by Kara Cooney
Such originality may not seem that astounding given his position of power, but Egyptian culture valued a certain kind of conservatism. Innovation, particularly among nonroyal elites, was practiced only sparingly. Officials were supposed to be followers of the king’s lead, not fashion trendsetters. Senenmut may have been seen by some as breaking with protocol when his statuary contained more originality than that of his mistress, but Hatshepsut had her own penchant for the unusual. It seems that they both valued breaking the mold. Apparently Hatshepsut never put a stop to his displays, even though they were unprecedented in scope. The very existence of such personal monuments placed in the public sphere implies that the relationship between Senenmut and Hatshepsut was probably closer than we will ever know.
A bold and motivated pair, they were blessed by the gods with political abilities that allowed them to hold great positions of authority. Aware of his lower origins and his lack of Theban family influence at court, Hatshepsut likely relied on Senenmut exactly because he had no outside interests or private agenda to divert him from her own interests. His lack of family connections made him less likely to betray her or to overlook her wishes in favor of his own gain. With no strong ties to other elites through birth or marriage, Senenmut himself had no one else to trust besides Hatshepsut. They seem to have been mutually dependent: she took advantage of his reliance on her, and he apparently used her lack of trust in others for his own advancement.
As soon as Hatshepsut became king, Senenmut claimed prime real estate in the west Theban hills for his own tomb chapel just overlooking her Deir el-Bahri funerary temple; it was a grand space to be painted with images of himself in the company of his mother, father, and siblings, all seated before ample food, drink, and wealth for the afterlife. This tomb was also meant to link him to Hatshepsut’s fortune in life and after death, because its proximity to her funerary temple allowed him to serve her in the afterlife. On its summit, he had a statue of himself carved from the live rock, with the King’s Daughter Nefrure snugly in his embrace. His mother was buried under his tomb forecourt accompanied by riches she had never known as a young woman; he moved the body of his father, who had died long before Senenmut took up high office, to join his mother.24 He even had one of his horses buried at his tomb site, on the slope of the hill just under the forecourt.25 The horse was buried fully wrapped in a huge wooden coffin. Dragging a dead horse to the top of the Sheikh abd el-Gurna hill for burial must have involved some advance planning, not to mention a great deal of labor. Senenmut wanted his horse in the afterlife, and he found a way to make it happen.
Senenmut’s preparation for death involved another extravagance. Instead of just cutting a burial chamber under his tomb chapel as most officials did, he chose a different location altogether. Not only did he lavish his funds on different localities for chapel and tomb, a privilege normally retained for kings, but he opted to have his corpse interred in the sacred Asasif valley, next to Hatshepsut’s funerary temple.26 This was perhaps the very first time a nonroyal individual separated his tomb (where his body was buried) from his tomb chapel (where relatives offered food and comfort to his soul). At this time, only kings did this: for example, Thutmose I and Thutmose II were buried deep in the Valley of the Kings while their temples for cult rituals lay in the desert fringes, near the Nile inundation. After he had done it, other officials followed his lead. Senenmut had created a new burial trend.
And Senenmut’s innovations did not stop there. Within his burial chamber in the Asasif, which was made up of a series of descending staircases and chambers that were meant to remain secret after his burial, he commissioned exclusive liturgical texts for the walls that no official had previously dared to carve into stone. He also asked his craftsmen to paint on his tomb ceiling the first astrological chart ever recorded. No burial chamber of any elite had ever been so elaborate. In this way, Senenmut communicated his exclusive access to these texts to other officials and priests, broadcasting his worth in this life and the next.
