The Woman Who Would Be King (41 page)

Near where the Red Chapel had once stood and around his own new barque shrine of gray granodiorite, Thutmose III ordered Hatshepsut erased from the surrounding suite of rooms.
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Perhaps since so few people saw these rooms, he never replaced these images with anything at all; the raw chisel marks remain as an open wound on these most sacred and intimate spaces in Karnak Temple.
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He was already distracting his elites with new monuments nearby, so perhaps no one really noticed. Around his new barque shrine he carved his own historical annals, which documented his feats, campaigns, and successes as king.
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Thutmose III never took down Hatshepsut’s obelisks, perhaps because that would have been seen as an affront to the gods or because the intense labor would have drawn more attention to his destructions than his constructions. She had already covered up the lower section of one pair of obelisks, building walls between the fourth and fifth pylons, which concealed the pertinent inscriptions and saved them from Thutmose III’s chisels.
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Apparently Thutmose III wasn’t worried about leaving the ideological essence of Hatshepsut’s names and images—and thus, in the Egyptian mind-set, her spirit—in the temple of Karnak. He simply wanted to prevent people from
seeing
and
interacting
with her as king. He did attack the other obelisks more visible to the public; craftsmen were sent to the
very top of these six-story shafts with rigging and rappelling equipment so that they could remove any figures of Hatshepsut and replace them with offering tables.
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On the southern face of the eighth pylon, where her monumental statuary had already been reassigned to earlier kings, Thutmose III completely defaced the reliefs of Hatshepsut; the entire pylon was essentially left blank, with only violent chisel marks as decoration. A temple pylon was meant to introduce the king as the protector of his people and was typically decorated with images of him grasping his vile enemies by the scruff of the hair, ready to smash their skulls with a stone mace. The king’s violence was thought to protect the temple space, creating a kind of force field between the profanity of the outside world and the sacred, clean, undefiled space inside the temple walls. Thutmose III had just such an image—smiting his eastern foes—carved on the seventh pylon, but because this pylon was hidden behind the eighth (Karnak was essentially a series of pylon gateways with shrines and colonnades in between), the public standing outside the temple entrance saw only undecorated surfaces, not images of their heroic king. Perhaps Thutmose III’s seventh pylon reliefs sufficed for the festival activity that took place in this part of Karnak Temple. Indeed, it wasn’t until the reign of his son that the eighth pylon was recarved with any new reliefs.
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Across the river, the defacement of Hatshepsut’s monuments on the west bank was also under way. Thutmose III wasn’t intent on dismantling the entire temple of Djeser Djeseru, probably because the site was intensely sacred, not only to Hathor but also to Amen and to deified kingship in general. Instead, he decided to transform this structure from a funerary temple dedicated to Hatshepsut into one dedicated to his father and grandfather. He converted every possible relief image into one of these kings, and because Hatshepsut was depicted as masculine here anyway, it was relatively easy work. Some of the images at Djeser Djeseru already represented Thutmose III, and thus the structure was altered into a confirmation of how kingship could move through three generations, ending at the rightful heir—himself. Hatshepsut did not fit into this story of masculine linear succession, nor did her daughter Nefrure. They were both removed from the temple walls, although Nefrure’s images were probably already long erased by this point.

Hatshepsut’s divine birth narrative claiming godly ancestry had
to be removed entirely, but the chiseling was so superficial that the text and imagery could still be easily read by any who cared to visit. The reliefs of Hatshepsut’s expedition to Punt and her obelisk scenes—some of Hatshepsut’s proudest achievements as king—were likewise only shaved down and never entirely erased. If Thutmose III redecorated these walls, he relied heavily on plaster, none of which remains today.

At Hatshepsut’s sacred funerary temple, all the ritual activity for Amen-Re, Hathor, Anubis, Re-Horakhty, and Osiris, all the incense offering, running, libation pouring, embracing, and other rites were assigned to different kings. It was now Thutmose I, Thutmose II, and Thutmose III who facilitated these most sacred rites as depicted in the reliefs. It must be said that Thutmose III may not have viewed his activities as destruction but rather as a transformation,
senefer
, “making good.” Regardless of any rationalized justification, Hatshepsut was still deprived of an eternal afterlife as chief priest and king in these temples; she was relegated to a few images in Karnak and elsewhere as queen, wife, and mother. As king she had merely been a placeholder.

It was the Djeser Akhet, Thutmose III’s new temple just south of Hatshepsut’s, that saved Djeser Djeseru from complete obliteration, because it created an architectural complex unifying all the buildings at the site, a visible manifestation in stone of three generations of kings.
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After Thutmose’s recarving, the bay of cliffs at Deir el-Bahri could be seen as containing an orderly progression of structures dedicated to the kingship of the Theban ancestors (Mentuhotep II’s funerary complex), to his father and his grandfather (Djeser Djeseru), and to his own cult (Djeser Akhet).

