Horemheb

It is tempting to read the erasures as hatred. The evidence suggests something colder and more characteristic. Horemheb had served the Amarna kings loyally and well; his own pre-royal tomb at Saqqara, built while he was still a commoner, is decorated in unmistakably Amarna style and shows him receiving the gold of honour from a king he would later delete. There is no sign of a convert’s fury. There is only a man who concluded that a particular arrangement of the Egyptian state had failed, and who then removed every operative trace of it because half-measures leave a system unstable.

The Great Edict of Horemheb, carved on a stela at Karnak and known from further copies, is the same mind working in peacetime. It is a piece of administrative law aimed squarely at official corruption: soldiers and inspectors seizing hides and boat cargoes from private citizens, tax collectors extorting the poor, judges taking bribes. The penalties are physical and specific — the cutting off of noses and banishment to the frontier fortress of Sile. He appointed new judges and regional officials, chose them from the priesthood and the army because those were the institutions that still functioned, and instructed them to take no payment from anyone. It is a compliance regime, written by someone who thinks in terms of enforcement mechanisms.

That is the signature of dominant extraverted thinking: the world is a set of structures that either produce the intended output or do not, and a ruler’s job is to fix the ones that do not. Akhenaten had shut the temples, redirected their revenues, and left the priesthoods of Amun destitute and the provincial administration unsupervised. Horemheb restored the endowments, reopened the temples, staffed them, and audited them. The god was, in a real sense, beside the point. The revenue stream and the chain of command were the point.

Horemheb was old enough to remember the reign of Amenhotep III — the last long, rich, uninterrupted period before the crisis — and it is precisely that Egypt he dated his own kingship from. Auxiliary Si gave him a concrete standard of what a working state had looked like, and he did not need to invent an ideal; he had one in memory. The temple restorations reproduced pre-Amarna forms; the titulary, the art, the ritual calendar were all pulled back to a remembered baseline.

Si is also what made the deletion feel legitimate rather than dishonest. To a Te-Si mind, the Amarna decades were not part of the record because they were not part of the tradition: an aberration, a gap, a period during which the proper thing had stopped happening. Removing four kings from the list was not falsification so much as bookkeeping — reconciling the ledger to the way things were supposed to have run.

The same faculty made him a builder of extraordinary practicality. He completed the Ninth and Tenth Pylons at Karnak, restored the great processional routes, and reused Amarna stone as fill rather than quarrying fresh — a decision that preserved tens of thousands of decorated blocks for modern archaeologists, entirely by accident, and which reveals a man constitutionally unable to waste a usable resource.

Tertiary Ne appears where the rules ran out. Horemheb had no royal blood and no son. By every conventional criterion he had no business on the throne, so he built a justification from scratch: a coronation narrative in which the god Horus of Hutnesut, his boyhood local deity, personally escorted him to Amun at Karnak during the Opet festival and the god acclaimed him king. Divine selection replaced descent. It is an inventive solution, and it became the template every later usurper in Egypt would use.

He improvised the succession the same way. Rather than let the throne fall to whichever official was nearest — the exact failure mode that had produced Ay — he designated his vizier and army colleague Pa-ramessu, a man from a military family in the Delta with a son and a grandson already living. Continuity of the institution mattered more than continuity of a bloodline. Pa-ramessu became Ramesses I, and the Nineteenth Dynasty, the dynasty of Seti I and Ramesses II, exists because Horemheb chose an administrator over a relative.

Inferior Fi is the reason Horemheb can be unnerving to read about. He deleted a boy he had served since infancy, an old man who had made him commander, and an entire generation of the royal family, and left no trace of hesitation about any of it. Personal loyalty, private grief, the question of what these people had felt or deserved — none of it registers anywhere in the record he left.

And yet the one place it surfaces is telling. He had built a magnificent tomb at Saqqara as a commoner, and when he became king he abandoned it for the Valley of the Kings — but he did not abandon his first wife, Amenia, who was buried there, nor Mutnodjmet, the queen who died in childbirth late in his reign and whose burial he seems to have arranged with unusual care. A man with a suppressed inferior function does not have no feelings; he has feelings he can express only in the narrow, unofficial spaces where the system is not watching.

Why ESTJ Over ISTJ

The distinction is clearest if you set him beside his own chosen successors. Seti I would inherit Horemheb’s settlement and lavish a lifetime of exquisite, painstaking craftsmanship on maintaining it — that is Si leading. Horemheb did the violence that made the settlement possible: the demolitions, the recut cartouches, the edict, the appointments, the invented coronation. He is the general who decides the state is broken, and then breaks it further in the specific direction required for it to work again. Te first, tradition second.