NINE
Hatshepsut was gone; Menkheperre Thutmose was now the sole king. He had no one to answer to; no one he needed to consult about his campaigns; no one to keep apprised of his location; no one chiding him to share Nefrure’s bed that night; no one to whom he must defer. It was year 22 of his reign, time to make a statement and show the world how his rule would be shaped.
His first move was a massive assault on Syria. The campaign came hard upon the passing of his co-king, so much so that he had probably been meeting with army generals and strategists while Hatshepsut was on her deathbed. Thutmose’s reign-defining action was to be taken against Syrian cities that had refused to send their annual tribute payments. An Egyptian account of these events has been preserved, and one adviser is said to have proclaimed dramatically, “From Yerdi to the ends of the earth, there is rebellion against his majesty.”1
Perhaps Syrian strongholds were resisting Egyptian hegemony because they thought Thutmose III was weak without his co-king, Hatshepsut. Or perhaps they had already stopped the onerous payments to their Egyptian overlord during the latter reign of Hatshepsut. No matter the reason for his timing, Thutmose III communicates in his historical records that these vile rebels needed to be brought to heel now.
At the end of his twenty-second year of kingship, Menkheperre Thutmose set out at the head of his men, perhaps as many as ten thousand strong, as they marched from their northern Sinai fortress up into Syria. He would have felt the dust in his nostrils and the grit on his palms, and his heart was likely joyful to be traveling with his men instead of leading another endless funerary ritual or temple ceremony. They were heading to the town of Megiddo where a coalition of Syrian princes had organized a defense against the invading Egyptians.
Thutmose III and his commanders were vexed over a vital strategic decision: there were three roads to the great city of Megiddo. Two of them circled the highlands and were well traveled and watched from on high, depriving the Egyptians of the advantages of speed and surprise. Their enemy would be waiting in large numbers for them where the roads opened up into the valley. But there was another way, a narrow path that no one would expect them to take, from the small town of Aruna, through the crags of the highlands, eventually spilling out into the valley just before Megiddo. It was the most direct path; his army would be able to reach the city quickly. But there was great risk in this choice. His army would have to travel in a single-file line—spreading his forces too thin to engage in battle once the first regiments arrived on the plain. If enemy forces were waiting for them, they would be cut down instantly, unable to mass a defense as they exited the pass.
Thutmose III was intent on taking the mountain pass. The story tells us that his generals questioned his decision openly, to his face. Perhaps they worried that Thutmose’s newly won power had gone to his head or that ruling under a woman had put a chip on his shoulder, forcing him into an impulsive decision that would destroy the Egyptian army in one stroke. Thutmose, on the other hand, was not interested in limiting his losses. He clearly desired one bold strategic move whose audaciousness would shock the world—military action that people would talk about on all three sides of the Great Green Sea.2 He likely also believed that victory was Amen’s will, and that with such divine protection he was invincible. Whatever Thutmose III’s motives were in such risky decision making, he no longer had to consult Hatshepsut. It was his time.
When they entered the mountain pass the next day, his majesty was in the lead, riding over rocky paths. His elite fighters followed their young king, their eyes probably looking up to the right and left constantly for the ambush they all expected. But they met not a single enemy. When Thutmose finally came through the pass into the Qena valley below, regiment after regiment followed behind, slowly filling up the mouth of the valley, one by one, until all three divisions were there, organized and in formation. Scouts returned to tell the king that the city of Megiddo was only lightly protected—the Syrian army had split its divisions between the other two roads, leaving only a small force at the city itself. The Syrian coalition had no time to move its great army back to protect the city.
His majesty led the center column of the three divisions, and they quickly broke the enemy line. Panic broke out among the coalition forces left to defend Megiddo. The routed Syrians ran back to their walled city. We can imagine the scene vividly: Thutmose knew that victory was imminent as he cut down men right and left, his gilded armor shining in glory, his gleaming weapon catching Amen’s first morning rays.
But the king failed to see what was happening behind him until it was too late. Instead of reorganizing themselves to take the city, his men had already begun to claim their booty—chariots and horses left behind by the fleeing enemy.
Most of the enemy had reached the gates and were now shutting the great doors behind them. Those Syrians who arrived too late were hoisted up on garments and rags dangled out by the inhabitants. When he heard the gates shut with a thud, Thutmose must have known that the only option was siege.
Thutmose III’s annals tell the story with precise detail: if his troops had not set their hearts to plundering the possessions of the enemy, they would have captured Megiddo in that one moment. But it seems likely that his soldiers were more accustomed to the Nubian campaigns, much crueler affairs meant to utterly destroy and pillage, than to the tough battles in the northeast that demanded patience and careful strategy. Thutmose’s disappointment at the pillaging is recorded; he was cognizant of how difficult it was to take and hold a Syrian city.
