The Woman Who Would Be King (26 page)

When Hatshepsut assumed the throne, Senenmut’s career took off: he was appointed Overseer of the House of Amen, which essentially made him steward of the entire Amen complex of Thebes, with economic and administrative oversight of the temples of Amen, Mut, and Khonsu and all the lands and income of these institutions.
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It was a huge promotion. The temples of Amen rivaled the richest palace institutions of the land and were counted among the largest landholders in Egypt. Many spoils of war, including proceeds from military occupations in Syria-Palestine and Nubia, went directly to these establishments, enriching treasuries with gold, precious stones, woven textiles, and grain.

As Overseer of the House of Amen, or Steward of Amen as many Egyptologists call the position, Senenmut oversaw not just the granaries of Amen but wealth of all kinds. He was the boss of the overseer of the houses of gold, the treasurers, the craftsmen and architects, and the overseer of works not just at Luxor but at Amen temples throughout Egypt. A number of highly placed officials in the Amen temple administration all reported to him, begged favors from him, and were probably somewhat afraid of him. Senenmut was essentially the CEO of Amen’s great institution.

Senenmut apparently had to give up his work as Nefrure’s tutor to
take the new position, and Hatshepsut’s old tutor Senimen was asked to care for the girl in his stead.
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Senenmut still kept his title as her tutor, which gives us some idea of the importance he attached to the position, but undoubtedly his extensive duties did not allow him to focus on the training of one girl, no matter how prominent. The thousands of men in the employ of the god Amen-Re and the mass of riches in the god’s treasuries were now his main priority.

Perhaps Senenmut felt it was acceptable to relinquish his close watch on Nefrure because she was growing up. Perhaps she had made a smooth transition to God’s Wife of Amen and was able to occupy her position without contest and without Senenmut’s overt protection. For her part, Hatshepsut must have thought it fitting to shift Senenmut’s attention to more pressing matters. She had trusted him with the care of her palace economy, and now she was asking him to manage and influence the balance sheet of Amen’s riches and his priesthood. Senenmut seemed to excel at both big-picture and detail-oriented organization, skills that were particularly useful for a treasurer of Egypt’s most influential temple. He probably did not rock the boat too much in his new post. Hatshepsut’s power relied on her continuing influence over the Amen priesthood. Who better to assign as the Amen temple’s moneyman than her most trusted personal financier?

As large a role as Senenmut may have played in the lives of Hatshepsut and Nefrure, he had no formal connection to Thutmose III. Nonetheless, the young king would have seen the old man in the presence of Hatshepsut and Nefrure from the earliest moments of his childhood, conducting business in the audience hall, engaging the regent in discussions over treasury matters, or working with priests to administer Nefrure’s income from her lands. Thutmose III may have even recognized Senenmut as one of the key players in Hatshepsut’s concentration of power within her own palace walls.

If Senenmut was not an intimate of Thutmose III, it does not seem to have affected his career as a high official under Hatshepsut. The inscriptions Senenmut had carved on his statues during Hatshepsut’s kingship bragged about his access to her. He claimed to be a “confidant of the king” and “the Chamberlain who speaks in privacy” and “one vigilant concerning what is brought to his attention, one who finds a solution every single
day.” The quartzite statue with this long inscription, now in the British Museum, also includes the assertion “The king made me great; the king enhanced me, so that I was advanced before the courtiers: and, having realized my excellence in her heart, she appointed me Chief Spokesman of her household.”
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On another statue, Senenmut maintained he was one “whose opinion the king has desired for himself, who pleases by means of what he says.”
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There is every reason to believe that Hatshepsut’s faith and trust in Senenmut were strong, if not absolute. According to one statue now in Berlin, he was the “judge of the gate in the entire land,”
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thus he decided who entered the throne room and who communicated with the king. If Hatshepsut had an essential message to give to an official, Senenmut was likely the one to deliver it. Even going so far as to impinge on others’ authority, Senenmut claimed control over the taxes of Upper and Lower Egypt, as well as other payments into and out of the palace treasuries. His responsibilities were similar to those of a vizier,
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according to his own description of them, which is strange because he never actually held that title. But perhaps Senenmut worked from the precedent Hatshepsut had set for practicing the duties of an office that one did not hold. After all, she had practiced the powers of a king for seven years without being formally crowned. In exercising powers for which he did not have official authority, Senenmut seems to have made some enemies, likely including the southern vizier, Useramen, since it was his official territory upon which Senenmut was encroaching. But even if Useramen had wanted to destroy this new man, Senenmut’s favor was ironclad, and all evidence suggests that Hatshepsut’s reprisal would have been swift and severe. In fact, there is no evidence that anyone acted against Senenmut, at least not while Hatshepsut was alive.

