Hatchepsut

by Joyce Tyldesley

  Having eventually gained entrance to the tomb, and cleared it of its accumulated debris, Carter discovered that internally the tomb was similar in plan to that which Tuthmosis II had been constructing

  Fig. 3.5 Plan of Hatchepsut's first tomb

  in the Valley of the Kings, with an entrance stairway descending to a doorway and leading in turn to a gallery, antechamber, second gallery and burial chamber. One of the descending galleries housed an impressive quartzite sarcophagus, a stone version of the massive rectangular wooden outer coffin provided for the burials of Queens Ahhotep and Ahmose Nefertari, measuring 1.99 m × 0.73 m × 0.73 m (6 ft 6 in × 2 ft 4 in × 2 ft 4 in). The lid, 0.17 m (6½ in) thick, was discovered propped against a corner of the sarcophagus. This, the first of the three magnificent sarcophagi which Hatchepsut was to commission, bore an inscription for ‘The Great Princess, great in favour and grace, Mistress of All Lands, Royal Daughter and Royal Sister, Great Royal Wife, Mistress of the Two Lands, Hatchepsut’. On the lid was a prayer to the goddess Nut, adapted from the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts:

  Recitation: The King's Daughter, God's Wife, King's Great Wife, Lady of the Two Lands, Hatchepsut, says ‘O my mother Nut, stretch thyself over me, that thou mayest place me among the imperishable stars which are in thee, and that I may not die.’21

  The burial shaft, cut into the floor of the chamber, was unfinished. The tomb had been abandoned before the preliminary work had been completed, and it had clearly never been used by its intended owner.

  Hatchepsut bore her brother one daughter, the Princess Neferure. For a long time it was believed that a second contemporary royal princess, Meritre-Hatchepsut (often referred to as Hatchepsut II), eventual consort of Tuthmosis III and mother of Amenhotep II, was the younger daughter of Hatchepsut and Tuthmosis II, but there is no foundation for this assumption which seems to be based on nothing more concrete than the coincidence that the two ladies shared the same name. Hatchepsut herself makes no mention of a second daughter on any of her monuments while Meritre-Hatchepsut is tantalizingly silent about her parentage although, given the fact that she became a God's Wife, Great Royal Wife and Mother of the king, it seems likely that she was born a member of the immediate royal family.

  Neferure, undisputed daughter of Hatchepsut and Tuthmosis II, appears suitably invisible, as we might expect of a young royal child, throughout her father's reign. However, following the death of Tuthmosis II, she starts to play an unusually prominent part in court life, suddenly appearing in public alongside her mother, the king. The little princess is now far more conspicuous than her mother was at an equally early age, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that, while Hatchepsut's childhood was overshadowed by that of her brothers, Neferure as an only child was being groomed from an early age to play an important role in the Egyptian royal family. However, there is a big difference between training a daughter to be queen consort – for it would have been almost a foregone conclusion, given her ancestry, that Neferure would marry the next pharaoh – and raising her to become king.

  To hint, as some modern historians have done, that Hatchepsut intended from the outset that her daughter would become pharaoh is to imply one of two very different views of Hatchepsut's personality. The first, the simplest and in many ways the most acceptable scenario, is that Hatchepsut was being merely practical in her assumption that Neferure might eventually inherit the throne. If Hatchepsut had realized that she herself, as queen, would not bear a son, if Tuthmosis III had died in infancy and if the immediate royal family could offer no more suitable (that is, male) candidate for the crown, she may well have been proved correct. Historical precedent would certainly have been on ‘King’ Neferure's side, as the Middle Kingdom Queen Sobeknofru had successfully claimed the throne in the absence of any more suitable male heir. In this case, we might push our speculation further by suggesting that Tuthmosis III, the son and eventual heir of Tuthmosis II, was either not born until the very end of his father's reign, or that for some reason – perhaps because of his mother's lowly birth – he was not always considered an entirely suitable heir. It would certainly have been prudent, in an age where no child could be guaranteed to live to become an adult, to ensure that as many royal children as possible were educated as future kings.

