Quick questions on New Kingdom Egypt - Amenhotep III, the golden age: HSC Ancient History

Among the most distinctive sources for the reign are its commemorative scarabs: large royal scarabs, of five known types, issued in bulk and distributed across the empire almost as official news bulletins. Over two hundred survive. They record, in the king's own controlled voice, the events the court wished remembered:

If diplomacy kept the empire, building expressed its wealth. Amenhotep III's programme was the largest of any New Kingdom ruler before Ramesses II.

Queen Tiye is inseparable from the image of the reign. Though her parents Yuya and Tjuyu were non-royal, she was named as Great Royal Wife on the official marriage scarab and depicted with exceptional prominence, at a scale approaching the king's own on monuments such as the colossal family group now in Cairo, and honoured with her own temple at Sedeinga. Her standing was diplomatic as well as ceremonial: the Mitanni king Tushratta addressed correspondence in the Amarna archive directly to her. Tiye's visibility set a precedent for powerful royal women that her son Akhenaten would extend to his own queen, Nefertiti.

The golden age was administered by a formidable bureaucracy, and one official stands out. Amenhotep son of Hapu served as the king's scribe of recruits and overseer of all the king's works, directing the quarrying, transport and construction that the building programme demanded, including, by tradition, the moving of the Colossi. His reward was extraordinary: he was granted his own mortuary temple among the royal mortuary temples on the west bank at Thebes, an honour almost never given to a commoner, and statues of him as a scribe were set up at Karnak to act as an intermediary between petitioners and the god. So great was his reputation that, more than a thousand years later, the Ptolemies deified him as a sage and healer alongside the Old Kingdom architect Imhotep.

On the west bank at Thebes he built Malkata, a sprawling mudbrick palace-city with royal apartments, audience halls, workshops and a huge artificial harbour, the Birket Habu, whose spoil heaps are still visible. Malkata was the stage for the court and for the Sed festivals of the reign.

His mortuary temple on the west bank was the largest ever built in Egypt. It was later almost entirely quarried away by subsequent kings (the famous "Israel Stela" of Merenptah is carved on the reverse of a stela taken from it), so that today it survives mainly through its two colossal seated quartzite statues of the king, around 18 metres high. Greek and Roman visitors called these the Colossi of Memnon; after an earthquake in 27 BC the northern statue "sang" at dawn, a phenomenon recorded by tourists such as Strabo and Pausanias until the emperor Septimius Severus repaired it.

At Thebes he built much of Luxor Temple (Ipet-resyt), a great temple bound to the annual Opet festival and to the cult of the royal ka, the divine essence of kingship. Its "birth room" reliefs depict the divine conception of Amenhotep III by the god Amun and his mother Mutemwiya, a visual assertion that the king was literally the son of a god.

In Nubia he built a temple at Soleb dedicated to Amun and to his own deified form, and a temple for Tiye at nearby Sedeinga. Across Egypt he set up statuary in unprecedented volume, including hundreds of granodiorite statues of the lioness goddess Sekhmet in the precinct of Mut at Karnak, sometimes read as a "litany in stone" for the king's health.