Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (17 page)

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.
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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).
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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-Rassul 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.
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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’.
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Within a mere two days the precious wooden coffins had been removed from the tomb, wrapped in matting, sewn into sailcloth, and
carried down to the river. Here, along the riverbank, huge crowds gathered to witness the final journey of the long-lost kings of Egypt. As the boat sailed by, the peasant women started to wail and tear their hair in the traditional Egyptian gesture of mourning. In Cairo, however, the situation quickly moved from the sublime to the ridiculous as a customs official, faced with the need to classify the bodies for tax purposes, decided that the mortal remains of some of Egypt's greatest pharaohs could best be described as
farseekh
, or ‘dried fish’.

No tomb has been conclusively proved to be that of Tuthmosis II, although Tomb KV 42 is the most likely contender. This tomb, anonymous, unadorned and with an uninscribed sarcophagus, is almost stark in its simplicity; it is matched by the relatively undistinguished mortuary temple set on the edge of the cultivation at Medinet Habu. This lack of elaborate funerary provision strongly suggests that the sudden death of the king had caught the royal stonemasons napping. Under normal circumstances a king would oversee the building of his own funerary monuments, with preparations for his death starting at the very commencement of the reign. In consequence, the size of a tomb and mortuary temple, and the magnificence of their decorations, are often directly related to the length rather than the success of their owner's rule. It may even be that Tuthmosis was never actually interred in his unfinished burial chamber;
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a similar situation was to occur over 150 years later when the sudden death of Tutankhamen resulted in the abandonment of his intended royal tomb and his interment in the tomb of a nobleman, hastily decorated to make a suitable resting place for a king.

It is less likely that the simple tomb should be read as a sign of general indifference towards Tuthmosis II,
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or indeed that Hatchepsut and/or Tuthmosis III would have neglected the burial of their predecessor as, under ancient Egyptian tradition, it was the burial of the old king which legitimized the accession of the new. Nor can we assume that Hatchepsut, bearing little affection for her late brother, was too preoccupied with her own plans to provide him with a decent funeral. She later dedicated at least one statue to her dead brother–husband, a likely indication that his early death was a genuine cause of sorrow to the widow–sister who still honoured his memory.

Tuthmosis II was succeeded on the throne by Tuthmosis III, his natural son by the Lady Isis (also known as Aset or Eset), a secondary
and somewhat obscure member of the harem whose origins are uncertain. Isis did not have the royal connections of her illustrious predecessor Mutnofret, and her most prestigious title seems to have been ‘King's Mother’. Tuthmosis III was therefore only of royal descent on his father's side, and perhaps in consequence not entirely acceptable as heir to the royal throne. This may be why in later years, and despite the fact that he had started the numbering of his regnal years from the death of his father, he was to suggest that he had been associated with Tuthmosis II in a co-regency. In an inscription on the seventh pylon of the Karnak temple, Tuthmosis III tells how as a young boy he had been serving as an acolyte in the temple of Amen when, on an auspicious festival day, the great god himself had selected him as a future king:

My father Amen-Re-Harakhti granted to me that I might appear upon the Horus Throne of the Living… I having been appointed before him within [the temple], there having been ordained for me the rulership of the Two Lands, the thrones of Geb and the offices of Khepri
at the side of my father
, the Good God, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Aakheperenre [Tuthmosis II], given life forever.
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‘At the side of’ has been interpreted as meaning ‘co-regent of my father’, although it seems equally likely to mean ‘in the presence of’ or ‘before’; should the latter be the correct reading the proclamation would represent Tuthmosis II's formal acknowledgement of his intended heir rather than the proclamation of a full co-regency. Tuthmosis III was only a child when his father died, and it would certainly have been unusual for the still young Tuthmosis II to appoint an infant co-ruler. However, the true importance of this inscription lies not in its specific details, but in the fact that Tuthmosis, like Hatchepsut before him, felt that he needed the support of an oracle of Amen to reinforce his right to rule.

Tuthmosis III was obviously very pleased with this inscription. So pleased, indeed, that he had it recarved over an earlier text which had been commissioned by Hatchepsut on the northern side of the upper portico of the Deir el-Bahri mortuary temple. However, this time the text was adjusted so that it described the identical elevation of Tuthmosis I. Tuthmosis III clearly wished his people to understand that both
he and his grandfather had been personally appointed by Amen who used the same method of announcing his choice on both occasions. Snatches of the original text underlying the Tuthmosis III recarving suggest that Hatchepsut too had undergone the same divine selection process and, as hers is undeniably the earlier carving, it would appear that Tuthmosis had decided to borrow her experience for both himself and his grandfather.
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Even more dubious evidence for a Tuthmosis II and III co-regency has been left by a New Kingdom visitor to the Old Kingdom step-pyramid complex at Sakkara. The monuments of the most ancient pharaohs – already a thousand years old by the reign of Hatchepsut – were a constant source of interest to their New Kingdom descendants, who took day-trips to picnic at the pyramids just as modern British tourists flock to Stonehenge or the Tower of London. Here a graffito, scribbled in hieratic writing, gives the date as Year 20 of the joint reign of Hatchepsut and Tuthmosis (in that order), and goes on to explain that:

now his majesty was… king with [his?] father, exalted upon the Horus Throne of the Living…

If the ‘majesty’ in question is Tuthmosis III, and if the phrase ‘… king with his father’ is not simply a meaningless expression, this graffito may well be considered valid evidence for a co-regency between Tuthmosis II and Tuthmosis III. However, it is equally likely that the king is Hatchepsut. In this case the graffito may be referring to Hatchepsut's ‘coronation’ or ‘coming of age’ which is discussed in more detail in
Chapter 4
.

At the time of his father's death Tuthmosis III was still a minor. His exact age at the time of his accession is unrecorded, but given that he reigned for over fifty years and that his mummy was not that of an elderly man, we can deduce that he was a young child or even a baby rather than a teenager. Hatchepsut herself was probably between fifteen and thirty years of age when she was widowed. To calculate her maximum age at this time, we must make the assumption that she was born after her father had acceded to the throne – this seems likely if we are correct in our assumption that Queen Ahmose was the sister or half-sister of Tuthmosis I. As her father reigned for approximately fifteen years, Hatchepsut can have been no more than fifteen years old when she married her brother and became consort. If Tuthmosis II then
reigned for the maximum suggested period of fifteen years, she would have been thirty years old at his death. However, the only fixed facts that we have concerning the marriage of Hatchepsut and Tuthmosis II are that Tuthmosis I reigned for at least one year, and that Hatchepsut bore her brother at least one child. Given that puberty probably occurred at about fourteen years of age, Hatchepsut may have been no more than fifteen years old when her husband, reigning for only three years, died.
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