Thutmose IV

Thutmose IV is the pharaoh who dug the Sphinx out of the sand and left a stone slab between its paws explaining that it had asked him to. He was a son of Amenhotep II and the grandson of Thutmose III, the conqueror whose campaigns are recorded at Karnak, and he was probably not the intended heir. The Dream Stele describes him falling asleep in the Sphinx's shadow while out hunting, and the god Horemakhet promising him the throne if he would clear the sand choking the monument. Whether that is a genuine account of a dream or a legitimation document composed for a prince who took the throne irregularly is the standing question about him, and most Egyptologists lean to the second. His reign of about ten years was quiet by the standards of the dynasty. He put down a rising in Nubia, campaigned in Syria without much consequence, and made peace with Mitanni, sealing it with a diplomatic marriage that ended two generations of intermittent war and set up the correspondence later found at Amarna. He also began the promotion of the sun disc, the Aten, as a distinct object of royal devotion - a small thing in his reign and the seed of what his grandson Akhenaten did with it. His son was Amenhotep III, under whom Egypt was richer than it ever became again. The Sphinx has been re-buried and re-excavated repeatedly since - most recently in the 1930s - which puts his achievement in perspective. His mummy was found in the cache in the tomb of Amenhotep II in 1898 and shows a man who died young, in his thirties, of an unidentified wasting illness.

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