The Woman Who Would Be King (40 page)

For the ancient Egyptians, violence against the images of the dead—
particularly in a tomb context—was not just a defacement of the deceased’s memory but action meant to harm the spirit for eternity in the afterlife. Without names or images for Senenmut’s spirit to recognize, he would forever be separated from the wealth of his tomb chapel and from the connections to the royal family that he had so carefully fostered. His tomb chapel suffered the most. Hardly any of the painted imagery remains. His statues scattered about Egypt’s temples were also attacked, but not with as much ferocity as his tomb chapel walls. His name was removed from only nine of his twenty-five statues.
³⁰
Presumably the priests of Amen did not appreciate it when enemies of Senenmut came to their temples to destroy statues in their sacred midst, so most of these depictions survive intact. The images Senenmut had carved into Djeser Djeseru were more systematically removed, probably by agents of Thutmose III.

The attacks against Senenmut even extended to his sealed and unmarked burial chamber, but here only a few representations were destroyed, probably because the space was largely inaccessible owing to the rubble cluttering the rooms. However, his tomb chapel on Gurna hill was intended to be a public space for the cult to his spirit; all those who wanted to give him offerings and connect with his spirit would be free to enter. Located within the community graveyard, it was ostensibly passed every week by officials who had been harmed by Senenmut’s power grabs during Hatshepsut’s reign. One’s tomb chapel was the place where an official chose to record his greatest personal and career exploits, and here Senenmut documented his close relationship to Nefrure as tutor and his responsibilities as Steward of Amen; he even listed all the different kinds of statuary Hatshepsut had granted him, down to the exact stone type and pose. As a record of his life’s work, his tomb chapel was a prime target for personal vendettas and attacks. It seems many wished him ill.

We can find irony in one of his tomb inscriptions: “As for any man who will cause damage to my image, he will not follow the king of his time; he will not be buried in the western cemetery; he will not be given any lifetime on earth.”
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Senenmut’s paranoia was obviously valid, and without Hatshepsut to protect him or his memory, he was powerless to stop such destruction. Because Senenmut was likely unsuccessful in finding a place in the new administration, his funerary monuments were left not only unfinished but also unfunded, unused, and unprotected. He likely lost the right to any funerary foundations he may have set up to pay for regular
priestly visits, a common elite method to provide economic support for ongoing mortuary cult activity. Even in death, the Theban people around him did not wish him well.

Similar acts of desecration were carried out against some of the other “new men” of Hatshepsut’s administration—particularly against those who had no links to the old and admired Theban families and had come from nothing to climb to the very pinnacle of the Egyptian government. The tombs of the royal steward Amenhotep and Nehesy, who had organized the great expedition to Punt, were also defaced, though not to the same extent as Senenmut’s, their names and images removed and hacked away. Amenhotep and Nehesy hadn’t commissioned as many monuments as Senenmut had, so there weren’t as many targets to hit.

Such a fate did not await every high official who worked under Hatshepsut, most of whom were retained under Thutmose III.
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The young king wasn’t intent on a revenge campaign or the upheaval of a completely new administration. Most officials stayed in their posts, facilitating a smooth transition of power.
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Senenmut’s ordeal related to his unique origins, or his methods of taking power, or his means of exercising it. Some believe that Senenmut’s fall was linked to a larger phenomenon: the propensity of overseers of the royal household to gain too much authority, thus creating an imbalance in the distribution of power away from the traditional sources, including the king himself and the elite Theban families.
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While the images of Senenmut, Amenhotep, and Nehesy were destroyed, Hatshepsut’s remained largely untouched.
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But not for long. She, too, would pay for her ambitions.

After forty-two years of rule, Thutmose III was now faced with the same problems of succession that had plagued his own accession. If he chose a son from a queen of great lineage, she might feel empowered by recent precedent to involve herself in government affairs, as Hatshepsut had done. Thutmose had learned his lesson, it seems, and he was already in the process of curtailing the office of God’s Wife of Amen, stripping its power little by little, handing the title off to one of his daughters so that he could better wield control. Soon the God’s Wife would be nothing more than a ritualist, without income, lands, personnel, or political influence.

