The Woman Who Would Be King (38 page)

In a much more private part of Karnak Temple, Thutmose III began his own masterpiece—the Akhmenu, “Effective of Monuments”—a structure featuring rows of grand columns in the shape of his beloved war campaign tent poles, a building he called his Temple of Millions of Years, in which he intended to celebrate and renew his kingship. Just after the Megiddo campaign, and likely using funds from it,
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he began building this grand structure at the eastern end of Karnak with an entrance
through a small gateway hidden behind the bulk of the temple on the south side. It was year 24; Thutmose III was already planning ahead for his Sed festival in year 30 by creating a protected but grand space for his coronation renewal. Statuary was ordered specifically for the Akhmenu temple at Karnak. The artisans carving the statues had spent years executing monumental works for Hatshepsut, so at first they delivered statues of Thutmose that continued to resemble Hatshepsut’s facial features in her masculine guise.
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When we remember how similar the faces of the two monarchs appear on the Red Chapel, it makes sense that at the beginning of his sole reign Thutmose III used a portrait that resembled his aunt’s. There were practical reasons for keeping this public face for new statues: it was almost certainly the same portrait he had been using during the last five years of joint reign with Hatshepsut.

Within this Akhmenu temple, he built a small chapel dedicated to his royal ancestors, including reliefs showing sixty-two seated kings who had served Egypt previously (now relocated in its entirety to the Louvre in Paris).
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Because this temple was to serve as a space for his sacred jubilee when he would be transformed into all kings past, present, and future, he filled the chapel with images of ancestor kings, placating and pleasing their spirits and eternally linking his kingship to their powerful presence. His father was almost certainly depicted in the list of previous monarchs, but the image is now lost. Most historians assume that Thutmose III decided not to include Hatshepsut with his other ancestors, but this is debatable since the ancestor list is not completely preserved.
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If he did leave her out, it would be a stark indication that Thutmose III did not think her worthy of the title of king anymore, and something had changed in the few years between his completion of her Red Chapel and his construction of the Hall of Ancestors. By the time this latter relief was carved, Thutmose III may no longer have wanted to continue his association with Hatshepsut.

This is clearly the case when, five years or so into his reign, he had Hatshepsut’s beloved Red Chapel, her triumphal display of kingship and legacy, dismantled block by block.
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After putting his own time and money into finishing a structure celebrating the coregency, he now decided to sever all visible ties to Hatshepsut. The blocks ended up in a haphazard pile somewhere within the Karnak precinct, inside the walls but beyond the sacred confines of the temple proper. All of those images
of Hatshepsut—as a man on the throne, running with oars, offering incense to the god, leading processions, acting in ritual with her co-king—lay strewn about the Karnak work area awaiting their fate. In place of the Red Chapel, Thutmose III commissioned a granodiorite chapel devoid of his former co-king.
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From that point on, Thutmose III would not order a single monument, text, statue, or papyrus that mentioned, or even visualized, his aunt Hatshepsut.

After the first five years of his reign, Thutmose III created new monuments that laid down a foundation for his own kingship wholly disconnected from his former coregent. Perhaps he was ashamed that his kingship had been sullied by a woman and that he had been weak (i.e., young) enough to need her help. Perhaps political elements from Hatshepsut’s side of the family, or even Nefrure herself, were asserting themselves, and he needed to deny them any connection to his crowns. Or maybe such negative emotions and strategies played no part, and he was only following every other king’s lead by linking the place where cosmic regeneration happened with the names and body of the currently reigning king.

Thutmose III nonetheless saw Hatshepsut in the temples all around him. Because she had built so much in so many places, her images were inescapable. At this point of his sole reign, around five to seven years in, images of Hatshepsut abounded all over Egypt: reliefs on the eighth pylon on Karnak’s south side, reliefs and statuary in the Great Festival Court of Thutmose II, her porch of drunkenness and main temple gateway in the Mut precinct, reliefs at the Amen-Kamutef temple nearby, dozens of reliefs from the Ma’at suite surrounding the barque shrine, not to mention her grand funerary temple of Djeser Djeseru at Deir el-Bahri, easily visible from the Karnak Temple quay where his boat alighted each morning from the royal palace during his stays in Thebes and still a highlight of the great Valley Festival every year. Why he took apart Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel while leaving untouched most of her other structures remains shrouded in mystery. Confident in his own divinely inspired place as Egypt’s unassailable leader, Thutmose III may have been content to rule with his aunt’s images looking over him from Karnak, Luxor, and temples throughout the kingdom. Or perhaps he did not want to waste precious time and money destroying when he could be making his mark building and campaigning.

Around this time, Thutmose III commissioned (or composed
himself) his Text of Youth, describing how he had been named king as a child.
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The text betrays a profound need to communicate to his people that he had been the god Amen’s specific choice as king even though he had been just a small, helpless boy. He describes his young age honestly, but highlights how he was chosen despite it. He dwells on his mystical encounters with the gods who called him to heaven as a divine falcon to see the secret forms in the sky and to adore the sun god in his own realm, presumably referring to his later initiation in which he was meant to confront divinity face-to-face in a transcendental moment of celestial contact. Nowhere in this text does he mention Hatshepsut—even though we know she facilitated his early kingship. This inscription focuses on his own extraordinary and innate characteristics, his ability to connect with the gods suggesting that Thutmose III needed to legitimize his reign on his own terms after Hatshepsut’s death.

Perhaps Thutmose III was finally able to assert his own will, independently of his now dead aunt, only after his successful campaign at Megiddo. It was his decision to make war that brought him his first solo income with which to placate, pay off, and otherwise reward officials, priests, and bureaucrats, autonomous of Hatshepsut’s already established economic systems. Only then, perhaps, was he able to defy her memory by dismantling the Red Chapel and changing his portrait to resemble his grandfather. Some Egyptologists go so far as to suggest that Thutmose III’s building program indicates a past hostility between the two rulers.
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If nothing else, Thutmose III’s decisions during the first five years of his sole reign laid a foundation for increasing separation between his kingship and that of Hatshepsut.

It is not clear how such decisions affected Nefrure. Some Egyptologists doubt she was still alive at this point, although others point toward documentation showing that she outlived her mother by at least two years and perhaps more.
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She disappeared from the archaeological record at some point after her mother’s death, in any case. Without Hapshepsut her value as queen and priestess was obviously gone. Thutmose III erased Nefrure’s name from temples and stelae, inserting the names of other royal women in her place. It was an irrevocable move. Up to this point, Thutmose III’s life had been inextricably linked
with Hatshepsut and her daughter. Now he was shifting to a life that included neither of them, even denying their memory in carved temple reliefs.

If Thutmose III excised Nefrure while she was still alive, he had plenty of wives to keep him company or serve as priestesses in her stead. His harem seems to have been one of the largest of any New Kingdom monarch thus far,
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in part due to the number of foreign women he brought back to Egypt from his campaigns. Daughters of vassal kings were given to Thutmose III and treated gently as hostages and tokens of their fathers’ loyalty, guarantees that these men would not align with another coalition. Egyptian documentation names Syrian wives of Thutmose III, including Menhet, Mertit, and Menway, all of whom cemented international alliances.
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In addition, Thutmose III promoted lesser royal wives to serve alongside his Great Wife instead of having them act only as informal companions. He himself had been the product of a union between a king and a lower-status woman, and we cannot discount the political problems of legitimation that this may have created for his own kingship. After all, his early years on the throne were shared with a woman ruler, which was unprecedented in Egyptian history. Something must have threatened the security of this boy king’s ascension to allow Hatshepsut to take the unparalleled step of kingship—possibly something connected to his own lowborn mother, Isis.

Now that he was established as the sole king, Thutmose III officially recognized many lower-born women as King’s Wives, thus easing the problem of legitimacy for one of his own sons in the future. Or maybe the king did not want Nefrure’s offspring to assume power, and by naming other women as legitimate queens he ensured that any offspring from these later unions would be seen as viable future kings. Perhaps Thutmose III was a kind of ancient Henry VIII of England—figuring out a way to create the succession that he wanted without any dependence on the highborn women around him and the unpredictable circumstances of their wombs.

Thutmose III’s chief wife probably resided in her own apartments in the royal palace, but most of the other wives, ornaments, and beauties lived in lavish palaces dedicated specifically to their comfort and upkeep. Harem palaces existed at Memphis, Thebes, and Medinet el-Gurob, the
latter founded by Thutmose III himself in a secluded but fertile location near the Fayum. Amazingly, we read nowhere of the men serving in such places (most likely
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eunuchs) or of the drama of the women trying to leverage their children for a spot at the top of their limited social spectrum. There is no suggestion of political intrigue among the women or descriptions of the king’s visit to remote locations populated by women whose only masculine company was that of their young sons and bureaucratic minders. We can imagine that some of these women only shared a bed with the king for one or two nights of their lives before he moved on to the next girl, or the next palace, or the next campaign.

Thutmose III’s harems housed not only many women but also many children. The boys not chosen to be crown prince who came of age during the king’s lifetime seemingly left all trace of their royal parentage behind; when they left the nursery, they married nonroyal women and raised families of their own supported by positions in the king’s administration. As for the royal girls, who likely were only allowed to marry the next king during the Eighteenth Dynasty, there is no evidence that the long-lived Thutmose III ever married any of his own sisters or daughters. On the other hand, there is no evidence that the king relented and let some of these women marry nonroyal men. The King’s Wives stayed busy by creating the most intricate and sumptuous royal textiles, bolts of linen cloth with a thread count so high that their softness was a marvel. The cemetery of Medinet el-Gurob indicates that these royal women and offspring were honored with fine burials.

During the early Eighteenth Dynasty, the role of King’s Great Wife was a singular position held by a woman of royal blood, usually the king’s sister. However, Satiah, Thutmose III’s best-known Great Wife, whom he married around the time of Hatshepsut’s death, had no royal blood at all. She was the daughter of the official Ahmose Pennekhbet.
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One of his stelae even named Satiah as God’s Wife of Amen, suggesting that Thutmose III also took this most precious office away from Nefrure and gave it to a woman with no bloodline connection to himself. Many Egyptologists, however, point out that Satiah is only named God’s Wife once and in a place where Nefrure’s name may have originally appeared. If Satiah did serve as God’s Wife, she held the office only until Thutmose III’s daughter Merytamen was old enough to replace her.
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Another of Thutmose III’s wives who was given the honor of being immortalized
on temple walls was Merytre-Hatshepsut, almost certainly not a daughter of Hatshepsut, because she never held the title King’s Daughter. Likely one of the many Ornaments of the King brought into the palace for his pleasure, this girl would soon realize her importance as the mother of many boys who managed to live through scourges and epidemics and who might grow up to be rulers.

The most highborn son of Thutmose III seems to have been Amenemhat, the possible offspring of Nefrure. The child may have been eight to ten years old at this point, and he was named an overseer of cattle in year 23 of Thutmose III’s reign, likely administering that position with help from royal agents and tutors.
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Thutmose III had produced a son who had survived the perils of childhood and was ready for his training to become a viable king, ensuring the future of the Thutmoside dynasty. Nefrure was never explicitly named as the boy’s mother, or the mother of any sons in fact, but such an omission does not necessarily discount her. It suggests that we are now dealing with a wary king who was unwilling to give any of his wives political power by marking them as mothers of princes on his monuments. If Nefrure wasn’t the mother, there were other candidates, such as Thutmose III’s wife Satiah.
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Or perhaps Nefrure is never mentioned as the mother because now that Thutmose III was trying to distance himself from his dead aunt, he had to cut out her daughter as well.