The Restoration Stela, Read as a Document

The clearest statement of what this reign was for is the stela set up at Karnak in the king name. Its account of the situation he inherited is bleak and deliberate: the temples of the gods from Elephantine to the marshes of the delta had fallen into ruin, their shrines overgrown, their sanctuaries as though they had never been, their courts used as footpaths. If anyone prayed to a god, the god did not come; if an army was sent to Syria to widen the borders of Egypt, it had no success. The gods had turned their backs on this land.

Then the repair. Images were made new in gold and precious stone, priesthoods were restaffed from the sons of the notables of their towns, endowments of land and people were restored and doubled, temple workshops reopened. The king own name had already been changed from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamun, the court had moved back to Thebes and Memphis, and the change of name is the whole policy in two syllables. A document of this kind is a proclamation and not a survey, so its picture of ruin is as much rhetoric as report. It still tells you exactly what the new regime wanted to be seen doing, and that the interruption had been severe enough to require saying so. The stela was afterwards usurped by Horemheb, who replaced the royal names with his own.