Seqenenre Tao II is the last of the original line of Egyptian Pharaohs
who was forced to live in exile in Thebes, king only of Upper Egypt,
while the Hyksos invaders dominated Lower Egypt.
He lived at the same time as the last great Hyksos ruler Apophis Ier.
He was married to Ahhotep I, who was also his sister.

Ahhotep was another powerful queen. An ambiguous sentence on a stela devoted to her
indicates that she may even have rallied troops:

           She is the one who has accomplished the rites and taken care of Egypt...
                      She has looked after her soldiers, she has guarded her,
           she has brought back her fugitives and collected together her deserters,
                       she has pacified Upper Egypt and expelled her rebels.

Seqenenre and Ahhotep had two sons, Kamose and Ahmose, whom they taught to dream of defeating the Hyksos.
In fact, Seqenenre battled the Hyksos, although undecisively, during his lifetime.
Kamose and Ahmose succeeded to the throne after their father's death;
it may even be that Kamose reigned for a short time, but he was very soon killed in battle,
and it was Ahmose who succeeded to the throne. He was only about ten years old, so his mother reigned as regent for some years;
the stela refers either to this period or to the later period when she helped Ahmose in his government and in his conquests.

It is to be remembered that the last Hyksos Pharaoh, Apophis
(possibly enraged because, as a Hyksos Pharaoh, he never had access to the
secret king-making rites of the legitimate pharaonic line) apparently wrote to Seqenenre Tao
to demand that he suppress his hippopotamus pool for keeping him awake at night -
in his Delta capital of Avaris, four hundred miles down river!
The story of this letter is contained in a papyrus from later in the New Kingdom,
which breaks off in the middle, with Seqenenre wondering what on earth he should respond.

       Let there be a withdrawal from the canal hippopotami which lie at the east of the City,
              because they don't let sleep come to me either in the daytime or at night.

Seqenenre Tao was mummified in most unusual circumstances.
His skull shattered by three symmetric blows, he was interred next to a miserable-looking gentleman,
possibly or probably the perpetrator of the blows, who underwent various miseries
before joining his sovereign in the netherworld. The mummies were found in Deir el-Bahri in 1881.

First Theory: Seqenenre Tao dies of battle wounds from a bronze Hyksos battle axe.