If he chose the son of a lesser wife, however, there was the worry of legitimacy because the child would have no other ties to the old kings and no links to Egypt’s great families. His own lineage from Isis had been problematic enough to cause Hatshepsut to step in as king, when many elites ostensibly complained that her young nephew lacked a pure and lofty descent.
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Passing over any sons of Nefrure or other highly placed wives would be a bold move. It may be that Thutmose III was carefully laying the groundwork for the acceptance of a successor who had no maternal connection to Egypt’s ancient bloodline. He chose to demonstrate that it was the king’s lineage
alone
that mattered; the queen’s origins had to be made inconsequential. He was looking forward to the future—to the support of his heir and to his legacy—but in so doing, he had to go back to the
past and rewrite history so that it followed his desired patriarchal succession. Thus, for the remainder of his reign, Thutmose III systematically removed all of Hatshepsut’s images and substituted the names and figures of his male line of descent for hers. Hatshepsut was now treated like an intercessor.

Despite all the time Hatshepsut had invested in her co-king, all the political support she had built for him, all the elites she had empowered, all the bureaucratic systems she had legitimized, and all the timeless monuments she had built, none of it mattered. Many of her supporters had already lost favor and were powerless to stop this machine of destruction that Thutmose III was now rolling out against her. Her legacy would soon be erased. Her monuments had been built to stand for centuries, as the temples and chapels of her predecessors had. But nothing could stop a king who was given the power to both build monuments and destroy them. It had taken almost no time for the legacy of Hatshepsut’s supporters—Nefrure, Senenmut, Amenhotep, Nehesy—to be swept away. Now the time had come for the most powerful woman in Egypt’s history to suffer the same fate.

Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel had already been dismantled, its quartzite blocks lying in a jumbled pile somewhere on the grounds of Karnak Temple. Her Djeser Djeseru temple was apparently still the main focus of the Beautiful Feast of the Valley, providing the context for the revelry, drinking, and sacred processions that took place over a week every summer in Thebes. But Thutmose III’s building program in Thebes was finally catching up with his aunt’s. His west bank funerary temple was probably complete at this point. His Akhmenu jubilee temple at Karnak had been finished, and his other modifications at Karnak would have been extensive and visible to many.

Something happened to change his perception of Hatshepsut, causing him to abandon any protection of her legacy in stone. He decided to eradicate her from every temple in Egypt. Between his years 43 or 44 and 46 or 47, when he was fast approaching fifty years of age, an astounding twenty-five years after her death, Thutmose III decided to embark on an official and systematic campaign to destroy the images and names of his aunt and former coruler, Hatshepsut.
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All around Egypt, but in Thebes especially, Thutmose sent chisel bearers to demolish what she had labored so long to build. The boy she had raised and trained as her partner and
heir for all of those years had become a man who, after twenty-five years of waiting, had finally come to the momentous decision to wipe all trace of her as king off the face of the earth.

At the beginning of Thutmose III’s reign, he had actually ordered his craftsmen to
finish
her monuments and piously add his name and likeness to Hatshepsut’s sacred structures where appropriate. Now he adopted the diametrically opposite approach by removing hundreds, if not thousands, of Hatshepsut’s images and replacing them with depictions of his father and grandfather. Dozens of life-size statues and Osirian monuments from Djeser Djeseru were attacked with hammer, mallet, and chisel until they were nothing more than fragments of their former splendor, fit only to be thrown into pits close to the temple site, to be buried and kept away from view. Those carved of hard stones like red granite or granodiorite required tremendous investments of labor and time to destroy. Any effort diverted toward this cause was costly and slowed the progress of Thutmose’s own extensive building program. Yet despite his advanced age and the urgency of the work on his own funerary temples and tombs, he obviously felt he had no choice but to allocate workmen and resources for such an important task. The woman who had paved his way to a stable and legitimate kingship now had to be obliterated from the Egyptian temple landscape. His own legacy demanded it.

