that can be clearly attributed to Ay are rare, not only due to his short length of reign, but also because his successor, Horemheb, instigated a campaign of damnatio memoriae against him and other pharaohs associated with the unpopular Amarna Period.

This could also be a daughter of Ay's by his wife Tey, and it is known that his successor Horemheb married a woman with the name Mutnodjimet .< ref name =" Sunset 98 "> Dodson, Aidan.

Horemheb also usurped Ay's mortuary temple at Medinet Habu for his own use.

Mature also starred with Hedy Lamarr in Cecil B. DeMille's Biblical epic, Samson and Delilah ( 1949 ) and as Horemheb in The Egyptian ( 1954 ) with Jean Simmons and Gene Tierney.

These images were later recarved by Horemheb who also usurped Tutankhamun's restoration inscriptions.

Horemheb had reformed the army and had developed a loyal chain of command within it.

" Horemheb quickly rose to prominence under Tutankhamun, becoming Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and advisor to the Pharaoh.

After Ay's reign which lasted for a little over four years, however, Horemheb managed to seize power presumably from his position as Commander of the Army to assume what he must have perceived to be his just reward for having ably served Egypt under Tutankhamun and Ay.

The Commander of the Army, Horemheb, had actually been designated as the " idnw " or " Deputy of the Lord of the Two Lands " under Tutankhamun and was presumed to be the boy king's heir apparent and successor.

" This evidence is consistent " with the Horemheb dockets from Deir el-Medina which mention Years 2, 3, 4, 6, 13 and 14, but again no higher dates ".... while a docket ascribed to Horemheb from Sedment has Year 12.

The ink graffito reads Year 27, first Month of Shemu day 9, the day on which Horemheb, who loves Amun and hates his enemies entered the temple for this event.

The Year 27 date of Horemheb is located within this interval and would reflect Horemheb's accession date, Krauss suggests.

Another important text, The Inscription of Mes, records that a court case decision was rendered in favour by a rival branch of Mes ' family in Year 59 of Horemheb.

Since the Mes inscription was composed during the reign of Ramesses II when the Amarna-era Pharaohs were struck from the official king-lists, the Year 59 Horemheb date certainly includes the nearly 17 year long reign of Akhenaten, the 2 year independent reign of Neferneferuaten, the 9 year reign of Tutankhamun and the 4 year reign of Ay.

Once all these rulers reigns are deducted from the Year 59 date, Horemheb would still have easily enjoyed a reign of 26 – 27 years.

At a well known 1987 Conference from Gothenburg Sweden, Kenneth Kitchen astutely noted that any attempt to explain away the Year 59 Horemheb date as a " scribal error " fails to consider the long and volumnious listed series of court trials and legal setbacks which Mes ' family endured in order to win back control over certain valuable lands which had been stolen from his family's line.

Mes, hence, could hardly be expected to forget the beginning of his family's legal tribulations in Year 59 of Horemheb.

Meanwhile, 22 dockets " mention Year 13 and 8 have Year 14 Horemheb " but none mention a higher date for Horemheb.

The " quality and consistency of the KV57 dockets strongly suggest that Horemheb was buried in his Year 14, or at least before the wine harvest of his Year 15 at the very latest.

Even if we assume that Horemheb did not begin the work on his royal tomb until his Year 7 or 8 ,... it remains a mystery how the work could not have been completed had he lived on for another 20 or more years.

As for the Year 27 hieratic graffito at Horemheb's Funerary temple at Medinet Habu and the Year 59 date from the inscription of Mes, Van Dijk argues that the first date likely inaugurated a statue of Horemheb during Year 27 of Ramesses II or III in Horemheb's temple while the latter date of Mes " can hardly be taken seriously, and indeed is not taken at face value by even the staunchest supporters of a long reign " for Horemheb since there was no standard Egptian practise of including the years of all the rulers between Amenhotep III and Horemheb as Wolfgang Helck makes clear.

When Tutankhamun died while still a teenager, Horemheb had already been officially designated as the rpat or iry-pat ( basically the " Hereditary or Crown Prince ") and idnw (" Deputy of the King " in the entire land ) by the child pharaoh ; these titles are found inscribed in Horemheb's then private Memphite tomb at Saqqara which dates to the reign of Tutankhamun since the child king's ...

Horemheb desecrated Ay's burial and had most of Ay's royal cartouches in his WV23 Tomb Wall paintings erased while his sarcophagus was smashed into numerous fragments.

The aged Vizier Ay sidelined Horemheb's claim to the throne and instead succeeded Tutankhamun likely because Horemheb was in Asia with the army ( no objects belonging to Horemheb was found in Tutankhamun's tomb whereas items donated by other high-ranking officials such as Maya and Nakhtmin were found in tomb KV62 by Egyptologists in the 20th century ) and because Tutankhamun's queen, Ankhesenamun, refused to marry Horemheb, a commoner, and make him the next king of Egypt.

Having pushed Horemheb's claims aside, Ay proceeded to nominate the aforementioned military officer named Nakhtmin who was possibly Ay's son or adopted son, to succeed him rather than Horemheb.

The forecourt of Horemheb's Memphite Tomb of Horemheb ( Memphis ) | tomb at Saqqara.

Finally, Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun, and Ay were removed from the official lists of Pharaohs, which instead reported that Amenhotep III was immediately succeeded by Horemheb.

Given his age, the king probably had very powerful advisers, presumably including General Horemheb, the Vizier Ay, and Maya, the " Overseer of the Treasury ".

The tombs of important officials from his reign, such as Horemheb and Maya, are situated in Saqqara, although Horemheb was eventually buried in the Valley of the Kings after reigning as pharaoh himself.

* Several clusters of tombs of high officials, among which the tombs of Horemheb and of Maya and Merit.

Maya was the Overseer of the Treasury during the reign of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, Ay and Horemheb of the eighteenth dynasty of Ancient Egypt.

When still a general, Horemheb built a large tomb here, though he was later buried as Pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes.

In 1907, just before his discovery of the tomb of Horemheb, Theodore M. Davis's team uncovered a small site containing funerary artifacts with Tutankhamun's name.

Horemheb quickly removed Naktmin's rival claim to the throne and arranged to have Ay's WV23 tomb desecrated by smashing the latter's sarcophagus into several pieces, systematically chiselling out Ay's name and figure out of the tomb walls and probably destroying Ay's mummy.

Because of his unexpected rise to the throne, Horemheb had two tombs constructed for himself: the first – when he was a mere nobleman – at Saqqara near Memphis, and the other – in the Valley of the Kings, in Thebes, in tomb KV57, as king.

The sarcophagus of Horemheb and wall reliefs in his KV57 tomb.

Martin in 2006 and 2007 establishes that Horemheb most likely died after a maximum reign of 14 years based on a massive hoard of 168 inscribed wine sherds and dockets recently discovered below densely compacted debris in a great shaft ( called Well Room E ) in this king's royal KV57 tomb.

The tomb is comparable to that of Seti I in size and decoration technique, and Seti I's tomb is far more extensively decorated than that of Horemheb, and yet Seti managed to virtually complete his tomb within a decade, whereas Horemheb did not even succeed in fully decorating the three rooms he planned to have done, leaving even the burial hall unfinished.