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

by Kara Cooney

  29. Dorman, Monuments of Senenmut, 178–81.

  30. Ibid., 158–64. Dorman convincingly argues that it was petty rivalries and personal attacks that sealed the fate of Senenmut’s monuments.

  31. Translation from Karl Leser’s page on Senenmut: http://​maat-​ka-​ra.​de/.

  32. E. Dziobek, “Denkmäler des Vezirs User-Amun,” Studien zur Archäologie und Geschichte Altägyptens 18 (Heidelberg: Heidelberger Orientverlag, 1998), 144–48.

  33. Bryan, “Administration in the Reign of Thutmose III,” 70.

  34. In the later reign of Thutmose III and later in the Eighteenth Dynasty, other officials suffered the same fate as Senenmut, including the vizier Rekhmire, the scribe and royal physician Nebamen, the royal steward Surer, and the queen’s steward Kheruef.

  35. It is difficult to connect the destruction of Senenmut’s monuments directly to Hatshepsut and her aberrant rule. For example, Senenmut’s monuments weren’t defaced in the same way or for the same reason as Hatshepsut’s and vice versa. On only three of his statues were both Senenmut’s and Hatshepsut’s names chiseled away, and the removal is inconsistent in any case. On some of his statues, all of Senenmut’s names have been removed, while Hatshepsut’s remain. See Keller in Roehrig, Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh, 126.

  Here is how Peter Dorman reconstructs the destruction of Senenmut’s names and images: When Senenmut died, his tomb chamber was sealed and the sarcophagus was left or deposited in the axial corridor of TT 71. A short time after, TT 353 was broken into and defaced. Before Hatshepsut’s proscription, Senenmut’s name was hacked out in TT 71. Around the same time, at least four of his statues, most of which were dedicated at Armant, were also attacked. Around this time, his sarcophagus was destroyed. When Thutmose III attacked the memory of Hatshepsut, Senenmut’s names and images were removed from Hatshepsut’s temple of Deir el-Bahri. However, many of Senenmut’s statues remained unharmed and on display, as later Ramesside restoration proves. Other Karnak statues show damage but were kept on display as late as Ptolemaic times, as their inclusion in the Karnak cachette suggests (Monuments of Senenmut, 178–81).

  Chapter Ten: Lost Legacy

  1. Again, this is not to support the so-called heiress theory (see Robins, “Critical Examination,” 67–77), but just to stress that maternal bloodline was an important factor in the selection of the next king during the early Eighteenth Dynasty.

  2. This later date for the destruction of Hatshepsut’s monuments was first established by C. F. Nims, “The Date of the Dishonoring of Hatshepsut,” Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 93 (1966): 97–100. Also see Blyth, Karnak, 51–52, and Dorman, Monuments of Senenmut.

  3. See Dorman, Monuments of Senenmut, plates 2–4.

  4. This part of Karnak is called the Palace of Ma’at. Much of the proscription in the heart of Karnak happened when Thutmose III erected his granite barque shrine in year 45. See the UCLA Digital Karnak website on the Ma’at suite at http://​dlib.​etc.​ucla.​edu/​projects/​Karnak/​feature/​PalaceOfMaat.

  5. The defacement usually included hacking with a broad chisel first, then chiseling with a finer tool, and finally polishing the stone surface for later recarving. In Hatshepsut’s Palace of Truth, the finer chiseling is unfinished and nowhere has the surface been polished, as if the workmen stopped in the middle of the proscription process. See Dorman, Monuments of Senenmut, 63, and Ann Macy Roth, “Erasing a Reign,” in Roehrig, Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh, 277–81.

  6. O’Connor, “Thutmose III: An Enigmatic Pharaoh,” 28.

  7. Blyth, Karnak, 81–84. It is not clear who walled in the lower part of Hatshepsut’s obelisks here, saving them from damage.

  8. See the removed figure of Hatshepsut from the northern obelisk of her first pair placed at eastern Karnak, which is now in the garden at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. For images, see the obelisk page on Karl Leser’s website at http://​maat-​ka-​ra.​de/.

  9. See Blyth, Karnak, 84–86, and Dorman, Monuments of Senenmut, 65.

  10. Dorman, Monuments of Senenmut, 65.

  11. For the painstaking work done by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to reconstruct these statues, see Hayes, Scepter of Egypt, 90–102.

