Under a Deep Blue Starry Sky

"A generation of young scholars has been introduced to the complex issue of Egyptian coregencies through Bill Murnane''s seminal dissertation on the topic, published by the Oriental Institute in 1977. Of all the coregencies discussed by Murnane, none has been debated with more passion than the one alleged between Amenhotep III and his son. The long coregency of ten or eleven years is far more than a chronological quibble: it has serious implications for the structure of royal administration, the determination of foreign relations, the management of economic resources, the promulgation of art styles, the coexistence of apparently conflicting religious cults, and the reconstruction of the genealogy of the royal family at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. This present revisitation of a subject that Bill Murnane himself addressed several times is affectionately dedicated to his memory, in admiration of his scholarship and out of gratitude for his unfailing personal generosity-and with the hope that he would have found the argument of interest..."