In any case he must have been of such noble rank, and of a family of such influence, that it was worth Akhenaten’s while to secure his adhesion to the new cause, even when he was no more than a boy, by marrying him to one of the young princesses. Accordingly he was married to the third of Akhenaten’s daughters, the princess Ankh. s. en. pa. aten, the first daughter, Meryt-aten, being married to another noble of the court, Smenkhara, and the second, Makt-aten, having died probably between her ninth and eleventh year; and at this time, and till after his accession to the throne, he bears the name Tutankhaten, the name of Amen being of course proscribed by the new faith. On the death of Akhenaten without male issue, Smenkhara, the husband of the eldest princess, naturally, according to Egyptian custom, succeeded to the throne, and reigned for a short and uncertain period; then on his death or deposition, the succession fell to Tutankhaten. For a time, apparently, he maintained himself in the new capital of Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna), but the reaction in favour of the old faith of Amen proved too strong for him, and he was obliged to remove the court to Thebes, and to conform to the worship of Amen. His name was changed to Tutankhamen (Living Image of Amen), and that of his wife to Ankh. s. en. Amen (Her Life is from Amen), and every trace of the religious revolution was obliterated so far as possible. The duration of his reign is uncertain, and probably it cannot have been longer than nine years. It has been suggested, from the evidence of some of the articles in his tomb, that he died before attaining maturity--at all events he must have been still a young man at the time of his death. As to the events of his reign, we are much in the dark. The brilliance of his funerary equipment has led to the rather hasty conclusion that the reign was marked by a great renaissance of Egyptian art and power, and an attempt to regain the Empire which had been largely lost during the pacifist reign of Akhenaten; but this theory rests on very slight foundations, and, as we shall see, there is another and much more likely explanation of the splendour of the tomb. The only evidences of foreign enterprise during the reign are found in the inscriptions in the tombs of two of the great nobles of the period, Huy and Horemheb, the latter of whom usurped the throne after the death or deposition of Tutankhamen’s successor, Ay. In the tomb of Huy there are records of tribute from Syria and the Soudan, so that it is evident that Egyptian influence was not altogether gone in these two quarters; and one of the statements in the tomb of Horemheb seems to point to military operations in Syria under Tutankhamen. In this inscription, from a fragment in the Cairo Museum, Horemheb describes himself as “King’s follower on his expeditions in the south and north country,” and “Companion of the feet of his lord upon the battlefield on that day of slaying the Asiatics.”