But the war was not lost; there was simply more work to be done. Engineers measured the town by walking around its perimeter, and ordered the infantry to dig a great ditch encircling the city walls. Thutmose ordered the surrounding fruit orchards to be felled, and he used the timber to reinforce the ditch. He then returned to the comfort of his tent to wait while the people inside the city starved.
The Syrians, however, were not interested in any heroic stands. After some months, they chose negotiation. The gates were opened, and the assembled Syrian princes showed their submission, likely crawling out on their bellies and begging the great Egyptian king’s forgiveness. In their arms, they held out tribute for Egypt—gold and silver, perhaps lapis lazuli and turquoise, definitely wine and beer. Servants behind them led out cattle, goats, and sheep. Thutmose listened to their pleas. He granted them leave to continue their rule—for a price.
As the real cost of rebellion, Thutmose carried eighty-four children of the enemy elites back to Egypt, probably forcibly separating them from distraught and desperate mothers whom they would never see again. Raised in his palaces as friends of Egypt and as future loyal vassals, these children were essential to the success of a growing empire. The Syrian populace left behind would fail to rebuild a successful coalition against Egypt while Thutmose III was alive.
Thutmose III started his reign off with a bold attack on foreign soil. Some historians have suggested that the rumor of Hatshepsut’s death may have been all that the Mitannians, who lived in Anatolia and northern Syria, were waiting for to form a coalition with the Syrians against the young, untested king.3
This first campaign took place when Thutmose III was in his early twenties. He had probably been active on the battlefield for some time during his joint reign with Hatshepsut, leading campaigns to Nubia long before his triumph in Syria.4 Based on the record he kept in his annals, he had apparently trained for such a war his whole life.
The Megiddo campaign occurred at the end of Thutmose III’s twenty-second regnal year and lasted into the first part of the twenty-third, when he had only been ruling solo for one or two years at most. The young king wasted no time in earning himself a reputation as a warrior-king. As the only king in Egyptian history to rule subservient to a female king, he likely felt conflicted about how his kingship was perceived. During the last few years of Hatshepsut’s reign, he may have been biding his time: planning and training, pondering this Syrian campaign as a defining declaration of his kingship. The Megiddo suppression was so successful that Thutmose III quickly became addicted to yearly military sojourns abroad; his fight for wealth, fame, and political influence never ended. During his thirty-two years of rule following Hatshepsut’s death, he would lead his Egyptian army on an astounding eighteen military campaigns to Nubia and Syria, quelling rebellions and gaining spoils for the gods in obscene quantities. Apparently he did have something to prove.
These risky ventures were still moneymakers. The army survived on the products of enemy lands5 and returned with extraordinary amounts of plunder: tens of thousands of prisoners of war to serve as slaves in elite households or temples; masses of luxury objects like exotic woods, metals, perfumes, and jewels; and commodities of daily life, including foodstuffs and livestock of various kinds. In Egypt, the prestige of all things Syrian began to soar among the elites at court. The rich competed with one another over fashionable products from the northeast, such as vessels made by wrapping molten columns of glass around a solid core, a technique that was improved upon in Egyptian glass factories.6
The Egyptians had long since developed an incentive system for these wars based on redistribution of plunder: men gave their takings to the king, who in turn granted some slaves and livestock as their due; the most successful warriors received additional prizes, such as solid gold neck ornaments in the shape of the flies that feasted on the corpses of the enemy dead. In the campaigns of Ahmose I and Amenhotep I, generations before Thutmose III, men boasted of winning the gold of honor in exchange for the hands they cut off the dead enemy, which they sometimes gruesomely displayed in strings around their necks.
Thutmose III’s intensive campaigning brought more riches to Egypt than ever before. He put the funds to good use with temple construction. One of the first things he did was finish Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel in Karnak. His own figures and names were already cut into many of the blocks of the structure, and during the early years of his sole reign, he completed the top courses of blocks in the two-room sanctuary. Thutmose III thus monumentalized Hatshepsut’s role in supporting his own kingship. Some historians argue that he felt compelled to show piety toward the dead aunt and former co-king who had supported his candidacy as prince.7 But there is the more pragmatic argument that finishing what was already under way was a much faster way to create monuments throughout Egypt instead of starting everything from scratch.
Some Egyptologists suggest that Thutmose III was actually an insecure king who needed to continue his connection to Hatshepsut, at least in the temples, to gain support among Egypt’s political factions.8 If this was the case, it’s no wonder that the young king started his reign off with a massive moneymaking invasion of Syria.
