8

The End and the Aftermath

Now my heart turns this way and that, as I think what the people will say. Those who shall see my monuments in years to come, and who shall speak of what I have done.¹

After more than twenty years as ruler of Egypt Hatchepsut, by now an ‘elderly’ woman between thirty-five and fifty-five years of age, prepared to die and live for ever in the Field of Reeds. Her funerary preparations were well underway, her mortuary temple was already established, and Hatchepsut was free to set her worldly affairs in order. Tuthmosis III was her intended successor, and we start to see an obvious shift in the balance of power as the fully mature king emerges from relative obscurity and starts to assume a more prominent role in matters of state. We now find Tuthmosis standing beside rather than behind his stepmother, acting in all ways as a true king of Egypt.² Tuthmosis, as commander-in-chief of the army, assumed the onerous responsibility of defending Egypt's borders. Egypt was already being troubled by sporadic outbreaks of unrest amongst her client states to the east; these minor insurrections were to culminate in the open rebellions which dominated much of Tuthmosis' subsequent reign. Tuthmosis now found himself forced to commit his troops to the first of the series of military campaigns which would prove necessary to re-impose firm control on both Nubia and the Levant.

Unfortunately, we have no Ineni to preserve a detailed record of the passing of the female pharaoh but, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we must assume that Hatchepsut died a natural death, flying to heaven on the 10th day of the 6th month of Year 22 (early February 1482 BC). The once popular idea that Tuthmosis, after more than twenty years of joint rule, might finally have snapped and either killed or otherwise ousted his ageing co-ruler seems unnecessarily melodramatic; Tuthmosis must have realized thathe had only to wait and allow nature to take her course. Hatchepsut had already lived far longer than might have been expected, and time was on the young king's side.

To Tuthmosis, as successor, fell the duty of burying the old king in order to reinforce his own claim to rule as the living Horus. We may therefore assume that Hatchepsut was properly mummified and allowed to rest with dignity, lying alongside her father in Tomb KV20. Suggestions that Tuthmosis might have been vindictive enough to deny Hatchepsut her kingly burial have often been made, but again these theories have generally been based on the assumption of Tuthmosis' hatred for his co-ruler which, as we shall see below, has been shown to be an oversimplification of events following Hatchepsut's death.³ Only one piece of material evidence has been put forward to suggest that Hatchepsut's sarcophagus may never have been occupied. When, in 1904, Howard Carter managed to force his way past the rubble which blocked the entrance to the burial chamber of KV20, he found that the tomb had already been ransacked. The two sarcophagi and the matching canopic chest were lying empty and the remaining grave goods had been reduced to worthless piles of smashed sherds and partially burned fragments of wood. The body of Tuthmosis I had, in fact, been removed prior to the robbery by workmen acting on the orders of Tuthmosis III, and had been trans-ferred to the new tomb, KV38, which was itself in turn to be robbed in antiquity. Inside KV20 the lid of Tuthmosis' sarcophagus was left propped against the wall where the necropolis officials had placed it in order to allow them sufficient room to manoeuvre the body from the tomb. The lid of Hatchepsut's sarcophagus, supposedly dislodged by the tomb robbers, was reportedly found lying intact and face upwards over 5 m (16 ft 5 in) away from its base. This position is

Fig. 8.1 The cartouche of King Tuthmosis III

somewhat unexpected; too heavy to simply lift, we might have expected to find evidence that the thieves used bars and wedges to prise up the lid, allowing it to fall face downwards immediately by the side of the sarcophagus.⁴

Could it be that the lid had never been placed on the sarcophagus, and that Carter had in fact found it lying where the original 18th Dynasty craftsmen had abandoned it? By extension, this would indicate that Hatchepsut's body was never interred within KV 20. However, this is a very slight and dubious piece of evidence on which to base a reconstruction of events at Hatchepsut's death. We have no photograph or plan of the tomb at the moment of re-entry, but examination of Carter's painting of the interior of the burial chamber plainly shows both the sarcophagus and its lid, which is not lying neatly on the floor but is roughly displaced on top of what seem to be heaps of debris and smashed grave goods.⁵ Carter himself tells us that when he entered the tomb ‘the sarcophagus of the queen was open, with the lid lying at the head on the floor… neither of the sarcophagi appeared to be in situ, but showed signs of handling’. It would therefore appear most likely that it was Carter or his workmen who moved the lid to its final resting place while clearing out the chamber.

Fragments of Hatchepsut's anthropoid wooden coffin – a sure indication that she had indeed been accorded a decent burial – were eventually recovered from KV4, the tomb of Ramesses XI, which had yielded broken artifacts from the burials of several earlier pharaohs including, as the excavators noted, ‘numerous pieces of wood from the funeral furniture of some of the kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty… rendered into small slivers that resembled kindling’.⁶ It would appear that, during the Third Intermediate Period, the tomb of Ramesses XI had been used as a temporary workshop where the necropolis officials could restore or re-wrap damaged mummies and process the artifacts recovered from earlier burials, in particular those of Hatchepsut and Tuthmosis III. Stripped of their most valuable recyclable aspects (for example, the gilded-gesso surface of the coffin of Tuthmosis III was adzed clean; the gold was presumably melted down and re-used, the coffin was still functional although less decorative and was certainly less likely to attract the attention of tomb robbers) the grave goods were sent together with the bodies of their owners to the cache at Deir el-Bahri for permanent storage.⁷

The remainder of Hatchepsut's funerary equipment is now lost, although a draughts-board and a ‘throne’ (actually the base and legs of a couch or bed), said to have been recovered from the Deir el-Bahri cache and presented to the British Museum by the Mancunian egypto-logical benefactor Jesse Howarth in 1887, have been identified as belonging to Hatchepsut on the basis of a wooden cartouche-shaped lid said to have been found with them. However, this identification is by no means certain; the Reverend Greville Chester, who obtained the artifacts on behalf of Mr Howarth, had himself acquired them from an Arab who had supposedly recovered them ‘… hidden away in one of the side chambers of the tomb of Ramesses IX [KV6], under the loose stones which encumber the place’.⁸

