7

Senenmut: Greatest of the Great

I was the greatest of the great in the whole land. I was the guardian of the secrets of the King in all his places; a privy councillor on the Sovereign's right hand, secure in favour and given audience alone… I was one upon whose utterances his Lord relied, with whose advice the Mistress of the Two Lands was satisfied, and the heart of the Divine Consort was completely filled.¹

Amongst Hatchepsut's loyal supporters there is one who stands out with remarkable clarity. Senenmut, Steward of the Estates of Amen, Overseer of all Royal Works and Tutor to the Royal Heiress Neferure, played a major bureaucratic role throughout the first three-quarters of Hatchepsut's reign. As one of the most active and able figures of his time, Senenmut occupied a position of unprecedented power within the royal administration; his was the organizational brain behind Hatchepsut's impressive public building programme, and to him has gone the credit of designing Djeser-Djeseru, one of the most original and enduring monuments of the ancient world. And yet, in spite of a comprehensive list of civic duties successfully accomplished, it has almost invariably been Senenmut's private life which has attracted the attention of scholars and public alike. In effect, Senenmut's considerable achievements have not merely been blurred as we might expect by the passage of time, they have been distorted and almost effaced by a host of preconceptions and speculations concerning Senenmut's character, his motivation and even his sex life.² The traditional tale of Senenmut, a classic rags-to-riches romance with a moral ending warning the reader against the twin follies of over-ambition and greed, is generally told as follows:

Senenmut, the highly talented and fiercely ambitious son of humble parents, started his career in the army where his natural abilities soon became apparent. Driven by a burning desire to shake off his lowly origins, he rose rapidly through the ranks before quitting the army to join the palace bureaucracy. Here, once again, his remarkable skills soon became apparent and Senenmut enjoyed accelerated promotion to become a high-grade civil servant. As it became obvious that there was no immediate heir to the throne, the royal court started to buzz with intrigues and plotting. Senenmut now took the calculated decision to link his future totally with that of Hatchepsut. He became the female king's most loyal supporter within the palace as he worked ruthlessly and efficiently to ensure that, against all the odds, her reign would succeed. When his gamble paid off, and Hatchepsut finally secured her crown, Senenmut was amply rewarded for his loyalty. He was showered with a variety of secular and religious titles including the prestigious Stewardship of the Estates of Amen, a position which allowed him free access to the vast wealth of the Karnak temple. His most publicized role was, however, that of tutor to the young princess Neferure.

Our hero's golden future seemed assured. He had amassed great personal wealth, and had started to build himself a suitably splendid tomb in the Theban necropolis. His position at court appeared unassailable. Not only did he have effective control over the state finances, he was a close personal friend of the royal family and a major influence in the life of the heiress-presumptive to the Egyptian throne. Most important of all, he was Hatchepsut's lover, dominating the passive queen to the extent that she, dazzled by his charm and ignorant of his true nature, became totally dependent upon his judgement. From his unprecedented position of power, Senenmut was able to exert great influence over the land. Effectively, Senenmut was ruler of Egypt.

Unfortunately, in best story-book tradition, Senenmut did not remain content with his lot. Caught in the grip of an uncontrollable avarice and corrupted by a false sense of his own importance, he started to take advantage of his exalted position, plundering the royal coffers for his own ends and permitting himself privileges hitherto reserved for the pharaoh. Showing great daring he abandoned his traditional T-shaped Theban tomb and, diverting the royal workmen away from their official task, started to excavate, in secret, a new tomb within the precincts of Hatchepsut's own mortuary temple. Eventually Senenmut committed his most heinous crime of all: he ordered that his own name and image be hidden behind the inner doors of Djeser-Djeseru.

Inevitably Nemesis struck and the betrayal of trust came to light. Hatchepsut's revenge was swift and furious, as befits a volatile woman deceived. Senenmut was instantly stripped of all his privileges and disappeared in mysterious circumstances. His unused tombs were desecrated, his monuments were vandalized and his reliefs and statues were defaced in a determined attempt to erase both the name and memory of Senenmut from the history of Egypt. However, in her impulsive destruction of her lover, Hatchepsut effectively destroyed herself. Bereft of Senenmut's guidance and unable to function alone, she rapidly lost her grip on the crown, and within two years of Senenmut's fall, Tuthmosis III was sole Pharaoh of Egypt.