But the Theban monuments tell a more complicated story than that of a desperately vulnerable and self-doubting king who was hoping to prolong the goodwill given to his dead aunt: at the same time that he was finishing Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel hidden deep inside Karnak, where few had access, he may have already removed Hatshepsut’s image from the most public parts of that same temple. In front of her eighth pylon, which was located where all could see—right at the front gate of the north-south axis of Karnak, where the Opet festival procession passed by—Hatshepsut had erected two colossal limestone statues of herself as a masculine king. Ordering chisel to stone, Thutmose III reassigned these statues to his father, Thutmose II, and to the Eighteenth Dynasty ancestor, King Amenhotep I. Inscriptions on both of these statues say they were “perfected” (senefer) or, in a sense, “made good” in year 22 of Thutmose III. By turning one of the statues into Thutmose II, Thutmose III was making a direct claim to the throne for himself, as the son of that king. The Egyptian kingship wasn’t meant to pass from aunt to nephew, after all. Perhaps to stake his claim as the divinely chosen king, Thutmose III had to make some changes to this very public space by inserting a figure of the father he had hardly known and whom Hatshepsut had erased to affirm his own legitimacy. If these statues were changed in year 22 (and there is some disagreement about the date),9 then it stands as our earliest evidence of Thutmose III’s removing Hatshepsut’s image from the temple landscape in favor of his own father’s. But it was far from the last.
In a much more private part of Karnak Temple, Thutmose III began his own masterpiece—the Akhmenu, “Effective of Monuments”—a structure featuring rows of grand columns in the shape of his beloved war campaign tent poles, a building he called his Temple of Millions of Years, in which he intended to celebrate and renew his kingship. Just after the Megiddo campaign, and likely using funds from it,10 he began building this grand structure at the eastern end of Karnak with an entrance through a small gateway hidden behind the bulk of the temple on the south side. It was year 24; Thutmose III was already planning ahead for his Sed festival in year 30 by creating a protected but grand space for his coronation renewal. Statuary was ordered specifically for the Akhmenu temple at Karnak. The artisans carving the statues had spent years executing monumental works for Hatshepsut, so at first they delivered statues of Thutmose that continued to resemble Hatshepsut’s facial features in her masculine guise.11 When we remember how similar the faces of the two monarchs appear on the Red Chapel, it makes sense that at the beginning of his sole reign Thutmose III used a portrait that resembled his aunt’s. There were practical reasons for keeping this public face for new statues: it was almost certainly the same portrait he had been using during the last five years of joint reign with Hatshepsut.
Within this Akhmenu temple, he built a small chapel dedicated to his royal ancestors, including reliefs showing sixty-two seated kings who had served Egypt previously (now relocated in its entirety to the Louvre in Paris).12 Because this temple was to serve as a space for his sacred jubilee when he would be transformed into all kings past, present, and future, he filled the chapel with images of ancestor kings, placating and pleasing their spirits and eternally linking his kingship to their powerful presence. His father was almost certainly depicted in the list of previous monarchs, but the image is now lost. Most historians assume that Thutmose III decided not to include Hatshepsut with his other ancestors, but this is debatable since the ancestor list is not completely preserved.13 If he did leave her out, it would be a stark indication that Thutmose III did not think her worthy of the title of king anymore, and something had changed in the few years between his completion of her Red Chapel and his construction of the Hall of Ancestors. By the time this latter relief was carved, Thutmose III may no longer have wanted to continue his association with Hatshepsut.
This is clearly the case when, five years or so into his reign, he had Hatshepsut’s beloved Red Chapel, her triumphal display of kingship and legacy, dismantled block by block.14 After putting his own time and money into finishing a structure celebrating the coregency, he now decided to sever all visible ties to Hatshepsut. The blocks ended up in a haphazard pile somewhere within the Karnak precinct, inside the walls but beyond the sacred confines of the temple proper. All of those images of Hatshepsut—as a man on the throne, running with oars, offering incense to the god, leading processions, acting in ritual with her co-king—lay strewn about the Karnak work area awaiting their fate. In place of the Red Chapel, Thutmose III commissioned a granodiorite chapel devoid of his former co-king.15 From that point on, Thutmose III would not order a single monument, text, statue, or papyrus that mentioned, or even visualized, his aunt Hatshepsut.
After the first five years of his reign, Thutmose III created new monuments that laid down a foundation for his own kingship wholly disconnected from his former coregent. Perhaps he was ashamed that his kingship had been sullied by a woman and that he had been weak (i.e., young) enough to need her help. Perhaps political elements from Hatshepsut’s side of the family, or even Nefrure herself, were asserting themselves, and he needed to deny them any connection to his crowns. Or maybe such negative emotions and strategies played no part, and he was only following every other king’s lead by linking the place where cosmic regeneration happened with the names and body of the currently reigning king.