  12. Roehrig, Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh, 103.

  13. Dorman, Monuments of Senenmut, 64.

  14. Nims, “Date of the Dishonoring of Hatshepsut,” 97–100.

  15. Roth, “Erasing a Reign,” 281.

  16. Bryan writes, “Thus the same motivation that would have encouraged support for Hatshepsut’s sovereignty—protection of the dynastic line—also supported her dishonoring. The royal ancestry was protected carefully by replacing Hatshepsut’s name with those of Thutmose III, Thutmose I, and even Thutmose II” (“In Women Good and Bad Fortune Are on Earth,” 34).

  17. Maybe there were other sons of Thutmose III with better connections to Hatshepsut’s family who were being passed over. We have no idea if Nefrure was alive during the campaign of destruction against her mother, but members of Hatshepsut’s family, descended from Thutmose I and his queen, Ahmes, almost certainly were. Laboury creates an interesting argument for two rival dynastic lines. He says that Thutmose I had children from at least two different beds: Thutmose II was a son of Mutnofret while Hatshepsut was a daughter of Ahmes. When Thutmose I died, the kingship went to the branch of the family in which a son was still alive—namely, Mutnofret’s side. But with the premature death of the latter and the youth of Thutmose III, the other branch of the family created access to the throne through Hatshepsut. To Laboury, the fact that both Thutmose III and Hatshepsut referred only to their own family branches on their monuments supports the idea of a royal family divided: a danger to a very young crown prince, the future Amenhotep II (“Royal Portrait and Ideology,” 266–67).

  18. Prince Siamen is known from a statue of the treasurer Sennefer, who lived under Hatshepsut. See Dodson and Hilton, Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt, 132–33.

  19. Roehrig, “Eighteenth Dynasty Titles,” 111–98, 336–37, 342, and Laboury, “Royal Portrait and Ideology,” 265.

  20. Roth, “Erasing a Reign,” 281. Hatshepsut needed to be removed only to pave the way for the coregency and sole kingship of Thutmose III’s son. After that happened smoothly, all interest in erasing her stopped. Indeed, the names and images of Hatshepsut were not damaged by Thutmose IV (son of Amenhotep II), Amenhotep III, or Akhenaten, the latter so well known for his zealous interest in destroying the names and images of the god Amen. However, Hatshepsut may have been judged harshly by the Ramesside kings because she is missing from the Abydos king list of Seti I.

  21. As the Egyptologist Peter Dorman argues, “The need for the proscription seems to have arisen toward the end of his reign and to have vanished shortly after Amenhotep II became co-ruler, two years before Thutmose III’s death” (Monuments of Senenmut, 269).

  22. Hatshepsut had done much the same when she had the names and images of her husband, Thutmose II, removed from Egypt’s sacred temples. She had obliterated the images of her own brother to position herself as her father’s heir and eldest child. The existence of Thutmose II on Egypt’s monuments put the success of her own claims to the throne in jeopardy. Thutmose III was just using the same tactic: removing Hatshepsut from Egypt’s temples to create a smooth and straight dynastic path for his son Amenhotep.

  23. Laboury, “Royal Portrait and Ideology,” 264–65.

  24. The next officeholder was Tiaa, the mother of Thutmose IV.

  25. Robins, Women in Ancient Egypt, 150. Merytre-Hatshepsut had no royal blood herself and her receipt of the position was unprecedented. The machinations surrounding appointments to this priestess post are interesting because the accession of Amenhotep II resembles a change in dynasty rather than a linear succession: a king from a new dynasty must quickly assign a new God’s Wife of Amen in direct relation to the king. Amenhotep II chose his own mother for the post.

  26. Bryan, “In Wome
n Good and Bad Fortune Are on Earth,” 40.

  27. For Hatshepsut’s place in Manetho’s histories, see W. Waddell, Manetho (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: W. Heinemann, 1948), 101–19.

  28. Betsy M. Bryan, “Antecedents to Amenhotep III,” in Amenhotep III: Perspectives on His Reign, ed. David O’Connor and Eric H. Cline (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 32.

  29. Bret Hinsch, Women in Early Imperial China, Asian Voices (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

  30. Bryan, “In Women Good and Bad Fortune Are on Earth,” 28.

  31. Ibid., 29–30.

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