Hatshepsut entrusted Senenmut with oversight of a tremendous number of building projects during her reign. No doubt he must have had architectural opinions and passions that she valued, because there is no evidence that he had any actual education in engineering. Despite this lack of formal training, he always seems to have been at the forefront of the next big thing in terms of form and design. Indeed, Hatshepsut asked him to direct construction of what was to be her greatest and most innovative temple achievement: her funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri, which was planned as an astoundingly creative, and nontraditional, tiered temple of three layers fronted by colonnades and dozens of statues of Hatshepsut as the god Osiris.27 Its appearance was inspired by Mentuhotep II’s Middle Kingdom temple in the adjacent site, but the architect, whoever he was (or she, if it was Hatshepsut’s design), transformed it into a radically new structure never before seen in Egypt. Hatshepsut would call this temple Djeser Djeseru, meaning “Holy of Holies,” and it was meant to promote the sanctity of her kingship. This most sacred cult place was dedicated to her depicted as an eternal Osiris king after death and as a solar falcon who traversed the heavens. It is the first surviving Temple of Millions of Years, the name the Egyptians gave to a king’s funerary temple.28 Even today, as one travels along the west bank of the Nile, amid the expected pylons and colonnaded sun courts of other great temples built centuries before and after, Deir el-Bahri is unmistakable—instantly unique, somehow modern and ancient at the same time. It stands as an unparalleled and iconic achievement.
Hatshepsut chose the site of Deir el-Bahri not only because of the dramatic half-moon of high cliffs underneath the pyramid-shaped mountain, but also because it was a popular destination for the Beautiful Feast of the Valley, a sacred procession that brought the gods’ statues to Egypt’s divine ancestors buried within the cliffs and beneath the hills on the west bank of Thebes. In short, this was the most public spot in western Thebes.
The Beautiful Feast of the Valley was a kind of carnival celebrated at the beginning of summer, when the Nile was at its lowest point, when the land itself seemed to be dying and families were anxious about having enough grain to make it to the next harvest.29 In the Valley Feast, priests bore the statue of the god Amen in a gilded carrying shrine on their shoulders beyond the gates of his home temple at Karnak, placing him on his sacred Nile barge so that he could cross the river and visit the sacred ancestors on the west bank in the land of the dead. It was a means of connecting with death itself, which to the Egyptians was not a final end but a pregnant beginning to a new re-creation. Thousands of men from the army and navy accompanied the god along the way, protecting his movements and reveling in his triumph. Everyone drank too much and partied too hard. Musicians played the lute and banged the drums. Young girls wearing only small girdles around their hips danced, and acrobats performed backbends and flips, all for the god’s erotic enjoyment. It was a time when the Egyptians pondered the shortness and unpredictability of life and celebrated the possibility of new beginnings. One of Hatshepsut’s first and most ambitious projects, her funerary temple, was constructed at a Valley Festival site. Clearly from the earliest years of her reign, she understood the value she could gain from these religious celebrations.
A temple here in the Asasif would set her up for maximum visibility among the people who mattered most, not to mention the gods of Thebes. The place was already sacred to the deified king Mentuhotep II, who, some five hundred years before, had reunified Egypt after a long period of civil war. Its cliff faces were also thought to be the realm of the goddess Hathor, the mistress of the western mountains, a daughter of the sun god known for her sexuality and violent protection. An ancient and sacred spot for centuries, the location was well chosen. Hatshepsut would project her most profound political-religious claims in the text and relief planned for this structure.
Hatshepsut began construction at Deir el-Bahri immediately after her coronation (although many argue it started even before).30 The project was ambiti
ous, and the temple work would continue until the end of her reign. The plan of the structure—the ramps leading the participant ever higher, the massive platforms on which thousands of spectators could stand, the colonnaded porticoes serving as stages visible to the crowds below—was meant to showcase Hatshepsut’s highly visible annual festival celebrations to further broadcast her unassailable kingship.31 She would use the city of Thebes as a giant stage to display her piety to the Egyptian world.
