[3] However, between Years 24 and 35 of Thutmose III, both queen Satiah and prince Amenemhat died, which prompted the pharaoh to marry the non-royal Merytre-Hatshepsut.

[5] While a prince, he oversaw deliveries of wood sent to the dockyard of Peru-nūfe in Memphis, and was made the Setem, the high priest over Lower Egypt.

Princes Amenhotep, Webensenu, Amenemopet, and Nedjem are all clearly attested, and Amenemhat, Khaemwaset, and Aakheperure as well as a daughter, Iaret, are also possible children.

These three facts combined, as Peter Der Manuelian writes, The Jewish historian Josephus, in his book Contra Apionem which translated Manetho's Aegyptiaca, assigns Amenhotep II, a certain Amenophis a reign of 30 years and 10 months.

[30] It is known that the pharaoh was attacked by the host of Qatna while crossing the Orontes river, but he emerged victorious and acquired rich booty, among which even the equipment of a Mitanni charioteer is mentioned.

The king was well known for his physical prowess and is said to have singlehandedly killed seven rebel princes at Kadesh, which successfully terminated his first Syrian campaign on a victorious note.

[31] The other was taken to the often rebellious territory of Nubia and hung on the city wall of Napata, as an example of the consequence of rising against Pharaoh and to demoralise any Nubian opponents of Egyptian authority there.

[32] In April of his seventh year, Amenhotep was faced with a major rebellion in Syria by the vassal states of Naharin and dispatched his army to the Levant to suppress it.

It may be that this campaign was more similar to one of the tours of Syria which his father had fought, and he only engaged minor garrisons in battle and forced cities to swear allegiance to him–oaths immediately broken after his departure.

[34] Alternatively, it appears that the two weeks when Amenhotep would have been closest to Mitanni are omitted from the stele, thus it is possible that his army was defeated on this campaign.

Amenhotep's last campaign took place in his ninth year, however it apparently did not proceed farther north than the Sea of Galilee.

[39] After the campaign in Amenhotep's ninth year, Mitanni sought to make peace with Egypt, and from then on, their armies never fought again.

Amenhotep records that the kings of Babylon, the Hittites, and Mitanni came to make peace and pay tribute to him after his ninth year, although this may be outlandish boasting.

[41] However, a second passage appears on the walls of Karnak, saying that the princes of Mitanni came to seek peace with Amenhotep, and this cannot be so easily explained away.

For Mitanni, relaxing military conflict with Egypt to its south allowed it to focus more on the rising powers of the Hittites and the Assyrians to its north.

For Egypt, it was able to begin extracting significant amounts of resources from Syria and Palestine and it was also now able to access Mediterranean trade routes with the Aegean.

[44] Since Thutmose III had devoted so much energy to expanding Karnak, Amenhotep's building projects were largely focused on enlarging smaller temples all over Egypt.

In the Delta, his father's Overseer of Works, Minmose, is attested from an inscription at Tura as overseeing construction of more temples.

[47] Thutmose III had begun constructing a temple which, technically, was dedicated to Horus there, although the presence of Re-Harakhti and Amun-Re is easily observed.

[32] He had a mortuary temple constructed at the edge of the cultivation in the Theban Necropolis, close to where the Ramesseum was later built, but it was destroyed in ancient times.

[48] In it, Amenhotep II reminded Usersatet of their military exploits together in Syria and proceeds to criticize the way this official conducted his office as Viceroy.

"[49]Usersatet was so impressed (or fearful) of Amenhotep's message that he ordered a copy of it to be engraved on a stela "that was once [located] at the Second Cataract [in Nubia] and is now in Boston.

"[50] Amenhotep II did not openly record the names of his queens; some Egyptologists theorize that he felt that women had become too powerful under titles such as God's Wife of Amun.

Amenhotep II adopted a large number of Canaanite gods into the Egyptian pantheon, including Resheph, Hauron, Baal, Astarte, Qetesh, and a few others.

The mummy of the king was first examined, described, and photographed in January 1902 by Gaston Maspero in the company of Howard Carter, Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing, and Pierre Lacau.

He found the body to be 1.67 metres (5.5 ft) tall and noted a strong facial resemblance to his son, Thutmose IV.

Unusually, the skin all over the body is covered with small tubercles though Smith could not say if they were the result of the embalming process or disease.