… we found a jumble of pieces of sculpture from the size of a finger-tip to others weighing a ton or more. There were large sections of the limestone colossi from the upper porch; brilliantly coloured pieces from the ranks of sandstone sphinxes which had lined the avenue… and fragments of at least four or five kneeling statues of the queen in red and black granite, over six feet high.20
Had these statues been merely thrown out of the temple, it would seem possible that they had been removed during a form of ancient spring clean so that Tuthmosis III, replacing them with statues of himself, could claim Djeser-Djeseru as his own. The erasure of the carved wall-images of Hatchepsut might then also be interpreted as a preliminary stage in Tuthmosis' plan to usurp Hatchepsut's role as founder and patron of the temple. However, as Winlock noted, the statues showed all the signs of a vicious personal attack:
They could only have been dragged out to their burial place slowly and laboriously and the workmen had plenty of opportunity to vent their spite on the brilliantly chiselled, smiling features. On the face of an exquisitely carved red granite statue a fire had been kindled to disintegrate the stone, and the features of the statue brought to the museum have been battered entirely away and the uraeus on the forehead, the symbol of royalty, completely obliterated. Tuthmosis III could have had no complaint to make on the execution of his orders, for every conceivable indignity had been heaped on the likenesses of the fallen queen.21
Other statues had undergone at least two distinct stages of vandalism. First the uraeus, symbol of kingship, had been knocked off the royal headdress, and then the face had been disfigured, the nose being broken and the eyes being carefully picked out with a chisel, before the statue was finally dragged from its base and smashed. Some of the larger fragments had later been converted by enterprising locals into querns and pestles.
The attempted obliteration of Hatchepsut's memory has invariably been linked with the attacks against Senenmut's name and monuments. Under the old theory, that of instant revenge against Hatchepsut and her acolytes, this was inevitable. The actual damage caused to the monuments of Senenmut is not, however, entirely consistent with this argument. Indeed, Senenmut's name and image seem to have suffered from several different types of damage without appearing to fit into any pre-organized plan. Occasionally it was only his name that was attacked while his image remained intact. At the other extreme some of his statues were smashed and physically thrown out of the temples. He seems, in fact, to have been unfortunate enough to attract the attentions of several diverse groups of campaigners: those who objected to him personally, perhaps because of his relationship with Hatchepsut, and who therefore disfigured both his entire name and his image; those who were devoted to the worship of the Aten and who took exception to certain elements of his name (which contains the name of the goddess Mut, wife of Amen); those early Christian and Islamic iconoclasts who routinely objected to all pagan images. Others of his monuments have merely suffered the unavoidable ravages of time and have, for example, been reused during later periods. There was, as far as we can tell, no intense, systematic campaign against the monuments of Senenmut as there was against the monuments of Hatchepsut. Therefore, although a study of the defacement of the monuments of Senenmut may tell us a great deal about the attitude of later generations to their heritage, it tells us less than we might hope about the persecution of Hatchepsut's memory.
One striking aspect of the campaign against Hatchepsut's memory, and one which will probably have already become apparent, is the fact that it was both relatively short-lived and somewhat erratic in execution. Throughout the 18th Dynasty, the removal of an old name or image and the renewal of a wall in preparation for the carving of the new scene followed three well-established stages. First, the old scene was hacked out with a broad chisel. Next, a fine implement was used to smooth the rough surface and remove the raised ridges and, finally, the wall was polished and re-carved.22 In many cases, however, we find that Hatchepsut's cartouche and figure were merely removed and not replaced, while her name was sporadically preserved at Armant, on the blocks of the Chapelle Rouge, at the Speos Artemidos where there is no sign of Tuthmoside erasures although there is some damage caused by the ‘restorations’ of Seti I, and in Tomb KV20 where the workmen who removed the body of Tuthmosis I seem to have made no attempt to deface Hatchepsut's own inscribed sarcophagus, although it is, of course, possible that the body of Tuthmosis I was removed before the proscription took effect. At Djeser-Djeseru it was even possible to read some of the ‘erased’ inscriptions which had supposedly been hacked off the temple walls.