Thutmose III nonetheless saw Hatshepsut in the temples all around him. Because she had built so much in so many places, her images were inescapable. At this point of his sole reign, around five to seven years in, images of Hatshepsut abounded all over Egypt: reliefs on the eighth pylon on Karnak’s south side, reliefs and statuary in the Great Festival Court of Thutmose II, her porch of drunkenness and main temple gateway in the Mut precinct, reliefs at the Amen-Kamutef temple nearby, dozens of reliefs from the Ma’at suite surrounding the barque shrine, not to mention her grand funerary temple of Djeser Djeseru at Deir el-Bahri, easily visible from the Karnak Temple quay where his boat alighted each morning from the royal palace during his stays in Thebes and still a highlight of the great Valley Festival every year. Why he took apart Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel while leaving untouched most of her other structures remains shrouded in mystery. Confident in his own divinely inspired place as Egypt’s unassailable leader, Thutmose III may have been content to rule with his aunt’s images looking over him from Karnak, Luxor, and temples throughout the kingdom. Or perhaps he did not want to waste precious time and money destroying when he could be making his mark building and campaigning.
Around this time, Thutmose III commissioned (or composed himself) his Text of Youth, describing how he had been named king as a child.16 The text betrays a profound need to communicate to his people that he had been the god Amen’s specific choice as king even though he had been just a small, helpless boy. He describes his young age honestly, but highlights how he was chosen despite it. He dwells on his mystical encounters with the gods who called him to heaven as a divine falcon to see the secret forms in the sky and to adore the sun god in his own realm, presumably referring to his later initiation in which he was meant to confront divinity face-to-face in a transcendental moment of celestial contact. Nowhere in this text does he mention Hatshepsut—even though we know she facilitated his early kingship. This inscription focuses on his own extraordinary and innate characteristics, his ability to connect with the gods suggesting that Thutmose III needed to legitimize his reign on his own terms after Hatshepsut’s death.
Perhaps Thutmose III was finally able to assert his own will, independently of his now dead aunt, only after his successful campaign at Megiddo. It was his decision to make war that brought him his first solo income with which to placate, pay off, and otherwise reward officials, priests, and bureaucrats, autonomous of Hatshepsut’s already established economic systems. Only then, perhaps, was he able to defy her memory by dismantling the Red Chapel and changing his portrait to resemble his grandfather. Some Egyptologists go so far as to suggest that Thutmose III’s building program indicates a past hostility between the two rulers.17 If nothing else, Thutmose III’s decisions during the first five years of his sole reign laid a foundation for increasing separation between his kingship and that of Hatshepsut.
It is not clear how such decisions affected Nefrure. Some Egyptologists doubt she was still alive at this point, although others point toward documentation showing that she outlived her mother by at least two years and perhaps more.18 She disappeared from the archaeological record at some point after her mother’s death, in any case. Without Hapshepsut her value as queen and priestess was obviously gone. Thutmose III erased Nefrure’s name from temples and stelae, inserting the names of other royal women in her place. It was an irrevocable move. Up to this point, Thutmose III’s life had been inextricably linked with Hatshepsut and her daughter. Now he was shifting to a life that included neither of them, even denying their memory in carved temple reliefs.
If Thutmose III excised Nefrure while she was still alive, he had plenty of wives to keep him company or serve as priestesses in her stead. His harem seems to have been one of the largest of any New Kingdom monarch thus far,19 in part due to the number of foreign women he brought back to Egypt from his campaigns. Daughters of vassal kings were given to Thutmose III and treated gently as hostages and tokens of their fathers’ loyalty, guarantees that these men would not align with another coalition. Egyptian documentation names Syrian wives of Thutmose III, including Menhet, Mertit, and Menway, all of whom cemented international alliances.20
In addition, Thutmose III promoted lesser royal wives to serve alongside his Great Wife instead of having them act only as informal companions. He himself had been the product of a union between a king and a lower-status woman, and we cannot discount the political problems of legitimation that this may have created for his own kingship. After all, his early years on the throne were shared with a woman ruler, which was unprecedented in Egyptian history. Something must have threatened the security of this boy king’s ascension to allow Hatshepsut to take the unparalleled step of kingship—possibly something connected to his own lowborn mother, Isis.
