by Kara Cooney
35. This precise orientation has since been shifted by earthquakes, but the sun does still enter the sanctuary on the winter solstice. It just does not hit the statues anymore. See J. Karkowski, “The Decoration of the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari,” in Queen Hatshepsut and Her Temple 3500 Years Later, ed. Z. Szafrañskj (Cairo: Warsaw University Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology in Cairo, 2001): 99–157.
36. The translation of all sections of this extraordinary text is after James P. Allen, “The Speos Artemidos Inscription of Hatshepsut,” Bulletin of the Egyptological Seminar 16 (2002): 1–17. Warburton points out that Hatshepsut was likely using Middle Kingdom monarchs as her inspiration when she claimed she was only doing what the god wanted and commanded (Architecture, Power, and Religion, 128).
Chapter Seven: The King Becomes a Man
1. Spalinger, “Covetous Eyes South,” in Cline and O’Connor, Thutmose III: A New Biography, 344–69, esp. 354.
2. For example, see A. H. Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 189, and H. E. Winlock, “The Egyptian Expedition 1925–1927: The Museum’s Excavations at Thebes,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 23, no. 2 (1928): 52. For a discussion of such patriarchal scholarship, see Joyce Tyldesley, Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (London: Viking, 1996), 137–40.
3. In year 12 we see evidence of another campaign to Kerma on a rock inscription at Tangur. See Davies, “Egypt and Nubia,” 52. Another campaign, which is undated but likely earlier, was led by Hatshepsut herself according to a biographical inscription at Sehel belonging to the royal chancellor Ty. Redford says there is reliable evidence to prove at least four campaigns during Hatshepsut’s rule and perhaps as many as six if the different campaigns mentioned in some Deir el-Bahri inscriptions are included (History and Chronology of the Eighteenth Dynasty, 62). According to another account by Overseer of the Treasury Djehuty in Theban Tomb 11, Hatshepsut accompanied her troops to Kush. Djehuty records that the queen engaged in the collection of booty personally. See Habachi, “Two Graffiti at Sehēl,” 88–104. But compare the more conservative view taken by Spalinger, “Covetous Eyes South,” in Cline and O’Connor, Thutmose III: A New Biography, 344–69.
4. O’Connor, “Thutmose III: An Enigmatic Pharaoh,” 6.
5. See Manfred Bietak, “Egypt and the Aegean: Cultural Convergence in a Thutmoside Palace at Avaris,” in Roehrig, Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh, 75–81.
6. For this idea of manifest destiny in Egyptian imperialism, see Bryan, “Administration in the Reign of Thutmose III,” 103.
7. Tyldesley notes that “the Thutmosides evidently had a family tendency towards shortness” (Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh, 125). Elliot G. Smith (The Royal Mummies, Catalogue général des antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Caire, nos. 61051-61100 [Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1912], 34) found the mummy of Thutmose III to be only 1.615 meters (5′3″), but some have argued that he was measured without his feet (Dennis C. Forbes, Tombs, Treasures, Mummies: Seven Great Discoveries of Egyptian Archaeology [Santa Rosa, CA: Kmt Communications, 1998], 631), indicating he was actually taller, maybe 5′6″. The most recent examination of Thutmose III’s mummy found it to be 175 centimeters (Z. Hawass, “Quest for the Mummy of Hatschepsut,” Kmt: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt 17, no. 2 (2006).
8. Roth points out that Hatshepsut is shown with a feminized male body (with breasts and narrow shoulders but no shirt or dress) only in the innermost sacred areas at Deir el-Bahri, in the sanctuaries of Amen and Hathor (“Models of Authority,” 13n2).
9. See Dorman’s summation in “The Early Reign of Thutmose III,” 52.
10. For the Egyptological study that lists all the known attestations of Sed festivals throughout history, see Erik Hornung and Elisabeth Staehelin, Studien zum Sedfest, Aegyptiaca Helvetica (Basel: Edition de Belles Lettres, 1974).
11. Another dating scheme might work for the jubilee; perhaps she celebrated her thirtieth year of life as thirty years of reign. No matter what, her priests were engaged in some serious numerology to justify the Sed. See Tyldesley, Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh, 110.
12. Some Egyptologists have suggested that she started her idealized reign with the death of Thutmose I, and thus this year 15 was really year 30, but the calculation only works if Thutmose II ruled for thirteen years or more (13 + 15 = 28). For discussion, see Jürgen von Beckerath, Chronologie des ägyptischen Neuen Reiches, HÄB 39 (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1994), 111, and Dorman, “The Early Reign of Thutmose III,” 39–68, especially 60n2.
