Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (37 page)

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’.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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
.
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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 stacked
¹⁹
– 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: