The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  His son arose in his place as king of the Two Lands, having assumed rule upon the throne of his begetter; while his sister, the god’s wife Hatshepsut, conducted the affairs of the land, the Two Lands being in her counsels. She is served; Egypt bows [its] head.7

  Her position as god’s wife gave her some authority, especially in the Theban region, but Hatshepsut and her courtiers must have been acutely aware that she was not the king’s mother, merely his stepmother and aunt. For her to exercise full control of the government would require appropriate ideological cover and proper theological justification. Her first bold step was to adopt the equivalent of a royal throne name, which she used alongside her queenly titles. Then, seven years into the new regency, in 1473, Hatshepsut made the determined and irrevocable decision to adopt the full panoply of kingship: the regalia of crowns and scepters and the hallowed titles and styles of Egyptian monarchy. Although she had to share the throne with her young stepson, there was no doubting who was the senior co-regent. Hatshepsut’s reign had begun in earnest.

  In the wake of such an unorthodox accession, the new female king and her advisers embarked on a concerted program of myth-making to bolster her legitimacy. They promoted the story of her divine birth, and rewrote history to have her elected as heir apparent during her father’s lifetime. On monuments and inscriptions, she consciously emphasized her father’s achievements, calling herself “the king’s firstborn daughter,” and studiously ignored the brief reign of her late husband. It was as if Thutmose II had never existed and the throne had passed directly from Thutmose I to Hatshepsut.

  This sleight of hand may have convinced some of her detractors, but there was still the awkward question of her gender. The ideology of kingship required—demanded—a male ruler. Yet Hatshepsut, as her very name announced, was female. Her response to this conundrum was deeply schizophrenic. On some monuments, especially those dating from the time before her accession, she had the images recarved to show her as a man. On others, she had female epithets applied to male monarchs of the past, in an apparent attempt to “feminize” her ancestors. Even when portrayed as a man, Hatshepsut often used grammatically feminine epithets, describing herself as the daughter (rather than son) of Ra, or the lady (rather than lord) of the Two Lands. The tension between male office and female officeholder was never satisfactorily resolved. Little wonder that Hatshepsut’s advisers came up with a new circumlocution for the monarch. From now on, the term for the palace, per-aa (literally “great house”), was applied also to its chief inhabitant. Peraa—pharaoh—now became the unique designation of the Egyptian ruler.

  While Thutmose I had concentrated his efforts on building an empire, his daughter’s greatest desire was to deck Egypt with buildings befitting its new status. Hatshepsut’s reign is remarkable for the sheer number and audacity of her monuments, from a rock-cut shrine deep in the mountains of Sinai to a stone-built temple inside the fortress of Buhen, in Nubia. But it was Thebes that benefited most from her plans. The city’s sacred landscape, laid out at the very beginning of the New Kingdom, offered Hatshepsut unrivaled opportunities to associate herself ever more closely with the state god Amun-Ra, and hence to silence her critics and doubters once and for all. For generations, Amun-Ra’s chief temple at Ipetsut had enjoyed a theological importance belied by its rather modest proportions. Hatshepsut changed all that. She set about transforming it into a true national shrine, adding a “noble pillared hall”8 between her father’s two monumental gateways. At the core of the temple she reshaped the Middle Kingdom sanctuary, while on the south side her architects created a vast new gateway, the largest to date, fronted by six colossal statues of the female king. Nearby, she erected a chapel carved from blocks of red sandstone and black granite, each of them decorated with exquisite scenes of Hatshepsut performing the rituals and duties of kingship. On the north side of the temple, she built a royal residence with the revealing name “the royal palace ‘I am not far from him’ [that is, Amun-Ra].”

  The crowning glory of her additions to Ipetsut were three pairs of obelisks, designed, quite literally, to point the way to the divine. On the base of one pair, she had her masons carve a long text, to record her pious motives for all eternity. It stands to this day as Hatshepsut’s principal apologia, the most revealing insight into her character and ambition:

  I have done this with a loving heart for my father Amun.… I call to attention the people who shall live in the future, who shall consider this monument that I made for my father.… It was when I was sitting in the palace that I remembered my maker. My heart directed me to make for him two obelisks of electrum [a natural alloy of gold and silver], their pinnacles touching the heavens.…