Fig. 7.1 The damaged figure of Senenmut from Tomb 353

So much for the popularly accepted biography of Senenmut which, with innumerable variations, was for a long time accepted as a true account of the spectacular rise and sudden fall of Hatchepsut's greatest supporter.³ Any reader could choose whether to believe in Superman-Senenmut, the dashing hero and devoted lover, or Svengali-Senenmut, the cunning manipulator and malevolent power behind the throne; either way, it was always Senenmut's dominant relationship with the queen that was important; his actual achievements were a relatively insignificant part of their joint story. Recently, however, there has been a growing awareness that the cloud of suppositions which has almost invariably hovered around any discussion of Hatchepsut and her court has spread to engulf Senenmut, obscuring him from the cold light of objective assessment. A review of the known facts about Senenmut, uncoloured as far as possible by prejudgements and assumptions, presents us with a less dramatic but equally fascinating portrait of an atypical 18th Dynasty man.

Archaeological evidence confirms that Senenmut hailed from Armant (ancient luny), a medium-sized town lying approximately fifteen miles to the south of Thebes. Armant had originally been the capital town of the Theban province; it was later to become well known for its Ptolemaic buildings and its Bucheum, the necropolis of the sacred Buchis bulls. The discovery of the shared tomb of Ramose and Hatnofer, Senenmut's parents, confirms that Senenmut was not of particularly high birth. Within his tomb Ramose, Senenmut's father, was given the non-specific epithet ‘The Worthy’, a polite but somewhat meaningless appellation invariably used for the respected dead. His mother, Hatnofer, daughter of a woman named Sitdjehuty, was simply identified as ‘Mistress of the House’, a very general title awarded to married women. The ancient Egyptians did not suffer from any sense of false modesty. They felt that their official titles were an important part of the personality, and it was customary for all ranks and decorations, no matter how trivial, to be recorded for posterity. An Egyptian would only have considered omitting a lowly or unimportant title from his parent's tomb if it had been superseded by a more prestigious accolade. We must therefore assume that Ramose and Hatnofer, with their rather modest epithets and undistinguished tomb, did not play a prominent role in public life.

However, it would be entirely incorrect to assume that Senenmut sprang from lowly peasant stock. We know that Senenmut was an able and well-educated administrator, and from this we may deduce that his father and grandfathers before him were members of the literate upper-middle classes. Education was always the key to professional advancement in ancient Egypt, and never was it more important than during the 18th Dynasty when the expanding empire created a constant demand for bureaucrats to maintain the vast civil service. The rather vague title of ‘scribe’, which could be applied to any literate Egyptian regardless of occupation, was a prestigious accolade to be accepted with pride. Literacy was, however, by no means widespread, and only the more privileged of middle- and upper-class boys – possibly five per cent of the total population were educated. Most people remained illiterate and unable to gain the foothold in the professions which would allow them to advance up the social pyramid. Their lack of mobility was reinforced by custom which demanded that sons should follow the trade or profession of their father, and by the tradition of marriage within the same family. To modern western eyes, accustomed to the idea of advancement through education, this acceptance of a static society may appear strange. However, in the ancient world, it was generally accepted that one had to be content with one's lot. As St Paul wrote, ‘Let each man abide in the same calling wherein he was called.*

Senenmut must, therefore, have belonged to the top ten per cent of the population. He was probably the scion of one of the families which formed the literate provincial classes and from which a talented son could rise to national prominence. Such meteoric rises were by no means common in Egypt, but they were certainly not unknown. The Pharaoh Ay, successor to Tutankhamen, who ruled Egypt 250 years after Hatchepsut, seems to have come from a family who first became prominent in the southern city of Akhmim, while thirty years after Ay's reign the family of the great King Ramesses II had their origins in a comparative backwater of the Eastern Nile Delta.

We know that Senenmut came from a typically large Egyptian family; he had at least three brothers named Amenemhat, Minhotep and Pairy and at least two sisters, Ahhotep and Nofret-Hor. For a long time it was assumed, on the basis of a mistranslation, that Senenmut also had a fourth brother named Senimen. Senimen's existence is not open to doubt; he was a contemporary court official who rose to succeed Senenmut as tutor to Princess Neferure, who was depicted in Senenmut's Tomb 71 (but not in Tomb 353 where Senenmut's true siblings were shown together with their parents), and who was buried in Theban Tomb 252 which makes no mention of any family link with Senenmut. However, we now know that Senimen was the son of a woman named Seniemyah, not Hatnofer and, while it is possible that the two were half-brothers, there is no evidence to show that this was actually the case.⁴

