6
I am his daughter in very truth, who works for him and knows what he desires. My reward from my father is life, stability, dominion upon the Horus Throne of all the Living, like Re, for ever.1
King Hatchepsut embarked at once upon an ambitious programme of public works, restoring the monuments of past pharaohs and establishing new temples for the glory of the gods. The benefits of this policy were to be felt up and down the Nile, but it is for the monumental work in and around Thebes that her reign is now best remembered. Such a programme was of threefold importance. At its most obvious level it impressed upon the people the economic prosperity of the new regime. Although Hatchepsut, as absolute ruler, had no need to pay for land, labour or materials, she did need to feed her workforce, and only the more affluent pharaohs could afford to dispense the daily rations of bread, beer and grain which were given in lieu of wages. Similarly, only a well-established and well-organized monarch could boast the efficient and far-sighted bureaucracy necessary to implement such labour-intensive plans. The massive stone buildings now starting to rise amidst the mud-brick houses of Thebes and the other major centres of population served as a constant reminder that there was a powerful pharaoh on the throne. They were, as Winlock has remarked, ‘everlasting propaganda in stone’.2
At the same time the new buildings, literally intended to last as ‘mansions of millions of years’ (temples) or ‘houses of eternity’ (rock-cut tombs), would ensure that the name of their founder would live with them for ever. The preservation of the personal name, always an important consideration for upper-class Egyptians, was particularly important to Hatchepsut, who seems to have understood that she would need to provide constant justifications of her own atypical reign. If her monuments could be larger and more impressive than those of her predecessors, then so much the better; a flattering comparison with the past was often a useful means of stressing the achievements of the present. Finally, the new temples would serve as perhaps the greatest offering that a king could make to the gods; they would be a tangible and permanent proof of the king's extreme piety, and would ensure that the gods would cooperate in maintaining the success of the reign.
The larger-scale stone buildings possessed one very useful feature which was quickly recognized and exploited. Their walls provided the new monarch with an enormous, obvious and permanent billboard upon which to speak directly to both her present and future subjects. Indeed, there was no other effective means of conveying general propaganda to the people. Word of mouth was doubtless used on a daily basis to communicate more specific and ephemeral matters, but spoken messages would surely perish with time, while the writings preserved on fragile papyri and ostraca would never reach a wide audience. Hatchepsut, never one to miss an opportunity, soon became adept at using the walls of her own buildings to proclaim her own glories and justify her own reign.
In the deserts of Middle Egypt, approximately one mile to the south-east of Beni Hassan, Hatchepsut endowed two temples dedicated to the obscure deity Pakhet, ‘She who Scratches’, a fierce lion-headed goddess of the desert, worshipped locally. Much later the Greeks equated Pakhet with their own goddess Artemis, and her larger temple, cut into a small, steep-sided valley, is now widely known by its classical name of Speos Artemidos, or the ‘Grotto of Artemis’. Its local name is the Istabl Antar (the stable of Antar; Antar was a pre-Islamic warrior poet), while the neighbouring smaller temple of Pakhet is known as the Speos Batn el-Bakarah. The Speos Artemidos survived the reigns of both Tuthmosis III and Akhenaten virtually intact, but was unfortunately ‘restored’ by Seti I who added his own texts to the previously unadorned sanctuary. The Speos Batn el-Bakarah was badly defaced during the reign of Tuthmosis III.
The Speos Artemidos consisted of two chambers: an outer pillared vestibule or hall which led via a short passage to an inner sanctuary cut into the living rock. A niche set into the back wall of the sanctuary, intended to house the cult statue of Pakhet, formed the religious focus of the shrine.