Hatchepsut's body has never been identified. However, the Deir el-Bahri cache which protected most of the 18th Dynasty royal mummies including Tuthmosis I(?), II and III, also included an anonymous and coffin-less New Kingdom female body together with at least one empty female coffin and a decorated wooden box bearing the name and titles of Hatchepsut and containing a mummified liver or spleen. We are therefore faced with the possibility that these female remains may include either all or part of the missing king. Further anonymous 18th Dynasty female remains have been recovered from the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV 35), which was used as a storage depot for a collection of dispossessed New Kingdom mummies. This tomb yielded sixteen bodies including two unidentified women, either of them potential Hatchepsuts, who are now known as the ‘Elder Lady’ and the ‘Younger Lady’. The Younger Lady is almost certainly too young to be Hatchepsut while the Elder Lady, thought to be a woman in her forties, was for a long time identified as the later 18th Dynasty Queen Tiy. However, recent X-ray analysis suggests that this lady may in fact have been less elderly than had been supposed; she appears to have died when somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age. It must be stressed that mummy-ages obtained by X-ray analysis do need to be treated with a degree of caution. The suggested X-ray age of thirty-five to forty years for the body of Tuthmosis III is, for example, plainly incompatible with the historical records which indicate that he reigned as king for over fifty years. However, if the analysis of the ‘Elder Lady’ is correct, it would appear that she too may have died too young to be Hatchepsut.

More intriguing is the suggestion that Hatchepsut may be identified with the body of the anonymous lady discovered in KV60, the tomb of the royal nurse Sitre. When it was discovered by Carter in 1903, this tomb still housed its two badly damaged female mummies, that of Sitre herself, and that of a partially unwrapped, obese middle-aged woman with worn teeth and red-gold hair. This lady had been approximately 1.55 m (5 ft 1 in) tall and had been mummified with her left arm across her chest in the typical 18th Dynasty royal burial position. Her obesity had apparently made it impossible for the embalmers to follow the usual custom of removing the entrails via a cut in the side, and she had instead been eviscerated through the pelvic floor. Carter had not been particularly interested in the tomb – he was looking for an intact royal burial which would please his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon – and, leaving things pretty much as he had found them, sealed it up again and departed. The English archaeologist Edward Ayrton had re-entered the tomb in 1906 and removed the lady Sitre and her wooden coffin to Cairo Museum, but the unknown lady had been left lying in a rather undignified position flat on her back in the middle of the burial chamber. The tomb entrance was subsequently resealed, and forgotten. When the American egyptologist Donald P. Ryan re-discovered the tomb in 1989, he provided the lady with a wooden coffin, and subsequently the burial was protected by fitting a door to the tomb. Several authorities have tentatively suggested that this unidentified lady might be none other than Hatchepsut who might have been removed from the nearby KV 20 following a robbery and hidden for safety in KV 60. Less likely is the theory that Tuthmosis III denied his stepmother an official burial and instead interred her alongside her old nurse.⁹

The funeral over, Tuthmosis III embarked upon thirty-three years of solo rule. He was immediately faced with revolt amongst a coalition of his Palestinian and Syrian vassals united under the banner of the Prince of Kadesh (a powerful city state on the River Orontes) and backed by the King of Mitanni, and he started a lengthy series of military campaigns designed to strengthen Egypt's position in the Near East. His aim, as he tells us, was to ‘overthrow that vile enemy and to extend the boundaries of Egypt in accordance with the command of his father Amen-Re’. By Year 33 the weaker client states had all been subdued, and Tuthmosis was able to emulate his esteemed grandfather by crossing the River Euphrates, defeating the army of the King of Mitanni and then returning to Egypt via Syria where, in established Tuthmoside tradition, he enjoyed a magnificent elephant hunt. By Year 42, after twenty-one years of intermittent fighting, the boundaries of the empire were at last secure and Tuthmosis was able to relax into old age. His triumphs, however, were not to be forgotten. Tuthmosis shared Hatchepsut's love of self-promotion, and his campaigns were recorded for posterity and for the glory of Amen on the walls of the newly-built ‘Hall of Annals’ at Karnak, where:

His majesty commanded to record the [victories his father Amen had given him] by an inscription in the temple which his majesty had made for [his father Amen so as to record] each campaign, together with the booty which [his majesty] had brought [from it and the tribute of every foreign land] that his father Re had given him.¹⁰

Towards the end of his reign, his foreign problems now settled, Tuthmosis followed Hatchepsut in instigating an impressive construction programme; there was yet another phase of building at the Karnak temple complex while all the major Egyptian towns from Kom Ombo to Heliopolis plus several sites in the Nile Delta and Nubia benefited from his attentions. In private, Tuthmosis appears to have been a well-educated man of great energy – a real credit to his stepmother's upbringing. Not only was he an action man, a fearless warrior, skilled horseman and superb athlete, he was also a family man blessed with at least two principal wives, several secondary wives and a brood of children. In his spare time he composed literary works and his interests ranged from botany to reading, history, religion and even interior design.¹¹ Tuthmosis eventually appointed his son as co-regent, and some two years later it was it Amenhotep II, son of Meritre-Hatchepsut, who buried Egypt's greatest warrior king in Tomb KV34 in the Valley of the Kings. Tuthmosis III had reigned for 53 years, 10 months and 26 days.

The mummy of Tuthmosis III, superficially intact and lying in its original inner coffin, was recovered from the Deir el-Bahri cache. The mummy was unwrapped and examined by Emile Brugsch in 1881, subsequently re-bandaged, and reopened by Maspero in 1886, who found that the body was covered in an unpleasant ‘layer of whitish natron charged with human fat, greasy to the touch, foetid and strongly caustic’.¹² The mummy had, in fact, been badly damaged by tomb robbers, the head, feet and all four limbs had become detached and Maspero found that the body was actually held together by four wooden oars concealed beneath the linen bandages. The face was, however, undamaged, and Tuthmosis was revealed to have died in his fifties, almost completely bald, with a low forehead, narrow face, delicate ears and the buck teeth so often found in Tuthmoside family members.

