Hatchepsut Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HATCHEPSUT

  Joyce Ann Tyldesley was born in Bolton, Lancashire. She gained a first-class honours degree in archaeology from Liverpool University in 1981 and a doctorate from Oxford University in 1986. She is now Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Oriental Studies at Liverpool University, and a freelance writer and lecturer on Egyptian archaeology. Her books, which are published by Penguin, include Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Eygpt, Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh, Nefertiti and Ramesses: Egypt's Greatest Pharaoh.

  By the same author

  DAUGHTERS OF ISIS

  HATCHEPSUT

  THE FEMALE PHARAOH

  JOYCE TYLDESLEY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Viking 1996

  Published in Penguin Books 1998

  16

  Copyright © J. A. Tyldesley, 1996

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192934-7

  For William Jack Snape

  Contents

  List of Plates

  List of Figures

  List of Maps and Chronologies

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 Backdrop: Egypt in the Early Eighteenth Dynasty

  2 A Strong Family: The Tuthmosides

  3 Queen of Egypt

  4 King of Egypt

  5 War and Peace

  6 Propaganda in Stone

  7 Senenmut: Greatest of the Great

  8 The End and the Aftermath

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Index

  Plates

  1 The Temple of Amen at Karnak. (Werner Foreman Archive)

  2 The Valley of the Kings.

  3 Hatchepsut as king offering before the barque of Amen. (Block from the Chapelle Rouge, Open-Air Museum, Karnak)

  4 The God Amen. (Cairo Museum garden)

  5 Seated statue of Hatchepsut from Djeser-Djeseru showing the king with a female body and male accessories. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund and Edward Harkness Gift, 1929 [29.3.2])

  6 The near-identical figures for King Hatchepsut and King Tuthmosis III, Hatchepsut in front. (Block from the Chapelle Rouge, Open-Air Museum, Karnak)

  7 Scene showing the gods crowning King Hatchepsut, which had been attacked in antiquity.

  8 Head of Hatchepsut. (Cairo Museum)

  9 Granite statue of Hatchepsut. (Open-Air Museum, Karnak)

  10 Red granite sphinx of Hatchepsut. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1931 [31.3.166])

  11 The standing obelisk of Hatchepsut at the heart of the Temple of Amen, Karnak. (Werner Foreman Archive)

  12 a and b Djeser-Djeseru.

  13 Senenmut and the Princess Neferure. (Cairo Museum and British Museum)

  14 Senenmut and Neferure. (Cairo Museum)

  15 Osiride head of Hatchepsut. (Cairo Museum)

  16 The carefully erased image of Hatchepsut. (Temple of Amen, Karnak)

  17 Tuthmosis III. (Luxor Museum)

  Figures

  Chapter 1

  1.1 The cartouche of King Sekenenre Tao II

  1.2 The cartouche of King Kamose

  1.3 The cartouche of King Ahmose

  1.4 Old and New Kingdom soldiers (after Wilkinson, J. G., 1853, The Ancient Egyptians: their life and customs, London, Figs 297, 300)

  1.5 The god Amen (after Sharpe, S., 1859, The History of Egypt, London, Fig. 94)

  1.6 The goddess Mut (after Seton-Williams, V. and Stocks, P., 1983, Blue Guide, Egypt, London and New York, p. 48)

  Chapter 2

  2.1 King Ahmose and his grandmother, Queen Tetisheri (after Ayrton, E. R., Currelly, C. T. and Weigall, A. E. P., 1903, Abydos III, London, Plate LII)

  2.2 The god Osiris (after Sharpe, S., 1859, The History of Egypt, London, Fig. 106)

  2.3 The god Horus (after Sharpe, S., 1859, The History of Egypt, London, Fig. 108)

  2.4 The cartouche of King Amenhotep I

  2.5 The cartouche of King Tuthmosis I

  Chapter 3

  3.1 The infant Hatchepsut being suckled by the goddess Hathor (after Naville, E., 1896, The Temple of Deir el-Bahari, 2, London, Plate LIII)

