We do not have to search far and wide for the Piankhi monuments. They were inscribed - predictably for a king noted for his piety and devotion to the god Amun - in the easternmost extremity of the Amun temple in Thebes. There, surrounding the shrine of his patron deity, as if in gratitude for all that the god had given him, Piankhi constructed, or reconstructed, enclosure walls on the north, west and south, the eastern wall of the temple serving to complete the enclosure. On the face of the newly renovated walls, beginning on the eastern extremity of the north wall and circling counter-clockwise through the west and southern walls, he composed his annals. They begin, as expected, with a Syrian campaign initiated late in his 22nd year!

        It goes without saying that the name of Piankhi is absent from the inscriptions. Instead they are credited to a king Menkheperre Thutmose, whose prenomen and nomen occur frequently. The name is well known to historians as the epithet of an 18th dynasty king, whose reign is typically dated to the 15th century B.C., and in consequence the inscription, in its entirety, has been dated in that time frame. In order not to prejudice our cause we will say little more at this time about the 15th century Menkheperre, known to historians as Thutmose III.  In a later chapter, in our discussion of the evidence forthcoming from the Barkal temple at Napata, we will have cause to elaborate.  Sufficient here to note that Thutmose III is known to history as a great military leader, indeed, as the greatest native military figure in the entire span of Egyptian history, a reputation based largely on the content of the annals we are about to read.  Needless to say, if we are correct, and the annals belong instead to the 7th century Piankhi, the life story of Thutmose III as preserved in the standard textbooks is a fiction.  Indeed, the entire history of the 18th dynasty, and of the ancient near eastern context in which that dynasty is placed, must be seriously in error, and will be dramatically affected by the changes we are about to recommend.  It is no small matter with which we are about to deal.  We must proceed with caution.

        The critic should be assured at the outset that we have no intention of dethroning the earlier king.  We do not deny the existence of an 18th dynasty Menkheppere Thutmose.[5]  We argue only that Piankhi adopted the names of this earlier king as his own and that centuries of scholarship have wrongly proceeded on the assumption that every inscription which bears this name was authored by the 15th century king.  But the scholars are wrong, and the consequences of their error for both the history of the 18th and of the 25th dynasties have been severe.  When the record is set straight it will be necessary to radically rewrite the histories of both dynasties.  Indeed, all of Egyptian dynastic history will be significantly affected.

        In the first chapter of this book we outlined our agenda - first to find inscriptions which clearly parallel the actions of the Egyptian army in the late 7th century B.C. as described in the Babylonian Chronicle and in the Hebrew Bible. And then to demonstrate that the inscriptions in all likelihood belong to Piankhi.  The first objective will require four chapters, as we demonstrate not only that the Menkheperre Annals fit perfectly in the suggested late 7th century context, but also that their traditional 15th century milieu is untenable.  A necessary corollary of this argument is that the king Menkheppere Thutmose named in the document cannot be the 15th century king by that name.  And since he belongs in the 7th century, if he is not Piankhi then who is he?

        Only in the sixth and seventh chapters of this book do we argue explicitly the likelihood that Menkheperre Thutmose was but another epithet of Piankhi (though the argument is implicit in the earlier chapters).  But that agenda needs to be emended ever so slightly.  It will be an enormous and unnecessary burden on the reader to ask him to continue reading without some further support for our claim that Piankhi was known to his contemporaries by the name Menkheperre Thutmose.  The argument need not be long, since it will be taken up again in later chapters.

Duplicate Regnal Names

        To appreciate the argument which follows the reader needs to know that Egyptian kings, at the time of their coronation, typically adopted four names, which, in combination with their birth name (nomen), constituted a five-fold titulary unique to that king.  The adopted names are known to scholars as the "horus", "two ladies"(or "nebty"), "golden horus" and "nsw-byty" names, the later often referred to as the "throne name" or "prenomen" of the king. Of these five names only two, the prenomen and nomen, typically appear on the monuments, each enclosed in a cartouche, as is the case in the annals of Menkheperre Thutmose, alias Piankhi