Senenmut may have been an ambitious man from the start, one who was willing to step on the toes of other officials, but it could have been equally true that Hatshepsut was a clever politician who created an administration with built-in redundancies—just as during her regency she had played Ahmose Pennekhbet and Senenmut against each other. In the case of Senenmut and the vizier Useramen, Hatshepsut once again assigned multiple men to perform some of the same duties. Her officials may have encroached on one another’s territory and annoyed fellow
administrators, but in the end such overlap formed a system of checks and balances that prevented anyone from gaining too much power independent of the king. Hatshepsut really had been bred for palace politics.

Throughout her reign, Hatshepsut created a convoluted web of intersecting responsibilities between officials and between spheres of power that allowed her to infiltrate every aspect of temple, financial, and military activities. She even overlapped the administrations of great institutions, which permitted the commingling of resources. For example, when she appointed her most trusted palace official, Senenmut, as Overseer of the House of Amen, she automatically linked all of that temple wealth and influence back to her court and to herself. By assigning an unmarried, presumably childless man to be Steward of Amen, she was essentially diverting power away from the elite Theban families and back toward herself—almost in the same way the Ottoman Empire would rely on gelded men to hold offices during their lifetime so that they could not be passed down to the next generation.
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This arrangement seems to have suited Senenmut well. His economic powers gave him access to grain, gold, and a pool of skilled and unskilled labor both abroad and in Egypt. He managed hundreds of master craftsmen, and he could easily acquire anything he desired: a well-cut statue of the hardest royal stone, an intricate broad collar, an inlaid walking stick of imported ebony, or the softest and finest royal linens of the highest thread count. His landholdings must have been augmented exponentially during Hatshepsut’s kingship, thereby increasing his own income in agricultural products, which were the chief commodities of payment in ancient economies. He probably had a villa in Thebes and another in Armant, where we think he grew up. Senenmut undoubtedly traveled in high style aboard his own barge, equipped with every luxury, that sailed up and down the Nile on his mistress’s errands.

Neither Senenmut nor any of his early acquaintances had ever dreamed that he could achieve such a high level of influence by working directly and closely with the one woman now in charge of it all. He was not humble about advertising his success. To commemorate his rank and prestige, Senenmut started a systematic campaign to position his image in every place of honor possible: he commissioned statues, stelae, rock art, shrines, temple reliefs, a tomb chapel, and a burial chamber. No official had ever commissioned as many statues as Senenmut—not any official
during the reign of the wise and relentless Senwosret III, who ruled in the Middle Kingdom, and not any administrator during the reign of Khufu, who marshaled hundreds of thousands of men to build his great pyramid during the Old Kingdom. No Egyptian administrator or general had ever deigned to proclaim his worth so publicly vis-à-vis his king, but Senenmut was fearless. He made sure his statues were strategically located in the most conspicuous spots.

His private artistic production was unprecedented, innovative, and completely devoted to establishing himself as one deserving of not just praise but awe among his peers. There were limits, though. Senenmut was apparently prohibited from showing himself in King Hatshepsut’s presence in his statuary.
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Representing himself next to the king would be placing himself on her level, as a god. But he could still show himself as tutor to her eldest offspring—even if it was only when she was a small girl. He took a liking to having himself depicted with Princess Nefrure and commissioned many three-dimensional images of himself with the child, because they broadcast his intimate connections to the royal family.

Even though the evidence suggests that Senenmut was in his fifties or beyond by this time, his statues always show him in an idealized and youthful way, with a full face, wide eyes, and a soft, smiling mouth. Some of the portraits from his tomb, however, show him as a timeworn man with a hooked nose, lines etched into the skin around his mouth, a flabby, weak chin, and fleshy lips. If these latter images are to be believed, he was not a handsome man.
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Whatever he really looked like, he wanted the world to know that he was not only Hatshepsut’s favorite but also an innovator in his own right. He prized new ideas. His statuary included poses that Egyptians had never seen before, and not just one new form, like the squatting figure holding the princess in the folds of his garment, but multiple novel types.
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In another innovative composition, he is kneeling behind the snake goddess Renenutet, the mistress of Armant, his hometown; her reptile coils fold in on themselves like a gathered ribbon. Another statue shows him offering a coil of surveyor’s rope in homage to his pious temple-building work, a bold new design that could have elicited gasps when it was put in place along a visible temple processional way. He even created a cryptogram of Hatshepsut’s name and had a statue commissioned of him holding the sign-puzzle he had invented. On another statue, he claimed to have created “images
which I have made from the devising of my own heart and from my own labor; they have not been found in the writing of the ancestors.”
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Such originality may not seem that astounding given his position of power, but Egyptian culture valued a certain kind of conservatism. Innovation, particularly among nonroyal elites, was practiced only sparingly. Officials were supposed to be followers of the king’s lead, not fashion trendsetters. Senenmut may have been seen by some as breaking with protocol when his statuary contained more originality than that of his mistress, but Hatshepsut had her own penchant for the unusual. It seems that they both valued breaking the mold. Apparently Hatshepsut never put a stop to his displays, even though they were unprecedented in scope. The very existence of such personal monuments placed in the public sphere implies that the relationship between Senenmut and Hatshepsut was probably closer than we will ever know.

A bold and motivated pair, they were blessed by the gods with political abilities that allowed them to hold great positions of authority. Aware of his lower origins and his lack of Theban family influence at court, Hatshepsut likely relied on Senenmut exactly because he had no outside interests or private agenda to divert him from her own interests. His lack of family connections made him less likely to betray her or to overlook her wishes in favor of his own gain. With no strong ties to other elites through birth or marriage, Senenmut himself had no one else to trust besides Hatshepsut. They seem to have been mutually dependent: she took advantage of his reliance on her, and he apparently used her lack of trust in others for his own advancement.

As soon as Hatshepsut became king, Senenmut claimed prime real estate in the west Theban hills for his own tomb chapel just overlooking her Deir el-Bahri funerary temple; it was a grand space to be painted with images of himself in the company of his mother, father, and siblings, all seated before ample food, drink, and wealth for the afterlife. This tomb was also meant to link him to Hatshepsut’s fortune in life and after death, because its proximity to her funerary temple allowed him to serve her in the afterlife. On its summit, he had a statue of himself carved from the live rock, with the King’s Daughter Nefrure snugly in his embrace. His mother was buried under his tomb forecourt accompanied by riches she had never known as a young woman; he moved the body of his father, who
had died long before Senenmut took up high office, to join his mother.
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He even had one of his horses buried at his tomb site, on the slope of the hill just under the forecourt.
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The horse was buried fully wrapped in a huge wooden coffin. Dragging a dead horse to the top of the Sheikh abd el-Gurna hill for burial must have involved some advance planning, not to mention a great deal of labor. Senenmut wanted his horse in the afterlife, and he found a way to make it happen.

Senenmut’s preparation for death involved another extravagance. Instead of just cutting a burial chamber under his tomb chapel as most officials did, he chose a different location altogether. Not only did he lavish his funds on different localities for chapel and tomb, a privilege normally retained for kings, but he opted to have his corpse interred in the sacred Asasif valley, next to Hatshepsut’s funerary temple.
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This was perhaps the very first time a nonroyal individual separated his tomb (where his body was buried) from his tomb chapel (where relatives offered food and comfort to his soul). At this time, only kings did this: for example, Thutmose I and Thutmose II were buried deep in the Valley of the Kings while their temples for cult rituals lay in the desert fringes, near the Nile inundation. After he had done it, other officials followed his lead. Senenmut had created a new burial trend.