Nor is there any evidence to suggest that Senenmut ever married; there is no mention of a wife or children in either of his tombs. If he did remain single, he must have been an oddity, one of the few bachelors living unwed in a country where married life and the fathering of many children was viewed as the ideal. Given the constant emphasis placed on family life, and the particular need for a son to perform the funeral rites of his dead parents, we might expect Senenmut to have married at the start of his career, and therefore to have been either divorced or widowed before he came to national prominence as a single man. However, had Senenmut ever been widowed, we would expect to find a reference to his dead wife within his tomb. Did his later involvement with the queen prevent him from referring to the fact that he had ever been married, no matter how briefly? It certainly is tempting to draw a parallel with the court of the English Queen Elizabeth I, albeit over 3,000 years later and in a different land, where, in turn, the Earl of Leicester and his stepson the Earl of Essex, both favourites of the queen, found it prudent to keep their inconvenient wives hidden in the country, away from the queen's unforgiving gaze.

Our meagre information about Senenmut's early life comes from the joint tomb of Ramose and Hatnofer. Careful excavation has shown that Ramose, aged about sixty, predeceased his wife and was buried in a relatively humble grave. This suggests that his children did not at the time of his death have the means to give their father a more splendid interment, as tradition decreed that it was a son's duty to bury his father in the best manner possible. When Hatnofer died of old age, during Year 6 or 7 of Hatchepsut's reign, Senenmut was in a far better position to provide for his mother's funeral. He had already chosen the site for his own final resting place and he decided to bury his mother on the same hillside, just below his own tomb. Here a relatively simple chamber was cut into the rock, and the expensively mummified body of Hatnofer was interred in a wooden anthropoid coffin together with a gilded mask, canopic jars and a selection of traditional grave-goods suitable for a woman. Ramose was then resurrected from his more lowly resting place, hastily re-bandaged, placed in a painted anthropoid coffin and re-united with his wife.

Hatnofer's tomb was also home to two further coffins housing the badly mummified remains of three anonymous women and three unknown children. The discoverers of the tomb saw these six bodies as the grisly evidence that Senenmut' immediate family had been struck by sudden catastrophe:

... that eight persons of the same family or group should have died so nearly at the same time that they could be buried together on one occasion is certainly extraordinary, but seems, nevertheless, to be what actually happened.⁵

It actually seems far more likely that these bodies represent members of Senenmut's immediate family who had previously been buried nearby; their decayed wrappings and disarticulated skeletons encrusted with mud suggest that they too had been retrieved from less impressive cemeteries. The re-burial of private individuals, while not common, was certainly not unknown at this time, and Senenmut's filial devotion would have met with general approval. Clearly, the parents of the few upwardly mobile children were able to enjoy the posthumous benefits of their offsprings' success.

There were three major career paths open to the educated and ambitious 18th Dynasty male: the army, the priesthood and the civil service. It is always possible that Senenmut chose to join the army, and a badly damaged fragment of what appears to be autobiographical text within his tomb (Tomb 71) lends some credence to this idea. The text, which includes the words ‘capture’ and ‘Nubia’, is positioned next to images of running soldiers. However, the remainder of the inscription is virtually unreadable and is therefore open to a variety of interpretations. His lack of military titles in later life, and his father's lack of any military titles, perhaps indicates that Senenmut selected a vocation more obviously suited to his organizational skills. The priesthood and the bureaucracy were very closely linked at this time, and it seems sensible to deduce that Senenmut rose to prominence as a local administrator working either for the royal bureaucracy or the temple, before being seconded to state administration at Thebes. Given Senenmut's subsequent plethora of Amen-based titles (for example, Overseer of Amen's Granaries, Storehouses, Fields, Gardens, Cattle and Slaves; Controller of the Hall of Amen; Overseer of the Works of Amen, etc.), the suggestion that he began his career as an administrator in the temple of Amen at Karnak appears entirely reasonable.

Our first concrete sighting of Senenmut, dating to the period before Hatchepsut's accession, finds him already busy at the palace with a variety of prestigious appointments including steward of the property of Hatchepsut and Neferure and tutor to the young princess. Unfortunately, we have no means of knowing when Senenmut had started his illustrious royal career. Our only clue is provided by a shrine built at the Gebel Silsila; this informs us that Senenmut was already ‘Steward of the God's Wife and Steward of the King's Daughter’ at the time of construction. These two tantalizingly anonymous ladies have been tentatively identified as Queen Ahmose and Princess Hatchepsut, indicating that Senenmut was in royal service during the reign of Tuthmosis I, but it is perhaps more likely that the two women are Queen Hatchepsut and Princess Neferure, and therefore that Senenmut was initially appointed either by Tuthmosis II or during the early part of Hatchepsut's regency following the death of Tuthmosis II.