At some point following Hatchepsut's death a serious attempt was made to deny her existence by physically removing her presence from the historical record. Gangs of workmen were set to work at the various monuments, and soon the name and figures of Hatchepsut had vani-ished; they had been completely hacked out – often leaving a very obvious Hatchepsut-shaped gap in the middle of a scene – as a preliminary to replacement by a different image or a new royal cartouche. At Karnak her obelisks were walled up and incorporated into the vestibule in front of pylon V, while at Djeser-Djeseru her statues and sphinxes were torn down, smashed and flung into rubbish pits. This was not merely a symbolic gesture of hatred; by removing every trace of the female king it was actually possible to rewrite Egyptian history, this time without Hatchepsut. If Hatchepsut's name was completely erased she would never have been, and the succession could now run from Tuthmosis I to Tuthmosis III without any female interference.

The removal of the name and image of a dead person, occasionally called a damnatio memoriae, served a dual purpose. Not only did it allow the rewriting of history, it was also a direct assault upon the spirit of the deceased. Theology dictated that, in order for the spirit or soul to live forever in the Field of Reeds, the body, the image or at least the name of the deceased must survive on Earth. If all memory of a dead person was lost or destroyed, the spirit too would perish, and there would come the much dreaded ‘Second Death’; total obliteration from which there could be no return. The effects of the proscription on the dead Hatchepsut herself would therefore have been drastic. Every image and cartouche served as a re-affirmation of her reign, not merely a means of preserving her memory amongst her contemporaries and her future subjects, but a guarantee that she would live for ever in the Afterlife.

Until relatively recently the author of this proscription, and his motives, seemed obvious. Tuthmosis III had spent over twenty years seething with hatred and resentment against his co-ruler; what could be more natural than to indulge in one vindictive but eminently satisfying act of defiance against both Hatchepsut and those who had supported her in her work? However juvenile, his actions were entirely understandable:

Two more facts of which we may be perfectly certain are: 1) that Tuthmosis III obtained supreme control over Egypt only after many years of humiliating subordination to Hatchepsut and only as the result of a long and bitter struggle against his aunt and against the capable members of her party, and 2) that, as a result of this, he came to independent power with a loathing for Hatchepsut, her partisans, her monuments, her name and her very memory which practically beggars description.¹³

The shattering of Hatchepsut's monuments would presumably have brought about a cathartic release, and would have made Tuthmosis feel much, much better. Even to those who championed Hatchepsut and her actions, Tuthmosis' vandalism could not be condemned:

He had grown up a short, stocky young man full of a fiery Napoleonic energy, suppressed up to now but soon to cause the whole known world to smart. Long since he should have been sole ruler of Egypt but for Hatchepsut and we hardly have to stretch our imaginations unduly to picture the bitterness of such a man against those who had deprived him of his rights…¹⁴

Nor is this action entirely foreign to modern ways of thinking. Indeed Winlock (writing in the 1920s) has compared the seemingly pointless destruction of Hatchepsut's monuments to the intensely patriotic period during the First World War when:

… the names of everything from Hamburger steaks to royal families were altered in a fervent desire to suppress memories of the enemy… Perhaps we are getting a little tamer than Tuthmosis III – but we can hardly pretend yet that his actions are entirely incomprehensible to us, when we find him destroying the statues of his mother-in-law.¹⁵

A more modern parallel may be drawn with the destruction of the statues of Lenin and other national leaders witnessed on the world's television following the collapse of the Communist regimes in the old Eastern-bloc countries.

But, however plausible, this theory of the brooding, vengeful

Fig. 8.2 Tuthmosis III being suckled by the tree-goddess Isis

Tuthmosis III is not entirely consistent with the image of the noble scholar, historian and soldier suggested by the king's other monuments. Naville, writing at the turn of the century, had already suggested that Tuthmosis may not have started his reign with an immediate persecution of Hatchepsut's memory:

… all the recently discovered documents tend to prove that if Tuthmosis III was the author of a few of these erasures, he did not begin by making them, and they do not belong to the early years of his reign. The relations between aunt and nephew were better than might be believed, and that excludes the idea that Tuthmosis III was guilty of the death of Hatchepsut… the era of what has been called the persecution, made not against the person of his aunt, but against her memory, must be placed at the end of her reign.¹⁶

Naville based this suggestion on his own interpretation of a scene discovered on the remains of the dismantled Chapelle Rouge. Here a king, identified by Naville as Tuthmosis III, is shown offering incense before two (originally three) pavilions, each of which holds a sacred barque and shrine. Hatchepsut herself appears in the form of two (originally six) Osiride statues standing one on each side of the three shrines; an unmistakable indication to Naville that she is now dead. The living Tuthmosis III then steers his own barque, possibly containing the sacred emblems of Hatchepsut, towards Deir el-Bahri. Naville believed that these tableaux were intended to represent Tuthmosis III officiating at Hatchepsut's apotheosis as she became united with the god Amen. He used this interpretation to argue that, if Tuthmosis was prepared to complete the unfinished Chapelle Rouge with a scene showing the new king effectively worshipping the old – for by its nature this scene could only have been carved after Hatchepsut's death – it is unlikely that he was simultaneously erasing her name from other monuments.

Unfortunately, Naville's ingenious interpretation is now known to be incorrect. The Chapelle Rouge scene does indeed show a king offering incense before the barque of Amen, but that king is intended to be Hatchepsut. Although entirely male in appearance she is clearly named as ‘The Good God, Lady of the Two Lands, Daughter of Re, Hatchepsut’ and the text makes it clear that the offering is being made to Amen and not Hatchepsut. The whole scene is, in fact, a representation of Hatchepsut offering incense before the Chapelle Rouge itself, and we must assume that before this building was dismantled there were indeed two colossal mummiform statues standing one on either side of the shrine. These would certainly not be the only Osiride statues of Hatchepsut to be carved during her lifetime and indeed, as we have already seen, Djeser-Djeseru was originally decorated with over forty similar statues.