13. For information about and scenes from the Sed festival, see E. P. Uphill, “A Joint Sed-Festival of Thutmose III and Queen Hatshepsut,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 20, no. 4 (1961), and Hermann Kees, Der Opfertanz des Ägyptischen Königs (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1912).
14. One obelisk from this pair still stands, and I have included extensive translations from it already. For the inscriptions on the base and shaft, see Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 2:25–29.
15. Dorman, Monuments of Senenmut, 129–30.
16. Laboury, “Royal Portrait and Ideology,” 274–75.
17. For a discussion of such scenes, see H. Brunner, Die Geburt des Gottkönigs: Studien zur Überlieferung eines altägyptischen Mythos (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1986). For a discussion online, go to the Second Portico of the Djeser-Djeseru section on Karl Leser’s website at http://maat-ka-ra.de/.
18. The translation is based on Warburton, Architecture, Power, and Religion, 229.
19. For recently uncovered fragments showing similar divine birth scenes from the mortuary temple of Senwosret III of the Middle Kingdom, see Dieter Arnold, “Neue architektonische Erkenntnisse von der Pyramide Sesostris III in Dashur,” Sokar: Geschichte und Archäologie Ägyptens 23, no. 2 (2011), and Adela Oppenheim, “The Early Life of Pharaoh: Divine Birth and Adolescence Scenes in the Causeway of Senwosret III at Dahshur,” in Abusir and Saqqara in the Year 2010, ed. Miroslav Bárta, Filip Coppens, and Jaromír Krejčí (Prague: Czech Institute of Egyptology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, 2011).
20. Assmann, Egyptian Solar Religion (London: Kegan Paul International, 1995), 102–32, and Arielle P. Kozloff and Betsy M. Bryan, Egypt’s Dazzling Sun: Amenhotep III and His World (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 96–97.
21. This translation is based on Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 2, 26.
22. Lana Troy, “Religion and Cult During the Time of Thutmose III,” in Cline and O’Connor, Thutmose III: A New Biography, 131, 138–39. Also see Jan Assmann, Der König als Sonnenpriester: Ein kosmographischer Begleittext zur kultischen Sonnenhymnik in thebanischen Tempeln und Gräbern, Ägyptologische Reihe Bd. 7 (Kairo: Abhandlungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts Kairo, 1970), 102–32.
23. The text is from Hatshepsut’s solar chapel at Deir el-Bahri. See J. Karkowski, The Temple of Hatshepsut: The Solar Complex (Warsaw, 2003). The translation is based on Assmann, Egyptian Solar Religion, 24.
24. For imagery, digital modeling, and a bibliography on the eighth pylon, see the UCLA Digital Karnak website at http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Karnak/feature/PylonVIII.
25. For this site, see Oriental Institute Epigraphic Survey, ed., Medinet Habu, vol. 9, The Eighteenth Dynasty Temple, pt. 1, The Inner Sanctuaries, Oriental Institute Publications 136 (Chicago: Oriental Institute of Chicago, 2009).
26. There is evidence that such rituals already existed in the Middle Kingdom, but they do not consistently show up in Egyptian temple architecture until Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Hatshepsut included these rituals in texts at her funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri and at the Mut precinct at Karnak. They seem to be associated with Valley Festival activities. See Bryan, “Temple of Mut,” 182.
27. Betsy M. Bryan, “Hatshepsut and Cultic Revelries in the New Kingdom,” in Galán, Bryan, and Dorman, Theban Symposium.
28. In the
Eighteenth Dynasty, kings had multiple wives, although their harems were likely relatively small, at least at the start of the dynasty and in comparison to later Ramesside harems. We know who some of their royal wives were from private monuments of their family members, nurses, tutors, and officials, as well as from funerary objects. Royal wives were usually not depicted in temples or on royal monuments, unless they were the most important queens. Likewise, few of the royal offspring of Eighteenth Dynasty kings are known; however, this was not the case for later kings, such as Ramses II in Dynasty 19, who depicted his many children in his Temples of Millions of Years. The depiction of Nefrure in Egypt’s temples alongside Hatshepsut after her ascension as king is thus telling of her increasing status. See Robins, Women in Ancient Egypt, 36.
