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Maathorneferure at Tanis

Maathorneferure in hieroglyphs

Maathorneferure was a daughter of the Hittite king Hattusili III, and was married to the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II in the 34th year of his reign, becoming the Great King's Wife. But only a short while after her marriage her name is not mentioned anymore, the supposition being that she died.

Egypt and the Hittite empire had been increasingly at odds since the demise of the kingdom of the Mitanni, and Maathorneferure's marriage to the Egyptian king was the conclusion of the peace process which had begun with the signing of a peace treaty thirteen years earlier.

Maathorneferure was the daughter of Hattusili III and his wife Puduchepa. Her original name is unknown, but her Egyptian name translates as "One who sees Horus, the invisible splendor of Ra".

At Tanis, there is a broken statue of Ramesses that shows her (mostly destroyed) figure touching his leg, together with her cartouche.

During the latter half of the first millennium BCE Maathorneferure's marriage to the pharaoh gave rise to the tale inscribed on the Bentresh Stela in which the sister of a foreign queen is healed by a divine statue sent from Egypt.

• Maat-hor-neferure
• Maatnefrure
• Maat-hor-nefrure

• "Marriage Stela" in Ancient Records of Egypt by J. H. Breasted, Part Three, §415ff
• "The Bentresh Stela" in Ancient Egyptian Literature by M. Lichtheim, Vol.3, pp.90ff.
• Ramesside Inscriptions by Kenneth Anderson Kitchen
• Letters of the Great Kings of the Ancient Near East: The Royal Correspondence of the Late Bronze Age by Trevor R. Bryce, p.117ff.
• The Kingdom Of The Hittites by Trevor Robert Bryce, p.283

• Faience plaque bearing the name of Queen Maathorneferure
• The Marriage Stela of Ramses II