Now that he was established as the sole king, Thutmose III officially recognized many lower-born women as King’s Wives, thus easing the problem of legitimacy for one of his own sons in the future. Or maybe the king did not want Nefrure’s offspring to assume power, and by naming other women as legitimate queens he ensured that any offspring from these later unions would be seen as viable future kings. Perhaps Thutmose III was a kind of ancient Henry VIII of England—figuring out a way to create the succession that he wanted without any dependence on the highborn women around him and the unpredictable circumstances of their wombs.
Thutmose III’s chief wife probably resided in her own apartments in the royal palace, but most of the other wives, ornaments, and beauties lived in lavish palaces dedicated specifically to their comfort and upkeep. Harem palaces existed at Memphis, Thebes, and Medinet el-Gurob, the latter founded by Thutmose III himself in a secluded but fertile location near the Fayum. Amazingly, we read nowhere of the men serving in such places (most likely not eunuchs) or of the drama of the women trying to leverage their children for a spot at the top of their limited social spectrum. There is no suggestion of political intrigue among the women or descriptions of the king’s visit to remote locations populated by women whose only masculine company was that of their young sons and bureaucratic minders. We can imagine that some of these women only shared a bed with the king for one or two nights of their lives before he moved on to the next girl, or the next palace, or the next campaign.
Thutmose III’s harems housed not only many women but also many children. The boys not chosen to be crown prince who came of age during the king’s lifetime seemingly left all trace of their royal parentage behind; when they left the nursery, they married nonroyal women and raised families of their own supported by positions in the king’s administration. As for the royal girls, who likely were only allowed to marry the next king during the Eighteenth Dynasty, there is no evidence that the long-lived Thutmose III ever married any of his own sisters or daughters. On the other hand, there is no evidence that the king relented and let some of these women marry nonroyal men. The King’s Wives stayed busy by creating the most intricate and sumptuous royal textiles, bolts of linen cloth with a thread count so high that their softness was a marvel. The cemetery of Medinet el-Gurob indicates that these royal women and offspring were honored with fine burials.
During the early Eighteenth Dynasty, the role of King’s Great Wife was a singular position held by a woman of royal blood, usually the king’s sister. However, Satiah, Thutmose III’s best-known Great Wife, whom he married around the time of Hatshepsut’s death, had no royal blood at all. She was the daughter of the official Ahmose Pennekhbet.21 One of his stelae even named Satiah as God’s Wife of Amen, suggesting that Thutmose III also took this most precious office away from Nefrure and gave it to a woman with no bloodline connection to himself. Many Egyptologists, however, point out that Satiah is only named God’s Wife once and in a place where Nefrure’s name may have originally appeared. If Satiah did serve as God’s Wife, she held the office only until Thutmose III’s daughter Merytamen was old enough to replace her.22
Another of Thutmose III’s wives who was given the honor of being immortalized on temple walls was Merytre-Hatshepsut, almost certainly not a daughter of Hatshepsut, because she never held the title King’s Daughter. Likely one of the many Ornaments of the King brought into the palace for his pleasure, this girl would soon realize her importance as the mother of many boys who managed to live through scourges and epidemics and who might grow up to be rulers.
The most highborn son of Thutmose III seems to have been Amenemhat, the possible offspring of Nefrure. The child may have been eight to ten years old at this point, and he was named an overseer of cattle in year 23 of Thutmose III’s reign, likely administering that position with help from royal agents and tutors.23 Thutmose III had produced a son who had survived the perils of childhood and was ready for his training to become a viable king, ensuring the future of the Thutmoside dynasty. Nefrure was never explicitly named as the boy’s mother, or the mother of any sons in fact, but such an omission does not necessarily discount her. It suggests that we are now dealing with a wary king who was unwilling to give any of his wives political power by marking them as mothers of princes on his monuments. If Nefrure wasn’t the mother, there were other candidates, such as Thutmose III’s wife Satiah.24 Or perhaps Nefrure is never mentioned as the mother because now that Thutmose III was trying to distance himself from his dead aunt, he had to cut out her daughter as well.
Almost all of the women and children in the king’s harem remain unnamed—vexing historians who want to know the method used to choose Thutmose III’s successor. During the Eighteenth Dynasty especially, it was not considered appropriate to show children in any formal reliefs or statuary because these royal children were all potential heirs, queens, and priestesses, and until they were fully indoctrinated in an office, there was no reason to formally inscribe their names anywhere.25 Daughters were more likely to be named on formal monuments than sons. After all, daughters could officially act for the king as ritual protectors and sexual exciters; no such ritual role existed for sons during their father’s reign.
Such a gender disparity in the representation of royal offspring shouldn’t be surprising. The Egyptians seem to have understood that it was politically threatening to show male royal family members on their sacred monuments, because it may have provided them with a religious claim to political power. Royal women, on the other hand, were largely cut out of administrative office, and thus they could be included in the king’s public life. It was the assumed innocuousness of such women that allowed them to be represented. Only rarely could King’s Daughters like Hatshepsut and Nefrure break out of such strictures and find a platform for real governmental rule.