  Now my mind turned this way and that, anticipating the words of the people who shall see my monument in future years and speak of what I have done.… He shall not declare what I have said to be an exaggeration. Rather, he will say, “How like her it is, loyal to her father!” … For I am his daughter in very truth, who glorifies him and who knows what he has ordained.9

  HOLY OF HOLIES

  BEYOND IPETSUT, HATSHEPSUT TOOK UP WHERE AMENHOTEP I HAD left off, adding yet more architectural props to the great Theban stage set of kingship. From her gateway on the south side of Ipetsut, she set forth a new axis that linked the temple of Amun-Ra with a temple dedicated to the god’s consort Mut and, beyond that, with a new shrine for the divine barque at Amun’s southern sanctuary (modern Luxor). To make proper symbolic use of this new processional way, Hatshepsut’s theologians inaugurated an annual celebration, the Festival of Opet, during which the cult image of Amun was carried from Ipetsut to Luxor, for a period of rest and relaxation. Amun of Opet would journey across the river to visit the west bank (and a small temple specially built by Hatshepsut to receive him), opening up yet another ritual axis. With the Beautiful Festival of the Valley already connecting Ipetsut and Deir el-Bahri, processional routes now demarcated the whole of Thebes. The city and everything in it belonged incontrovertibly to Amun-Ra, thanks to the ministrations of his beloved daughter.

  Of Hatshepsut’s many constructions in Egypt, none received more care and attention than her temple at Deir el-Bahri. The site’s close assocation with Hathor, mother goddess and guardian of kingship, must have given it a special appeal to a female monarch. The fact that it lay directly opposite her new southern gateway at Ipetsut gave it added symbolic potency. Such a spot demanded a monument of uncommon quality. What Hatshepsut and her architects created at Deir el-Bahri over the course of thirteen years remains one of the most remarkable buildings from ancient Egypt. The uniqueness of its design is striking, even today. Its scale and grandeur overwhelm just as their patron intended. Though devised, first and foremost, as a grand resting place for the barque shrine of Amun-Ra during the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, the temple called by Hatshepsut Djeser-djeseru, “Holy of Holies,” also incorporated shrines to Anubis, Hathor, and Ra, as well as a set of chapels for the perpetual celebration of her funerary cult alongside that of her father, Thutmose I. A single building sought to incorporate every aspect of royal ideology, from the monarch’s relationship with the ancient deities Hathor and Ra to the celebration of the royal ancestors and the king’s eternal destiny.

  Scene from the Egyptian expedition to Punt WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  The entire complex was arranged as a series of huge terraces, with the sheer cliff face as a stunning natural backdrop. It was inspired by the neighboring temple of Mentuhotep, yet it outdid its predecessor in every department and cast Hatshepsut as the founder of a new age. A causeway linked the main temple to a valley temple more than half a mile to the east. The last five hundred yards of this processional route were flanked by more than a hundred sphinxes of Hatshepsut. The temple proper was likewise furnished with magnificent statuary showing the monarch in different guises, offering to the gods or transfigured as Osiris. Behind the pillared façades of each terrace, delicately carved and painted scenes recorded key episodes from Hatshepsut’s
life, real or imagined: her divine birth; her election as heir apparent; her coronation; the transport of her obelisks to Ipetsut; and, perhaps most famous, the expedition she sent in 1463 to the fabled land of Punt to bring back exotic materials for Amun-Ra. The vivid details of the African landscape, the Puntites’ stilt houses, and their obese queen have made this tableau one of the best-known in any Egyptian temple. It seems to capture the freshness, vitality, and innovation that characterize the reign of Hatshepsut, the most effective and powerful of the handful of women ever to rule ancient Egypt.

  There is one further, unusual aspect to Hatshepsut’s reign—the unprecedented favors bestowed on her most devoted follower, Senenmut. A man of humble origins, Senenmut rose to prominence during Hatshepsut’s regency. As tutor to her daughter, he enjoyed privileged access to the royal family’s inner sanctum. As overseer of the audience chamber, he effectively controlled who did and did not get to see the regent. While as steward of the queen’s estate, he wielded considerable economic influence. The combination of offices made him Hatshepsut’s most influential courtier by far. He seems to have had an artistic bent, to judge from the unparalleled quantity, quality, and diversity of his surviving statuary, and his skills were recognized by Hatshepsut, who promoted him to the office of overseer of all the king’s works, and chief architect. In this capacity, he masterminded the sculpting and transport of the Ipetsut obelisks, and the construction of “Holy of Holies.” His special reward, among many, was royal permission to carve his own devotional reliefs at Deir el-Bahri, Ipetsut, and “in [all] the temples of Upper and Lower Egypt.”10 At Deir el-Bahri, he even had himself depicted in the upper sanctuary, albeit carefully concealed behind the open doors of the shrine. For a commoner to be shown in the most sacred part of the temple was not just unusual but unprecedented.