29. There is a great deal of debate about whether Thutmose III and Nefrure were ever married at all. As we are unlikely to find evidence of their sexual relationship—such as texts documenting their offspring—we are left to look for instances of her name as a high-ranking queen. However, nearly every instance of Nefrure’s name was removed from the historical record after her death and replaced with the name of another queen of Thutmose III. Therefore, it is difficult to reconstruct their relationship. There is evidence that Nefrure appeared as God’s Wife of Amen with Thutmose III in year 22 or 23, only to be erased in favor of a woman named Satiah when Thutmose III began his sole reign. In other words, if Nefrure was the king’s Great Royal Wife, then she was removed from that office either because she died or because Thutmose III wanted her gone. See Dorman, Monuments of Senenmut.
30. Although Nefrure was often named as God’s Wife, on Hatshepsut’s later Red Chapel, depictions of the God’s Wife were left unnamed. Three scenes from the Red Chapel show a woman performing as God’s Wife, and we might assume that this girl was Nefrure during the reign of Hatshepsut. See Burgos and Larché, eds., La chapelle Rouge, vol. 1, blocks 140, 292.
31. The stela is currently in the Cairo Museum (JdÉ 38546). See Peter F. Dorman, “The Career of Senenmut,” in Roehrig, Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh, 108.
32. Arielle P. Kozloff, “The Artistic Production of the Reign of Thutmose III,” in Cline and O’Connor, Thutmose III: A New Biography, 297.
33. Given that most of Nefrure’s monumental inscriptions were recarved, Egyptologists have had to look for traces of her name to reconstruct her titles and thus her place in society as God’s Wife of Amen and Great Royal Wife. Some argue that Nefrure was never named King’s Wife at all. For instance, there is one stela that may depict Thutmose III and Nefrure together, and here she was marked as God’s Wife of Amen, not as Thutmose’s wife. This stela was usurped by a later wife, Satiah. It comes from the Ptah temple at Karnak, is now in the Cairo Museum (CG 34013), and dates from the early years of Thutmose III’s sole reign. Another stela that may have originally shown Nefrure was found in the funerary temple of Thutmose III at Sheikh abd el-Gurna (CG 34015); her name may have been erased for his mother, Isis (although this is contested by Piccione). For discussion of all these historical documents, see Troy, Patterns of Queenship, 164. For an image of the Cairo stela CG 34013, see Peter J. Brand, The Monuments of Seti I: Epigraphic, Historical, and Art Historical Analysis, Probleme Der Ägyptologie, 16 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), fig. 51. For discussion of the recutting of the Ptah temple stela, see P. A. Piccione, “The Women of Thutmose III in the Stelae of the Egyptian Museum,” Journal of the Society of the Study of Egyptian Antiquities 30 (2003): 91–100. This Ptah temple stela shows a woman labeled as the King’s Great Wife and the God’s Wife of Amen, and this figure could indeed have once been Nefrure. Robins, however, argues that while a sun disk is clearly visible, it is off center, even though this Re element of Nefrure’s name was always centered. Because of this, Robins claims that this was originally the name Merytre-Hatshepsut; she was also a wife of Thutmose III, and the sun disk in her name often appears off center. See Robins, “Review of Patterns of Queenship.”
Chapter Eight: The Setting Sun
1. For the timing of his change of throne name and its connection to the jubilee, see Uphill, “Joint Sed-Festival,” 250.
2. Made of alabaster, this shrine was built by Amenhotep I; its translucent qualities caught the lamplight. For a discussion of Hatshepsut’s new placement of this monument and Thutmose III’s later dismantlement, see Blyth, Karnak, 52–53. For a reconstruction, see the UCLA Digital Karnak website at http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Karnak/feature/AmenhotepICalciteChapel. Hatshepsut seems to have had a penchant for picking the most sacred places in Thebes, dismantling the structures on-site, and erecting her own innovative edifices in their place. She was very confident about her architectural agenda.
3. The Red Chapel was found dismantled inside of Amenhotep III’s third pylon. That is why the original location of Hatshepsut’s masterpiece has been much debated. Some Egyptologists think that it was placed in the middle of the Palace of Truth, where the shrine of Philip Arrhidaeus is today; however, her structure seems too big to have actually fit in this space. If it was somehow jammed into her Palace of Truth, such placement would have severely limited the Red Chapel’s visibility. Newer Egyptological thinking places the Red Chapel in the Great Festival Court of Thutmose II, in front of the Palace of Truth, where Hatshepsut could better display her divine predestination and ritual activity to her people and where the structure could better function as a barque shrine with an entrance and an exit. See Franck Burgos and François Larché, eds., La chapelle Rouge: Le sanctuaire de barque d’Hatshepsout, vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 2008); Warburton, Architecture, Power, and Religion, 236; and Blyth, Karnak, 57. For a reconstruction of the Red Chapel in different possible locations, see the UCLA Digital Karnak website at http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Karnak/feature/RedChapel.