Thutmose III never wrote down any explanations for his removal of Hatshepsut from the Egyptian temples, but he had already been distancing himself from her for some time before he diverted precious resources to destroy her images. He had already changed his own portrait to give it a unique visage apart from his aunt’s stylistic legacy. He chose a likeness that resembled the faces of his father and grandfather instead, visibly aligning himself with the male ancestors with whom he wanted to be associated. Statue after statue featured Thutmose’s new portrait; it was an inevitable development to distinguish his face from what he was now having demolished.

The erasure of his former coruler was methodical and calculating. He removed her from the public spots that served as settings for particular festivals and from the innermost shrines where the gods dwelled. Nearly every image of Hatshepsut as king was affected. Sometimes craftsmen were clearly ordered to leave the reliefs of her face and body alone but to cut down the raised carving of her names, so that they could quickly and
easily replace them with the hieroglyphic names of Thutmose I or II. But this strategy proved more troublesome than expected because many of the texts surrounding her figure included remnants of her femininity. Every .
s
of “she” had to be replaced with .
f
for “he.” The -
t
after
sat
, for “daughter,” had to be removed so that the label read only
sa
, for “son.”

Hatshepsut’s nuanced use of pronouns often tripped up Thutmose III’s craftsmen. For instance, on the gateway to the upper terrace of Djeser Djeseru they changed the name of the king from Hatshepsut to Thutmose III but neglected to change “her” to “his,” so one inscription about him incongruously reads, “Amen is satisfied by her monuments.”

The sheer volume of monuments to destroy, coupled with the painstaking attention to detail required to complete the erasure work, meant that Thutmose III’s men couldn’t always get around to creating new images to fill the blanks. Sometimes he substituted a tall offering table of food for Hatshepsut’s image, which left the god standing before a meal instead of interacting with the king. This solution removed most of the ritual activity and movement from the temple walls, so it was not always a satisfying fix. Instead of seeing the king burning incense in a brazier before the god, now the viewer observed the god standing inexplicably still before his offering table. Instead of the female king running before the god, now the god was simply standing before another offering table.

The banality of such fixes was probably disappointing to both the craftsmen and the king, but in many other places nothing at all was added to beautify or clean up the destroyed reliefs. We see only the rough shape of a human body formed by overlapping chisel marks, as if Hatshepsut’s crisply cut concrete form had been supplanted by an unlabeled and blurry shadow of her former self.

Interestingly, images of Hatshepsut as queen—from before her claim to the throne—were left untouched. Only reliefs and statuary that supported the presumption of her kingship were revised. Thutmose III was attacking only Hatshepsut’s kingly ambitions and actions, not her soul as a woman or a human being. In fact, he seems to have been content to coexist with her depictions as God’s Wife, King’s Daughter, and King’s Wife. But portraits and texts showing her as king caused him grief, enough to create an ideological purge twenty-five years after her death. Most Egyptians only lived thirty years. It’s important to remember that Thutmose III waited an entire lifetime before he attacked his aunt’s monuments. Something
must have shifted in his political landscape, something that hadn’t been a problem before, something that kings worry about at the end of their reigns, not the beginning. After twenty-five years of coexisting with the memory of his aunt—the extraordinary woman with whom he had once reigned and worked, perhaps even argued with and loved—he now removed her from his presence.

He even ordered his men to erase her from the dismantled blocks of her Red Chapel at Karnak, even though they were not being used in any current structure. A disassembled monument with images of Hatshepsut as king was enough to vex Thutmose III. Leaving the great heap of heavy blocks where they lay, the craftsmen chiseled away her name and images only from those stones that proved to be easily accessible in the massive pile.
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And so, after all visible traces of Hatshepsut had been removed from the quartzite, the blocks would remain there for a few generations until they were salvaged as rubble fill for the construction of a new pylon. Eventually they were discovered inside of a Karnak pylon by archaeologists quite confused at the haphazard pattern of Hatshepsut’s removal.