During Hatshepsut’s coregency with Thutmose III, the money, time, and labor spent on festival activity exploded. It may be hard for us to understand why this investment was necessary, but in a world where seasons of planting, harvest, and inundation ruled life and death, it was imperative to bring the gods into daily life to help things along. The more a king invested in festivals of cyclical renewal, the more prosperity the gods bestowed. But if the gods were ignored, bad floods would result, and that meant meager planting and poor harvest, which led in turn to drought, pestilence, disease, and death. Festivals were viewed as a way to physically invite the gods into public spaces where the people could appease them and give them gifts of food, music, and incense, as much as was needed. The statues of the gods were taken out of their sanctuaries and placed into mobile shrines that were carried aloft beyond their temple walls and out of doors, so that the gods could visit other temples and family members, engage in sexual activity, and revel in the adoration of the pious Egyptian people. Such intensification of festivals would have been a drain on earlier New Kingdom treasuries, but apparently Hatshepsut could afford it. The power of kingship was renewed in the process of many such celebrations, another reason, perhaps, for Hatshepsut to emphasize such ritual activity.
The whole population stopped their work to witness the movement of the gods and to participate in the revelry, drinking and eating to excess, dancing and singing, communing with divinity. For example, in the Beautiful Feast of the Valley, the god Amen crossed the Nile to visit the tombs of kings, ancestors, and dead gods, so that he could link with that most sacred potentiality of rebirth after death. Thebans followed the procession, partaking in massive feasts at the tombs of their own ancestors, in a weeklong banquet akin to Mexico’s Día de los Muertos.
Across the river, during the Opet festival,32 the god Amen left his sanctuary at Karnak to visit the temple at Luxor and thus meld with a manifestation of himself linked to sexuality and self-creation. It was during Hatshepsut’s reign that we see the first evidence of the Opet festival, also known as the Festival of the Residence, when the sexualized manifestation of the god Amen left his temple of Ipet-Sut at Karnak for his enclosure at Ipet Resut, his residence to the south. Opet was celebrated at the beginning of fall, after the Nile inundation waters had receded and planting had begun. According to the people of Thebes, the success of their crops depended on Amen’s renewed sexual potency.
The festival was shrouded in mystery; no priest or king ever explicitly recorded the rituals that took place inside of the temple, but they appear to have been definitely sexual in nature. Hatshepsut and Thutmose III would have been initiated in such secret knowledge and might have facilitated the strange mysteries of Amen-Bull-of-His-Mother’s mounting and impregnating his own mother with his own future self. During the later public procession, crowds followed along and watched with rapt attention the god’s regenerative journey and thus the renewal of their own crops and livelihoods. By injecting her presence into these festivals, Hatshepsut was essentially saying that her rule was necessary to keep the sun rising and setting and the Nile flooding. During her reign, these religious occasions lasted for more days, included more participants, and grew in overall importance. Just the architectural evidence alone proves that she spent more money on these events than all previous New Kingdom kings combined.
Hatshepsut enacted her festival rituals in stone buildings of great size and opulence instead of the temporary or mud-brick structures used before her reign. She thought in terms of a broad plan, not single buildings. Her ambitious constructions created massive festival processions that stretched for many miles along ways now paved in stone. It took more than a dozen years of continuous dusty and noisy construction work that was halted probably only to celebrate religious ceremonies, but Hatshepsut essentially turned Thebes into one giant stone ritual space stamped repeatedly with her names and imagery.
She was the first king to build extensively in sandstone, and its hardness allowed her to construct larger and taller buildings than ever before, bridging wider spans than had been possible with the limestone used by previous kings. Sandstone also had its religious associations. The quarries of Gebel el-Silsila were located south of Thebes,33 directly adjacent to the river, and were bathed by the Nile when it flooded its banks every summer. Sandstone cut from these banks was thought to be connected to the source of new life, of creation from nothing, and any temples built of this precious resource would be imbued with the hallowed powers of the annual inundation.
Although Hatshepsut’s most innovative (and lasting) structures were built at Thebes, she was systematic in her construction efforts and injected her divine presence into religious activities all over Egypt, from north to south—temples for Ptah at Memphis, for Thoth at Hermopolis, her Speos Artemidos shrine for Pakhet at Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt, temples for Khnum and Satet at Elephantine, Monthu at Armant, Ptah at Thebes, and numerous constructions in Nubia.34 But in the end, Thebes was her base of ideological power, and some of her most vital constructions for the legitimization of her kingship were erected at Karnak in the heart of Amen’s domain, where Amen had picked her to rule all those years ago, actualizing the event in stone to make it ritually real for her people.