Thus the carving of Thutmose III’s eldest son Amenemhat into the stone blocks of Karnak Temple must have been a significant move for the Egyptians, a testament to the plans that were being made for him. The fact that his name was incised into a sacred space dedicated to the eternal continuity of kingship from father to son is even more telling, encouraging the presumption that he was to be the next king. But, as was so often the case in the ancient world, the boy disappeared before he could fulfill these royal plans. If he died, there is no record of the circumstances in Egyptian documents. It is also possible that Thutmose III decided, for reasons unknown, that Amenemhat was not fit to serve as the next king. This last point highlights how little we know about the royal succession or about how the living king chose his heir from among his sons. In the end, all of that investment in the boy did not amount to anything. He disappeared from the historical record, leaving his father, Thutmose III, without his chosen son and with the anxiety of having to groom another crown prince.
Either way, Thutmose III had to make do with the offspring of his lesser wives, knowing that boys who resulted from these unions would not have a bloodline hearkening back to the old kings or linked to the higherborn queens in his harem. And this genealogical deficiency seems to have been the tipping point for Thutmose III and his formal relationship with his dead aunt. At some point, he must have realized that just the mere remembrance of Hatshepsut’s legitimate ancestry was a severe liability to him, something he needed to erase utterly from Egypt’s sacred temples. If he was going to have to pick a future king from the harem of lesser wives anyway, then he had to find alternative ways of bolstering such a son’s rights to the throne by changing the system of royal succession in his favor. Since he himself had likely been such a lesser son, the claim for legitimate kingship had to begin with him and his own lineage, direct from his grandfather, Thutmose I, and down to his own chosen son and heir.
In true Egyptian fashion, Thutmose III started with the temple, tying the legitimacy of his successor to that of his own ideologically grounded, public image. If his portrait still resembled Hatshepsut, then his kingship would be perceived as dependent on her support. Now that he knew his heir would come from a lesser wife, just like he himself had, perhaps he worried that the boy might suffer from the same doubts of lineage. Thutmose decided that he needed a makeover, and during the next decade he crafted his public representations to differentiate himself from Hatshepsut as much as possible. He worked to create the perfect portrait of himself, and the surviving texts suggest he actually gave personal instructions to his sculptors so that they got it right.26 Around year 42, almost twenty years after his Megiddo campaign, he officially changed his portrait to resemble that of his father and grandfather. Most Egyptologists agree that his father, Thutmose II, had only been able to order a few statues to grace the halls of Egypt’s temples because his reign had been so short. But images of his grandfather, Thutmose I, were much more commonplace, and the grandson now chose to emulate the portrait of his grandfather, connecting himself with Thutmose I’s Osirian statues from Karnak’s wadjyt hall and from the old king’s relief imagery in the heart of Karnak.
Then, a few years later, Thutmose III started construction on a new temple on the west bank at Deir el-Bahri that could compete in innovation, magnificence, and visibility with Hatshepsut’s funerary temple at Djeser Djeseru. He called it Djeser Akhet, “Holy of Horizon,” and he built it right next to his aunt’s looming masterpiece. Strangely, in his zeal to best Hatshepsut, he ended up copying both her architecture (mimicking the multiple tiers and ramps) and her choice of placement (locating his temple in the same sacred bay of cliffs across from Karnak Temple). His structure was smaller, but he placed it higher up on the cliff side—so high that an earthquake eventually caused its collapse, probably not that long after his reign was over. The construction of this temple so close to Hatshepsut’s most visible monument may seem surprising if he was really trying to distance himself from the dead female king. Even the choice of name, Djeser Akhet, seems derivative of Hatshepsut’s Djeser Djeseru, and indeed it came from the name of the solar altar within Hatshepsut’s temple. It seems he felt that Djeser Djeseru’s holiness transcended the identity of the person who built it. Hatshepsut’s temple was considered so beloved and so sacred that his best choice was to associate himself with its prominence. He kept her temple, even embellishing it, despite the presence of his aunt that haunted its colonnades and shrines.