4. For the Palace of Ma’at, see the UCLA Digital Karnak website at http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Karnak/feature/PalaceOfMaat.
5. It was during Hatshepsut’s reign that we see a new emphasis on solarism and the cults of solar gods. She built solar altars for the first time in sandstone, a material evoking the sun. Bryan writes, “The piety and divine engenderment so consistently expressed by Hatshepsut was a source of inspiration to Amenhotep III. For it is this queen whom the later king imitated, even including a form of her divine birth reliefs and inscriptions in his new Luxor Temple. It was almost certainly her original plan to bring the southern temples of Thebes into a cultic cycle with Karnak that Amenhotep III explored and very nearly accomplished” (Kozloff and Bryan, Egypt’s Dazzling Sun, 96–97).
6. A speech of the god Amen recorded on Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel includes many ritual duties for the king, including: “Fill the estate, supply the altar. Instruct the wab priest regarding their tasks. Advance the laws. Perpetuate the regulations. Enrich the property. Increase that which existed previously. Expand the space of my treasuries. Build without neglecting sandstone or granite. Renew for my temple the statues in good quality limestone. Advance this work for me in the future. Control the monuments of the temples. Install every god according to his (own) regulations. Each one there exactly according to his means. Advance his primeval time for him. Advancing his laws is the joy of a god.” For the translation, see Troy, “Religion and Cult,” 134.
7. Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom kings likely instituted cult activity for royal statues, but we have little direct representation of the practice in their temples.
8. Another block from the Red Chapel shows just such a priestess. It was carved with a woman’s figure labeled as the God’s Wife of Amen performing cult activity for the gods in the courtyard of the temple with attendants burning effigies of Egypt’s enemies upon a brazier of coals. She was meant to ritually roast these vile combatants alive. This female figure was not labeled as Nefrure, but if Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel was carved during the last five years of her reign and if Nefrure was still alive at this po
int, then the image was likely meant to have represented her. Why she is not named as such remains a vexing problem for Egyptologists. See Burgos and Larché, La chapelle Rouge, vol. 1: blocks 140, 292.
9. See Dorman, Monuments of Senenmut, 79, and Schnittger, Hatschepsut, 24. There is actually no direct evidence that Nefrure was Amenemhat’s mother; see Bryan, “Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 238. For the suggestion that Satiah was the prince’s mother, see Dodson and Hilton, Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt, 132.
10. For the argument that Nefrure was being groomed by her mother for the kingship, see Z. Szafrański, “Imiut in the ‘Chapel of Parents’ in the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari,” in 8. Ägyptologische Tempeltagung: Inter-connections Between Temples, ed. Monika Dolinska and Horst Beinlich, Königtum, Staat und Gesellschaft früher Hochkulturen 3 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010). Szafrański uses art historical evidence to make his case. The female figure in question is on the south side of the upper terrace at Hatshepsut’s temple of Djeser Djeseru. She was recarved and relabeled as Hatshepsut’s mother, Ahmes, and Szafrański thinks the image originally represented Nefrure.
11. Troy, Patterns of Queenship, 141.
12. This stela from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai is now in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum (JdÉ 38546). See Dorman, “Royal Steward Senenmut,” 108.
13. Troy, Patterns of Queenship, 133–38.
14. Szafrański, “Imiut in the ‘Chapel of Parents.’ ”
15. When I say that Egyptologists only whisper about Hatshepsut’s possible murder, I mean that most do not want such unsubstantiated claims in print. Egyptologists today are loath to make the claim that either Hatshepsut or Nefrure may have been assassinated, probably because they are reacting to the unfounded and heavy-handed patriarchal arguments of early Egyptology (that Senenmut was Hatshepsut’s lover, for example, or that she was incapable of directing military campaigns—two claims for which there was never any real evidence), in addition to a healthy fear of appearing sensationalist in the manner of Bob Brier’s The Murder of Tutankhamen: A True Story (New York: Putnam, 1998). What Egyptologists put in print is often different from what they might say at the bar among friends. In keeping with such hypothetical claims, Warburton places his intimations about Nefrure’s murder (and even Hatshepsut’s) in a footnote (Architecture, Power, and Religion, 55–56n213.