Gebel Silsila, forty miles to the north of Aswan, was both the location of sandstone quarries and a cult centre for the worship of the Nile in flood. Senenmut's shrine, which is of uncertain use and which has been variously described as a grotto, cenotaph, temple and tomb, is one of a number of such edifices built on the West Bank by the highest-ranking civil servants of the 18th Dynasty, including Hapuseneb, the first Prophet of Amen and architect of Hatchepsut's burial chamber, and Neshi, the leader of Hatchepsut's celebrated expedition to Punt. The monument therefore serves to emphasize Senenmut's prominent role amongst the great and the good (and the influential) of his time.

Senenmut's shrine (Shrine 16) is situated high on the cliff and faces east, towards the Nile. It was almost certainly designed to be reached from the river at the time of high water. The shrine consists of a framed doorway, cut into the sandstone cliff, leading into a square room housing a seated statue of Senenmut, cut from the living rock. The walls originally displayed a series of sunk relief scenes and inscriptions. These are now badly damaged, although the flat ceiling still shows traces of its original colourful pattern. Although most of the Gebel Silsila shrines incorporate a fairly consistent funerary emphasis in their texts and scenes, Senenmut'S shrine omits the customary earthly and funerary feasts and includes instead a depiction of Hatchepsut being embraced by the crocodile-headed god Sobek and Nekhbet, the vulture goddess of Upper Egypt, shown as a woman wearing a feathered vulture headdress. As other commentators have observed, ‘the peculiar status of Senenmut and the relationship between him and his monarch no doubt account for these unusual features’.⁶

… I was promoted before the companions, knowing that I was distinguished with her; they set me to be chief of her house, the palace, may it live, be prosperous and be healthy, being under my supervision, being judge in the whole land, Overseer of the Granaries of Amen, Senenmut…⁷

Following Hatchepsut's rise to power, Senenmut dropped a number of his lesser titles, including that of tutor to Neferure, acquired a clutch of more prestigious accolades (such as Overseer of the Granaries of Amen and Overseer of all the Works of the King [Hatchepsut] at Karnak), and settled into his principal post as Steward of Amen. Although, as far as we are aware, he never held the title of First Prophet of Amen, arguably the most powerful position that a non-royal Egyptian could aspire to, the stereotypical and self-congratulatory propaganda text quoted above confirms the wide range of his official duties. Titles in ancient Egypt were not necessarily indicative of actual employment, but rather served to place a man in the social hierarchy; for example, the exact duties of the ‘Sandal-bearer of the King’ or the ‘Royal Washerman’ are unknown, but it is highly unlikely that they involved the performance of undignified personal services for the monarch, as both posts were held by men of rank and breeding. Winlock's intriguing suggestion that, in addition to his obvious public duties, Senenmut had ‘held more intimate ones like those of the great nobles of France who were honoured in being allowed to assist in the most intimate details of the royal toilet at the king's levees’⁸appears very unlikely. Winlock based this remarkable conclusion on the fact that Senenmut bore what we now assume to be the purely honorary titles of ‘Superintendent of the Private Apartments’, ‘Superintendent of the Bathroom’, and ‘Superintendent of the Royal Bedroom’.

Senenmut's plethora of epithets should, therefore, be taken as an indication of his general importance rather than a precise listing of his actual duties, and the exact amount of time that he was actually required to devote to his official posts remains unclear. His range of titles does, however, suggest that he might by now have been a relatively elderly man. As the average life expectancy for a high-ranking court official was between thirty and forty-five years, any official who lived past forty years could reasonably expect to become a much venerated and much decorated elder statesman, if only because death had removed almost all his contemporary competitors. The longer that Senenmut lived, and of course the longer that he continued in the queen's favour, the more titles he could expect to acquire. Thus we find Ineni, an equally long-serving statesman, rejoicing in the titles of:

Hereditary Prince, Count, Chief of all Works in Karnak; the double silver-house was in his charge; the double gold house was on his seal; Sealer of all contracts in the House of Amen; Excellency, Overseer of the Double Granary of Amen.⁹

Unofficially, Senenmut seems to have acted as the queen's right-hand-man and general factotum. The rapid increase in his personal wealth at this time is obvious. Not only was Senenmut now rich enough to bury his mother with appropriate pomp, he was also able to start constructing his own magnificent tomb, acquire a quartzite sarcophagus and build his Silsila shrine.

In the absence of any contemporary written description of Senenmut, we must turn to his surviving images in an attempt to find clues to his character. What did the queen see when she turned to look at her faithful servant? Possibly not what modern observers have seen when studying Senenmut's somewhat unprepossessing physiognomy:

Whatever first attracted Great Royal Wife Hatchepsut to Senenmut, it certainly was not his good looks…. portraits show a pinch-featured man with a pointed high-bridge nose and fleshy lips that seem pursed; with a weak chin tending to jowliness and eyes that might be judged a bit shifty; and with deep creases or wrinkles about the cheeks, nose and mouth, and under the jaw.¹⁰

Winlock was also struck by Senenmut's ‘aquiline nose and nervously expressive, wrinkled face. As for the wrinkles, they surely were the feature by which Senmut was known’.¹¹ However beauty, or in this case a shifty eye, wrinkles and a tendency towards ‘jowliness’, lies as always in the eye of the beholder, and others have been prepared to take a kinder view of his features:

The profile has the imperious outline of the Tuthmoside family. A slight fullness of the throat, with two strokes of the brush suggesting folds, the sparingly executed lines around the eyes, and a reversed curve from the eyes past nose and mouth indicate in masterful fashion the sagging plump features of the aging man of affairs.¹²

Each of these descriptions has been based on our four surviving ink sketches of Senenmut's face. Three of these portraits are on ostraca now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, while the fourth has survived undamaged on the wall of Tomb 353. All four show Senenmut in profile, with a single eye and eyebrow facing forwards in the conventional Egyptian style. His rather rounded face and double chin certainly suggest a man used to enjoying the finer things in life, while his crows’ feet and wrinkles confirm that he was no longer in the first flush of youth when the sketches were made. The striking similarity between these less-than-flattering sketches suggests that all four may be actual depictions of Senenmut, drawn by people who actually knew him. In contrast, our other more formal images of Senenmut, his statues and his tomb illustrations, are merely conventional representations of a ‘great Egyptian man’ with little or no attempt at accurate portrayal.

… Grant that there may be… made for me many statues from every kind of precious hard stone for the temple of Amen at Karnak and for every place wherein the majesty of this god proceeds…¹³

At least twenty-five hard stone statues of Senenmut have survived the ravages of time. This is an extraordinarily large number of statues for a

Fig. 7.2 Sketch-portrait of Senenmut from the wall of Tomb 353

private individual; no other New Kingdom official has left us so many clear indications of his exalted rank and, as we must assume that most, if not all, were the gift of the queen, his highly favoured status. In ancient Egypt, statues were not simply designed to beobjets d'art, intended to enhance rooms or beautify gardens. All images were automatically invested with magical or religious powers, and they were commissioned so that they could replace either living people or gods within the temple and the tomb. It seems likely, given his links with Amen, that the majority of Senenmut's statues would have been placed in the courtyard of the great temple of Amen at Karnak, although Senenmut appears to have dedicated statues of himself in most of the major temples around Thebes. Within the temple the statues would have been positioned in ranks facing the sanctuary, ensuring that the living Senenmut received the benefits of their proximity to the god.

The artistic inventiveness of the Senenmut figures confirms the innovative nature and general technical excellence of small-scale sculpture throughout Hatchepsut's reign. They depict Senenmut in his various roles, most typically holding the infant Neferure in his arms, a pose designed to stress Senenmut's importance rather than his tender feelings towards his young charge. Some show him squatting with the child's body wrapped in, and almost obscured by, his cloak, while one shows Senenmut sitting with Neferure – stiff and unchild-like – held at right angles in his lap, a position hitherto reserved for women nursing children. The majority of the remaining statues show Senenmut kneeling to present a religious symbol such as a sistrum or a shrine. At least one statue, a 1.55 m (5 ft 1 in) high granite representation of Senenmut presenting a sistrum to the goddess Mut, originally housed in the temple of Mut at Karnak, was so admired by its subject that it was reproduced in black diorite on a smaller scale, presumably so that it could be placed in a less public shrine and used for private worship.

Not all contemporary representations of Senenmut were intended to flatter, as crude graffiti from an unfinished Middle Kingdom tomb show. This chamber, situated in the cliffs above Deir el-Bahri, was used as a resting place by the gangs of workmen engaged in building Hatchepsut's mortuary temple. Here the builders idled away their rest breaks by doodling and scribbling on the walls. Included amongst the doodles are a number of mildly pornographic scenes including depictions of naked, well-endowed young men. One sketch shows a tall, fully clothed, unnamed male who has variously been identified as both Senenmut and Hatchepsut, and who is apparently being approached by a smaller naked male with an improbably large erection. Although it is possible that the two figures represent entirely separate and unconnected doodles, they are close enough together for us to speculate whether Senenmut/Hatchepsut is about to become the subject of a homosexual encounter.

