The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt

by Kara Cooney

  During the early Eighteenth Dynasty, the role of King’s Great Wife was a singular position held by a woman of royal blood, usually the king’s sister. However, Satiah, Thutmose III’s best-known Great Wife, whom he married around the time of Hatshepsut’s death, had no royal blood at all. She was the daughter of the official Ahmose Pennekhbet.21 One of his stelae even named Satiah as God’s Wife of Amen, suggesting that Thutmose III also took this most precious office away from Nefrure and gave it to a woman with no bloodline connection to himself. Many Egyptologists, however, point out that Satiah is only named God’s Wife once and in a place where Nefrure’s name may have originally appeared. If Satiah did serve as God’s Wife, she held the office only until Thutmose III’s daughter Merytamen was old enough to replace her.22

  Another of Thutmose III’s wives who was given the honor of being immortalized on temple walls was Merytre-Hatshepsut, almost certainly not a daughter of Hatshepsut, because she never held the title King’s Daughter. Likely one of the many Ornaments of the King brought into the palace for his pleasure, this girl would soon realize her importance as the mother of many boys who managed to live through scourges and epidemics and who might grow up to be rulers.

  The most highborn son of Thutmose III seems to have been Amenemhat, the possible offspring of Nefrure. The child may have been eight to ten years old at this point, and he was named an overseer of cattle in year 23 of Thutmose III’s reign, likely administering that position with help from royal agents and tutors.23 Thutmose III had produced a son who had survived the perils of childhood and was ready for his training to become a viable king, ensuring the future of the Thutmoside dynasty. Nefrure was never explicitly named as the boy’s mother, or the mother of any sons in fact, but such an omission does not necessarily discount her. It suggests that we are now dealing with a wary king who was unwilling to give any of his wives political power by marking them as mothers of princes on his monuments. If Nefrure wasn’t the mother, there were other candidates, such as Thutmose III’s wife Satiah.24 Or perhaps Nefrure is never mentioned as the mother because now that Thutmose III was trying to distance himself from his dead aunt, he had to cut out her daughter as well.

  Almost all of the women and children in the king’s harem remain unnamed—vexing historians who want to know the method used to choose Thutmose III’s successor. During the Eighteenth Dynasty especially, it was not considered appropriate to show children in any formal reliefs or statuary because these royal children were all potential heirs, queens, and priestesses, and until they were fully indoctrinated in an office, there was no reason to formally inscribe their names anywhere.25 Daughters were more likely to be named on formal monuments than sons. After all, daughters could officially act for the king as ritual protectors and sexual exciters; no such ritual role existed for sons during their father’s reign.

  Such a gender disparity in the representation of royal offspring shouldn’t be surprising. The Egyptians seem to have understood that it was politically threatening to show male royal family members on their sacred monuments, because it may have provided them with a religious claim to political power. Royal women, on the other hand, were largely cut out of administrative office, and thus they could be included in the king’s public life. It was the assumed innocuousness of such women that allowed them to be represented. Only rarely could King’s Daughters like Hatshepsut and Nefrure break out of such strictures and find a platform for real governmental rule.

  Thus the carving of Thutmose III’s eldest son Amenemhat into the stone blocks of Karnak Temple must have been a significant move for the Egyptians, a testament to the plans that were being made for him. The fact that his name was incised into a sacred space dedicated to the eternal continuity of kingship from father to son is even more telling, encouraging the presumption that he was to be the next king. But, as was so often the case in the ancient world, the boy disappeared before he could fulfill these royal plans. If he died, there is no record of the circumstances in Egyptian documents. It is also possible that Thutmose III decided, for reasons unknown, that Amenemhat was not fit to serve as the next king. This last point highlights how little we know about the royal succession or about how the living king chose his heir from among his sons. In the end, all of that investment in the boy did not amount to anything. He disappeared from the historical record, leaving his father, Thutmose III, without his chosen son and with the anxiety of having to groom another crown prince.

  Either way, Thutmose III had to make do with the offspring of his lesser wives, knowing that boys who resulted from these unions would not have a bloodline hearkening back to the old kings or linked to the higherborn queens in his harem. And this genealogical deficiency seems to have been the tipping point for Thutmose III and his formal relationship with his dead aunt. At some point, he must have realized that just the mere remembrance of Hatshepsut’s legitimate ancestry was a severe liability to him, something he needed to erase utterly from Egypt’s sacred temples. If he was going to have to pick a future king from the harem of lesser wives anyway, then he had to find alternative ways of bolstering such a son’s rights to the throne by changing the system of royal succession in his favor. Since he himself had likely been such a lesser son, the claim for legitimate kingship had to begin with him and his own lineage, direct from his grandfather, Thutmose I, and down to his own chosen son and heir.