  3.2 A hippopotamus hunter (after Wilkinson, J. G., 1853, The Ancient Egyptians: their life and customs, London, Fig. 253)

  3.3 The cartouche of King Tuthmosis II

  3.4 Tuthmosis II (after Naville, E., 1906, The Temple of Deir el-Bahari, 5, London, Plate CXXXV)

  3.5 Plan of Hatchepsut's first tomb (after Carter, H., 1917, A Tomb prepared for Queen Hatshepsuit and other recent discoveries at Thebes, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 4, Plate 20)

  Chapter 4

  4.1 The cartouche of King Maatkare Hatchepsut

  4.2 The pregnant Queen Ahmose is led to the birthing bower (after Naville, E., 1896, The Temple of Deir el-Bahari, 2, London, Plate XLIX)

  4.3 The infant Hatchepsut in the arms of a divine nurse (after Naville, E., 1896, The Temple of Deir el-Bahari, 2, London, Plate LIII)

  4.4 Hatchepsut and Amen on a block from the Chapelle Rouge

  4.5 Plan of Hatchepsut's king's tomb (after Davis, T. M., ed., 1906, The Tomb of Hatshopsitu, London, Plate 8)

  4.6 The goddess Isis from the sarcophagus of Hatchepsut

  Chapter 5

  5.1 Hatchepsut as a man (after Naville, E., 1908, The Temple of Deir el-Bahari, 6, London, Plate CLVII)

  5.2 Tree being transported from Punt (after Naville, E., 1898, The Temple of Deir el-Bahari, 3, London, Plate LXXIV)

  5.3 House on stilts, Punt (after Naville, E., 1898, The Temple of Deir el-Bahari, 3, London, Plate LXIX)

  5.4 The obese queen of Punt (after Naville, E., 1898, The Temple of Deir el-Bahari, 3, London, Plate LXIX)

  5.5 Ape from Punt (after Naville, E., 1898, The Temple of Deir el-Bahari, 3, London, Plate LXXVI)

  5.6 Tuthmosis III offers before the barque of Amen (after Naville, E., 1898, The Temple of Deir el-Bahari, 3, London, Plate LXXXII)

  Chapter 6

  6.1 Plan of the Speos Artemidos (after Fairman, H. W. and Grdseloff, B., 1947, Texts of Hatshepsut and Sethos I inside Speos Artemidos, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 33, Fig. 1)

  6.2 Reconstruction of the Amen temple at Karnak during the reign of Hatchepsut

  6.3 Plan of Djeser-Djeseru

  6.4 Hatchepsut being suckled by the goddess Hathor in the form of a cow (after Davis, T.M., ed., 1906, The Tomb of Hatshopsitu, London, Plate 58)

  6.5 Hathor in her anthropoid form (after
Sharpe, S., 1859, The History of Egypt, London, Fig. 101)

  Chapter 7

  7.1 The damaged figure of Senenmut from Tomb 353 (after Dorman, P. F, 1991, The Tombs of Senenmut, New York, Plate 81)

  7.2 Sketch-portrait of Senenmut from the wall of Tomb 353

  7.3 Hatchepsut and Senenmut? Crude graffito from a Deir el-Bahri tomb (after Manniche, L., 1977, Some Aspects of Ancient Egyptian Sexual Life, Acta Orientalia 38, Fig. 4)

  7.4 Senenmut worshipping at Djeser-Djeseru

  7.5 Plan and reconstruction of the façade of Tomb 71 (based on Dorman, P. F., 1991, The Tombs of Senenmut, New York, Plates 4a and 4c)

  7.6 Plan of Tomb 353 (after Dorman, P. F., 1991, The Tombs of Senenmut, New York, Plate 51c)

  Chapter 8

  8.1 The cartouche of King Tuthmosis III

  8.2 Tuthmosis III being suckled by the tree-goddess Isis (after Stevenson Smith, W, revised by W. K. Simpson, 1981, The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, New Haven and London, Plate 257)