  Alternatively, it has been suggested by those historians belonging to the anti-Hatchepsut camp that Hatchepsut's treatment of Neferure was the outward sign of her own personal disappointment and thwarted ambition. Hatchepsut may have grown to see the position of queen consort and eventual queen mother as an unfulfilling and unacceptably subordinate role both for herself and her daughter. Herself the daughter and sister of a king, she had experienced years of being passed over in favour of male relations, and had no intention of seeing her much-loved daughter repeat her humiliation. She therefore planned that her daughter should upset the status quo and become a female pharaoh. In many respect this argument lacks conviction. We have no evidence to suggest that Hatchepsut was ever dissatisfied with her own role as consort during the reign of Tuthmosis II, although it could of course be argued that we are unlikely ever to find such evidence. More to the point, it seems unlikely that Hatchepsut, the product of a highly conservative society brought up to think in conventional gender stereotypes, would even dare to imagine that she had any chance of successfully challenging maat without a valid and widely acceptable reason.

  From infancy, the care of the royal princess was considered to be a matter of some importance, and successive high-ranking officials laid claim to the prestigious title of royal nurse or royal tutor. In his tomb at el-Kab, Ahmose-Pennekheb proudly recalls how ‘the God's Wife repeated favours for me, the great King's Wife Maatkare, justified; I educated her eldest daughter, Neferure, justified, when she was a child at the breast’.22 Later Senenmut, Hatchepsut's most influential courtier, became first Steward of Neferure and then royal tutor; Senenmut seems to have taken particular pride in his association with the young princess and we have several statues which show him holding Neferure in his arms, or sitting with her on his lap. When Senenmut eventually moved on to greater glories, the administrator Senimen took over the role of caring for the young princess. The extent to which Neferure was actually educated by any of her tutors is hard for us to assess. It seems very probable that most kings of Egypt could read and write, particularly those who had been taught in the harem schools, but literacy was by no means a necessity as the king had access to armies of scribes who could read and write on his behalf. If Neferure was truly being raised to inherit the throne, we might expect that she was given the education appropriate to a crown prince. In general, however, royal women were less likely than their brothers to be literate but would find this less of a disadvantage than we might suppose, thanks to the ready availability of professional scribes who could be hired as often as needed.

  Given her background as the daughter and half-sister of a king, it would seem almost certain that Neferure was the intended bride of Tuthmosis III. The heir to the throne would have been the only man royal enough to marry such a well-connected girl, and she in turn would have made the most suitable mother of the next king. However, we have no record of their ever marrying, and it was Meritre-Hatchepsut rather than Neferure who was to become the mother of the subsequent pharaoh of Egypt, Amenhotep II. It is therefore surprising to find that throughout her mother's reign Neferure bore the title of ‘God's Wife’, the title which her mother had preferred as both consort and regent, and one which was normally reserved for the principal queen or queen mother. Any ‘normal’ king would be accompanied in such scenes by his wife, and here we almost certainly have the true explanation of Neferure's prominence. Hatchepsut as king needed a God's Wife to participate in the ritual aspects of her role and to ensure the preservation of maat. As Hatchepsut could not act simultaneously as both God's Wife and King her own daughter, herself the daughter of a king (or rather two kings) and therefore an acknowledged royal heiress, was the ideal person to fill the role and act as
her mother's consort. The dismantled blocks of the Chapelle Rouge at Karnak (discussed in further detail in Chapter 4) include three sets of scenes in which an unnamed God's Wife is shown performing her duties during the reign of King Hatchepsut. In the absence of a more suitable candidate for the position, it seems safe to assume that the anonymous lady must be Neferure. The groups of scenes make the importance of the God's Wife clear. This was not an honorary role and, in theory at least, the God's Wife had to be present during the temple rituals. In one scene the God's Wife is shown, together with a priest, performing a ritual to destroy by burning the name of Egypt's enemies. In the second tableau she stands, both arms raised, with three priests to watch Hatchepsut present the seventeen gods of Karnak with their dinner. The final ritual shows the God's Wife leading a group of male priests to the temple pool to be purified, and then following Hatchepsut into the sanctuary where the King performs rites in front of the statue of Amen.

