He had several sons;* but the one who succeeded him, and who, like him, was named Amenothes, was the most paradoxical of all the Egyptian sovereigns of ancient times.** * One of them, Thutmosis, was high priest of Phtah, and we possess several monuments erected by him in the temple of Memphis; another, Tutonkhamon, subsequently became king. He also had several daughters by Tii--Sitamon. ** The absence of any cartouches of Amenothes IV. or his successors in the table of Abydos prevented Champollion and Rosellini from classifying these sovereigns with any precision. Nestor L'hote tried to recognise in the first of them, whom he called _Bakhen-Balchnan_, a king belonging to the very ancient dynasties, perhaps the Hyksos Apakhnan, but Lepsius and Hincks showed that he must be placed between Amenothes III. and Harmhabi, that he was first called Amenothes like his father, but that he afterwards took the name of Baknaten, which is now read Khunaten or Khuniaton. His singular aspect made it difficult to decide at first whether a man or a woman was represented. Mariette, while pronouncing him to be a man, thought that he had perhaps been taken prisoner in the Sudan and mutilated, which would have explained his effeminate appearance, almost like that of an eunuch. Recent attempts have been made to prove that Amenothes IV. and Khuniaton were two distinct persons, or that Khuniaton was a queen; but they have hitherto been rejected by Egyptologists. He made up for the inferiority of his birth on account of the plebeian origin of his mother Tii,* by his marriage with Nofrititi, a princess of the pure solar race.** Tii, long accustomed to the management of affairs, exerted her influence over him even more than she had done over her husband. Without officially assuming the rank, she certainly for several years possessed the power, of regent, and gave a definite Oriental impress to her son's religious policy. No outward changes were made at first; Amenothes, although showing his preference for Heliopolis by inscribing in his protocol the title of prophet of Harmakhis, which he may, however, have borne before his accession, maintained his residence at Thebes, as his father had done before him, continued to sacrifice to the Theban divinities, and to follow the ancient paths and the conventional practices.*** * The filiation of Amenothes IV. and Tii has given rise to more than one controversy. The Egyptian texts do not define it explicitly, and the title borne by Tii has been considered by some to prove that Amenothes IV. was her son, and by others that she was the mother of Queen Nofrititi. The Tel el-Amarna correspondence solves the question, however, as it gives a letter from Dushratta to Khuniaton, in which Tii is called "thy mother."