However, it appears that Naville may have been close to the truth when he suggested that the Chapelle Rouge might hold the key to the date of Hatchepsut's proscription. More recent analysis of the 18th Dynasty architecture of the Karnak temple, the so-called ‘Hatchepsut suite’ in particular, has shown that while the effacement of Hatchepsut's name did indeed occur during the reign of Tuthmosis III, it could not have occurred until relatively late in that reign, possibly not before Year 42.¹⁷ Naville was correct in his assumption that the Chapelle Rouge, far from being immediately defaced, was completed by Tuthmosis III, who added the topmost register of decorations in his own name and who then claimed the shrine as his own; an unlikely action for one who supposedly hated Hatchepsut's memory.

At about this time Tuthmosis was planning the construction of his own temple of Amen, Djeser-Akhet, which was to be built at Deir el-Bahri directly to the south of Djeser-Djeseru; at first sight, a rather perverse choice of site for one who could hardly bear the sight of Hatchepsut's name, although it is possible that the temple was built with the specific intention of reducing the importance of Djeser-Djeseru.¹⁸ If so, the plan was successful, because once Djeser-Akhet was complete it took over as the focus for the celebration of the annual Feast of the Valley. Djeser-Akhet is now in a much damaged state, but it would appear that it was originally similar in design to Djeser-Djeseru. It too was built on a raised terrace and was approached by a broad causeway and ramp, although its geography dictated that it could have no rock-cut sanctuary. As it was built on higher ground, Djeser-Akhet must have dominated Djeser-Djeseru as its architects intended.

Some years later, Tuthmosis' own building projects at Karnak, including the construction of the Hall of Annals which from its texts can have occurred no earlier than Year 42, inadvertently concealed a few inscriptions and illustrations relating to Hatchepsut which should, had the proscription been in force by that time, already have been erased. Those parts of the scenes which were not protected by Tuthmosis' buildings were subsequently attacked, while the Chapelle Rouge was completely dismantled, its blocks put in storage for subsequent re-use and its granite doorways re-used in the Hall of Annals. The blocks of the Chapelle Rouge do show some rather random and incomplete erasures; either this destructive work was halted before it was fully underway or, more realistically, the attacks against the still-visible images of Hatchepsut occurred after the Chapelle had been dismantled and its blocks had been stacked¹⁹ – it seems that the rather slapdash workmen did not take the trouble to examine every surface of every block, but simply erased all visible references to Hatchepsut. It is therefore a moot point whether the destruction of the Chapelle Rouge should actually be seen as a part of the persecution of Hatchepsut's memory; common sense would suggest that the building was simply demolished to make room for the even more magnificent granite shrine which Tuthmosis III intended to build in its place. As we have already seen, this rather drastic type of ‘restoration’ occurred with relative frequency at Karnak; the barque shrine of Tuthmosis III was itself later to be replaced by the barque shrine of Philip Arrhidaeus, the half-brother of Alexander the Great, who ruled Egypt as king but who never visited his adopted country.

Similarly, it is extremely doubtful whether the walling up of Hatchepsut's obelisks can be considered a serious attempt at concealing them from view. It is, after all, a very difficult task to hide successfully a 29.5 m (97 ft) tall pair of obelisks without lowering them to the ground. The bases of the obelisks, now shrouded in their masonry boxes, were destined to be incorporated in the new vestibule that Tuthmosis was already constructing in front of pylon V, and it seems that they, like the Chapelle Rouge, were simply being adapted to fit in with Tuthmosis' building plans. However, if some of the Hatchepsut ‘desecrations’ are now open to question, there can be no doubt about the thoroughness of others. Throughout his seasons of work at Deir el-Bahri, H. E. Winlock was fortunate enough to find the remains of scores of statue fragments, all of which had been torn from their sites in and around the temple and dumped in the convenient pits and hollows left by the contemporary building works at the site. Winlock was later to calculate that the temple and its processional way must originally have been home to some two hundred brightly coloured statues and sphinxes, each one a likeness of Hatchepsut herself. The ‘Hatchepsut Hole’ discovered by accident during the 1922–3 season beneath the dump of a late nineteenth-century excavation yielded dozens of limestone and granite statues and occupied the workforce of 450 workmen for half the season. Later, during the 1926–7 and 1927–8 seasons, more statue fragments turned up in the nearby ‘Senenmut Quarry’ where, as their excavator reported:

… we found a jumble of pieces of sculpture from the size of a finger-tip to others weighing a ton or more. There were large sections of the limestone colossi from the upper porch; brilliantly coloured pieces from the ranks of sandstone sphinxes which had lined the avenue… and fragments of at least four or five kneeling statues of the queen in red and black granite, over six feet high.²⁰

Had these statues been merely thrown out of the temple, it would seem possible that they had been removed during a form of ancient spring clean so that Tuthmosis III, replacing them with statues of himself, could claim Djeser-Djeseru as his own. The erasure of the carved wall-images of Hatchepsut might then also be interpreted as a preliminary stage in Tuthmosis' plan to usurp Hatchepsut's role as founder and patron of the temple. However, as Winlock noted, the statues showed all the signs of a vicious personal attack:

They could only have been dragged out to their burial place slowly and laboriously and the workmen had plenty of opportunity to vent their spite on the brilliantly chiselled, smiling features. On the face of an exquisitely carved red granite statue a fire had been kindled to disintegrate the stone, and the features of the statue brought to the museum have been battered entirely away and the uraeus on the forehead, the symbol of royalty, completely obliterated. Tuthmosis III could have had no complaint to make on the execution of his orders, for every conceivable indignity had been heaped on the likenesses of the fallen queen.²¹

Other statues had undergone at least two distinct stages of vandalism. First the uraeus, symbol of kingship, had been knocked off the royal headdress, and then the face had been disfigured, the nose being broken and the eyes being carefully picked out with a chisel, before the statue was finally dragged from its base and smashed. Some of the larger fragments had later been converted by enterprising locals into querns and pestles.