  Neferure fades out of the limelight towards the end of her mother's reign; she is mentioned in the first tomb of Senenmut built in regnal Year 7 and appears on a stela at Serabit el-Khadim in Year 11, but then vanishes. She is unmentioned in Senenmut's Tomb 353 dated to Year 16, and the lack of further references to the hitherto prominent princess strongly suggests that she had died and been buried in her tomb in the Wadi Sikkat Taka ez-Zeida, close to that being prepared for her mother. There is only one, inconclusive, shred of evidence which hints that Neferure may have outlived her mother and married Tuthmosis III.23 It is possible, but by no means certain, that Neferure was originally depicted on a stela dated to the beginning of Tuthmosis III's solo reign. However, although Neferure's title of God's Wife is given, the associated name on the stela now reads ‘Satioh’. We know that Satioh was the first principal wife of Tuthmosis III, and that she never bore the title God's Wife. Is it possible that the stela, originally designed to include Neferure as the chief wife of Tuthmosis III, could have been altered after her death to show a replacement chief wife?

  There is a general consensus of opinion that Tuthmosis II was not a healthy man, and that throughout his reign he was ‘hampered by a frail constitution which restricted his activities and shortened his life’.24 His mummy, unwrapped by Maspero in 1886, was found to have been badly damaged by ancient tomb robbers. The left arm had become detached, the right arm was severed from the elbow downwards and the right leg had been completely amputated by a single axe-blow. Maspero was particularly struck by the unhealthy condition of the king's skin:

  The mask on his coffin represents him with a smiling and amiable countenance, and with fine pathetic eyes which show his descent from the Pharaohs of the XVIIth dynasty… He resembles Tuthmosis I; but his features are not so marked, and are characterised by greater gentleness. He had scarcely reached the age of thirty when he fell victim to a disease of which the process of embalming could not remove the traces. The skin is scabrous in patches and covered with scars, while the upper part of the [scalp] is bald; the body is thin and somewhat shrunken, and appears to have lacked vigour and muscular power.25

  Some years later Smith was also allowed access to the mummy, and noted that:

  The skin of the thorax, shoulders and arms (excluding the hands), the whole of the back, the buttocks and legs (excluding the feet) is studded with raised macules varying in size from minute points to patches a centimetre in diameter.26

  Smith concluded that the mottled patches of skin were unlikely to be the signs of disease, as similar blotches were also to be found, albeit to a lesser extent, on the mummified bodies of Tuthmosis III and Amenhotep II. He therefore decided that they must have been caused by preservative used in mummification.

  Unfortunately, nothing in egyptology can ever be taken for granted, and it is by no means one hundred per cent certain that the body of a man in his early thirties found associated with the wooden coffin of Tuthmosis II is actually that of the young king. The body and coffin were discovered not lying in their original tomb but as part of a collection of New Kingdom royal mummies which is now known as the Deir el-Bahri cache. Although the new 18th Dynasty tradition of separating the hidden burial chamber from the highly conspicuous mortuary temple was, at least in part, intended to protect the royal burials from thieves, it had proved impossible to embark upon the excavation of substantial rock-cut chambers in secret, and it was widely known that the Valley of the Kings contained caches of untold wealth. The temptation proved irresistible, and the officials who controlled the necropolis were faced with the constant headache of guarding the royal burials, often needing to protect the sealed tombs from the very workmen who had worked on their ‘secret’ construction. Security occasionally failed, and the officials were then faced with the task of attempting to right the wrongs before resealing the tomb. A graffito from the tomb of Tuthmosis IV, dated to the reign of Horemheb and therefore written little more than seventy years after the original interment, tells how this desecrated tomb was restored on the orders of the king:

  His Majesty, life, prosperity, health, ordered that it should be recommended to the fanbearer on the left of the King, the Royal Scribe, the Superintendent of the Treasury, the Superintendent of the Works in the Place of Eternity [i.e. the Valley of the Kings]… Maya… to renew the burial of Tuthmosis IV, justified in the Precious Habitation in Western Thebes.27

