Amenhotep III (sometimes read as Amenophis III) was the ninth pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty. According to different authors, he ruled Egypt from June 1386 to 1349 BC or June 1388 BC to December 1351 BC/1350 BC after his father Thutmose IV died. Amenhotep III was the son of Thutmose by Mutemwia, a minor wife of Amenhotep's father. His lengthy reign was a period of unprecedented prosperity and artistic splendor, when Egypt reached the peak of her artistic and international power. When he died (probably in the 39th year of his reign), his son reigned as Amenhotep IV, later changing his royal name to Akhenaten.

In the fifth year of his reign, Amenhotep conducted campaigns against a territory called Akuyata in Nubia. Thereafter his reign was peaceful, except for some disturbances in the Nile River delta, which Amenhotep, son of Hapu, the king's most prominent official, quelled by carefully regulating access into Egypt by land and sea.

Amenhotep appears to have been crowned while still a child, perhaps between the ages of 6 and 12. It is likely that a regent acted for him if he was made pharaoh at that early age. He married Tiye two years later and she lived twelve years after his death. His lengthy reign was a period of unprecedented prosperity and artistic splendour, when Egypt reached the peak of her artistic and international power. Proof of this is shown by the diplomatic correspondence from the rulers of Assyria, Mitanni, Babylon, and Hatti which is preserved in the archive of Amarna Letters; these letters document frequent requests by these rulers for gold and numerous other gifts from the pharaoh.

Amenhotep III's refusal to allow one of his daughters to be married to the Babylonian monarch may indeed be connected with Egyptian traditional royal practices that could provide a claim upon the throne through marriage to a royal princess, or, it be viewed as a shrewd attempt on his part to enhance Egypt's prestige over those of her neighbours in the international world.

The pharaoh's reign was relatively peaceful and uneventful. The only recorded military activity by the king is commemorated by three rock-carved stelas from his fifth year found near Aswan and Sai Island in Nubia. The official account of Amenhotep III's military victory emphasizes his martial prowess with the typical hyperbole used by all pharaohs.

Amenhotep III enjoyed the distinction of having the most surviving statues of any Egyptian pharaoh, with over 250 of his statues having been discovered and identified. Since these statues span his entire life, they provide a series of portraits covering the entire length of his reign.

Another striking characteristic of Amenhotep III's reign is the series of over 200 large commemorative stone scarabs that have been discovered over a large geographic area ranging from Syria (Ras Shamra) through to Soleb in Nubia. Their lengthy inscribed texts extol the accomplishments of the pharaoh. For instance, 123 of these commemorative scarabs record the large number of lions (either 102 or 110 depending on the reading) that Amenhotep III killed "with his own arrows" from his first regnal year up to his tenth year. Similarly, five other scarabs state that the foreign princess who would become a wife to him, Gilukhepa, arrived in Egypt with a retinue of 317 women. She was the first of many such princesses who would enter the pharaoh's household.

Amenhotep III's highest attested reign date comes from a pair of Year 38 wine jar-label dockets from Malkata; though he may have lived briefly into an unrecorded 39th Year and died before the wine harvest for that year arrived.

Amenhotep III was buried in the Western Valley of the Valley of the Kings, in Tomb WV22. Sometime during the Third Intermediate Period his mummy was moved from this tomb and was placed in a side-chamber of KV35 along with several other pharaohs of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties where it lay until discovered by Victor Loret in 1898.

An examination of his mummy by the Australian anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith concluded that the pharaoh was aged between forty and fifty years old at death. His chief wife, Tiye, is known to have outlived him for at least twelve years as she is mentioned in several Amarna letters dated from her son's reign as well as depicted at a dinner table with Akhenaten and his royal family in scenes from the tomb of Huya, which were made during Year 9 and Year 12 of her son's reign.

When Amenhotep III died, he left behind a country that was at the very height of its power and influence, commanding immense respect in the international world; however, he also bequeathed an Egypt that was wedded to its traditional political and religious certainties under the Amun priesthood.

The cause of Tutankhamun's death was unclear, and was the root of much speculation. In early 2005 the results of a set of CT scans on the mummy were released.

