Hatchepsut
Page 10
Amenmose, the younger but possibly longer-lived son, was accorded the title of ‘Great Army Commander’, the role now traditionally allocated to the crown prince. Physical bravery had become an important New Kingdom royal attribute and Amenmose was clearly expected to enjoy the hearty lifestyle of the male élite. A broken stela tells us that, during his father's regnal Year 4, Amenmose was already hunting wild animals in the Giza desert near the Great Sphinx, a favourite playground of the royal princes. Big-game hunting was by now a major prestige sport recently made infinitely more exciting by the use of the composite bow and the swift and highly mobile horse-drawn chariot which allowed the pursuit of fast-moving creatures such as lions and ostriches. Middle Kingdom hunting had been a far more staid affair, with the brave huntsman standing still to fire arrows at a pre-herded and occasionally penned group of ‘wild’ animals.
Fig. 3.1 The infant Hatchepsut being suckled by the goddess Hathor
Just how old could Amenmose have been when he was to be found chasing ostriches across the Giza desert? If Amenmose was the A son of Ahmose and Tuthmosis, if Ahmose was the sister or half-sister of Tuthmosis, and if we therefore assume that the royal siblings embarked upon their incestuous marriage only after Tuthmosis became king, Amenmose must have been barely four years old during his father's Year 4; surely a little too young for even the most precocious of princes to be found training with the army or hunting wild animals. This reasoning is, of course, full of ‘ifs’, and it is entirely possible that a relatively young prince could have played a purely honorary role in the life of the army; Ramesses II, for example, allowed all his sons to travel with the army, and the five-year-old Prince Khaemwaset is known to have accompanied a military campaign in Lower Nubia. However, the apparent discrepancy in ages strongly suggests that Amenmose and Wadjmose, and perhaps the ephemeral Ramose, may not in fact have been the children of Ahmose but of an earlier wife, possibly the mysterious Lady Mutnofret who features alongside Wadjmose in his father's funerary chapel.
We know very little about Lady Mutnofret, but it is obvious that she was a person of rank, perhaps even of royal blood, who was held in the highest honour. This is confirmed by an inscription at Karnak where a lady named Mutnofret is described as ‘King's Daughter’.7 We have already seen that it is Mutnofret rather than Queen Ahmose who appears alongside Wadjmose and Ramose in the king's mortuary chapel; here her statue wears the royal uraeus and her name is written in a cartouche. Mutnofret is also known to have been the mother of Tuthmosis' eventual successor, Tuthmosis II. The Princes Amenmose, Wadjmose, Ramose, and Tuthmosis II may therefore have been full brothers, possibly born before their father married Ahmose. This tangle of relationships would make more sense if we had confirmation that Tuthmosis was a widower at his accession – highly likely, given that he is likely to have been at least thirty-five years old – his first wife Mutnofret having borne him several sons before dying.
Fig. 3.2 A hippopotamus hunter
The Tuthmoside succession following the death of Tuthmosis I – the so-called ‘Hatchepsut Problem’ – is a subject which greatly perplexed late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century egyptologists, and the effects of their confusion still linger in some more recent publications. The names of the individual monarchs involved had been known for some time (Tuthmosis I, II and III, Hatchepsut), but the precise sequence of their reigns and their relationships with each other were not, although it was generally assumed that the three Tuthmoses followed each other in sequence with Hatchepsut appearing in some unknown capacity some time after Tuthmosis II. Unfortunately, the monumental evidence which might have been expected to help solve the mystery had been tampered with at some point in antiquity, the original cartouches8 being re-cut to give the names of other pharaohs
Fig. 3.3 The cartouche of King Tuthmosis II
involved in the succession muddle. This deliberate defacement of the royal monuments was generally accepted as evidence of intense personal hatreds stemming from a desperate struggle for power within the royal family.