  Towards the end of the New Kingdom, when Egypt was experiencing a period of economic instability with unprecedented poverty for the lower classes and sporadic bouts of civil unrest, it became increasingly obvious that necropolis security had completely broken down and that many of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been entered and looted. The royal burials were in a disgraceful condition; the bodies of the kings, stripped of their jewellery and often minus their wrappings, were simply lying where they had been flung. Urgent action was needed. During the Third Intermediate Period reign of Pinedjem II, the officials of the necropolis decided to conduct an inspection of all known tombs. Those that had already been desecrated were re-entered and the royal mummies and their remaining grave goods were removed, ‘restored’ at an official workplace, replaced in wooden coffins – either their own, or someone else's – and then transported to one of the royal caches. Most of the royal burials were transferred to the comparative safety of the rock-cut tomb of the Lady Inhapi (DB320) while other, smaller, caches were established in the tombs of Amenhotep III (KV35), Horemheb (KV57) and Twosret/Sethnakht (KV14).28 Tomb DB320, hidden in a crack behind the Deir el-Bahri cliff, had been specially prepared to receive the royal visitors. The burial chamber had been greatly enlarged so that behind the small doorway of the original tomb there was now a vast storage area. Unfortunately, the mummies, coffins and grave goods which eventually made their way to Deir el-Bahri were, in spite of the labels attached by the necropolis officials, hopelessly muddled; the mummy of the 19th Dynasty King Ramesses IX, for example, was discovered lying in the coffin of the Third Intermediate Period Lady Neskhons, the coffin of Queen Ahhotep I housed the body of Pinedjem I, and the coffin of Queen Ahmose Nefertari also contained the mummy of Ramesses III.

  The Deir el-Bahri cache had been discovered in 1871 by the Abd el-Rassul family of Gurna, a village situated close to the royal tombs on the west bank of Thebes. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the men of Gurna made their living by farming, by working for genuine archaeological excavations, and by the illicit selling of antiquities, both fake and real, to the tourists and antiquarians who were already flocking to Thebes in ever increasing numbers. In true Gurna tradition Ahmed Abd el-Rassul and his brothers kept their find to themselves, and started to sell off the more portable of the highly valuable contents of the tomb. Dealing in plundered antiquities was then, as it is now, a very serious offence and, after several years of lucrative trading, two of the brothers were arrested and the secret of the tomb was finally revealed. A party of officials led by Emile Brugsch, assistant to the director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, was guided by Mohammed Abd el-Ra
ssul along the steep mountain path behind the mortuary temple of Hatchepsut to the remote private tomb. Here Brugsch, the first to enter, was startled by the sight of corridors and rooms filled with a collection of mummies beyond his wildest expectations:

  Their gold covering and their polished surfaces reflected my own excited visage that it seemed as though I was looking into the faces of my own ancestors. The gilt face on the coffin of the amiable Queen Nefertari seemed to smile upon me like an old acquaintance. I took in the situation quickly, with a gasp, and hurried to the open air lest I should be overcome and the glorious prize, still unrevealed, be lost to science.29

  This collection of royal mummies and their grave goods included the bodies of at least forty kings, queens and chief priests dating to the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st Dynasties, amongst whom were to be found Sekenenre Tao II, Ahmose, Amenhotep I, Ahmose Nefertari and Tuthmosis I(?), II and III. The shock of the discovery seems to have gone to Brugsch's head. He took the decision that, for reasons of security, the entire tomb was to be cleared and the precious antiquities sent at once by boat to Cairo. Three hundred workmen immediately set to work, and it is a matter of the deepest regret that no one felt it necessary to either photograph or plan the interior of the tomb before it was emptied. Brugsch's behaviour, all the more puzzling because he is known to have been a proficient and experienced photographer, has led to speculation that there may have been some sort of cover-up, and that perhaps Brugsch himself, or someone high-up in the government service, had actually been dealing in the pilfered antiquities. Brugsch seems not to have been particularly well suited to his position of responsibility, and ‘he left behind him an evil reputation for his clandestine transactions with native antiquity-dealers, and for his intriguing and mischief-making habits’.30