The attempted obliteration of Hatchepsut's memory has invariably been linked with the attacks against Senenmut's name and monuments. Under the old theory, that of instant revenge against Hatchepsut and her acolytes, this was inevitable. The actual damage caused to the monuments of Senenmut is not, however, entirely consistent with this argument. Indeed, Senenmut's name and image seem to have suffered from several different types of damage without appearing to fit into any pre-organized plan. Occasionally it was only his name that was attacked while his image remained intact. At the other extreme some of his statues were smashed and physically thrown out of the temples. He seems, in fact, to have been unfortunate enough to attract the attentions of several diverse groups of campaigners: those who objected to him personally, perhaps because of his relationship with Hatchepsut, and who therefore disfigured both his entire name and his image; those who were devoted to the worship of the Aten and who took exception to certain elements of his name (which contains the name of the goddess Mut, wife of Amen); those early Christian and Islamic iconoclasts who routinely objected to all pagan images. Others of his monuments have merely suffered the unavoidable ravages of time and have, for example, been reused during later periods. There was, as far as we can tell, no intense, systematic campaign against the monuments of Senenmut as there was against the monuments of Hatchepsut. Therefore, although a study of the defacement of the monuments of Senenmut may tell us a great deal about the attitude of later generations to their heritage, it tells us less than we might hope about the persecution of Hatchepsut's memory.

One striking aspect of the campaign against Hatchepsut's memory, and one which will probably have already become apparent, is the fact that it was both relatively short-lived and somewhat erratic in execution. Throughout the 18th Dynasty, the removal of an old name or image and the renewal of a wall in preparation for the carving of the new scene followed three well-established stages. First, the old scene was hacked out with a broad chisel. Next, a fine implement was used to smooth the rough surface and remove the raised ridges and, finally, the wall was polished and re-carved.²² In many cases, however, we find that Hatchepsut's cartouche and figure were merely removed and not replaced, while her name was sporadically preserved at Armant, on the blocks of the Chapelle Rouge, at the Speos Artemidos where there is no sign of Tuthmoside erasures although there is some damage caused by the ‘restorations’ of Seti I, and in Tomb KV20 where the workmen who removed the body of Tuthmosis I seem to have made no attempt to deface Hatchepsut's own inscribed sarcophagus, although it is, of course, possible that the body of Tuthmosis I was removed before the proscription took effect. At Djeser-Djeseru it was even possible to read some of the ‘erased’ inscriptions which had supposedly been hacked off the temple walls.

All this evidence leaves the very strong impression that the vindictive campaign, whatever its original purpose, was never carried out to its logical conclusion. Either the desired results had been achieved before the obliteration had been completed, or the impetus behind the campaign had been removed. It is perhaps not too fanciful a leap of the imagination to suggest that Tuthmosis III, having started the persecution relatively late in his reign, may have died before it was concluded. His son and successor Amenhotep II, with no personal involvement in the campaign, may have been content to allow the vendetta to lapse. It may therefore be that Hatchepsut's subsequent omission from the 19th Dynasty king lists of Seti I and Ramesses II does not necessarily have a sinister motive; perhaps those who compiled the lists genuinely believed her to have been a queen-consort or queen-regent rather than a full king. Ironically, it is ultimately that fact that Hatchepsut had been content to share her reign with Tuthmosis III which allowed future generations to forget her name. Had she ruled alone – having discreetly removed her young co-regent – her name must have been preserved or else there would have been an unaccountable gap in the king lists. As she always, in theory, ruled alongside Tuthmosis III it was a simple matter to drop her name from the historical record.

This casts a whole new light on the reasons underlying the proscription of Hatchepsut; while it is possible to imagine and even empathize with Tuthmosis indulging in a sudden whim of hatred against his

Fig. 8.3 Tuthmosis III and his mother Isis, boating through the Underworld

stepmother immediately after her death, it is far harder to imagine him overcome by such a whim some twenty years later. Indeed, if we can no longer be certain that Tuthmosis hated his stepmother as she lay on her deathbed, can we be certain that he ever hated her during her lifetime? There is certainly no other evidence to support the assumption that he did. Similarly, we must question whether Tuthmosis' primary motive in erasing the name of Hatchepsut was the persecution of her memory leading to the death of her soul, or whether this was merely an unfortunate side-effect of his wish to rewrite history by making himself sole ruler. In order to be fully effective, a damnatio memoriae required the complete obliteration of all cartouches and all images intended to represent the deceased. The spirit of the dead person could linger on if even one name was left intact, and Tuthmosis would have been well aware of this. Yet, as we have seen, the attacks against Hatchepsut's name and images were lackadaisical, to say the least. Of course, this begs the obvious question – if hatred was not the prime motivation behind the attacks on Hatchepsut's monuments, what was? What had Hatchepsut done to deserve this intensive persecution?

Tuthmosis III was clearly an intelligent and rational monarch. All that we know of his character suggests that he was not given to rash, impetuous acts and it seems logical to assume that throughout his life Tuthmosis was motivated less by uncontrollable urges than by calculated political expediency. We must therefore divorce his private emotions from his political actions, just as we must separate the person of Hatchepsut the woman from her role as Egypt's female pharaoh. Whatever his personal feelings towards his stepmother, Tuthmosis may well have found it advisable to remove all traces of the unconventional female king whose reign might possibly be interpreted by future generations as a grave offence against maat, and whose unorthodox co-regency might well cast serious doubt upon the legitimacy of his own right to rule. Hatchepsut's crime need be nothing more than the fact that she was a woman. Wounded male pride may also have played a part in his decision to act; the mighty warrior king may have balked at being recorded for posterity as the man who ruled for twenty years under the thumb of a mere woman.

Furthermore, Tuthmosis had always to consider the possibility that the first successful female king might establish a dangerous precedent. Until now this had not been a danger. Admittedly there had already been one dynastic queen-regnant, but her reign was generally acknowledged to be a brave failure; a failure which had served to underline the traditional view that a woman was basically incapable of holding the throne in her own right. Queen Sobeknofru had ruled at the very end of a fading Dynasty, and from the very start of her reign the odds had been stacked against her. She was therefore acceptable to the conservative Egyptians as a patriotic ‘Warrior Queen’ who had failed, and few would have seen reason to repeat the experiment of a female monarch.

Hatchepsut, however, was a very different case. By establishing a lengthy and successful reign in the middle of a flourishing dynasty she had managed to demonstrate that a woman could indeed become a successful king, and therefore she posed more than a temporary threat to both established custom and to the conservative interpretation of maat. It should not be assumed that Hatchepsut was the only strong-willed lady at the Tuthmoside court – indeed, Tuthmosis' refusal to reinstate the position of ‘God's Wife of Amen’ suggests that he may have been wary of granting his womenfolk additional power – and with the end of his life rapidly approaching Tuthmosis may have felt it necessary to reinforce the tradition of male succession before he died. By removing the most obvious signs of Hatchepsut's reign he could effectively delete the memory of the co-regency, and Tuthmosis himself would emerge as sole successor to Tuthmosis II. Without an obvious role-model, future generations of potentially strong female kings might remain content with their traditional lot as wife, sister and eventual mother of a king. It therefore becomes highly significant that it is only the images of Hatchepsut as king which have been defaced. Hatchepsut as queen consort – the correct place for a female royal – is still present for all the world to see. Whether Tuthmosis deliberately left a few hidden and undamaged images of his stepmother and mentor, granting her the priceless gift of eternal life, we will never know.²³

But, in spite of all Tuthmosis' efforts, Hatchepsut was not destined to be Egypt's final female king, nor indeed her only conspicuous queen. Although his own queen, Meritre-Hatchepsut, was nowhere near as prominent as her illustrious predecessors, the subsequent queens of the 18th Dynasty continued to play an important and highly visible role in public life. Queen Tiy, the commoner wife of Amenhotep III, was politically active during the reign of both her husband and her son, Akhenaten, while Queen Nefertiti, Akhenaten's consort, appeared for a time to be almost as powerful as the king himself. Their daughter Ankhesenamen, widow of Tutankhamen, was independent enough to attempt to arrange her own marriage with the son of a foreign ruler. With the end of the 18th Dynasty the importance of the queens diminished slightly although Nefertari, chief wife of Ramesses II, appears in a prominent role on many monuments. Two hundred and fifty years after the death of Hatchepsut, at a time of widespread civil unrest when Egypt was moving perilously close to a total breakdown of law and order, the final Egyptian queen-regnant, Twosret, came to power. Unfortunately, such disturbed and maat-less periods tend to be very badly documented, and we have little archaeological or historical evidence with which to flesh out the bare bones of Twosret's reign.

Fig. 8.4 The High Priestess of Amen-Re, Hatchepsut

Twosret had been the principal wife of the 19th Dynasty King Seti II and, while not a member of the immediate royal family, is likely to have been of royal blood. She bore her husband no living son and, after a brief reign of no more than six years, Seti died and was succeeded on the throne by Ramesses Siptah (later known as Merenptah Siptah), his natural son by a Syrian secondary wife named Sutailja. History was starting to repeat itself as Twosret found herself required to act as regent to a young king who was not her own flesh and blood and whose physical weakness, the legacy of the childhood polio which had withered one of his legs, made him an ineffectual ruler. Once again the inevitable happened. Gradually the already powerful dowager queen started to take control, easing herself into the position of consort and co-ruler. Whether or not she actually married her ward in order to consolidate her position is unclear; on the wall of her tomb she is depicted standing behind Siptah in a typical wifely pose, but the young king's name has been erased and that of her actual husband Seti II has been substituted.

Following Siptah's early death a wave of discontent spread over the country and Twosret saw her opportunity. With no obvious successor to challenge her authority she clung on to her role as co-regent, reinforcing her position by adopting the full titulary of a male king of Egypt. She undertook the now traditional expeditions to Sinai and Palestine and commenced building works at Heliopolis and Thebes, but her solo rule was destined to be brief, possibly less than two years. She disappeared into obscurity, to be replaced by the rather nondescript pharaoh Sethnakht, founder of the 20th Dynasty, who later claimed to have ‘driven out the usurper’. Manetho preserved the name of a King Thuoris as the final king of the 19th Dynasty.

At first sight there are many obvious points of similarity between the stories of these two female kings. Both were married to relatively short-lived and somewhat ineffectual kings, both failed to produce a male heir to the throne, both were required to act as regent to an unrelated minor and, while neither had a living husband, both came under the influence of a dominant court official (Hatchepsut was supported by Senenmut; Twosret had a less certain relationship with a mysterious individual known as the Great Chancellor Bay). Both must also have been strong-minded and forceful women capable of fighting against well-established traditions and holding their own against the male-dominated establishment. However, there are also some important dissimilarities between the two reigns. Twosret, like Sobeknofru before her, came to power as the last resort of a decaying dynasty lacking any more suitable (that is, male) monarch. In spite of Sethnakht's claim she was never, as far as we know, widely perceived as a usurper, and could even be congratulated on her valiant attempt to prolong a dying line. Furthermore, Twosret's reign was not a spectacular success. It was brief, undistinguished, and left Egypt in a worse political state than it had been before she came to power. It therefore posed no threat to subsequent male rulers. This seems to have made her in many ways far more acceptable as a monarch and, although Sethnakht usurped her tomb and attempted to remove her name and image from its walls, it seems that Twosret was never subjected to the persecution inflicted on Hatchepsut's memory.²⁴