  He was likewise allowed to commission a vast funerary complex, the largest of its time, comprising a public cult chapel and a secluded burial chamber, the latter reaching right underneath the sacred enclosure at Deir el-Bahri and equipped with a stone sarcophagus, another royal prerogative. It is little wonder that Senenmut’s jealous contemporaries harbored suspicions about the precise nature of his relationship with Hatshepsut, and little wonder that a cheeky Theban workman illustrated the more scurrilous rumors in a sexually explicit graffito.

  Ironically, Hatshepsut’s elevation to the kingship did not bring commensurate promotion for Senenmut. He was replaced as tutor to the princess and subsequently disappeared from the official record. Whether he fell out of favor, retired, or simply died from natural causes remains a mystery. What is clear is that he never married and he left no heirs. Such, perhaps, was the price of winning and keeping his mistress’s favor.

  MIGHTIER YET

  WHILE HATSHEPSUT, IN HER MORE AMBITIOUS MOMENTS, MAY HAVE hoped to see her daughter follow in her footsteps, a mother-daughter succession would have stretched the ideology of kingship just too far. In the end, the throne passed to her stepson, nephew, and son-in-law, Thutmose III, who after a decade and a half as junior co-regent finally achieved sole rule in 1458. Whatever his personal feelings toward his stepmother, he certainly shared her idolization of Thutmose I. And it was with his grandfather’s energy and zeal that he set about consolidating his imperial inheritance. Just ten weeks after taking over the reins of power, Thutmose III rode out at the head of his army on his first military campaign to the Near East. He was determined, no doubt, to prove himself as brave and resolute a leader as his forebear, but there was also an immediate political imperative. While Hatshepsut’s regime had been preoccupied with construction projects at home, Egypt’s foreign rivals had not been idle. The kingdom of Mittani, temporarily humbled by Thutmose I, had reasserted itself and was busy stirring up resistance to Egyptian rule among a coalition of Asiatic princes. Chief among them was the prince of Kadesh (modern Tell Nebi Mend), who had holed himself up with his key allies in the fortified town of Megiddo (the biblical Armageddon). Since Megiddo controlled the Jezreel Valley, the main north-south route through northern Canaan as well as the easiest route between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean coast, Egypt ignored such unwelcome developments at its peril. Attack was the best form of defense.

  At the end of winter 1458, Thutmose III and his household division of ten thousand men passed through the border fortress of Tjaru, bound for Megiddo. After a march of nine days, they reached Gaza and bedded down for the night in friendly company. But this was no time for relaxation. They were off again at the crack of dawn, setting forth “in valor, victory, power, and vindication.”11 A further eleven days’ march through unfamiliar and hostile territory brought the army to the town of Yehem, where the king held a war council. From Yehem, three roads led to Megiddo: one to the north, one to the south, and the most direct route through the narrow Aruna Pass. According to the official campaign record, the king argued for the Aruna road against the advice of his generals. Whatever the truth behind the decision, it was inspired, for as the Egyptian soldiers advanced through the narrow defile, with Thutmose leading from the front, they met no resistance. The enemy had been waiting for them to the north and south, never expecting them to risk the Aruna road. Once the Egyptian rear guard had safely emerged from the pass, the entire force continued down the road toward Megiddo and pitched camp on the bank of the Qina Brook in the early afternoon. Like Shakespeare’s Henry V on the eve of Agincourt, Thutmose steeled his men for battle the following morning, telling the soldiers of the watch, “Be steadfast, be steadfast! Be vigilant, be vigilant!”12