British archaeologist Howard Carter's team initially examined the body in the early 1920s, although they primarily were interested in recovering the jewelry and amulets from the body. To remove these objects from the body, which often were stuck fast by the hardened embalming resins used, Carter's team cut up the mummy into various pieces: the arms and legs were detached, the torso cut in half and the head was severed. Hot knives were used to remove it from the golden mask to which it was cemented by resin.

Since 1926, the mummy has been X-rayed three times: first in 1968 by a group from the University of Liverpool led by Dr. R. G. Harrison, then in 1978 by a group from the University of Michigan, and finally in 2005 a team of Egyptian scientists led by Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawass, who conducted a CT scan on the mummy.

X-rays of Tutankhamun's mummy, taken in 1968, revealed a dense spot at the lower back of the skull interpreted as a subdural hematoma. Such an injury could have been the result of an accident, but it has also been suggested that the young pharaoh was murdered. A trauma specialist from Long Island University at C. W. Post Campus insisted that this injury could not have been from a natural cause. The specialist stated that the blow was to a protected area at the back of the head which is not easily injured in an accident. Theories as to who was responsible for the death include Tutankhamun's immediate successor Ay, his wife, and his chariot-driver. Calcification within the supposed injury indicates that Tutankhamun lived for a fairly extensive period of time (on the order of several months) after the injury was inflicted.

Scientists discovered a small, loose, sliver of bone within the upper cranial cavity, which was discovered from the same X-ray analysis. In fact, since Tutankhamun's brain was removed post mortem in the mummification process, and considerable quantities of now-hardened resin introduced into the skull on at least two separate occasions after that, had the fragment resulted from a pre-mortem injury, some scholars, including the 2005 CT scan team, say it almost certainly would not still be loose in the cranial cavity. But other scientists suggested that the loose sliver of bone was loosened by the embalmers during mummification, but it had been broken before. A blow to the back of the head (from a fall or an actual blow) caused the brain to move forward, hitting the front of the skull, breaking small pieces of the bone right above the eyes.

In February 2010, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the 19-year-old may well have died of complications from malaria, combined with a rare bone disorder affecting the foot called Kohler disease II, a disease typically affecting boys aged 5-9 caused when the navicular bone temporarily loses its blood supply. As a result, tissue in the bone dies and the bone collapses, producing symptoms of a club foot. He also had a curvature of the spine.

"Not long before his death, the king fractured his leg, and the scientists think this was important. The bone did not heal properly and began to die. This would have left the young king frail and susceptible to infection. What finished him off, they believe, was a bout of malaria on top of his general ill health."

Amenhotep III built extensively at the temple of Karnak including the Luxor temple which consisted of two pylons, a colonnade behind the new temple entrance, and a new temple to the goddess Ma'at. Amenhotep III dismantled the fourth pylon of the Temple of Amun at Karnak to construct a new pylon-the third pylon-and created a new entrance to this structure where he erected "two rows of columns with open papyrus capital[s]" down the centre of this newly formed forecourt. The forecourt between the third and fourth pylons of Egypt, sometimes called an obelisk court, was also decorated with scenes of the sacred barque of the deities Amun, Mut, and Khonsu being carried in funerary boats. The king also started work on the Tenth pylon at the Temple of Amun there. Amenhotep III's first recorded act as king--in his Years 1 and 2--was to open new limestone quarries at Tura, just south of Cairo and at Dayr al-Barsha in Middle Egypt in order to herald his great building projects. He oversaw construction of another temple to Ma'at at Luxor and virtually covered Nubia with numerous monuments.

His enormous mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile was, in its day, the largest religious complex in Thebes, but unfortunately, the king chose to build it too close to the floodplain and less than two hundred years later, it stood in ruins. Much of the masonry was purloined by Merneptah and later pharaohs for their own construction projects. The Colossi of Memnon-two massive stone statues, eighteen meters high, of Amenhotep that stood at the gateway of his mortuary temple-are the only elements of the complex that remained standing. Amenhotep III also built the Third Pylon at Karnak and erected 600 statues of the goddess Sekhmet in the Temple of Mut, south of Karnak. Some of the most magnificent statues of New Kingdom Egypt date to his reign "such as the two outstanding couchant rose granite lions originally set before the temple at Soleb in Nubia" as well as a large series of royal sculptures. Several beautiful black granite seated statues of Amenhotep wearing the nemes headress have come from excavations behind the Colossi of Memnon as well as from Tanis in the Delta.

