Little remains to be told. The Pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty were filled with loose chips and rubble. One of them was named Kakau or Kuku, and another turned out to be a punster. Pepy I of the Sixth Dynasty was a fine fellow, but something seemed to be wrong with his budget, and Pepy II tried to bring back prosperity by building another pyramid. As pyramids were causing the trouble, it didn’t help much. Then everybody got very bored with pyramids and took up checkers.
1 The ancient Egyptian word for south was “upstream.” It was the wrong word.
2 Or 3500 B.C., or possibly 3000 B.C.
3 Menes may have been Aha or Ohe.
4 Predynastic Egyptians beat their wives with naboots, or rough wooden quarterstaves. First Dynasty husbands used exquisitely wrought axes of porphyry capable of breaking an arm at one blow.
5 This was called the wisdom of the ancients.
6 Few people realize that the habitable portion of Egypt comprises only about 13,000 square miles.
7 I never argue with Sumerian enthusiasts. I just ask: “Then what about the Badarians?”
8 The Egyptians believed that the body must be preserved indefinitely in order to obtain immortality. Shows what they knew.
9 The later Pharaohs used stone for this purpose. It fell out, too.
10 Or Hwfw.
11 How the Greeks made Cheops out of Hwfw is at present unknown.
12 The Empire State Building is 1,248 feet high.
13 No radio programs were broadcast from the King’s Burial Chamber until February 7, 1938.
14 The main ambition of every Egyptian was to be a mummy, but only the rich could afford it. Later on, people of moderate means could be mummies.
15 The Great Pyramid is very wonderful, if you care for pyramids.
16 He was not aware that his mummy would be taken out of its coffin and thrown away. That might have worried him.
17 This was their idea of taking a bath. The upper classes used olive oil. All the ancient Egyptians were somewhat oily.
18 They called the pyramid Ekhut Khufu, or Khufu’s Folly.
19 You can get a solid stone facsimile of the Great Pyramid made to order for $156,000,000. It is cheaper to do it yourself – then you know it’s done right.
20 It probably could not fall down if it tried.
21 Queen Merytyetes or Mertitiones, the stepmother-wife, survived Khufu and was passed along to his son Khafre. Odd, I must say.
22 There was a minor Pharaoh between Khufu and Khafre. All we know about him positively is his name, which was Radedef, or Tetf-Re, or Didoufri, or Ratiosis.
23 Some interesting structural details were uncovered in 1925–26 by Monsieur Baraize of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.
24 Thanks to General Vyse, who entered the Third Pyramid in 1837 and shipped part of its contents to the British Museum, the elaborate basalt sarcophagus of Menkaure is now at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
HATSHEPSUT
IN THE Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt was ruled by Queen Hatshepsut1 and Thutmose III,2 and every so often Hatshepsut would catch Thutmose III3 right behind the ear with a piece of rock. You can hardly blame her, for all her life she had been completely surrounded by Thutmoses, a family of ugly little Pharaohs with retreating foreheads, bulging eyes, and projecting front teeth, and it was getting on her nerves. She was suffering from an advanced stage of Thutmose trouble, a condition in which you see one or more Thutmoses in any direction you look. It became second nature to throw something whenever she saw one, real or imaginary.
Hatshepsut was the daughter of Thutmose I and had helped him govern Egypt when she was a mere girl. He was too lazy and shiftless to do it alone. Then she had married her half brother, Thutmose II, in order to strengthen his position on the throne, as she was of royal blood on both sides and he wasn’t. Thutmose II was the son of Thutmose I and some outsider, a fact to which Hatshepsut doubtless called his attention from time to time.4 He was a frail, effeminate youth with a blotchy complexion, the weakest of all the Thutmoses, but Hatshepsut was the managing kind and they had two daughters, Neferure and Merytre.
Thutmose II died in 1501 B.C., leaving Hatshepsut face to face with Thutmose III, his nine-year-old son by one of his concubines. Modern research shows that the shoulders, hips, pelvis, and breastbone of Thutmose II had been broken. His nose was deformed, too, as if somebody had let a flatiron slip, and there were symptoms of rat poison. Egyptologists have no idea who did all this.5
So there she was with another one on her hands. Thutmose III was easily the ugliest of the lot, with almost no forehead at all and a nasty habit of talking back.6 The back of his head was perfectly flat.7 As she was the only surviving child of Ahmose, the Great Royal Wife of Thutmose I,8 Hatshepsut had to act as regent and do all the work during the minority of her young nephew and stepson, and the arrangement proved a little difficult on both sides. She even married her daughter Neferure to Thutmose III for the good of the family, thus becoming his mother-in-law as well as his stepmother and Aunt Hattie. It didn’t seem to work out somehow.
When this had gone on for six or seven years, Hatshepsut decided to take steps. After all, she was legitimate, and she was sick and tired of stooging for these sons of concubines without receiving equal honors. She thought it over and decided that if some people could be Pharaohs she would be one herself instead of stepping down and out when Thutmose III came of age.
There was, however, an unbreakable tradition that only a king could rule in Egypt, so she was not eligible for the job. For her handling of this situation, Hatshepsut has been called the first great woman of history. She simply appointed herself King of Egypt and that was all there was to it.
To show her subjects that she was properly qualified, Hatshepsut set up many statues and portraits representing herself as a regular male Pharaoh with a beard.9 This fooled nobody, but it was legal proof because she was the law, and she was the law because she said she was. Hatshepsut was quite a surprise to the Egyptians, who had gone along thinking that it’s a man’s world. It is, with certain exceptions.
Hatshepsut allowed Thutmose III to keep his title of Pharaoh and act as junior co-ruler. That is, she would let him burn incense in her honor, feed her herd of pet cows, run errands, and have his name on the monuments after her own, in smaller hieroglyphics. He wanted to be a soldier and fight the Mesopotamians in Asia, like Ahmose I10 and Thutmose I, but whenever he mentioned it she would hit him again. Hatshepsut was a firm believer in peace outside the home.11 Although she let the army go to seed, the fact is that as long as she lived the Nubians were as quiet as mice and the Mesopotamians never revolted, even once. They had probably heard about her.
Hatshepsut had her tender side, too, as who hasn’t? Her name has been rather bandied about in connection with Senmut, a handsome architect of humble birth whose plans and specifications she much admired. She had seen him first while her husband, Thutmose II, was still alive and had made a memo in case she ever wanted any new architecture. When and where they met is uncertain, but one evening shortly after the funeral they were noticed loitering in the sacred sycamore grove as if they had some important buildings in mind, and the next morning Senmut was appointed Chief of the Royal Works.
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