  At daybreak on April 27, the king appeared in the midst of his infantry, standing on a chariot of electrum and clad in shining armor—a dazzling sight to inspire his troops and intimidate the enemy. It seems to have done the trick, for the opposing forces “fled headlong toward Megiddo with faces of fear, abandoning their horses and their chariots of gold and silver, [the men] to be hoisted up into the town by their clothes.”13 Then, to the Egyptians’ eternal shame, their discipline cracked, and instead of pressing home their advantage, they set about plundering the possessions the enemy had left behind on the battlefield. Having failed to capture Megiddo before the town could muster its defenses, the Egyptians found themselves preparing for a long siege. A detachment of soldiers was sent to measure the town walls, while others cut down the surrounding orchards. After a great effort, Megiddo was surrounded by the Egyptians with a wooden wall seven feet high and three feet thick, and was further isolated by a ditch. As the days and weeks dragged on, some of the beleaguered and famished townspeople came out to surrender, and were duly pardoned. For the prince of Kadesh and his allies, it was only a matter of time. Eventually, they too surrendered to Thutmose, crawling “upon their bellies to kiss the ground before His Majesty’s might, and to beg breath for their nostrils.”14

  Their public submission was only the beginning. The victorious king appointed new rulers to all their towns, seized their land, and annexed it to the royal treasury. The produce from the rich, arable fields of the Megiddo Plain, together with annual tribute from across the Near East, gave Egypt the economic clout to match its political and military might. The haul of booty from the Battle of Megiddo was stupendous: two thousand horses and nearly a thousand chariots; almost two thousand cattle, the same number of goats, and more than twenty thousand sheep; 1,796 male and female slaves and their children, and numerous prisoners of war, including the wives of the ruler of Kadesh. All in all, it was the most signficant military event of Thutmose III’s reign and it secured Egyptian control over the Transjordan for the next four centuries.

  THE DREAD AND ENVY OF THEM ALL

  BEHIND THE OFFICIAL RHETORIC OF THE CAMPAIGN ANNALS, THE spoils of Megiddo also had a human dimension. Egyptian soldiers returned from battle with foreign wives as well as plunder. The captives and concubines who made the long journey to the Nile Valley brought about a transformation of Egyptian society, integrating themselves with their host communities and turning New Kingdom Egypt into a thoroughly cosm
opolitan country—a wholly unintended consequence of Egypt’s imperial adventures. The Nile Valley had always been a melting pot of peoples and cultures, Mediterranean and African influences coexisting and cross-pollinating. From prehistoric times Egypt had welcomed immigrants from other lands, as long as they thoroughly integrated themselves and adopted Egyptian customs. Even at the height of the Pyramid Age, when Egyptian chauvinism and self-confidence had known no bounds, a native citizen of Memphis might have rubbed shoulders with a shipwright from Kebny or a mercenary from Nubia, albeit bearing adopted Egyptian names. But the influx of foreigners prompted by Thutmose III’s campaigns was on an altogether different scale. Egyptian towns and cities found themselves home to significant foreign populations, and the migrants were quick to make the most of their new opportunities. One particularly talented prisoner of war, named Pas-Baal, rose to become chief architect in the temple of Amun, an office his descendants held for at least six generations. Even the royal palace witnessed changing attitudes toward foreigners. Among the booty brought back from the Near East by Thutmose III were three Syrian women on whom the young king seems to have doted. One of them was named Manuwai, from the Amorite word meaning “to love.” Her companions were named Manhata and Maruta (Hebrew “Martha,” meaning “lady”). Thutmose showered all three of them with sumptuous gifts: golden armlets, bracelets, and anklets; beaded collars; diadems inlaid with precious stones; vessels of precious metal, and rare glass vases. Barely a century after the expulsion of the hated Hyksos, the Egyptian king had Asiatic wives in his harem. It was a remarkable turnaround.

  After Megiddo, Thutmose III led another sixteen military operations in the Near East during the next two decades, at a dizzying frequency of almost one a year. Most were little more than heavily militarized tours of inspection, to cement previous victories and receive tribute from vassal princes. But a few forays into Syria-Palestine had real military objectives. The city-state of Tunip, in northern Syria, posed a particular threat, and was the focus of three consecutive campaigns. Thutmose turned his forces against Tunip’s coastal protectorates, conquering them, taking their rulers hostage, and transforming their harbors into fortified supply centers for the Egyptian army. Slowly but surely, Egypt was eliminating the opposition and annexing large swaths of the Near East. Where Thutmose I had been content with a show of force, his grandson was determined to win and hold territory for the long term.