In 1896, the German egyptologist Kurt Sethe, basing his conclusions on a meticulous study of the erased cartouches, and on the erroneous assumption that the defaced cartouches must have been re-carved by the monarch whose name replaced the original, suggested that the succession of monarchs must have been as follows:9
1 Tuthmosis I. Deposed by –
2 Tuthmosis III
3 Hatchepsut and Tuthmosis III co-regents, Hatchepsut the senior king. Hatchepsut deposed by –
4 Tuthmosis III
5 Tuthmosis II and Tuthmosis I co-regents, until the death of Tuthmosis I
6 Tuthmosis II. Reigning until his death
7 Tuthmosis III and Hatchepsut co-regents until Hatchepsut's death
8 Tuthmosis III
It is perhaps all too easy for modern historians, blessed with the benefit of hindsight, to dismiss this over-elaborate sequence as a triumph of scholarly methodology over common sense. To those accustomed to studying the complex Ptolemaic succession, however, where parent succeeded child and brother succeeded sister in rapid and confusing sequence, it was not quite so far-fetched. The theory, accompanied by appropriate explanations of intra-family feuding to justify the rapid changes of ruler, became almost universally adopted despite a complete absence of corroborative evidence, and initially only the Swiss egyptologist Edouard Naville made a direct challenge to Sethe's suggested sequence of rulers, maintaining that the cartouches which replaced those of Hatchepsut should, equally erroneously, all be dated to the Rames-side period. Sethe and Naville, two illustrious contemporaries, were never to reach agreement over the fundamental aspects of Hatchepsut's reign and were, indeed, for a time reduced to open warfare over the subject; their famous scholarly arguments being conducted with dignity via the pages of learned journals. A well-known archaeological story tells of the time when the two found themselves to be near neighbours, Sethe occupying the ‘German house’ at Deir el-Bahri and M. and Mme Naville living close by in the newly built British expedition house. When the Navilles' kitchen collapsed into a tomb-pit, threatening the continuation of the British mission, Sethe generously invited his colleague to stay in the German house, on condition that the name of Hatchepsut would not be mentioned between them. The Navilles spent several peaceful weeks staying with Sethe before they returned to their house, their kitchen now restored, and the feud at once recommenced.10
While Naville was content with a flat denial of Sethe's conclusions, others struggled to incorporate the new scheme into their own work. Even those such as Flinders Petrie, who found themselves unable to accept the full complexities of the proposed succession, were heavily influenced by the underlying reasoning and unquestioningly accepted the principal of the Tuthmoside feud. Eventually, dissatisfaction with Sethe's scheme did start to gather momentum. In 1928 it was publicly repudiated by both Herbert Winlock and Eduard Meyer, working independently, and in 1933 William Edgerton11 was able to highlight the fatal flaw in Sethe's argument: it was simply not safe to assume that those who defaced the cartouches of their predecessors invariably replaced the erased name with their own. Indeed, we now know that the name of Hatchepsut was often replaced by that of her predecessors, either Tuthmosis I or Tuthmosis II. Edgerton's work was confirmed by W C. Hayes's study of the royal sarcophagi of the early 18th Dynasty which, by tracing the stylistic evolution of the sarcophagi, was able to suggest a more reasonable sequence of rulers.12 Sethe's complex scheme was swept away, to be replaced by the far simpler succession of Tuthmosis I, Tuthmosis II, Tuthmosis III, with Hatchepsut taking power during the earlier part of the reign of Tuthmosis III.
Although Sethe's complex sequence of rulers was abandoned with some relief, the legacy of his work lingered, with many historians unable to shake off the idea of the Tuthmosides as a family at war with itself and the Tuthmoside court as a hot-bed of intrigue and plotting. The simplified order of succession now made it difficult to justify any hatred between either Tuthmosis I or Tuthmos
is II and the other members of the family, but the legendary enmity between Tuthmosis III and Hatchepsut – bolstered by the undeniable fact that many of Hatchepsut's cartouches had indeed been attacked after her death – remained as an integral part of accepted early 18th Dynasty history, colouring many interpretations of their joint reign. Hatchepsut the hated stepmother, and Tuthmosis III the wronged and brooding king, had entered the historical imagination and could not easily be dislodged.