  8.3 Tuthmosis III and his mother Isis, boating through the Underworld (after Stevenson Smith, W, revised by W. K. Simpson, 1981, The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, New Haven and London, Plate 257)

  8.4 The High Priestess of Amen-Re, Hatchepsut (after Budge, E.A.W., 1902, Egypt and her Asiatic Empire, London, Fig. 3)

  Maps and Chronologies

  Maps

  Chronologies

  The Tuthmoside Family Tree

  Historical Events

  Acknowledgements

  Many people have helped with the preparation of this book, and I would like to express my gratitude to all concerned. First and foremost I must thank my husband, Steven Snape, for his unflagging support, encouragement and cooking. Thanks are also due to Eleo Gordon and Sheila Watson who gave practical advice whenever needed, to Bill Tyldesley who provided translations from German sources, and to the members of the Liverpool University S.E.S. photography department, Ian Qualtrough and Suzanne Yee, who produced photographic prints at lightning speed. Plates 5 and 10 are published by kind permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

  Introduction

  My command stands firm like the mountains, and the sun's disk shines and spreads rays over the titulary of my august person, and my falcon rises high above the kingly banner unto all eternity.1

  Queen or, as she would prefer to be remembered, King Hatchepsut ruled 18th Dynasty Egypt for over twenty years. Her story is that of a remarkable woman. Born the eldest daughter of King Tuthmosis I, married to her half-brother Tuthmosis II, and guardian of her young stepson–nephew Tuthmosis III, Hatchepsut somehow managed to defy tradition and establish herself on the divine throne of the pharaohs. From this time onwards Hatchepsut became the female embodiment of a male role, uniquely depicted both as a conventional woman and as a man, dressed in male clothing, carrying male accessories and even sporting the traditional pharaoh's false beard. Her reign, a carefully balanced period of internal peace, foreign exploration and monumental building, was in all respects – except one obvious one – a conventional New Kingdom regime; Egypt prospered under her rule. However, after Hatchepsut's death, a serious attempt was made to delete her name and image from the history of Egypt. Hatchepsut's monuments were either destroyed or usurped, her portraits were vandalized and her rule was omitted from the official king lists until only the historian Manetho preserved the memory of a female monarch named Amense or Amensis as the fifth sovereign of the 18th Dynasty.

  Had Hatchepsut been born a man, her lengthy rule would almost certainly be remembered for its achievements: its stable government, successful trade missions and the impressive architectural advances which include the construction of the Deir el-Bahri temple on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor, a building which is still widely regarded as one of the most beautiful in the world. Instead, Hatchepsut's gender has become her most important characteristic and almost all references to her reign have concentrated not on her policies but on the personal relationships and power struggles which many historians have felt able to detect within the claustrophobic early 18th Dynasty Theban royal family. Two interlinked questions arise again and again, dominating all accounts of Hatchepsut's life: What made a hitherto conventional queen decide to become a king? And how, in a highly conservative and male-dominated society, was she able to achieve her goal with such apparent ease?

  It has generally been allowed that the answer to these riddles must be sought in the character of the woman herself. However, this is where all agreement ends as the identical and rather limited set of facts has suggested radically diverse images of the same woman to different observers, to the extent that a casual reader browsing along a shelf of egyptology books might be forgiven for assuming that Hatchepsut suffered from a seriously split personality. Egyptologists, normally the most dry and cautious of observers, have been only too happy to allow their own feelings to intervene in their telling of Hatchepsut's tale and, more particularly, in their interpretation of the motives underlying her deeds. These feelings have tended to coincide with the beliefs common to a generation, so we find egyptologists at the turn of the century, unaware of the complexities of the Tuthmoside succession and accustomed to the idea of successful female rule personified by Queen Victoria, happy to accept Hatchepsut's own propaganda. To these champions Hatchepsut was a valid monarch, an experienced and well-meaning woman who ruled amicably alongside her young stepson, steering her country through twenty peaceful, prosperous years.

  Though unmentioned in the Egyptian king lists, [she] as much deserves to be commemorated among the great monarchs of Egypt as any king or queen who ever sat on its throne during the 18th Dynasty.2

  As a woman who ‘did not fall below the standard of the rest of the 18th Dynasty… [having given] early evidence of her capacity to reign’,3 Hatchepsut ‘naturally undertook the rule of Egypt, and we are quite justified in saying that the interests of the country suffered in no way through being in her hands’.4 In summary:

  … though she has never been considered as a legitimate sovereign, and though she has left us no account of great conquests, her government must have been at once strong and enlightened, for when her nephew Tuthmosis III succeeded her, the country was sufficiently powerful and rich to allow him to venture not only on the building of great edifices, but on a succession of wars of conquests which gave him, among all the kings of Egypt, a pre-eminent claim to the title of ‘the Great’.5

  By the 1960s, knowledge of early 18th Dynasty history had increased, the climate of opinion had changed, and Hatchepsut had been transformed into the archetypal wicked stepmother familiar from the popular films Snow White and Cinderella. She was now an unnatural and scheming woman ‘of the most virile character’,6 and one who would deliberately abuse a position of trust to steal the throne from a defenceless child, thereby cutting short the reign one of Egypt's most successful pharaohs, Tuthmosis III. Hatchepsut was a bad-tempered, ‘shrewd, ambitious and unscrupulous woman [who soon] showed herself in her true colours’.7 Her foreign policy – the direct result of her weaker sex – was quite simply a disaster and:

  her reign is marked by a halt in the policy of conquests started by Ahmose and so splendidly followed by his three successors… [Hatchepsut] was too busy with the internal difficulties which she herself had created by her ambition to interest herself in the affairs of Asia.8

  With the growing realization that Hatchepsut, a flesh-and-blood woman rather than a one-dimensional storybook character, cannot be simply classified as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, most of these more extreme reactions have been abandoned. However, they have left their mark on the pages of the more popular histories and a significant number of chronicles of 18th Dynasty court life continue to uphold the tradition of the great Tuthmoside family feud. While it is very difficult for any biographer to remain entirely impartial about his or her subject, I am attempting to provide the non-specialist reader with an objective and unbiased account of the life and times of King Hatchepsut, gathered
from the researches of those egyptologists who have spent years studying, sometimes in minute detail, the individual threads of evidence which, when woven together, form the tapestry of her reign. It is left for the reader to decide on the rights or wrongs of her actions. However, it will almost immediately become apparent that Hatchepsut's story unravels to become three interlinked stories: the history of the king and her immediate family, the history of Hatchepsut's memory after her death, and the equally fascinating tale of those who have since studied and interpreted her. It is impossible to study one without making reference to the others, and I have made no attempt to separate the three.

  Writing about the public King Hatchepsut has proved to be something of an exercise in detection, as all too often the archaeological record throws up enough clues to intrigue Hercule Poirot while modestly withholding the final piece of evidence needed to prove or disprove a particular theory. Nevertheless, despite the fact that there are huge gaps in our knowledge, the monuments which testify to her achievements and the propaganda texts written to explain her actions do provide us with the evidence needed to reconstruct at least a partial history of Hatchepsut's reign. The private woman – Hatchepsut as daughter, wife and mother – has been far more difficult to reach as we are lacking almost all the intimate details which can help a historical character come alive to the modern reader. Hatchepsut lived in a literate age, but belonged to a society which did not believe in keeping personal written records. The contemporary records which have been preserved are almost invariably official documents which, by their very nature, rarely express private opinions. We have no intimate letters written to, by or about Hatchepsut and no diaries or memoirs to provide us with a glimpse of early 18th Dynasty court life; we cannot even be sure of Hatchepsut's actual appearance, as all her portraits are formal works of art designed to depict the ideal of the divine Egyptian pharaoh. The real Hatchepsut, therefore, remains something of an enigma, although if we look hard enough at her relationships with the daughter whom she clearly loved and the father whom she adored, or if we consider her obvious need to explain her actions and justify her unusual rule whenever possible, we may feel ourselves able to detect a more complex and less secure personality hidden behind the façade of the mighty king.