Homosexual intercourse for pleasure in ancient Egypt is not well attested. Instead, homosexuality was generally regarded as a means of gaining revenge on a defeated enemy. By implanting his semen the aggressor not only humiliated his victim by forcing him to take the part of a woman, but also gained a degree of power over him. If Senenmut is really being approached in this way, he is about to be thoroughly degraded. No disgrace ever attached to the aggressor performing the homosexual rape; the shame belonged entirely to the victim. Thus, in the New Kingdom story which tells of the seduction of the young god Horus by his uncle Seth, it is Horus who feels the shame of a woman. Seth is merely acting like any red-blooded male:

Now when evening had come a bed was prepared for them and they lay down together. At night Seth let his member become stiff, and he inserted it between the thighs of Horus. And Horus placed his hand between his thighs, and caught the semen of Seth.¹⁴

By catching the semen before it enters his body and subsequently throwing it into the marsh, Horus has effectively thwarted his uncle's evil plan to discredit him in the eyes of other males. Later, with the help of his mother, he is able to turn the tables on Seth. He sprinkles his own semen over the lettuces growing in the palace garden which he knows that Seth will eat. When the two gods are called to give an account of their deeds, although Seth claims to have done ‘a man's deed’ to Horus, the semen of Horus is discovered within Seth's own body and Seth is totally humiliated.

Nearby on the tomb wall (Fig. 7.3) are shown a couple, naked but for their idiosyncratic headgear, who are indulging in a form of sexual

Fig. 7.3 Hatchepsut and Senenmut? Crude graffito from a Deir el-Bahri tomb

intercourse which has modestly been described as ‘a method of approach from the rear’.¹⁵ As Manniche has noted:

Intercourse from behind (‘dog fashion’)… seems to have been rather popular in Egypt, to judge from the number of extant representations of the position, the man most frequently standing, with the woman bending over. Whether any of these examples indicate anal intercourse cannot be determined from the representations alone, but it seems rather unlikely in that no practical purpose would have been served…¹⁶

The more dominant male figure sports what has been described as an overseer's leather cap, but which may actually be a bad haircut, while his larger and curiously androgynous companion has a dark female pubic triangle but no breasts. She is wearing what has been identified as a royal headdress without the uraeus, and is generally acknowledged to represent Hatchepsut. The whole scene has been interpreted, some might say over-interpreted, as a contemporary political parody intended to highlight the one way in which Hatchepsut could never be a true king – she could never dominate a man in the way that she is now being dominated.¹⁷ Senenmut is shown quite literally taking his queen for a ride.

Hatchepsut is by no means the first woman in a position of authority to be insulted by this type of graffiti. The deep-rooted feeling that any female who rejects her traditional submissive role is both unfeminine and unnatural has often led to wild charges of wanton behaviour fired at dominant women. Accusations of sexual lust and impropriety are perhaps the only way in which less powerful and therefore, it has been argued, emasculated and frustrated men can attack their more powerful mistresses. Nor is this type of assault the prerogative of men. Women who have not themselves breached social boundaries are often the first to condemn those who have and, as women well know, an attack on a woman's reputation is the most damaging attack of all. Certainly the influential females of history – women who have dominated in a man's world – have consistently attracted prurient speculation concerning their sexual behaviour. These women, who range from Cleopatra of Egypt via Semiramis of Assyria and Livia of Rome to Catherine the Great of Russia, were routinely accused of sexual promiscuity of the grossest and most vivid kind.

It seems that only by making a deliberate feature of her virtue and chastity, often maintained under the most difficult of conditions, can a powerful woman hope to avoid tales of her sexual depravity becoming her main contribution to her country's history. Thus Odysseus's faithful Penelope, Shakespeare's ‘most unspotted lily’ Elizabeth I and Joan of Arc, ‘the Maid of Orleans’, all strong women, deliberately made purity one of their main attributes. We should therefore not be surprised to find that Hatchepsut's subjects, unused to the idea of a strong female ruler, were prepared to speculate on the relationship between the female king and Senenmut, her servant and their immediate boss. Humour would have been the only weapon that the workmen could use to attack their superiors, and it would perhaps be attaching too much importance to what appears to be a casual scribble, were we to assume that it signifies anything other than a crude attempt to depict Hatchepsut in her rightful female place: being dominated by a man.

