3
The king [Tuthmosis I] rested from life, going forth to heaven, having completed his years in gladness of heart. The hawk in the nest [appeared as] the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Aakheperenre [Tuthmosis II], he became king of the Black Land and ruler of the Red Land, having taken possession of the Two Regions in triumph.1
The former general Tuthmosis I soon proved himself a worthy successor to the newly established tradition of the mighty Egyptian warrior-king, embarking on a series of flamboyant and highly successful foreign campaigns intended to impress Egyptian superiority on the traditional enemies of the south and north. In his second regnal year Egyptian troops marched southwards into Nubia where, as Ahmose, son of Ibana, tells us, they successfully ‘destroyed insurrection throughout the lands and repelled the intruders from the desert region’, advancing past the Third Cataract of the Nile, where Tuthmosis set up a stela to commemorate his great achievement, and reaching the island of Argo. The new king sailed home in triumph with the body of a Nubian bowman, a dreadful warning to others who might be tempted to rebel, draped ‘head down over the bow of his majesty's ship, the Falcon’. He left behind him a subdued land controlled by a chain of Egyptian fortresses stretching across Nubia and the Sudan.
This was followed by an even more spectacular victory. After establishing new military headquarters at the old northern capital of Memphis, Tuthmosis pressed eastwards into Naharin, crossing the River Euphrates and entering the territory ruled by Egypt's new enemy, the King of Mitanni. Here, as the ever-present Ahmose records:
[His Majesty] went to Retenu to vent his wrath throughout foreign lands. His Majesty arrived at Naharin. His Majesty – life, prosperity and health be upon him – found that the enemy was gathering troops. Then his Majesty made a great heap of corpses among them. Countless were the living captives of his Majesty from his victories. Lo, I was at the head of the army and his Majesty saw my bravery. I brought away a chariot, its horse, and the one who was upon it as a living captive to present to his Majesty. I was rewarded with gold yet again.2
After a great battle and with many of the enemy killed or taken prisoner, Tuthmosis laid down the foundations of what was later to develop into Egypt's Asian empire. Once again a commemorative stela was needed, this time to be set on the bank of the River Euphrates. On his journey home the victorious king paused for a celebratory elephant hunt in the swamps of Syria, thus establishing a family tradition which was to be followed some fifty years later by his grandson, Tuthmosis III, a prolific big-game hunter who was to boast of killing or maiming over a hundred elephants at the same hunting ground.
Tuthmosis I instigated an equally successful domestic policy and his reign saw extensive and innovative building programmes at all the major Theban sites. To Ineni, a high-ranking Theban official, Hereditary Prince, Overseer of Double Granary of Amen and possibly Mayor of Thebes, fell the responsibility for supervising what was to become the first phase of the 18th Dynasty embellishment of the Karnak temple complex. The original Middle Kingdom temple was now enclosed within a sandstone wall, the processional ways were extended, and two magnificent pylons or monumental gateways, complete with towers and flagpoles, were installed, the area between them being roofed over to form a pillared hall. Most impressive of all, two inscribed red-granite obelisks, each standing 19.5 m (64 ft) high and with a gold-leaf coated tip designed to mirror the sun's rays, were erected within the enclosure wall before the main entrance to the temple.
Ineni was evidently an experienced architect and overseer of building projects. He had previously worked on the construction of the gate of Amenhotep I at Karnak, and he was now to be entrusted with the quarrying of the king's secret tomb which was to be the first excavated in the remote Biban el-Muluk, the Valley of the Gates of the Kings, now better known simply as the Valley of the Kings, on the West Bank of the Nile, opposite Thebes. The autobiography preserved in his tomb tells how he:
… supervised the excavation of the cliff-tomb of His Majesty alone, no one seeing, no one hearing… I was vigilant in seeking that which is excellent. I made fields of clay in order to plaster their tombs of the necropolis. It is work such as the ancestors had not which I was obliged to do there.3
The tomb was to follow the new custom, established by Amenhotep I, of physically separating the actual burial chamber from the mortuary temple. The theological move away from the cult of Re and the associated pyramid form, and the development of mortuary temples which were effectively temples of Amen, caused the architects some problems. It was neither practical nor desirable to site the large and conspicuous mortuary temples in the steep Valley of the Kings while, although the mortuary temple could be constructed on the flatter and more accessible desert fringes, the burial chamber could not be dug underneath the temple without incurring the risk of flooding. Separation was inevitable, and brought a welcome side effect; it was now possible to make a realistic attempt to hide the entrance to the burial chamber from the thieves who were irresistibly attracted by the sumptuous paraphernalia traditionally provided with the burial of a king. The preservation of an intact tomb was vital, not merely to provide storage for the grave goods which the deceased might need in the Afterlife, but to conserve the mummified body itself. Egyptian theology decreed that the soul, or Ka, could not survive if the body was destroyed and, as the prospect of ‘dying the second death’ (that is, the destruction of the body and subsequent death of the soul) seemed almost too horrific to contemplate, the tradition of mummification was developed in a desperate attempt to defeat nature and preserve the deceased for eternity. Unfortunately, the custom of wrapping valuable items under the mummy bandages meant that the bodies of dead kings, once discovered, were treated with scant respect. By the beginning of the New Kingdom tomb-robbery was a major problem, and it had become all too obvious that a large monument placed in close proximity to a wealthy grave simply served as a signpost to buried treasures.
Tuthmosis’ hidden tomb, usually identified using the modern tomb-numbering convention as KV 38, was a relatively simple affair consisting of a rectangular antechamber, a pillared burial chamber and small storeroom linked together by a series of narrow passages and steep stairways. His associated mortuary chapel, Khenmetankh (literally ‘United with Life’), which was for a long time mis-identified as the shrine of Prince Wadjmose, was situated a good hour's walk away from the Valley of the Kings, at a site later chosen for the mortuary temple of the 19th Dynasty King Ramesses II, now popularly known as the Ramesseum.
Tuthmosis had been a middle-aged man with a successful career behind him when he acceded to the throne and he had reigned for no more than ten to fifteen years before, aged about fifty, he ‘rested from life’. Fifty years may seem a short life-span to modern readers accustomed to seeing relations living well into their seventies and eighties, but it would have been an eminently reasonable age for an active Egyptian soldier to achieve; throughout the New Kingdom, life expectancy at birth was considerably lower than twenty years, while those who survived the perils of birth and infancy to reach fourteen years of age might then expect to live for another fifteen years. This compares well with the average life expectancies normally found in pre-industrial societies, which tend to vary between twenty and forty years, and with the suggested average life expectancy of a Roman senator at birth of thirty years.4 Those élite Egyptian males, who able to maintain higher standards of hygiene and nutrition than the less fortunate artisans and peasants, who performed little or no dangerous manual work, who were not faced with the dangers of childbirth and could afford the best medical attention, benefited from a slightly increased life expectancy, but no one could look forward with any confidence to a long old age. Although the Egyptians were famed throughout the ancient world for their medical expertise, there was relatively little that any doctor could do to help when faced with a seriously ill or wounded patient, and the average age for tomb owners (that is, the male élite) of the Dynastic Period has been calculated at between thirty and forty-five years.5
The high levels of infant and child mortality, combined with the low life expectancy, made it very difficult for the Egyptian royal family to maintain its exclusivity. In an ideal world, as we have already seen, the heir to the throne would be the son of the king and his consort who was usually herself a close blood relation, and often a half- or full sister of the king. The crown prince would, therefore, be of unblemished royal descent through both his father and his mother, and by marrying his sister he could maintain the tradition of family purity. However, no matter how many children were conceived by the royal couple, there could be no guarantee that any would live to become adults.