        It has been acknowledged since the early days of the 20th century that Piankhi, at least on one of his Napatan monuments, adopted as his own the "horus", "two ladies:" and "golden horus" names of Menkheperre Thutmose. When the Harvard Egyptologist Harry Reisner excavated at the Barkal temple, in the early decades of the last century, he uncovered, near the spot where the great Piankhi stela had been found a half century earlier, another stela, this one made of sandstone, bearing the five fold titulary of a Napatan king.  Unfortunately the prenomen and nomen of the king had been "savagely chiseled" out by an unfriendly successor.  Fortunately the "horus", "two ladies" and "golden horus" names remained intact.  The name of Piankhy had been added to one of the damaged cartouches by an unknown third party, suggestive of the fact that Piankhy was the author of this damaged stela.  Indeed Reisner, after examining an undamaged area within one cartouche, was able to read "confidently the name Mery-[Amun]-P'i-'nkhy."  In Reisner's opinion "the general appearance, the language, the script, all point to the early Ethiopian period", leaving little doubt that the stela originated from the time of Piankhi, thus securing the identification.  But there was a problem.  The horus, nebty and golden horus names on this stela were not typical of the titulary names on other Piankhi inscriptions within the Barkal temple, nor of those found elsewhere in Nubia.  In the words of Reisner these three names belong to "the usual titulary of Thumosis III."  But now Piankhi was using them as his own.

        Nearby the sandstone stela Reisner unearthed another monument bearing the identical three names, this time with the two additional cartouche names intact.  But here the cartouche names are those of Menkheperre Thutmose and the stela, which contained an abbreviated account of the major incidents in this king's life, with many duplications from the Theban temple annals, was clearly the work of the same king who authored those annals, the 18th dynasty king.  There was for Reisner no entertaining the notion that the two monuments belonged to Piankhi.  The question would never have been raised.  For him the Thutmose stela served only to provide an explanation for the presence of Thutmose's horus, golden horus, and nebty names on Piankhi's sandstone stela.  "Written on the granite stela which was on view at Napata, the titulary stood ready to be imitated by any of the Ethiopian kings; and we know they copied many of their names from the older names of Egyptian kings." (italics added).

        Needless to say, we disagree with Reisner's explanation (though we do agree with the italicized sentiment). We wonder, as he no doubt wondered, how and why an 800 year old monument of an 18th dynasty pharaoh, weighing multiple tons, came to lay side by side with Piankhi's sandstone stela in a temple built by Piankhi.  But there they sat, within a few meters of one another, both bearing the identical three titulary names.  It is irrelevant whether the obliterated cartouche names on the sandstone stela also originally read Menkheperre Thutmose (as seems likely) or Meryamun Piankhi (as restored by Reisner). At minimum the sandstone stela serves to confirm the fact that Piankhi, at least once in his life, adopted as his own three of the five titulary names of Thutmose III, a titulary which, in Reisner's stated opinion, is "used by no other Egyptian king." [6]

        The excavations at Barkal also established beyond doubt that Piankhi was ambivalent regarding his first cartouche name, his prenomen. On several monuments in the Barkal temple he employed as his own the prenomen of Ramses II (Usermaatre), on others the prenomen Senefere.  He seemed to have adopted each name to suit some specific purpose, now unknown, like a chameleon adapts his colors on an ad hoc basis to suit his environment. More often than not, he used no personal name at all in his first cartouche, choosing instead as his prenomen the identical name (Piankhi) he employed as his nomen. And as we will see in chapter six, Piankhi is not even a personal name, but rather a title, with indeterminate meaning, but more than likely a designation of rank. The fact that it may simply be the Nubian word for "king" (a proposal first raised by F. Laming McAdam, the excavator of the Kawa temple, whose work was discussed briefly in Nebuchadnezzar) remains a distinct possibility.  But if Piankhi is not a name, and is only a title, then what were the cartouche names of the 25th dynasty patriarch?  We cannot be faulted for suggesting that they were "Menkheperre Thutmose".  It is not a guess.  At least in one instance, in the opinion of a majority of Egyptologists, he did adopt the name Menkheperre as his prenomen.