While Hatshepsut’s nephew was working to establish his legacy, her greatest supporter was scrambling. Senenmut, old as he was, may have lived into the reign of Thutmose III, and while the nature of his relationship with the new administration is unclear, he was likely doing his best to stay in the court’s good graces. During the early years of Hatshepsut’s regency and reign, Senenmut had mentioned only her and her daughter in the hieroglyphic texts on his statues and monuments, but in the last years of her reign, he obviously felt the need to start lauding Thutmose III, too,27 a decision that was probably connected to the year 16 jubilee and the larger part Thutmose III took in Egypt’s rule as he came of age. Whatever the exact political reasons, it represents a shift away from Senenmut’s earlier thinking that loyalty to Hatshepsut was all he required. By all accounts, Senenmut possessed a calculating mind, and he had probably been trying to find inroads into Thutmose III’s entourage and court even before Hatshepsut’s death.
When Hatshepsut died, Senenmut lost his most important link to power and influence. And he suffered as a result. His monuments dwindled in number during Thutmose III’s sole reign, most likely because he did not have the same unfettered access to high-quality stone and craftsmen that he had enjoyed during Hatshepsut’s kingship. His images were no longer carved into the king’s funerary temple, or into any of the niches of Thutmose III’s state temple structures. Nor was he named tutor to any of Thutmose III’s children as he had been with Hatshepsut’s. Instead, Senenmut was only able to scrape together the resources to commission a few statues, which at the very least suggests that he was a survivor, able to stay visible on the political-religious scene even without his patron Hatshepsut. But it also signals that Thutmose III’s sole kingship marked the beginning of Senenmut’s downfall.
Some of Senenmut’s statues were found by archaeologists in situ at Thutmose III’s Djeser Akhet temple, and one statue fragment includes hieroglyphic text specifically mentioning this later temple at Deir el-Bahri. Because this temple was not started until year 43 of Thutmose III’s reign, this provides evidence that Senenmut lived to a venerable old age, perhaps into his late sixties or early seventies, continuing on in public service for about twenty years after his mistress’s death.28
Work on his tomb construction was stopped suddenly while the chambers were still quite incomplete. His tomb chapel (Theban Tomb 71) included the unusual touch of a block statue atop the structure depicting the tomb owner as a tutor, squatting with his cloak wrapped around his young pupil, Princess Nefrure, as she would have appeared as a small child. It was carved out of the live rock on the summit above the tomb—a visible transmission to all his fellow elites of his close connection to Hatshepsut’s family. This statue was never completed even though the limestone from which it was cut was quite soft and easy to carve. Something or somebody stopped it from being finished.
Senenmut’s extensive burial chamber (Theban Tomb 353) was not located underneath his tomb chapel as was the norm. Instead, he followed his king and located the burial chamber near Hatshepsut’s temple Djeser Djeseru, probably so that his body would always be near her eternal cult and the pioneering temple he had labored so hard to create. His underground burial chamber was crafted as a series of rooms and staircases that descended to the west, toward Hatshepsut’s temple enclosure and the Valley of the Kings where his mistress was buried. Only the first of Senenmut’s burial chambers had decorated walls, and these were not fully finished. More strangely still, this first chamber was filled with limestone rubble cut from the lower two chambers, themselves only roughly carved and completely undecorated. The fill in the burial chambers was never cleared, which leads us to believe that Senenmut’s body was never interred here. The tomb was sealed without his corpse inside it.
We can only speculate as to why work stopped on this tomb. Perhaps Senenmut died, and the workmen quit in the absence of payment. Or maybe the project was disrupted during Thutmose III’s sole reign when Senenmut lost most of his influence, leaving him with no access to the workers and funds needed to continue construction on his extensive tomb. If so, Senenmut ceased work on his sepulchers during his own lifetime, content to use them in their incomplete state for his eventual burial.
His ostensible lack of a wife or a son to bury him might explain why his body was never interred in his burial chamber at Theban Tomb 353, but it does not help us understand the greatest mystery about Senenmut. Inexplicably, his quartzite sarcophagus was dragged up the steep slope to his tomb chapel on the top of Gurna hill. Not only was Senenmut’s sarcophagus in the wrong place—located in the corridor of his accessible tomb chapel and not in a sealed burial chamber underground—but there is no evidence that he was ever buried in the priceless quartzite object: no linens, mummy parts, amulets, remains of embalming resins, or any of the detritus of death that is so common in the western hills of Thebes.
And Senenmut’s final end is even more peculiar. At some point, the sarcophagus was completely destroyed, smashed into hundreds of pieces. Usually when an individual died while his tomb was still in progress, the structure was simply left unfinished while the owner was buried in a shaft beneath the chapel. But this is not what happened to Senenmut. There is absolutely no evidence that he was interred underneath his tomb chapel, which has no burial chambers at all—they were all far away at Deir el-Bahri. His final resting place and the circumstances of his burial remain a mystery. The information we do have speaks only to a bad ending for poor Senenmut, alone and friendless, lacking the great resources that he had once amassed during his lifetime under Hatshepsut.