All this evidence leaves the very strong impression that the vindictive campaign, whatever its original purpose, was never carried out to its logical conclusion. Either the desired results had been achieved before the obliteration had been completed, or the impetus behind the campaign had been removed. It is perhaps not too fanciful a leap of the imagination to suggest that Tuthmosis III, having started the persecution relatively late in his reign, may have died before it was concluded. His son and successor Amenhotep II, with no personal involvement in the campaign, may have been content to allow the vendetta to lapse. It may therefore be that Hatchepsut's subsequent omission from the 19th Dynasty king lists of Seti I and Ramesses II does not necessarily have a sinister motive; perhaps those who compiled the lists genuinely believed her to have been a queen-consort or queen-regent rather than a full king. Ironically, it is ultimately that fact that Hatchepsut had been content to share her reign with Tuthmosis III which allowed future generations to forget her name. Had she ruled alone – having discreetly removed her young co-regent – her name must have been preserved or else there would have been an unaccountable gap in the king lists. As she always, in theory, ruled alongside Tuthmosis III it was a simple matter to drop her name from the historical record.
This casts a whole new light on the reasons underlying the proscription of Hatchepsut; while it is possible to imagine and even empathize with Tuthmosis indulging in a sudden whim of hatred against his
Fig. 8.3 Tuthmosis III and his mother Isis, boating through the Underworld
stepmother immediately after her death, it is far harder to imagine him overcome by such a whim some twenty years later. Indeed, if we can no longer be certain that Tuthmosis hated his stepmother as she lay on her deathbed, can we be certain that he ever hated her during her lifetime? There is certainly no other evidence to support the assumption that he did. Similarly, we must question whether Tuthmosis' primary motive in erasing the name of Hatchepsut was the persecution of her memory leading to the death of her soul, or whether this was merely an unfortunate side-effect of his wish to rewrite history by making himself sole ruler. In order to be fully effective, a damnatio memoriae required the complete obliteration of all cartouches and all images intended to represent the deceased. The spirit of the dead person could linger on if even one name was left intact, and Tuthmosis would have been well aware of this. Yet, as we have seen, the attacks against Hatchepsut's name and images were lackadaisical, to say the least. Of course, this begs the obvious question – if hatred was not the prime motivation behind the attacks on Hatchepsut's monuments, what was? What had Hatchepsut done to deserve this intensive persecution?
Tuthmosis III was clearly an intelligent and rational monarch. All that we know of his character suggests that he was not given to rash, impetuous acts and it seems logical to assume that throughout his life Tuthmosis was motivated less by uncontrollable urges than by calculated political expediency. We must therefore divorce his private emotions from his political actions, just as we must separate the person of Hatchepsut the woman from her role as Egypt's female pharaoh. Whatever his personal feelings towards his stepmother, Tuthmosis may well have found it advisable to remove all traces of the unconventional female king whose reign might possibly be interpreted by future generations as a grave offence against maat, and whose unorthodox co-regency might well cast serious doubt upon the legitimacy of his own right to r
ule. Hatchepsut's crime need be nothing more than the fact that she was a woman. Wounded male pride may also have played a part in his decision to act; the mighty warrior king may have balked at being recorded for posterity as the man who ruled for twenty years under the thumb of a mere woman.
Furthermore, Tuthmosis had always to consider the possibility that the first successful female king might establish a dangerous precedent. Until now this had not been a danger. Admittedly there had already been one dynastic queen-regnant, but her reign was generally acknowledged to be a brave failure; a failure which had served to underline the traditional view that a woman was basically incapable of holding the throne in her own right. Queen Sobeknofru had ruled at the very end of a fading Dynasty, and from the very start of her reign the odds had been stacked against her. She was therefore acceptable to the conservative Egyptians as a patriotic ‘Warrior Queen’ who had failed, and few would have seen reason to repeat the experiment of a female monarch.