        A stela known to Egyptologists from early in the 18th century, now in the Louvre (C 100), bearing a double cartouche and containing a poetical eulogy of the king's daughter Mutirdis, has been the subject of much discussion over several centuries. The author identifies himself by his prenomen Menkheperre, but the second cartouche name is damaged, beginning with a hieroglyphic sign variously read as "ra" or "kh" or "set" or "p", and ending with a clearly articulated "y".  The intermediate sign is completely obliterated.  Both the provenance of the stela and internal criteria have convinced scholars that it originates from the area of Hermopolis, and that it dates to the Ethiopian period.  The name was variously read by early scholars as ra-men-y or kh-men-y (cf. Petrie HE III 292-293) but by the middle of the twentieth century was assigned to Pi-ankh-y by no less an authority than Von Beckerath [7].  Even Kenneth Kitchen, the last holdout among Egyptologists specializing in the 3rd intermediate period, in the supplement to the 2nd edition of his influential 3rd Intermediate Period (1986), has advised that we should "delete the supposed local king Menkheperre Khmuny rather, one should read Menkheperre Pi(ankh)y on the famous stela Louvre C.100 (i.e. Piankhy himself)."[8]  This is no small admission considering the nature of the inscription.  For in it Piankhy appears to identify himself solely by the name Menkheperre, as if that name was sufficient to identify the author to passers by.  We quote Petrie's translation of the extant portion of the stela:

A sweet of love, the prophetess of Hathor, Mutardus
A sweet of love unto the king, Menkheperra
A sweet of love unto all men,
A lovely one to all women,
Is this royal daughter,
A sweet of love, the beautiful of women;
A damsel of whom thou hast not seen the like;
Black is her hair more than the blackness of night,
More than the fruit of the sloe;
Red is her cheek more than the pebble of jasper,
More than the crushing of henna;
Her bosom is more captivating than her arms, ... HE III 293-4.

        At minimum we have established that Piankhi, at least once in his life, adopted as his own four of the five titulary names of Thutmose III.  It is not a large step to assume that he employed the fifth name (Thutmose) as well.  To argue that he did not would be a begging of the question. since hundreds of monuments attest the presence of both names.  It is only because Egyptologists insist on identifying all of these monuments as the property of an 18th dynasty king that the claim can be made that Piankhi did not employ all five names as his own.  In light of this there can be no strong objection to our proceeding.  As we will soon see, it is not the name which constitutes the difficulty in the identification we propose.  But the name was clearly the first hurdle to be overcome.

        In passing we mention one other reason for suggesting that scholars should not object strenuously to our proposal that two pharaohs bore the name Menkheperre Thutmose.  It is not without precedent, particularly in the late 22nd dynasty time frame in which Piankhi lived, for a king to bear both the throne name and personal name of an illustrious predecessor.  We have noted, both in Nebuchadrezzar & the Egyptian Exile, and in some of our responses to criticism of that book, the serious confusion which has arisen because of the existence of two Egyptian kings bearing the name Hedjkheppere Sheshonk, two kings bearing the name Hedjkheperre Takeloth, and two kings bearing the names Usimare Setepenamun Osorkon Meryamun. It should surprise no one to find that there were two kings bearing the name Menkheperre Thutmose.  It is the contents of the Annals, not the name of the king named therein, that should inform us whether we are dealing with a 15th century or a 7th century pharaoh.

        Before we examine the Annals we cannot help but comment on our good fortune.  When, in the first book of our Displaced Dynasties series, we reduced the dates of dynasties 22-26 by 121 years, the 25th dynasty patriarch Piankhi became the only viable candidate for the role of Egyptian ally to Sinsharishkun and Assuruballit, the terminal kings of the Assyrian Empire.  When we search the Amun temple for historiography which resembles the actions of Egypt during those critical years, as portrayed in the Babylonian Chronicle and the Hebrew Bible, we find a remarkable parallel in only one place, the Annals of Menkheperre Thutmose.  Is it merely by chance that the only Egyptian king other than Thutmose III of the 18th dynasty who could possibly have authored the Annals, because he is the only other king known to have used Thutmose's names, is this same Piankhi?