Message #151

[Bianca]

THE DAKHAMANZU AFFAIR



On the other hand,it is unlikely that Kiya wrote the highly political letter to Suppiluliumas in which a widowed Egyptian queen requested a Hittite prince to be her consort. The Hittite sources speak of an actual queen regnant, a "female king of Egypt", which Kiya certainly was not.
                                 
This letter is preserved only in Hittite sources and identifies the Egyptian queen only by her title,
"Dakhamanzu", not by name.  She wrote to Suppiluliumas that her royal husband had died without leaving a son.  This excludes Merytaten, who did not outlive Smenkhare, leaving only Nefertiti, Akhen-
aten's widow, or Ankhesenamun, the widow of Tutankhamun, as the potential author of the letter.

The request for a Hittite prince initially succeeded, but the murder of Prince Zananza while he was en
route to Egypt prevented a diplomatic marriage and an alliance of the two great powers at this early date; this was not to be accomplished until nearly a century later under Ramesses II.

Now, however, the assassination of the prince triggered a retaliatory attack on the part of the Hittites,
its unforturnate result was an outbreak of pestilence, to which the great Hittite king Suppiluliumas
succumbed and it has been suspected that this plague was the cause of the early deaths of several other leading figures of the Amarna Period.