  In true Egyptian fashion, Thutmose III started with the temple, tying the legitimacy of his successor to that of his own ideologically grounded, public image. If his portrait still resembled Hatshepsut, then his kingship would be perceived as dependent on her support. Now that he knew his heir would come from a lesser wife, just like he himself had, perhaps he worried that the boy might suffer from the same doubts of lineage. Thutmose decided that he needed a makeover, and during the next decade he crafted his public representations to differentiate himself from Hatshepsut as much as possible. He worked to create the perfect portrait of himself, and the surviving texts suggest he actually gave personal instructions to his sculptors so that they got it right.26 Around year 42, almost twenty years after his Megiddo campaign, he officially changed his portrait to resemble that of his father and grandfather. Most Egyptologists agree that his father, Thutmose II, had only been able to order a few statues to grace the halls of Egypt’s temples because his reign had been so short. But images of his grandfather, Thutmose I, were much more commonplace, and the grandson now chose to emulate the portrait of his grandfather, connecting himself with Thutmose I’s Osirian statues from Karnak’s wadjyt hall and from the old king’s relief imagery in the heart of Karnak.

  Then, a few years later, Thutmose III started construction on a new temple on the west bank at Deir el-Bahri that could compete in innovation, magnificence, and visibility with Hatshepsut’s funerary temple at Djeser Djeseru. He called it Djeser Akhet, “Holy of Horizon,” and he built it right next to his aunt’s looming masterpiece. Strangely, in his zeal to best Hatshepsut, he ended up copying both her architecture (mimicking the multiple tiers and ramps) and her choice of placement (locating his temple in the same sacred bay of cliffs across from Karnak Temple). His structure was smaller, but he placed it higher up on the cliff side—so high that an earthquake eventually caused its collapse, probably not that long after his reign was over. The construction of this temple so close to Hatshepsut’s most visible monument may seem surprising if he was really trying to distance himself from the dead female king. Even the choice of name, Djeser Akhet, seems derivative of Hatshepsut’s Djeser Djeseru, and indeed it came from the name of the solar altar within Hatshepsut’s temple. It seems he felt that Djeser Djeseru’s holiness transcended the identity of the person who built it. Hatshepsut’s temple was considered so beloved and so sacred that his best choice was to associate himself with its prominence. He kept her temple, even embellishing it, despite the presence of his aunt that haunted its colonnades and shrines.

  While Hatshepsut’s nephew was working to establish his legacy, he
r greatest supporter was scrambling. Senenmut, old as he was, may have lived into the reign of Thutmose III, and while the nature of his relationship with the new administration is unclear, he was likely doing his best to stay in the court’s good graces. During the early years of Hatshepsut’s regency and reign, Senenmut had mentioned only her and her daughter in the hieroglyphic texts on his statues and monuments, but in the last years of her reign, he obviously felt the need to start lauding Thutmose III, too,27 a decision that was probably connected to the year 16 jubilee and the larger part Thutmose III took in Egypt’s rule as he came of age. Whatever the exact political reasons, it represents a shift away from Senenmut’s earlier thinking that loyalty to Hatshepsut was all he required. By all accounts, Senenmut possessed a calculating mind, and he had probably been trying to find inroads into Thutmose III’s entourage and court even before Hatshepsut’s death.

  When Hatshepsut died, Senenmut lost his most important link to power and influence. And he suffered as a result. His monuments dwindled in number during Thutmose III’s sole reign, most likely because he did not have the same unfettered access to high-quality stone and craftsmen that he had enjoyed during Hatshepsut’s kingship. His images were no longer carved into the king’s funerary temple, or into any of the niches of Thutmose III’s state temple structures. Nor was he named tutor to any of Thutmose III’s children as he had been with Hatshepsut’s. Instead, Senenmut was only able to scrape together the resources to commission a few statues, which at the very least suggests that he was a survivor, able to stay visible on the political-religious scene even without his patron Hatshepsut. But it also signals that Thutmose III’s sole kingship marked the beginning of Senenmut’s downfall.