Hatchepsut, however, was a very different case. By establishing a lengthy and successful reign in the middle of a flourishing dynasty she had managed to demonstrate that a woman could indeed become a successful king, and therefore she posed more than a temporary threat to both established custom and to the conservative interpretation of maat. It should not be assumed that Hatchepsut was the only strong-willed lady at the Tuthmoside court – indeed, Tuthmosis' refusal to reinstate the position of ‘God's Wife of Amen’ suggests that he may have been wary of granting his womenfolk additional power – and with the end of his life rapidly approaching Tuthmosis may have felt it necessary to reinforce the tradition of male succession before he died. By removing the most obvious signs of Hatchepsut's reign he could effectively delete the memory of the co-regency, and Tuthmosis himself would emerge as sole successor to Tuthmosis II. Without an obvious role-model, future generations of potentially strong female kings might remain content with their traditional lot as wife, sister and eventual mother of a king. It therefore becomes highly significant that it is only the images of Hatchepsut as king which have been defaced. Hatchepsut as queen consort – the correct place for a female royal – is still present for all the world to see. Whether Tuthmosis deliberately left a few hidden and undamaged images of his stepmother and mentor, granting her the priceless gift of eternal life, we will never know.23
But, in spite of all Tuthmosis' efforts, Hatchepsut was not destined to be Egypt's final female king, nor indeed her only conspicuous queen. Although his own queen, Meritre-Hatchepsut, was nowhere near as prominent as her illustrious predecessors, the subsequent queens of the 18th Dynasty continued to play an important and highly visible role in public life. Queen Tiy, the commoner wife of Amenhotep III, was politically active during the reign of both her husband and her son, Akhenaten, while Queen Nefertiti, Akhenaten's consort, appeared for a time to be almost as powerful as the king himself. Their daughter Ankhesenamen, widow of Tutankhamen, was independent enough to attempt to arrange her own marriage with the son of a foreign ruler. With the end of the 18th Dynasty the importance of the queens diminished slightly although Nefertari, chief wife of Ramesses II, appears in a prominent role on many monuments. Two hundred and fifty years after the death of Hatchepsut, at a time of widespread civil unrest when Egypt was moving perilously close to a total breakdown of law and order, the final Egyptian queen-regnant, Twosret, came to power. Unfortunately, such disturbed and maat-less periods tend to be very badly documented, and we have little archaeological or historical evidence with which to flesh out the bare bones of Twosret's reign.
Fig. 8.4 The High Priestess of Amen-Re, Hatchepsut
Twosret had been the principal wife of the 19th Dynasty King Seti II and, while not a member of the immediate royal family, is likely to have been of royal blood. She bore her husband no living son and, after a brief reign of no more than six years, Seti died and was succeeded on the throne by Ramesses Siptah (later known as Merenptah Siptah), his natural son by a Syrian secondary wife named Sutailja. History was starting to repeat itself as Twosret found herself required to act as regent to a young king who was not her own flesh and blood and whose physical weakness, the legacy of the childhood polio which had withered one of his legs, made him an ineffectual ruler. Once again the inevitable happened. Gradually the already powerful dowager queen started to take control, easing herself into the position of consort and co-ruler. Whether or not she actually married her ward in order to consolidate her position is unclear; on the wall of her tomb she is depicted standing behind Siptah in a typical wifely pose, but the young king's name has been erased and that of her actual husband Seti II has been substituted.
Following Siptah's early death a wave of discontent spread over the country and Twosret saw her opportunity. With no obvious successor to challenge her authority she clung on to her role as co-regent, reinforcing her position by adopting the full titulary of a male king of Egypt. She undertook the now traditional expeditions to Sinai and Palestine and commenced building works at Heliopolis and Thebes, but her solo rule was destined to be brief, possibly less than two years. She disappeared into obscurity, to be replaced by the rather nondescript pharaoh Sethnakht, founder of the 20th Dynasty, who later claimed to have ‘driven out the usurper’. Manetho preserved the name of a King Thuoris as the final king of the 19th Dynasty.