Fig. 7.4 Senenmut worshipping at Djeser-Djeseru

Nevertheless, the suggestion that Senenmut and Hatchepsut were more than just good friends is worthy of serious consideration. An intimate relationship with the queen would account for the rapid rise in Senenmut's fortunes and would explain why Senenmut chose to defy tradition and remain unmarried. It is certainly tempting to see Senenmut's unprecedented privileges, such as burial within the confines of Djeser-Djeseru and the linking of their two names within Tomb 353, as Hatchepsut's tacit acknowledgement of Senenmut's role as her morganatic partner, if not her consort. Queens, however great, are not immune from normal human feelings, and at times Hatchepsut may have found her position to be an intolerably lonely one. A trusted companion may have helped to ease the burden of state.

In theory, Hatchepsut and Senenmut, both unattached individuals, would have been free to enjoy an open sexual relationship without public censure. Dynastic Egypt was not an unduly prudish society and Hatchepsut, as king, would have been at liberty to choose her own partners just as other New Kingdom monarchs were free to fill their harems with the women of their choice. And yet Hatchepsut, firstly as a woman and secondly as a king with a rather tenuous claim to the throne, was in a very difficult position. Throughout her reign she en-deavoured to emphasize her unique royal position as the daughter, wife and sister of a king. The enormous gulf which separated the divine pharaoh from the people is hard for us to understand but would have been very real to Hatchepsut. Marriage or a permanent alliance with a commoner would have compromised and damaged her position, making the aura of divinity with which she chose to cloak herself appear more transparent to those around her.

Senenmut is generally credited with being the political force behind Hatchepsut's assumption and exercise of kingship. While this assessment cannot be proved, it is probably correct.¹⁸

If Hatchepsut and Senenmut were not lovers, did they enjoy anything other than a purely professional relationship? Did Senenmut control Hatchepsut by the power of his personality? And if so, was he directly responsible for Hatchepsut's unprecedented decision to seize power? As Gardiner has noted: ‘It is not to be imagined… that even a woman of the most virile character could have attained such a pinnacle of power without masculine support.’¹⁹ Senenmut was one of Hatchepsut's most loyal servants at this time, and it is clear that he must have approved of her claim to the throne since he continued to work for the new regime. The suggestion that he masterminded the accession is far less feasible; it is an idea based less on the available archaeo-historical evidence (nil) than on the twin assumptions that Senenmut was a manipulative person and that Hatchepsut, possibly due to her femininity, was incapable of controlling her own destiny. It is certainly difficult to equate the strong and mature Hatchepsut of the Deir el-Bahri temple with the timid and passive Trilby or the childish Lady Jane Grey, and it seems impossible that any intelligent woman could have been persuaded to take such a momentous step against her will. Winlock, believing Senenmut and Hatchepsut to have been kindred souls and acknowledging that Hatchepsut's gender did not necessarily preclude intelligence, has summarized the situation:

… the only question is whether it was through infatuation for her [Hatchepsut] that Sen-Mut followed her in a course of her own designing, or whether through ambition for himself he was encouraging her to break with the customs of her people.²⁰

It is clear that Senenmut's main strengths lay in his abilities as an organizer, administrator and accountant. In modern times there is a tendency to laugh at desk-bound civil servants; their work is seen as dull, repetitive and unnecessary, and those unfortunate enough to be employed as clerks or accountants are often perceived as boring, faceless nonentities. In ancient Egypt nothing could be further from the truth. The scribe enjoyed the most enviable of employments as, exempt from the need to perform degrading manual labour in the hot sun, he revelled in his exalted position. The importance of the efficient civil servant in a developing state should never be underestimated. Construction work in Egypt, without the benefits of modern machinery, was a lengthy and labour-intensive business requiring the coordination of vast numbers of workmen and their associated back-up facilities such as food, water, accommodation and equipment, and a tried and tested administrator would have been of great value to the queen.

The extent of his creative talents is perhaps more open to question. Senenmut is often credited with building all of Hatchepsut's monuments, although there is no evidence that he was actually an architect, and he himself is often rather vague when referring to his precise role in these operations. Nevertheless, he appears to have had a hand in various construction projects in and around Thebes. His main architectural achievements must remain the overseeing of Djeser-Djeseru and the erecting of the obelisks at Karnak. However, the unique astronomical ceiling in his Tomb 353 (discussed in further detail below), and the eclectic variety of texts and ostraca included in Tomb 71 (ranging from plans of the tomb itself through various calculations to the Story of Sinuhe), certainly suggests that Senenmut was a cultured and well-rounded man with a wide range of interests extending far beyond his official duties.