  Some of Senenmut’s statues were found by archaeologists in situ at Thutmose III’s Djeser Akhet temple, and one statue fragment includes hieroglyphic text specifically mentioning this later temple at Deir el-Bahri. Because this temple was not started until year 43 of Thutmose III’s reign, this provides evidence that Senenmut lived to a venerable old age, perhaps into his late sixties or early seventies, continuing on in public service for about twenty years after his mistress’s death.28

  Work on his tomb construction was stopped suddenly while the chambers were still quite incomplete. His tomb chapel (Theban Tomb 71) included the unusual touch of a block statue atop the structure depicting the tomb owner as a tutor, squatting with his cloak wrapped around his young pupil, Princess Nefrure, as she would have appeared as a small child. It was carved out of the live rock on the summit above the tomb—a visible transmission to all his fellow elites of his close connection to Hatshepsut’s family. This statue was never completed even though the limestone from which it was cut was quite soft and easy to carve. Something or somebody stopped it from being finished.

  Senenmut’s extensive burial chamber (Theban Tomb 353) was not located underneath his tomb chapel as was the norm. Instead, he followed his king and located the burial chamber near Hatshepsut’s temple Djeser Djeseru, probably so that his body would always be near her eternal cult and the pioneering temple he had labored so hard to create. His underground burial chamber was crafted as a series of rooms and staircases that descended to the west, toward Hatshepsut’s temple enclosure and the Valley of the Kings where his mistress was buried. Only the first of Senenmut’s burial chambers had decorated walls, and these were not fully finished. More strangely still, this first chamber was filled with limestone rubble cut from the lower two chambers, themselves only roughly carved and completely undecorated. The fill in the burial chambers was never cleared, which leads us to believe that Senenmut’s body was never interred here. The tomb was sealed without his corpse inside it.

  We can only speculate as to why work stopped on this tomb. Perhaps Senenmut died, and the workmen quit in the absence of payment. Or maybe the project was disrupted during Thutmose III’s sole reign when Senenmut lost most of his influence, leaving him with no access to the workers and funds needed to continue construction on his extensive tomb. If so, Senenmut ceased work on his sepulchers during his own lifetime, content to use them in their incomplete state for his eventual burial.

  His ostensible lack of a wife or a son to bury him might explain why his body was never interred in his burial chamber at Theban Tomb 353, but it does not help us understand the greatest mystery about Senenmut. Inexplicably, his quartzite sarcophagus was dragged up the steep slope to his tomb chapel on the top of Gurna hill. Not only was Senenmut’s sarcophagus in the wrong place—located in the corridor of his accessible tomb chapel and not in a sealed burial chamber underground—but there is no evidence that he was ever buried in the priceless quartzite object: no linens, mummy parts, amulets, remains of embalming resins, or any of the detritus of death that is so common in the western hills of Thebes.

  And Senenmut’s final end is even more peculiar. At some point, the sarcophagus was completely destroyed, smashed into hundreds of pieces. Usually when an individual died while his tomb was still in progress, the structure was simply left unfinished while the owner was buried in a shaft beneath the chapel. But this is not what happened to Senenmut. There is absolutely no evidence that he was interred underneath his tomb chapel, which has no burial chambers at all—they were all far away at Deir el-Bahri. His final resting place and the circumstances of his burial remain a mystery. The information we do have speaks only to a bad ending for poor Senenmut, alone and friendless, lacking the great resources that he had once amassed during his lifetime under Hatshepsut.

  Archaeological evidence indicates that Senenmut’s statuary, tomb chapel, and even his sarcophagus, the priceless quartzite body container he received as a gift from his patroness the king, were all defaced and destroyed. The assault on Senenmut’s tomb chapels and burial chambers—and even the intentional defacement of his names and images—seems to have happened either around year 40 of Thutmose III’s reign29 or perhaps later, around year 43, when Thutmose III was building his new temple of Djeser Akhet. It is even possible that Senenmut was still alive to witness his own annihilation. The Egyptologist Peter Dorman has argued that the pattern of attack suggests opportunistic enemies of Senenmut rather than the king’s agents. In other words, Thutmose III probably did not order the destruction of Senenmut’s names and images because the attacks were neither systematic nor thorough. People seem to have taken the matter into their own hands and fulfilled their personal vendettas against this man who had angered so many. Using a number of different methods, from careful chiseling to rough hacking, they erased his legacy when they found the time and energy. Whatever the justification, the destruction of a hard quartzite sarcophagus would have required extensive labor and considerable expense. Someone really wanted him disgraced.

  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 wit
h 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.”31 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.