Her funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri—Djeser Djeseru—was the centerpiece of her overall scheme at Thebes. Its sightline connected to a new pylon gateway she was constructing on the north side of Karnak Temple. Standing on the topmost terrace of her funerary temple and looking east, one could see her obelisks and pylons at Karnak directly across the river. Everything at Deir el-Bahri was planned on this axis, including the sanctuary of her funerary temple. In fact, the sanctuary was precisely oriented so that on the winter solstice the sunlight streamed through a window to bathe the statue of Amen, the hidden one, inside.35
Farther north, Hatshepsut had a rock-cut shrine built to the goddess Pakhet, “the one who scratches,” a lioness and fierce protector of her father, the sun god. Inside, Hatshepsut left a lengthy and radical treatise on her kingship. The temple, now called the Speos Artemidos by Egyptologists, gives us some idea of why Hatshepsut spent so much time and money building ritual spaces out of stone; she was of one mind with the gods.
My divine mind is looking out for posterity, the king’s heart has thought of eternal continuity, because of the utterance of him who parts the ished-tree, Amun, lord of millions, and I have magnified the Order he has desired. For it is known to me that he lives on it: it is my bread, and it is of its dew that I drink. I was in one body with him, and he has brought me up to make the awe of him powerful in this land. I am one whom Atum-Khepri, who made what is—made know[ledgeable], one whom the Sun has fated as established for him.
She continues with a section on how temple building is akin to marking herself as the chosen one.
The temple of the mistress of Qusae, which had (completely) fallen into dissolution—the earth having swallowed its noble sanctuary, children dancing on its roof(s), no tutelary goddess causing fear, the lowly reckoning defenselessness in (her) absence, nor her days of appearance having ever (be)en experienced—I hallowed it, built anew, fashioning its Leading Serpent of gold […] in order to defend its town in the processional bark.… My incarnation gives clarity of vision to those who shoulder the god.
Next, the text includes a rare claim that links Hatshepsut’s success with the creator god himself.
Every [god] says to himself: “One who will achieve eternal continuity has come, whom Amun has caused to appear as king of eternity on Horus
’s throne.” So listen all you elite and multitude of commoners. I have done this by the plan of my mind. I do not sleep forgetting, (but) have made firm what is ruined. For I have raised up what was dismembered beginning from the time when Asiatics were in the midst of the Delta (in) Avaris, with vagrants in their midst toppling what had been made. They ruled without the Sun, and he did not act by god’s decree down to my (own) uraeus-incarnation. (Now) I am set on the Sun’s thrones, having been foretold from ages of years as one born to take possession. I am come as Horus, the sole uraeus spitting fire at my enemies. I have banished the gods’ abomination, the earth removing their footprints.36
Hatshepsut used all of her ingenuity to negotiate a difficult path as a female king. She was approaching thirty years of age, was ruler of the most powerful land in the Mediterranean and Africa, and shared the throne with a boy who would soon grow into a man. She had triumphantly received a successful expedition from Punt. The Nubian and Eastern Desert mines were creating a steady stream of gold at the expense of indigenous populations and society’s unwanted. Trade with Syria-Palestine was booming, with timber from Lebanon, wine from Crete, poppy products from Persia and beyond, and luxury goods brought in from places as far off as Babylon, Anatolia, and Afghanistan. The quarries were churning out stone for new statuary. All over Egypt, hammers and chisels rang out as they met stone; men were laboring in her name and building temples that would forever link Hatshepsut’s reign to Egypt’s current prosperity. In temples north and south, people saw new priests hired and old, neglected festivals reinstated. By all appearances, everything seemed in order and on track for Hatshepsut.