At first sight there are many obvious points of similarity between the stories of these two female kings. Both were married to relatively short-lived and somewhat ineffectual kings, both failed to produce a male heir to the throne, both were required to act as regent to an unrelated minor and, while neither had a living husband, both came under the influence of a dominant court official (Hatchepsut was supported by Senenmut; Twosret had a less certain relationship with a mysterious individual known as the Great Chancellor Bay). Both must also have been strong-minded and forceful women capable of fighting against well-established traditions and holding their own against the male-dominated establishment. However, there are also some important dissimilarities between the two reigns. Twosret, like Sobeknofru before her, came to power as the last resort of a decaying dynasty lacking any more suitable (that is, male) monarch. In spite of Sethnakht's claim she was never, as far as we know, widely perceived as a usurper, and could even be congratulated on her valiant attempt to prolong a dying line. Furthermore, Twosret's reign was not a spectacular success. It was brief, undistinguished, and left Egypt in a worse political state than it had been before she came to power. It therefore posed no threat to subsequent male rulers. This seems to have made her in many ways far more acceptable as a monarch and, although Sethnakht usurped her tomb and attempted to remove her name and image from its walls, it seems that Twosret was never subjected to the persecution inflicted on Hatchepsut's memory.24
Queen, or King, Twosret was the last native-born Egyptian queen regnant. However, over one thousand years later Egypt was again to be ruled by a handful of dominant and short-lived women, this time the Greek queens of the Ptolemaic royal family. The last of these, Cleopatra VII, has entered the public imagination not only as the archetypal Egyptian queen but as one of the most widely recognized women of all times. Her story, an intriguing cocktail of incest, passion, and tragedy played out against a louche oriental setting, was fascinating to her more strait-laced Roman contemporaries, while the fact that her actions had a direct effect on the development of the Roman Empire ensured that her history would be recorded for posterity. Plutarch, writing a good many years after her death, was clearly intrigued by reports of the queen's physical charms:
The contact of her presence, if you lived with her, was irresistible; the attraction of her person, joining with the charm of her conversation, and the character that attended all she said or did, was something bewitching. It was a pleasure merely to hear the sound of her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings, she could pass from one language to another.25
The story of Hatchepsut, a far more successful ruler but one who was less well documented, who was le
ss interestingly ‘wanton’ in her behaviour, and who played little or no part in the development of western society, has never had the power to compete with the myths and legends which have grown up around Cleopatra, beautiful ‘Serpent of the Nile’.
Cleopatra was, in spite of the legend, a rather plain woman, a direct descendant of Ptolemy I, the Macedonian general who had been made King of Egypt following the death of Alexander the Great. She ruled over one of the most fertile countries in the Mediterranean world, but it was a dissatisfied Egypt once again torn by civil unrest, chafing under Greek rule and directly influenced by the political infighting endemic in Roman politics. The royal family, heavily in debt, was in a constant state of violent feud, and Cleopatra only became queen following the untimely deaths of her father Ptolemy XII, her sister Cleopatra VI and a second sister Berenike. Her third sister Arsinoe rebelled against her rule and was eventually killed, her brother and co-regent Ptolemy XIII drowned, and her second brother–husband died in mysterious circumstances soon after their marriage. Cleopatra, the family survivor, proclaimed her infant son Caesarion (allegedly the child of Julius Caesar) co-regent, effectively making herself sole ruler of Egypt. Her reign brought a brief period of internal peace and economic stability. However, her decision to support Mark Anthony, the father of three of her children, in his power struggle with Octavian spelt disaster for Egypt. When Octavian's troops reached Alexandria in 30 BC Cleopatra and Anthony committed suicide, and Egypt was absorbed into the Roman Empire.
Long before Cleopatra's ill-fated reign, Hatchepsut had been all but forgotten by her people. Although Djeser-Djeseru continued to be recognized as a potent religious centre the name of its founder was now a distant memory, and Hatchepsut had been omitted from the king lists of Abydos and Sakkara where the succession was recorded as passing from Tuthmosis I to Tuthmosis II and then directly to Tuthmosis III. Similarly, she was excluded from the celebration of the festival of Min depicted on the wall of the Ramesseum, where again the procession of royal ancestors shows Tuthmosis I, II and III in sequence. This was not solely a royal vendetta; Hatchepsut was also missing from the non-royal tombs dating to the time of Tuthmosis III which might reasonably have been expected to include her name, and she is not even to be found amongst the 19th and 20th Dynasty private monuments of Deir el-Medina which recorded a host of far more ephemeral Tuthmoside princes and princesses. However, her memory must have lingered somewhere – possibly included on king lists which have not survived – as Manetho, writing his history of the kings of Egypt in approximately 300 BC, was able to include a female ruler named Amense or Amensis, sister of Hebron and mother of Mishragmouthosis (Tuthmosis III) as the fifth ruler of the 18th Dynasty. He accorded this female ruler a reign of either 21 years 9 months (Josephus version) or 22 years (Africanus).
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