Thanks to his role as Overseer of Works at Deir el-Bahri, Senenmut was able to ensure that his connection with the queen and her monument was preserved for eternity. Over sixty small representations of Senenmut, either kneeling or standing with outstretched arms, have been discovered concealed within the temple. These images had been carved on walls normally covered by the wooden doors of shrines and statue niches, so that they would have been completely hidden from public gaze while the doors were opened for worship. The accompanying short inscriptions make it clear that Senenmut is engaged in worshipping both the god Amen and his mistress Hatchepsut ‘on behalf of the life, prosperity and health of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare living forever’.

In Egyptian art, the image could always serve as a substitute for the person or thing being represented. Therefore, by placing his image near the god's sanctuary, Senenmut was actually placing himself in close proximity to the god, and was receiving unspecified benefits from this close association. However, being near to the gods was purely a royal prerogative, a privilege allowed only to the king who served as high priest of every Egyptian deity. Because he appeared to be usurping royal privileges, and because it was hitherto unheard of for a non-royal person to be included in any royal temple, many egyptologists deduced that Senenmut had commissioned the carving without obtaining the permission of the queen. This theory fitted with the then-current view of Senenmut as a devious and scheming manipulator, and has remained surprisingly popular despite the translation of a badly damaged text, also from the Deir el-Bahri mortuary temple, in which Senenmut states that he had royal permission to carve his image within the sacred precincts and indeed within every Egyptian temple. This text is worth quoting at length:

Giving praise to Amen and smelling the ground to the Lord of the gods on behalf of the life, prosperity and health of the King [i.e. Hatchepsut] of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare, may he live forever, by the Hereditary Prince and Count, the Steward of Amen, Senenmut, in accordance with a favour of the King's bounty which was extended to this servant in letting his name be established on every wall, in the following of the King, in Djeser-Djeseru [Deir el-Bahri], and likewise in the temples of the gods of Upper and Lower Egypt. Thus spoke the King.²¹

This bold proclamation of royal authority was carved on the reveals of the doorway leading into the north-west offering hall of the temple, and was available for all who were exalted enough to enter the temple precincts to read. It confirms what common sense suggests, that the queen must have known about the ‘secret’ images. Senenmut would have experienced a great deal of difficulty in keeping scores of illicit carvings hidden and, given that a powerful man like Senenmut must have had many enemies, it seems inconceivable that no word of this treachery would have reached Hatchepsut's ears. An alternative theory, that Senenmut not only carved his images in secret, but also lied about receiving royal approval for his action, is more convoluted and perhaps less easy to accept. We now know that Senenmut was not the only 18th Dynasty official to include his own image within a royal monument. Neshi, Viceroy of Kush under Tuthmosis III, had himself depicted in the act of praying on the reveals of some of the doorways in the temples of Hatchepsut and Tuthmosis III at Buhen. Although Buhen, lying beyond the southern border of Egypt, was far enough away from the court to allow a certain amount of variation from standard Egyptian practices, it is interesting that Neshi did not suffer in any way for his impertinence.

May the king give an offering: a thousand of bread, beer, cattle and fowl… that they may grant abundance and he may be purified, for the Ka of the Steward of Amen, Senenmut the justified.²²

Senenmut was wealthy enough to provide himself with two funerary monuments on the West Bank at Thebes; Tomb 71, the ‘first tomb’, conspicuously sited on top of the Sheikh Abd el-Gurna hill, and Tomb 353, the ‘second tomb’, hidden beneath the precincts of Djeser-Djeseru. Historians have consistently placed great emphasis on these two tombs, concluding that it was his presumption in building secretly within the precincts of the Deir el-Bahri temple which finally turned Hatchepsut against Senenmut. It is therefore worth considering the art and architecture of these two very different monuments in some detail.²³

Senenmut selected a (then) little used area of the Theban necropolis for his first tomb, securing a highly desirable, and highly visible, location on the brow of the hill now known as the Sheikh Abd el-Gurna. His choice of site was to prove well judged. He was soon joined by two of his illustrious contemporaries, the steward Amenhotep (Tomb 73) and the royal tutor Senimen (Tomb 252), and several lesser-ranking officials quickly followed suit, making Gurna one of the most popular private cemeteries on the West Bank during the reigns of Hatchepsut and Tuthmosis III. Senenmut's own tomb ultimately served as a focal point for a number of less important burials, and clearance of the hillside below Tomb 71 in the 1930s revealed a scattering of subsidiary inhumations; an unknown woman in a cheap wooden coffin wearing a scarab inscribed for the ‘God's Wife Neferure’, an unknown male wrapped in reed matting, a boy named Amenhotep who may have been Senenmut's much younger brother, a male singer named Hormose who was buried with his lute beside him, two anonymous human bodies in anthropoid coffins and the bodies of a horse and an ape, each mummified and in its own coffin.