The statues from Hatshepsut’s funerary temple were probably a great annoyance for Thutmose III, as they could not be converted into other kings without extensive recarving of the face and sometimes of the body as well. Despite the expense of stones like red granite, which other later New Kingdom kings (like Ramses II) would have been more than happy to reuse rather than throw away, Thutmose III decided that the best course of action was the removal and complete destruction of all of Hatshepsut’s statuary. Crews of men pulled down and smashed the dozens of colossal limestone statues of Hatshepsut as Osiris that fronted the temple
colonnades. A row of standing Osiris-Hatshepsut divinities fronting each colonnade was renovated into a row of plain rectangular columns, which lent Deir el-Bahri a more austere, and perhaps less Egyptian, air.

Thutmose III ordered any freestanding statues of his aunt utterly destroyed—one depicted her wearing a dress in combination with the king’s
nemes
headdress; another showed her wearing a masculine kilt but with girlish breasts on her bare chest. Most of the statues from Djeser Djeseru, however, depicted her in an orthodox fashion, as a strong man kneeling before the gods in the act of offering jars, vessels, or insignia. But all of these statues, too, even though they could have been easily reassigned like the colossi in front of the eighth pylon, were dragged down the ramps of the temple from their sanctuaries or processional avenues and into the courtyards below, where they were brutally smashed.
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The ancient Egyptians believed that harming a statue or removing a name could provoke the dead. Angry ghosts could visit considerable devastation upon the living. Hatshepsut had been a formidable personality in life and remained a force to be reckoned with after her death. The priests must have tried to calm Hatshepsut’s spirit during all of this destruction by performing spells and incantations or placating her with food and drink offerings. We don’t know how the Egyptians justified this destruction in their own minds. All we have is the devastation they left behind.

Thutmose III’s craftsmen were instructed in how to best annihilate these statues, presumably so that they could deactivate them and break the link between Hatshepsut and the kingship. Every statue was purposefully and directly struck at the uraeus cobra on her forehead, severing the queen from her kingly rule in one swift blow. And each one had erasures or strikes where Hatshepsut had been named king, thus cutting the owner from the royal titulary. These explicitly destructive ritual actions were likely performed first, and then the statues were haphazardly struck to pieces. Workmen used an old limestone quarry near the Djeser Djeseru temple causeway—ignominiously termed the “Hatshepsut Hole” by twentieth-century archaeologists—as a dumping ground for the fragments of Hatshepsut’s once grand statuary.

Some officials seem to have followed their king’s lead. For example, Puyemre, the Second High Priest of Amen, perhaps worried about his close professional connections to the former female king, removed all her names and images from his tomb and modified scenes to include Thutmose
III instead. He was able to keep his position when Thutmose III became sole king, but his son Menkheperre never rose in rank as high as his father. His family’s political associations with Hatshepsut may have been to blame for his son’s stunted career.
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Despite the breadth and organization of the destruction, Hatshepsut had simply built too much and embellished Egypt too widely for Thutmose III to destroy it all. He did not start his methodical removal of Hatshepsut until the last decade of his reign, and ten years was, astoundingly, not enough time for him to complete it. Destruction fatigue seems to have set in for him and for his workmen.
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Perhaps his architects and engineers became anxious about the time and expense of these side activities and encouraged their crewmen to focus on the living king’s construction work so that they could finish vital building before his death. Thutmose III’s successor would have to continue the removal of Hatshepsut, but history would show that he lacked the necessary zeal for the work, eventually dropping the chisel, as it were, a few years into his own reign.

When Egyptologists first considered the destruction of Hatshepsut’s monuments, it was easy to write a simplistic story about a woman who took what was not hers and got what was coming to her in the end, a tale of the rightful heir taking revenge on an aunt who had deigned to claim his crown for herself. Narratives full of loathing and retaliation were written with impunity. It wasn’t until 1966 that the Egyptologist Charles Nims concluded that the systematic erasure of her names and images did not happen until after year 42 of Thutmose III, at least twenty years after her death.
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Other Egyptologists have since pushed the date even further.
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It seems that Thutmose III’s campaign of destruction was done more for complex political reasons than personal hatred and vendettas. Hatshepsut’s erasure does not seem to have been a campaign driven by Thutmose’s narcissism, either, since he replaced most of her images with those of his ancestors, not himself. Her defacement wasn’t about the status and perception of his own kingship but about something larger: how the office of kingship was transferred from one generation to the next. Thutmose III was repairing the ideology of succession to fit his current needs, and each modification he made to a relief or a statue was ostensibly to show how the sacred office had been passed from Thutmose I
through Thutmose II to him—and eventually to his own son.
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Thutmose III waited until the end of his reign to erase Hatshepsut’s presence because it was only then that he needed to shore up the legitimate kingship for a son who had no genealogical connection to Hatshepsut’s side of the family. By removing his aunt, whose lofty and pure family connections sullied the aspirations of his own chosen son, Thutmose III was strengthening the history of
his
dynasty.

Some Egyptologists have theorized the existence of two rival family lines: one descended from Hatshepsut’s family and the other from Thutmose III’s, both vying for the throne.
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Unfortunately, no direct evidence speaks to any claims to the kingship by men descended from Thutmose I and Ahmes, but there is no doubt that this calculated destruction of Hatshepsut’s images would have sent a powerful message that Thutmose III would brook no upheavals among his courtiers and family members, or against his chosen heir.