Queen, or King, Twosret was the last native-born Egyptian queen regnant. However, over one thousand years later Egypt was again to be ruled by a handful of dominant and short-lived women, this time the Greek queens of the Ptolemaic royal family. The last of these, Cleopatra VII, has entered the public imagination not only as the archetypal Egyptian queen but as one of the most widely recognized women of all times. Her story, an intriguing cocktail of incest, passion, and tragedy played out against a louche oriental setting, was fascinating to her more strait-laced Roman contemporaries, while the fact that her actions had a direct effect on the development of the Roman Empire ensured that her history would be recorded for posterity. Plutarch, writing a good many years after her death, was clearly intrigued by reports of the queen's physical charms:

The contact of her presence, if you lived with her, was irresistible; the attraction of her person, joining with the charm of her conversation, and the character that attended all she said or did, was something bewitching. It was a pleasure merely to hear the sound of her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings, she could pass from one language to another.²⁵

The story of Hatchepsut, a far more successful ruler but one who was less well documented, who was less interestingly ‘wanton’ in her behaviour, and who played little or no part in the development of western society, has never had the power to compete with the myths and legends which have grown up around Cleopatra, beautiful ‘Serpent of the Nile’.

Cleopatra was, in spite of the legend, a rather plain woman, a direct descendant of Ptolemy I, the Macedonian general who had been made King of Egypt following the death of Alexander the Great. She ruled over one of the most fertile countries in the Mediterranean world, but it was a dissatisfied Egypt once again torn by civil unrest, chafing under Greek rule and directly influenced by the political infighting endemic in Roman politics. The royal family, heavily in debt, was in a constant state of violent feud, and Cleopatra only became queen following the untimely deaths of her father Ptolemy XII, her sister Cleopatra VI and a second sister Berenike. Her third sister Arsinoe rebelled against her rule and was eventually killed, her brother and co-regent Ptolemy XIII drowned, and her second brother–husband died in mysterious circumstances soon after their marriage. Cleopatra, the family survivor, proclaimed her infant son Caesarion (allegedly the child of Julius Caesar) co-regent, effectively making herself sole ruler of Egypt. Her reign brought a brief period of internal peace and economic stability. However, her decision to support Mark Anthony, the father of three of her children, in his power struggle with Octavian spelt disaster for Egypt. When Octavian's troops reached Alexandria in 30 BCCleopatra and Anthony committed suicide, and Egypt was absorbed into the Roman Empire.

Long before Cleopatra's ill-fated reign, Hatchepsut had been all but forgotten by her people. Although Djeser-Djeseru continued to be recognized as a potent religious centre the name of its founder was now a distant memory, and Hatchepsut had been omitted from the king lists of Abydos and Sakkara where the succession was recorded as passing from Tuthmosis I to Tuthmosis II and then directly to Tuthmosis III. Similarly, she was excluded from the celebration of the festival of Min depicted on the wall of the Ramesseum, where again the procession of royal ancestors shows Tuthmosis I, II and III in sequence. This was not solely a royal vendetta; Hatchepsut was also missing from the non-royal tombs dating to the time of Tuthmosis III which might reasonably have been expected to include her name, and she is not even to be found amongst the 19th and 20th Dynasty private monuments of Deir el-Medina which recorded a host of far more ephemeral Tuthmoside princes and princesses. However, her memory must have lingered somewhere – possibly included on king lists which have not survived – as Manetho, writing his history of the kings of Egypt in approximately 300 BC, was able to include a female ruler named Amense or Amensis, sister of Hebron and mother of Mishragmouthosis (Tuthmosis III) as the fifth ruler of the 18th Dynasty. He accorded this female ruler a reign of either 21 years 9 months (Josephus version) or 22 years (Africanus).

As the centuries passed and all knowledge of hieroglyphic writing faded, Hatchepsut sank even deeper into obscurity. Her name was to be lost for almost two thousand years, during which time her monuments with their unreadable cartouches stood in mute testimony to their founder. Eventually, however, Djeser-Djeseru, now ruined and to a large extent buried under dunes of wind-blown sand and piles of rocks fallen from the cliff above, started to attract the attention of the western tourists who were becoming increasingly fascinated by Egypt's ancient past.²⁶ By the middle of the eighteenth century, Deir el-Bahri had been proved to be a prolific source of mummies, papyri and other exotic oriental desirables, and trade in the stolen antiquities was both brisk and lucrative. A steady trickle of distinguished visitors now started to arrive at the site, and Djeser-Djeseru was recorded by the British cleric Richard Pococke (1737), by the Napoleonic Expedition (1798–1802) and by William Beechey and the ex-circus strongman turned antiquarian Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1817). With the decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822 came the first breakthrough in attempts to reconstruct the history of the temple. In 1828, the distinguished philologist and principal decoder of hieroglyphics, Jean François Champollion, paid a visit to Deir el-Bahri. Champollion was able to recognize the cartouche of Tuthmosis III, whom he called Moeris, and he realized that this king's cartouche usurped that of an earlier king whose partially erased name he misread as Amenenthe or Amonemhe.

Champollion firmly believed that his Amenenthe was a man. This caused him endless puzzlement as he noted that the name of the supposedly male king was consistently accompanied by feminine titles and forms. His words on this subject – fascinating to those of us blessed with hindsight – are worth quoting at length as they provide a good illustration of how a subconscious assumption or prejudice on the part of the excavator or translator may have a drastic effect on the interpretation of archaeological evidence:

If I felt somewhat surprised at seeing here, as elsewhere throughout the temple, the renowned Moeris, adorned with all the insignia of royalty, giving place to this Amenenthe, for whose name we may search the royal lists in vain, still more astonished was I to find on reading the inscriptions that wherever they referred to this bearded king in the usual dress of the Pharaohs, nouns and verbs were in the feminine, as though a queen were in question. I found the same peculiarity everywhere. Not only was there the prenomen of Amenenthe preceded by the title of sovereign ruler of the world, with the feminine affix, but also his own name immediately following on the title of ‘Daughter of the Sun’. Finally, in all the bas-reliefs representing the gods speaking to this king, he is addressed as a queen, as in the following formula: ‘Behold, thus saith Amen-Re, Lord of the Thrones of the World, to his daughter whom he loves, sun devoted to the truth: the building which thou hast made is like to the divine dwelling.’²⁷