Archaeological evidence indicates that Senenmut’s statuary, tomb chapel, and even his sarcophagus, the priceless quartzite body container he received as a gift from his patroness the king, were all defaced and destroyed. The assault on Senenmut’s tomb chapels and burial chambers—and even the intentional defacement of his names and images—seems to have happened either around year 40 of Thutmose III’s reign29 or perhaps later, around year 43, when Thutmose III was building his new temple of Djeser Akhet. It is even possible that Senenmut was still alive to witness his own annihilation. The Egyptologist Peter Dorman has argued that the pattern of attack suggests opportunistic enemies of Senenmut rather than the king’s agents. In other words, Thutmose III probably did not order the destruction of Senenmut’s names and images because the attacks were neither systematic nor thorough. People seem to have taken the matter into their own hands and fulfilled their personal vendettas against this man who had angered so many. Using a number of different methods, from careful chiseling to rough hacking, they erased his legacy when they found the time and energy. Whatever the justification, the destruction of a hard quartzite sarcophagus would have required extensive labor and considerable expense. Someone really wanted him disgraced.
For the ancient Egyptians, violence against the images of the dead—particularly in a tomb context—was not just a defacement of the deceased’s memory but action meant to harm the spirit for eternity in the afterlife. Without names or images for Senenmut’s spirit to recognize, he would forever be separated from the wealth of his tomb chapel and from the connections to the royal family that he had so carefully fostered. His tomb chapel suffered the most. Hardly any of the painted imagery remains. His statues scattered about Egypt’s temples were also attacked, but not with as much ferocity as his tomb chapel walls. His name was removed from only nine of his twenty-five statues.30 Presumably the priests of Amen did not appreciate it when enemies of Senenmut came to their temples to destroy statues in their sacred midst, so most of these depictions survive intact. The images Senenmut had carved into Djeser Djeseru were more systematically removed, probably by agents of Thutmose III.
The attacks against Senenmut even extended to his sealed and unmarked burial chamber, but here only a few representations were destroyed, probably because the space was largely inaccessible owing to the rubble cluttering the rooms. However, his tomb chapel on Gurna hill was intended to be a public space for the cult to his spirit; all those who wanted to give him offerings and connect with his spirit would be free to enter. Located within the community graveyard, it was ostensibly passed every week by officials who had been harmed by Senenmut’s power grabs during Hatshepsut’s reign. One’s tomb chapel was the place where an official chose to record his greatest personal and career exploits, and here Senenmut documented his close relationship to Nefrure as tutor and his responsibilities as Steward of Amen; he even listed all the different kinds of statuary Hatshepsut had granted him, down to the exact stone type and pose. As a record of his life’s work, his tomb chapel was a prime target for personal vendettas and attacks. It seems many wished him ill.
We can find irony in one of his tomb inscriptions: “As for any man who will cause damage to my image, he will not follow the king of his time; he will not be buried in the western cemetery; he will not be given any lifetime on earth.”31 Senenmut’s paranoia was obviously valid, and without Hatshepsut to protect him or his memory, he was powerless to stop such destruction. Because Senenmut was likely unsuccessful in finding a place in the new administration, his funerary monuments were left not only unfinished but also unfunded, unused, and unprotected. He likely lost the right to any funerary foundations he may have set up to pay for regular priestly visits, a common elite method to provide economic support for ongoing mortuary cult activity. Even in death, the Theban people around him did not wish him well.
Similar acts of desecration were carried out against some of the other “new men” of Hatshepsut’s administration—particularly against those who had no links to the old and admired Theban families and had come from nothing to climb to the very pinnacle of the Egyptian government. The tombs of the royal steward Amenhotep and Nehesy, who had organized the great expedition to Punt, were also defaced, though not to the same extent as Senenmut’s, their names and images removed and hacked away. Amenhotep and Nehesy hadn’t commissioned as many monuments as Senenmut had, so there weren’t as many targets to hit.
Such a fate did not await every high official who worked under Hatshepsut, most of whom were retained under Thutmose III.32 The young king wasn’t intent on a revenge campaign or the upheaval of a completely new administration. Most officials stayed in their posts, facilitating a smooth transition of power.33 Senenmut’s ordeal related to his unique origins, or his methods of taking power, or his means of exercising it. Some believe that Senenmut’s fall was linked to a larger phenomenon: the propensity of overseers of the royal household to gain too much authority, thus creating an imbalance in the distribution of power away from the traditional sources, including the king himself and the elite Theban families.34 While the images of Senenmut, Amenhotep, and Nehesy were destroyed, Hatshepsut’s remained largely untouched.35 But not for long. She, too, would pay for her ambitions.