Horemheb Receives Collars of Gold, from his mortuary temple at Saqqarah, Egypt

After traveling in Egypt and seeing so many things I'd studied when I was both an undergraduate and a graduate student at U.C.L.A., I was flooded with feelings about everything I had ever associated with loving Ancient Near Eastern Studies. I've put up this photograph from a moment in Horemheb's life because, like Horemheb, I myself am bridging several parts of my own life. For one thing, it was truly a collar of gold to travel with an illustrious group of people who came together to visit hard-to-see sites in Egypt and for another thing, it was a coming home of sorts for me. I studied Egyptian studies for many years but after I was married to an archaeologist whose field was Classics, I found myself more involved in Greek and Roman studies than in my own area. I love Classics but it was never my first love in the realm of archaeology; no, that was Egypt. I even diverted from Egyptian studies over to Pre-Columbian for a while and even though I love that work, too, my thoughts never strayed very far from Egypt, its history, architecture, archaeology, art, religion and languages. When I found myself arriving in the new Cairo airport I was elated and stunned by the fact that I'd actually made it there.
Horemheb was a general for Pharaoh Ankhenaten and, later, for Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The enormous political and sociological changes which the former implemented and the latter reinstated all took place whilst Horemheb was living in Thebes, Memphis, Saqqarah, Amarna and then back to Thebes and Memphis. He lived a long life, from civil servant to commander of the chariotry to Pharaoh, himself.
Changes in history, like changes in one's own life, can be stunning, amazing, life-changing. If Horemheb had not outlived the time of the Atenist leader, we might know very little about him but he did survive and he did so very well.
Therefore, I am starting this blog, hoping to comment on how ancient history of all sorts has shown me how to live, how to recast old scenarios and to see them differently, and how to move forward, past old histories.
There is so much we do not know about Horemheb, or, for that matter, about all of the players in the Amarna Era; but the good news is that the mysteries of those times are enticing, fascinating and challenging.
Ah! Such is life!
Deborah Nourse Lattimore,
member of
The American Research Center in Egypt OC
The Egypt Exploration Organization
The Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators