The Woman Who Would Be King (37 page)

Unfortunately, her choice of a hidden burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings did not have the desired effect. Hatshepsut’s tomb in the grand valley was robbed when all the other New Kingdom tombs were opened—five hundred years after her burial, at the end of the Twentieth Dynasty and in the beginning of the Twenty-First, when Egypt entered a deep economic and political crisis. Only a few tombs survived unscathed, and those owing to the good fortune of virulent flash floods or later construction that had obliterated their entrances shortly after they were sealed.
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Hatshepsut’s tomb was a tomb-robber’s prize, filled as it was with gilded objects and statuary, furniture, precious woods and gems, and linens. Thieves took items that were valuable or could be exchanged and they left behind wooden, ceramic, or stone objects that had no fungible worth.

There is no evidence of her body having survived in the two known caches of royal mummies.
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The heretic king Akhenaten was another monarch tellingly missing from the royal caches.
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It’s tempting to think that her corpse may have been purposefully discarded by Amen priests during the reburial of the royal mummies at the end of the New Kingdom, but Hatshepsut was no heretic. She wasn’t even a rule breaker. Even the body of Thutmose I—a universally venerated king—remains missing. Perhaps Hatshepsut is still waiting for archaeologists to find her body, fittingly, alongside her father’s.
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Hatshepsut was gone; Menkheperre Thutmose was now the sole king. He had no one to answer to; no one he needed to consult about his campaigns; no one to keep apprised of his location; no one chiding him to share Nefrure’s bed that night; no one to whom he must defer. It was year 22 of his reign, time to make a statement and show the world how his rule would be shaped.

His first move was a massive assault on Syria. The campaign came hard upon the passing of his co-king, so much so that he had probably been meeting with army generals and strategists while Hatshepsut was on her deathbed. Thutmose’s reign-defining action was to be taken against Syrian cities that had refused to send their annual tribute payments. An Egyptian account of these events has been preserved, and one adviser is said to have proclaimed dramatically, “From Yerdi to the ends of the earth, there is rebellion against his majesty.”
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Perhaps Syrian strongholds were resisting Egyptian hegemony because they thought Thutmose III was weak without his co-king, Hatshepsut. Or perhaps they had already stopped the onerous payments to their Egyptian overlord during the latter reign of Hatshepsut. No matter the
reason for his timing, Thutmose III communicates in his historical records that these vile rebels needed to be brought to heel now.

At the end of his twenty-second year of kingship, Menkheperre Thutmose set out at the head of his men, perhaps as many as ten thousand strong, as they marched from their northern Sinai fortress up into Syria. He would have felt the dust in his nostrils and the grit on his palms, and his heart was likely joyful to be traveling with his men instead of leading another endless funerary ritual or temple ceremony. They were heading to the town of Megiddo where a coalition of Syrian princes had organized a defense against the invading Egyptians.

Thutmose III and his commanders were vexed over a vital strategic decision: there were three roads to the great city of Megiddo. Two of them circled the highlands and were well traveled and watched from on high, depriving the Egyptians of the advantages of speed and surprise. Their enemy would be waiting in large numbers for them where the roads opened up into the valley. But there was another way, a narrow path that no one would expect them to take, from the small town of Aruna, through the crags of the highlands, eventually spilling out into the valley just before Megiddo. It was the most direct path; his army would be able to reach the city quickly. But there was great risk in this choice. His army would have to travel in a single-file line—spreading his forces too thin to engage in battle once the first regiments arrived on the plain. If enemy forces were waiting for them, they would be cut down instantly, unable to mass a defense as they exited the pass.

Thutmose III was intent on taking the mountain pass. The story tells us that his generals questioned his decision openly, to his face. Perhaps they worried that Thutmose’s newly won power had gone to his head or that ruling under a woman had put a chip on his shoulder, forcing him into an impulsive decision that would destroy the Egyptian army in one stroke. Thutmose, on the other hand, was not interested in limiting his losses. He clearly desired one bold strategic move whose audaciousness would shock the world—military action that people would talk about on all three sides of the Great Green Sea.
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He likely also believed that victory was Amen’s will, and that with such divine protection he was invincible. Whatever Thutmose III’s motives were in such risky decision making, he no longer had to consult Hatshepsut. It was his time.

When they entered the mountain pass the next day, his majesty was
in the lead, riding over rocky paths. His elite fighters followed their young king, their eyes probably looking up to the right and left constantly for the ambush they all expected. But they met not a single enemy. When Thutmose finally came through the pass into the Qena valley below, regiment after regiment followed behind, slowly filling up the mouth of the valley, one by one, until all three divisions were there, organized and in formation. Scouts returned to tell the king that the city of Megiddo was only lightly protected—the Syrian army had split its divisions between the other two roads, leaving only a small force at the city itself. The Syrian coalition had no time to move its great army back to protect the city.

His majesty led the center column of the three divisions, and they quickly broke the enemy line. Panic broke out among the coalition forces left to defend Megiddo. The routed Syrians ran back to their walled city. We can imagine the scene vividly: Thutmose knew that victory was imminent as he cut down men right and left, his gilded armor shining in glory, his gleaming weapon catching Amen’s first morning rays.

But the king failed to see what was happening behind him until it was too late. Instead of reorganizing themselves to take the city, his men had already begun to claim their booty—chariots and horses left behind by the fleeing enemy.

Most of the enemy had reached the gates and were now shutting the great doors behind them. Those Syrians who arrived too late were hoisted up on garments and rags dangled out by the inhabitants. When he heard the gates shut with a thud, Thutmose must have known that the only option was siege.

Thutmose III’s annals tell the story with precise detail: if his troops had not set their hearts to plundering the possessions of the enemy, they would have captured Megiddo in that one moment. But it seems likely that his soldiers were more accustomed to the Nubian campaigns, much crueler affairs meant to utterly destroy and pillage, than to the tough battles in the northeast that demanded patience and careful strategy. Thutmose’s disappointment at the pillaging is recorded; he was cognizant of how difficult it was to take and hold a Syrian city.

But the war was not lost; there was simply more work to be done. Engineers measured the town by walking around its perimeter, and ordered the infantry to dig a great ditch encircling the city walls. Thutmose ordered the surrounding fruit orchards to be felled, and he used the timber
to reinforce the ditch. He then returned to the comfort of his tent to wait while the people inside the city starved.

The Syrians, however, were not interested in any heroic stands. After some months, they chose negotiation. The gates were opened, and the assembled Syrian princes showed their submission, likely crawling out on their bellies and begging the great Egyptian king’s forgiveness. In their arms, they held out tribute for Egypt—gold and silver, perhaps lapis lazuli and turquoise, definitely wine and beer. Servants behind them led out cattle, goats, and sheep. Thutmose listened to their pleas. He granted them leave to continue their rule—for a price.

As the real cost of rebellion, Thutmose carried eighty-four children of the enemy elites back to Egypt, probably forcibly separating them from distraught and desperate mothers whom they would never see again. Raised in his palaces as friends of Egypt and as future loyal vassals, these children were essential to the success of a growing empire. The Syrian populace left behind would fail to rebuild a successful coalition against Egypt while Thutmose III was alive.

Thutmose III started his reign off with a bold attack on foreign soil. Some historians have suggested that the rumor of Hatshepsut’s death may have been all that the Mitannians, who lived in Anatolia and northern Syria, were waiting for to form a coalition with the Syrians against the young, untested king.
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This first campaign took place when Thutmose III was in his early twenties. He had probably been active on the battlefield for some time during his joint reign with Hatshepsut, leading campaigns to Nubia long before his triumph in Syria.
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Based on the record he kept in his annals, he had apparently trained for such a war his whole life.

The Megiddo campaign occurred at the end of Thutmose III’s twenty-second regnal year and lasted into the first part of the twenty-third, when he had only been ruling solo for one or two years at most. The young king wasted no time in earning himself a reputation as a warrior-king. As the only king in Egyptian history to rule subservient to a female king, he likely felt conflicted about how his kingship was perceived. During the last few years of Hatshepsut’s reign, he may have been biding his time: planning and training, pondering this Syrian campaign as a defining declaration of his kingship. The Megiddo suppression was so successful that Thutmose III quickly became addicted to yearly military sojourns abroad; his
fight for wealth, fame, and political influence never ended. During his thirty-two years of rule following Hatshepsut’s death, he would lead his Egyptian army on an astounding eighteen military campaigns to Nubia and Syria, quelling rebellions and gaining spoils for the gods in obscene quantities. Apparently he did have something to prove.

These risky ventures were still moneymakers. The army survived on the products of enemy lands
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and returned with extraordinary amounts of plunder: tens of thousands of prisoners of war to serve as slaves in elite households or temples; masses of luxury objects like exotic woods, metals, perfumes, and jewels; and commodities of daily life, including foodstuffs and livestock of various kinds. In Egypt, the prestige of all things Syrian began to soar among the elites at court. The rich competed with one another over fashionable products from the northeast, such as vessels made by wrapping molten columns of glass around a solid core, a technique that was improved upon in Egyptian glass factories.
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The Egyptians had long since developed an incentive system for these wars based on redistribution of plunder: men gave their takings to the king, who in turn granted some slaves and livestock as their due; the most successful warriors received additional prizes, such as solid gold neck ornaments in the shape of the flies that feasted on the corpses of the enemy dead. In the campaigns of Ahmose I and Amenhotep I, generations before Thutmose III, men boasted of winning the gold of honor in exchange for the hands they cut off the dead enemy, which they sometimes gruesomely displayed in strings around their necks.

Thutmose III’s intensive campaigning brought more riches to Egypt than ever before. He put the funds to good use with temple construction. One of the first things he did was finish Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel in Karnak. His own figures and names were already cut into many of the blocks of the structure, and during the early years of his sole reign, he completed the top courses of blocks in the two-room sanctuary. Thutmose III thus monumentalized Hatshepsut’s role in supporting his own kingship. Some historians argue that he felt compelled to show piety toward the dead aunt and former co-king who had supported his candidacy as prince.
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But there is the more pragmatic argument that finishing what was already under way was a much faster way to
create monuments throughout Egypt instead of starting everything from scratch.

Some Egyptologists suggest that Thutmose III was actually an insecure king who needed to continue his connection to Hatshepsut, at least in the temples, to gain support among Egypt’s political factions.
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If this was the case, it’s no wonder that the young king started his reign off with a massive moneymaking invasion of Syria.

But the Theban monuments tell a more complicated story than that of a desperately vulnerable and self-doubting king who was hoping to prolong the goodwill given to his dead aunt: at the same time that he was finishing Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel hidden deep inside Karnak, where few had access, he may have already removed Hatshepsut’s image from the most public parts of that same temple. In front of her eighth pylon, which was located where all could see—right at the front gate of the north-south axis of Karnak, where the Opet festival procession passed by—Hatshepsut had erected two colossal limestone statues of herself as a masculine king. Ordering chisel to stone, Thutmose III reassigned these statues to his father, Thutmose II, and to the Eighteenth Dynasty ancestor, King Amenhotep I. Inscriptions on both of these statues say they were “perfected” (
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) or, in a sense, “made good” in year 22 of Thutmose III. By turning one of the statues into Thutmose II, Thutmose III was making a direct claim to the throne for himself, as the son of that king. The Egyptian kingship wasn’t meant to pass from aunt to nephew, after all. Perhaps to stake his claim as the divinely chosen king, Thutmose III had to make some changes to this very public space by inserting a figure of the father he had hardly known and whom Hatshepsut had erased to affirm his own legitimacy. If these statues were changed in year 22 (and there is some disagreement about the date),
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then it stands as our earliest evidence of Thutmose III’s removing Hatshepsut’s image from the temple landscape in favor of his own father’s. But it was far from the last.