On the death of her father the young Hatchepsut, possibly only twelve years old, emerged from the obscurity of the women's palace to marry her half-brother and become queen consort of Egypt. Although we have very little information about Hatchepsut's life in the harem, we are fortunate enough to have a badly damaged sandstone statue which shows her as a miniature adult pharaoh sitting on the knee of her nurse Sitre, known as Inet, with her feet resting on the symbolic representation of the ‘nine bows’, the traditional means of depicting the military supremacy of the Egyptian king. Throughout the Dynastic age the position of royal wet-nurse was an honourable post of some influence and importance, often given as a reward to the mothers and wives of the élite courtiers. Hatchepsut clearly bore enough affection for the woman who had cared for her in infancy to commission a statue of Sitre to be placed in her Deir el-Bahri temple. Unfortunately, the statue inscription was so badly damaged as to be almost unreadable, but as Winlock himself records:
It seems that there has long been a flake of limestone in the Ambras Collection in Vienna… on which an ancient scribe had jotted down an inscription in vertical columns. Comparing this inscription with the one on the statue, I have little doubt that the ostracon gives the preliminary draft for the statue inscription, drawn up by the scribe who was directing the sculptor. On the statue the inscription is incomplete, and it gives us a curious feeling to find ourselves filling in the gaps from the original rough draft after a lapse of thirty-five hundred years.13
The text, so fortuitously preserved and identified, was translated by Winlock as follows:
May the king Maatkare [Hatchepsut] and Osiris, first of the Westerners, [the great god] Lord of Abydos, be gracious and give a mortuary offering [of cakes and beer, beef and fowl, and thousands of everything] good and pure, and the sweet breath of the north wind to the spirit of the chief nurse who suckled the Mistress of the Two Lands, Sit-Re, called Yen [Inet], justified.
During his 1903 season of excavations in the Valley of the Kings, Howard Carter opened a small tomb, now known by its number KV60, which housed two non-royal female burials, one of which was still lying in half a wooden coffin, together with a number of mummified geese and a mummified leg of beef. Carter was not interested in the tomb, which had suffered badly at the hands of tomb robbers, and he quickly sealed it up. However, the tomb was re-opened three years later and the body in the coffin was transported to the Cairo Museum. The second body was left where the robbers had abandoned it, lying on the floor of the tomb. The wooden coffin was inscribed with the name of In or Inet, and it would appear that Carter had stumbled across the burial of Hatchepsut's wet-nurse, who had been accorded the unprecedented privilege of interment in the Valley of the Kings.14 The other body, that of an unusually fat woman with red-gold hair and worn teeth indicative of middle age, is so far unidentified.
Tuthmosis II and Hatchepsut buried their father and started to rule Egypt as a conventional New Kingdom king and queen consort, following the successful internal and foreign policies developed by Amenhotep I and Tuthmosis I. At home the now traditional building works at the Karnak temple of Amen continued, and the country prospered under the new regime. Unfortunately, the military achievements of Tuthmosis II have been almost entirely effaced by the more spectacular campaigns of both his father and his son, but there is evidence of at least two successful military strikes during his reign, even though it appears that Tuthmosis himself – possibly because the ‘hawk in the nest’ was too young – did not accompany his troops into battle. In Year – an army of foot-soldiers sailed southwards to crush an insurrection in Nubia, a triumph which was commemorated by a stela set up on the Aswan-Philae road which told the tale of the rebellion:
... one came to inform His Majesty that vile Cush had revolted and that those who were subjects of the Lord of the Two Lands had planned rebellion to plunder the people of Egypt…15
‘Raging like a panther’, Tuthmosis took swift action to defeat the rebels. Later there was a campaign in Palestine where, as Ahmose-Pennekheb records, Egypt's control of the region was reinforced and many prisoners were taken.