One of the most stunning finds of royal statues dating to his reign was made as recently as 1989 in the courtyard of Amenhotep III's colonnade of the Temple of Luxor where a cache of statues was found, including a 6 feet (1.8 m)-high pink quartzite statue of the king wearing the Double Crown found in near-perfect condition. It was mounted on a sled, and may have been a cult statue. The only damage it had sustained was that the name of the god Amun had been hacked out wherever it appeared in the pharaoh's cartouche, clearly done as part of the systematic effort to eliminate any mention of this god during the reign of his successor, Akhenaton.

Colossal red granite statue of Amenhotep III

The 18th Dynasty Ancient Egyptian colossal red granite statue of Amenhotep III, dating from c.1370 BC was found in the temple enclosure of Mut at Karnak in Egypt. Two parts of the broken colossal statue are known: the head and an arm. Both parts are now in the British Museum.

The statue is thought to have been erected by King Amenhotep III, one of the huge number of statues that he set up to himself in Thebes. It is uncertain whether it was originally erected at its findspot at the Temple of Mut in Karnak, or if it came to be there having been removed in antiquity from Amenhotep's massive mortuary temple on the West Bank of the River Nile at Kom el-Hitan. Other colossal statues of Amenhotep III include the two Colossi of Memnon, which still stand at his mortuary temple at Kom el-Hitan. The statue is made of red granite. It is fragmentary: only the head and an arm are known to survive.

After its discovery, the statue was originally ascribed by scholars as a statue of King Thutmose III. The confusion has arisen from modification of the head by later rulers -- it was common practice in Ancient Egypt for pharaohs to usurp statues of earlier rulers, modifying and re-inscribing them. The lips have had their corners drilled to suggest a smaller mouth, and the heavy cosmetic lines around the eyes, suggestive of the style of cosmetic fashion in Amenhotep III's time, have been largely erased. It is now thought that the alterations were made in the time of and to represent Ramesses II.

The broken statue was discovered in the temple enclosure of Mut at Karnak by Giovanni Battista Belzoni and Henry William Beechey in 1817. The head was found in front of the temple of Khonsupakhered. After uncovering the head, it needed to be moved to Luxor on the Nile for transport upriver to Alexandria and thence to London. Moving the head was not easy: it took 8 days to transport it the one mile (1.6 km) to Luxor. Belzoni does not mention the exact findspot of the arm, though it is assumed it was found with the head.

The 18th Dynasty Ancient Egyptian colossal quartzite statue of Amenhotep III, dating from c.1350 BC, was found in the massive mortuary temple of the pharaoh Amenhotep III on the West Bank of the River Nile at Thebes (the present-day settlement of Kom el-Hitan) in Egypt. Only the head of the broken colossal statue survives. It is part of the British Museum's Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan collection.

This brown quartzite statue was one of a series of near-identical statues that flanked the west side of a colonnaded courtyard. When complete, it would have measured more than 8 metres (26 feet) high without its base, and the body would have stood in the classic pose of Osiris with legs together and arms crossed, holding the crook and the flail, which were symbols of Egyptian kingship. The statue would have worn a short royal kilt and the red crown of Lower Egypt. The discovery in 1964 of the head of one other statue and numerous body-fragments of yet more has allowed the reconstruction of the statue's pose. The statues on the other side of the courtyard were similar, but were made of red granite and wore the white crown of Upper Egypt.

The pose has been interpreted as symbolising the first "sed" festival of Amenhotep III, when it was believed that the pharaoh underwent a rite of rejuvenation and became a god while still living. This happened on the 30th anniversary of his rule. As a god, Amenhotep III was then worshipped through this statue and similar ones.

The head is 1.17m high, 81cm wide and 66cm deep. It was purchased from Henry Salt in 1823. It has the reference number EA 7 and is currently displayed in the Museum's Great Court. From September 2006-February 2008 it was sent on loan to the United States of America as part of the "Temples and Tombs" travelling exhibition.