by Kara Cooney
Such a fate did not await every high official who worked under Hatshepsut, most of whom were retained under Thutmose III.32 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.33 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.34 While the images of Senenmut, Amenhotep, and Nehesy were destroyed, Hatshepsut’s remained largely untouched.35 But not for long. She, too, would pay for her ambitions.
TEN
Lost Legacy
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.1 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.2 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.3 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.
Near where the Red Chapel had once stood and around his own new barque shrine of gray granodiorite, Thutmose III ordered Hatshepsut erased from the surrounding suite of rooms.4 Perhaps since so few people saw these rooms, he never replaced these images with anything at all; the raw chisel marks remain as an open wound on these most sacred and intimate spaces in Karnak Temple.5 He was already distracting his elites with new monuments nearby, so perhaps no one really noticed. Around his new barque shrine he carved his own historical annals, which documented his feats, campaigns, and successes as king.6
Thutmose III never took down Hatshepsut’s obelisks, perhaps because that would have been seen as an affront to the gods or because the intense labor would have drawn more attention to his destructions than his constructions. She had already covered up the lower section of one pair of obelisks, building walls between the fourth and fifth pylons, which concealed the pertinent inscriptions and saved them from Thutmose III’s chisels.7 Apparently Thutmose III wasn’t worried about leaving the ideological essence of Hatshepsut’s names and images—and thus, in the Egyptian mind-set, her spirit—in the temple of Karnak. He simply wanted to prevent people from seeing and interacting with her as king. He did attack the other obelisks more visible to the public; craftsmen were sent to the very top of these six-story shafts with rigging and rappelling equipment so that they could remove any figures of Hatshepsut and replace them with offering tables.8
On the southern face of the eighth pylon, where her monumental statuary had already been reassigned to earlier kings, Thutmose III completely defaced the reliefs of Hatshepsut; the entire pylon was essentially left blank, with only violent chisel marks as decoration. A temple pylon was meant to introduce the king as the protector of his people and was typically decorated with images of him grasping his vile enemies by the scruff of the hair, ready to smash their skulls with a stone mace. The king’s violence was thought to protect the temple space, creating a kind of force field between the profanity of the outside world and the sacred, clean, undefiled space inside the temple walls. Thutmose III had just such an image—smiting his eastern foes—carved on the seventh pylon, but because this pylon was hidden behind the eighth (Karnak was essentially a series of pylon gateways with shrines and colonnades in between), the public standing outside the temple entrance saw only undecorated surfaces, not images of their heroic king. Perhaps Thutmose III’s seventh pylon reliefs sufficed for the festival activity that took place in this part of Karnak Temple. Indeed, it wasn’t until the reign of his son that the eighth pylon was recarved with any new reliefs.9
Across the river, the defacement of Hatshepsut’s monuments on the west bank was also under way. Thutmose III wasn’t intent on dismantling the entire temple of Djeser Djeseru, probably because the site was intensely sacred, not only to Hathor but also to Amen and to deified kingship in general. Instead, he decided to transform this structure from a funerary temple dedicated to Hatshepsut into one dedicated to his father and grandfather. He converted every possible relief image into one of these kings, and because Hatshepsut was depicted as masculine here anyway, it was relatively easy work. Some of the images at Djeser Djeseru already represented Thutmose III, and thus the structure was altered into a confirmation of how kingship could move through three generations, ending at the rightful heir—himself. Hatshepsut did not fit into this story of masculine linear succession, nor did her daughter Nefrure. They were both removed from the temple walls, although Nefrure’s images were probably already long erased by this point.
Hatshepsut’s divine birth narrative claiming godly ancestry had to be removed entirely, but the chiseling was so superficial that the text and imagery could still be easily read by any who cared to visit. The reliefs of Hatshepsut’s expedition to Punt and her obelisk scenes—some of Hatshepsut’s proudest achievements as king—were likewise only shaved down and never entirely erased. If Thutmose III redecorated these walls, he relied heavily on plaster, none of which remains today.
At Hatshepsut’s sacred funerary temple, all the ritual activity for Amen-Re, Hathor, Anubis, Re-Horakhty, and Osiris, all the incense offering, running, libation pouring, embracing, and other rites were assigned to different kings. It was now Thutmose I, Thutmose II, and Thutmose III who facilitated these most sacred rites as depicted in the reliefs. It must be said that Thutmose III may not have viewed his activities as destruction but rather as a transformation, senefer, “making good.” Regardless of any rationalized justification, Hatshepsut was still deprived of an eternal afterlife as chief priest and king in these temples; she was relegated to a few images in Karnak and elsewhere as queen, wife, and mother. As king she had merely been a placeholder.
It was the Djeser Akhet, Thutmose III’s new temple just south of Hatshepsut’s, that saved Djeser Djeseru from complete obliteration, because it created an architectural complex unifying all the buildings at the site, a visible manifestation in stone of three generations of kings.10 After Thutmose’s recarving, the bay of cliffs at Deir el-Bahri could be seen as containing an orderly progression of structures dedicated to the kingship of the Theban ancestors (Mentuhotep II’s funerary complex), to his father and his grandfather (Djeser Djeseru), and to his own cult (Djeser Akhet).
The statues from Hatshepsut’s funerary temple were probably a great annoyance for Thutmose III, as they could not be converted into other kings without extensive recarving of the face and sometimes of the body as well. Despite the expense of stones like red granite, which other later New Kingdom kings (like Ramses II) would have been more than happy to reuse rather than throw away, Thutmose III decided that the best course of action was the removal and complete destruction of al
l of Hatshepsut’s statuary. Crews of men pulled down and smashed the dozens of colossal limestone statues of Hatshepsut as Osiris that fronted the temple colonnades. A row of standing Osiris-Hatshepsut divinities fronting each colonnade was renovated into a row of plain rectangular columns, which lent Deir el-Bahri a more austere, and perhaps less Egyptian, air.
Thutmose III ordered any freestanding statues of his aunt utterly destroyed—one depicted her wearing a dress in combination with the king’s nemes headdress; another showed her wearing a masculine kilt but with girlish breasts on her bare chest. Most of the statues from Djeser Djeseru, however, depicted her in an orthodox fashion, as a strong man kneeling before the gods in the act of offering jars, vessels, or insignia. But all of these statues, too, even though they could have been easily reassigned like the colossi in front of the eighth pylon, were dragged down the ramps of the temple from their sanctuaries or processional avenues and into the courtyards below, where they were brutally smashed.11
The ancient Egyptians believed that harming a statue or removing a name could provoke the dead. Angry ghosts could visit considerable devastation upon the living. Hatshepsut had been a formidable personality in life and remained a force to be reckoned with after her death. The priests must have tried to calm Hatshepsut’s spirit during all of this destruction by performing spells and incantations or placating her with food and drink offerings. We don’t know how the Egyptians justified this destruction in their own minds. All we have is the devastation they left behind.
Thutmose III’s craftsmen were instructed in how to best annihilate these statues, presumably so that they could deactivate them and break the link between Hatshepsut and the kingship. Every statue was purposefully and directly struck at the uraeus cobra on her forehead, severing the queen from her kingly rule in one swift blow. And each one had erasures or strikes where Hatshepsut had been named king, thus cutting the owner from the royal titulary. These explicitly destructive ritual actions were likely performed first, and then the statues were haphazardly struck to pieces. Workmen used an old limestone quarry near the Djeser Djeseru temple causeway—ignominiously termed the “Hatshepsut Hole” by twentieth-century archaeologists—as a dumping ground for the fragments of Hatshepsut’s once grand statuary.