We are perhaps in some danger of underestimating Tuthmosis II's military prowess, and indeed of underestimating his entire personality. Winlock is not alone in seeing the new king as a somewhat negligible ruler:
The young King Tuthmosis II was a youth of no more than twenty, physically frail and mentally far from energetic, who let the country run itself. Old officials who had started their careers in the days of his grandfather – and even of his great-grandfather – occupied their places throughout his reign, and it was his father's generals who suppressed a rebellion which broke out in Nubia.16
It is all too easy to fall into the trap of seeing the Tuthmoside imperialism as a deliberate policy, with Tuthmosis I as the founder of a potentially mighty Asian empire which was, following the disappointingly peaceful reigns of Tuthmosis II and Hatchepsut, successfully consolidated by Tuthmosis III. This expansionist strategy – so obvious to modern students of Egyptian history – may not have been quite so apparent to either Tuthmosis II or Hatchepsut. By the time that Tuthmosis II came to the throne, Egypt had suffered the effects of a vicious war of liberation followed by a spate of foreign campaigns. Her traditional boundaries were now secure, an acceptable buffer zone had been established between Egypt and her nearest enemies, and Tuthmosis may, with some justification, have seen little need to engage in further unnecessary and expensive military action.
Fig. 3.4 Tuthmosis II
It is also worth remembering that battles often have little or no impact on the archaeological record while the texts and monuments which document military campaigns are subject to the same processes of random preservation as other historical records. It is entirely possible that Tuthmosis II indulged in more campaigns than the historical record now gives him credit for. Nor is it entirely fair to criticize Tuthmosis II for retaining the efficient bureaucracy of his predecessor. Indeed, it has probably already become apparent to the reader that the same soldiers and officials (for example, Ineni, Ahmose, son of Ibana, and Ahmose-Pennekheb, to name but three) continued to serve under successive kings, providing strong indirect evidence for the lack of any political upheaval at the end of each reign.
The new consort was now accorded the conventional queen's titles of King's Daughter, King's Sister and King's Great Wife, although her preferred title was always God's Wife. She behaved in an exemplary fashion throughout her husband's reign. A stela now housed in Berlin (Ägyptisches Museum 15699) shows us the immediate royal family at this time: Tuthmosis II stands to face the god Re while immediately behind him stands the senior lady, the Dowager Queen Ahmose, whose regal headdress of tall feathers and a uraeus worn on top of a vulture crown indicates her importance. The Queen Consort Hatchepsut stands modestly behind both her mother and her husband in approved wifely fashion. She is dressed in a simple sheath dress and wearing a rather understated crown, although her lack of tall feathers may owe as much to a lack of space on the stela as it does to her more junior role. There is no reason to suppose that Hatchepsut was anything other than content with her position at this time, and certainly no justification for the assertion that Tuthmosis II, ‘knowing the temper of his ambitious consort’, was forced to take measures to ensure that his son would eventually succeed to the throne.17 Nor is there any proof to support the assumption that during the reign of the supposedly sickly Tuthmosis II it was Hatchepsut, the power behind the throne, who ruled Egypt: ‘… the experience which she gained in the time of her fa
ther was of the greatest use to her, and her natural ability made her to profit by it to the utmost.’18
Perhaps the clearest indication of Hatchepsut's acceptance of her subsidiary role is the excavation of her queen's tomb, which commenced some time towards the end of her husband's reign. At the beginning of the 18th Dynasty the Valley of the Queens had not yet come into operation and, in the absence of a formal queen's cemetery on the West Bank at Thebes, Hatchepsut selected a site in the Wadi Sikkat Taka ez-Zeida, a lonely and inaccessible ravine approximately one mile to the west of the site she was later to choose for her mortuary temple. Here the tomb was hidden high up in the face of the cliff, facing west, where there was a splendid view over the Nile Valley and where ‘the setting October sun throws its last beams right into the mouth of the tomb’.19 The tomb was well sited to deter tomb robbers, and almost inaccessible for its eventual excavator, Howard Carter:
The tomb was discovered full of rubbish… this rubbish having poured into it in torrents from the mountain above. When I wrested it from the plundering Arabs I found that they had burrowed into it like rabbits, as far as the sepulchral hall… I found that they had crept down a crack extending halfway down the cleft, and there from a small ledge in the rock they had lowered themselves by a rope to the then hidden entrance of the tomb at the bottom of the cleft: a dangerous performance, but one which I myself had to imitate, though with better tackle… For anyone who suffers from vertigo it certainly was not pleasant, and though I soon overcame the sensation of the ascent I was obliged always to descend in a net.20