Dakhamunzu’s Request for a Husband
In about 1323BC, Suppiluliuma, the King of the Hittites received an extraordinary proposal of marriage in a letter from the widow of the recently deceased Pharaoh of Egypt, Nibhururiya. “My husband is dead, and I have no son,” stated the Queen, named as Dakhamunzu, “people say that you have many sons. If you send me one of your sons, he will become my husband for it is repugnant to me to take one of my servants (or subjects) as a husband.” This unorthodox love letter was to start a war between the two nations.
Suppiluliuma was somewhat surprised. Aside from the straightforward tone of the letter, the lady had no specific son in mind. Indeed, any one of them would do. Suppiluliuma reasoned Dakhamunzu wished to ally to protect Egyptian territory. Under his rule, the Hittites had seized parts of Egypt’s Syrian territory. The newly widowed Queen evidently felt vulnerable to attack, and so hoped to shield herself and Egypt by marriage to a Hittite Prince. It was an excellent opportunity to infiltrate Egypt. Never the less, Suppiluliuma was suspicious. He decided to send an embassy to Egypt to check that the Queen was telling the truth.
The embassy returned and reported the situation was as Queen Dakhamunzu had described. She was quite unattached. The queen, however, was not happy to have been doubted. “If I had a son, should I write to a foreign country in a manner humiliating to me and to my country?” she complained to Suppiluliuma, “… I have written to no other country, I have written to you.” Faced with such insistence and deciding he would be a fool to lose the opportunity to have one of his son’s on the throne of Egypt, Suppiluliuma dispatched his son, Zannanza to Egypt to become the Queen’s bridegroom.
However, Zannanza had no sooner crossed the Egyptian border than he was mysteriously dead. Suppiluliuma, suspecting foul play, demanded an explanation-only to find that the Queen had indeed ended up married to one of her ‘subjects’- her dead husband’s Vizier, Ay. “I was ready to send my son to be King. But you were already on the throne, and I did not know,” he wrote to the new Pharaoh, “…if you had ascended to the throne in the meantime you should have sent my son back to his home…what have you done with my son?”
The new Pharaoh denied any foul play, but the damage was done. The Hittites and Egyptians remained at war until Reassess II concluded peace with the Hittites in 1258BC. As for the Queen who sought, unsuccessfully for a Hittite husband, who was she? Her name and that of her dead husband are preserved in a biography of Suppiluliuma, by his son, Mersili II. However, these are Hittite names, rather than the Egyptian names by which the royal couple were better known. For the Queen’s real name was Ankhesenamun and her dead husband’s, Tutankhamen.
In twelfth-century France, the love letters between a monk and a nun reveal the details of a tragic love affair.