In order to explain this extraordinary situation, Champollion proposed the existence of an 18th Dynasty heiress-queen Amense, a sister of Tuthmosis II, who had first married a man named Tuthmosis and then, after his death, married the mysterious Amenenthe. Both these men ruled Egypt in Queen Amense's name. Following the death of Amense, Amenenthe retained his crown, becoming co-regent with the young Tuthmosis III, who turned out to be a somewhat ungrateful ward who was to spend much of his subsequent solo reign attempting to efface the name of his co-ruler from the walls of the Deir el-Bahri temple.

Niccolo Rosellini, Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Pisa and a close personal friend of Champollion, published a description of Djeser-Djeseru in 1844. Rosellini put forward a variant on Champollion's theme; his succession passed from Tuthmosis I to Tuthmosis II, then to his wife Queen Amoutmai, her sister Queen Amense, and finally to Tuthmosis III. At the same time John Gardiner Wilkinson, another distinguished linguist and the first to classify and number the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, took up residence on the West Bank of Thebes where he had plenty of time to read the hieroglyphs for himself. Wilkinson tentatively suggested that the mysterious king should be re-named Amenneitgori or Amun-Noo-Het and should be re-classified not as a man but as a woman ‘not in the list; a queen?’²⁸ It was left to Karl Richard Lepsius, leader of the Prussian expedition of 1842–5, to make some sense of the muddle by confirming that the clue to the king's identity was not to be found in her appearance, which as all agreed was entirely masculine, but in her inscriptions:

In the outermost angle of this rock-cove [Deir el-Bahri, called el-Asasif by Lepsius] is situated the most ancient temple-building of Western Thebes, which belongs to the period of the New Egyptian Monarchy, at the commencement of its glory… It was queen Numt-Amen, the elder sister of Tuthmosis III, who accomplished this bold plan… She never appears on her monuments as a woman, but in male attire; we only find out her sex by the inscriptions. No doubt at that period it was illegal for a woman to govern; for that reason, also, her brother, probably still a minor, appears at a later period as ruler along with her. After her death her Shields [cartouches] were everywhere converted into Tuthmosis Shields, the feminine forms of speech in the inscription were changed, and her names were never adopted in the later lists along with the legitimate kings.²⁹

Lepsius was the first to publish the name of ‘Hat… u Numt-Amen’ although he assigned her to the 17th Dynasty.

However, the situation was still far from clear, and Samuel Sharpe, writing in 1859 and relying on secondary sources including Manetho, Herodotus and Eratosthenes for his information, was fairly typical of many of his fellow authors in his confusion. He knew of the existence of the female Egyptian king, and he even knew many of the salient facts of her reign, but he had her dates and even her name hopelessly jumbled:

… Tuthmosis II followed the first of that name on the throne of Thebes; but he is very much thrown into the shade by Amun-Nitocris, his strong-minded and ambitious wife. She was the last of the race of Memphite sovereigns, the twelfth or eleventh in succession from the builders of the great pyramids; and by her marriage with Tuthmosis, Upper and Lower Egypt were brought under one sceptre. She was handsome among women, and brave among men, and she governed the kingdom for her brother with great splendour… Tuthmosis III, on coming to the throne was a minor: queen Nitocris, who had before governed for her husband, now governed for his successor, and even when the young Tuthmosis came of age, he was hardly king of the whole country till after the death of Nitocris… in her sculptures she is always dressed in men's clothes to indicate that she was a queen in her own right, and not a queen consort…³⁰

Sharpe correctly credits Hatchepsut with building works at Karnak, the erection of a pair of obelisks and the construction of the Deir el-Bahri temple, but he also believed that she had built the third pyramid at Giza, misreading her name Maatkare and confusing her with both King Menkaure of the 4th Dynasty and Queen Menkare-Nitocris, the 6th Dynasty female ruler of Egypt whose story has become entangled with a host of myths and legends and whose beautiful naked ghost – this time confused with the fictional courtesan and queen, Rhodolphis – is said to haunt the pyramids.

A mere twenty-five years later, with a greater understanding of the hieroglyphic language, much of the confusion had been cleared away. Hatchepsut's name, titles and principal monuments were now known, and she even had her own entry in a dictionary of Egyptian archaeology published in 1875:

Hatsou… queen of the 18th Dynasty. Her prenomen is Ra-ma-ka [Maatkare read backwards]. Her father, Thouthmes I, proclaimed her queen in preference to her two brothers, who reigned later under the names of Thouthmes II and Thouthmes III. However she shared power with Thouthmes II, who died a short time after. Again Hatchepsut reigned alone… Next she associated herself with her second brother Thouthmes III, and it was not until the fifteenth year of his reign that she eventually decided to give up the throne. She is represented on the monuments as a king, with a bearded face.³¹

From this time on it was the work of the archaeologists patiently excavating in and around Luxor and on the West Bank at Thebes which was to add factual flesh to the bare bones of Hatchepsut's history. Mariette, Naville, Carter, Winlock, Lancing, Hayes and the Polish Mission, to name but a few, have all made substantial contributions to our increasing understanding of her unusual reign, an understanding which is, through necessity, based almost entirely on Hatchepsut's own surviving monuments and monumental inscriptions – her own propaganda in stone. Hatchepsut had always intended that her monuments should be read as eternal testimonies to her own grandeur. It is perhaps only fitting that they should now, some three thousand years after their conception, start to slowly reveal the story of her rule as the king herself wished it to be told. Hatchepsut's mummified body may be lost to us but her name, temporarily forgotten but now forever linked with the beautiful Djeser-Djeseru, is once again spoken in Egypt.

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