Senmut was a born architect, as he proved while building the temple which Hatshepsut founded at Deir el Bahri, across the river from Thebes, in honor of herself and the sun god Amon. After seven years, still incomplete, the temple was three times as large as he said it would be, had cost eight or nine times as much as he figured, and bore no resemblance to the original plans except that it was a temple. He never did get it finished.13
Hatshepsut, who was very religious, covered the walls with pictures of herself and hieroglyphics saying that she was the daughter of this god Amon and that he had crowned her in person, giving her a much better right to the throne than Thutmose III. Whenever she thought up another one, she would put that on the wall, too.
Part of the time Hatshepsut and Thutmose would build ruined temples in Thebes, but mostly they stuck to obelisks. Hatshepsut would put up two obelisks covered with pictures of Egyptians going both ways at once and other hieroglyphics telling how good she was. The next day Thutmose would rush out and put up two much taller obelisks telling how good he was, and this went on until neither of them could think of any more lies.
For a general notion of Hatshepsut’s appearance at a certain stage of her career, we are indebted to one of those wall inscriptions. It states that “to look upon her was more beautiful than anything; her splendor and her form were divine.” Some have thought it odd that the female Pharaoh should have been so bold, fiftyish as she was. Not at all. She was merely saying how things were about thirty-five years back, before she had married Thutmose II and slugged it out with Thutmose III. “She was a maiden, beautiful and blooming,” the hieroglyphics run, and we have no reason to doubt it. Surely there is no harm in telling the world how one looked in 1514 B.C.
Whatever the records may hint about Hatshepsut and her friend, they accomplished plenty of solid constructive work, and the rest is only hearsay. You know how people talk. Titles like Chief of the Works, Superintendent of the Royal Bedroom, and Steward of the Private Apartments are easily misunderstood, as are gifts of land and gold running into the millions and prolonged conversations in the small hours, all of which may have been Hatshepsut’s method of handling a business connection necessary to the success of her career. Really good architects are hard to get.
One of the main events of Hatshepsut’s reign was the voyage to Punt, or Somaliland, for things to use in the temple services and in the terraced gardens of Amon. Five small vessels went down the Red Sea in 1492 B.C. and returned with thirty-one living myrrh trees, many other varieties of odoriferous and ornamental plants,14 myrrh resin, ihmut incense, cinnamon wood, Khesyt wood,15 ebony, ivory, gold, electrum, more than three thousand animals, including greyhounds, monkeys, and a giraffe, some Puntites, a collection of native throw sticks, and several unidentified objects.16
The Punt adventure is generally regarded as an important advance in Egyptian bottomry. The truth is that bottomry had been going on in a quiet way since the beginning of Egyptian history. Trips down the Red Sea were getting to be routine as early as the Fifth Dynasty, with Punt as a regular stop. In the Sixth Dynasty, an official named Khnumhotep went to Punt eleven times for myrrh and stuff and made no fuss about it whatever. But you know Hatshepsut. She covered a whole wall with a pictorial account of the expedition and how it was the biggest thing ever, thanks to a certain party.
Hatshepsut died in 1479 B.C. at the age of fifty-nine or so, having reigned twenty-one years and nine months, figuring from the death of her husband, Thutmose II. Nobody can prove that Thutmose III murdered his Aunt Hattie or even harmed her in the least. We do know, however, that she had kept him sitting in a corner biting his nails all that time, when he should have been the sole ruler of Egypt, and it looked like another twenty years of the same unless something drastic happened. Well, what would you have done?17
Guilty or innocent, Thutmose III did not behave as one should when one’s aunt, stepmother, and mother-in-law has passed away. First, he went on a spree for two weeks, or some say three. Then he chopped the noses off all Hatshepsut’s statues and dumped them into a deep quarry, chiseled her face and her name off the records, and walled up her best obelisk so that posterity should never know she had existed, let alone read her hieroglyphics about what a wonderful woman she was.
You can’t do that, of course. Some of those very statues, dug up and nicely repaired, may be seen today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.18 And the masonry fell away from the obelisk, leaving it in splendid condition, with its hieroglyphics undamaged by the centuries and easy for us to decipher as the result of Thutmose’s dirty trick. So she had the last word after all, which doesn’t surprise me a bit.
But guess what this frustrated little fellow did next, after he ran out of noses to smash. He went to Asia with his army and killed the natives to his heart’s content, and stole so much of their goods that Egypt was rolling in wealth for quite a while.19 Thutmose III was thus one of the earliest exponents of internationalism, or going into other countries and slaughtering the inhabitants. He made seventeen campaigns into Asia and then took it easy for the last twelve years of his life, erecting obelisks of his own, writing his memoirs on walls, murdering a few Nubians to keep in practice, and helping to bring up his little grandson, Thutmose IV. For these activities, many scholars regard him as the greatest of the Pharaohs. You’ll find him on every list of really important people.
Thutmose III died in 1447 B.C. in the fifty-fourth year of his reign, or the thirty-second counting from the death of Hatshepsut. None of his obelisks, inscribed with whopping big lies about his seventeen campaigns, remained in Egypt. They were picked up as souvenirs and carried to distant lands. One of them, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, although it has nothing to do with Cleopatra and never had, is now in Central Park, New York City, where it causes passers-by to pause for a moment in the day’s rush and inquire: “What the hell is that?” It is called Cleopatra’s Needle because the world is full of people who think up those things. If you ask me, it always will be.20
1 Pronounced Hȧ-chĕp’sŭt.
2 Or, if you prefer, Thothmes, Tahutmes, Tahutimes, or Dhutmes. Or Thuthmose, Thothmoses, Tothmoses, Thuthmoses, Tethmoses, or anything within reason.
3 Pronounced Chumley.
4 She wanted to be the boss whether anyone loved her or not. Some people are like that.
5 Egyptologists who examined the mummy of Thutmose II almost 3,500 years after his death say that he was not a well man. He looked awful.
6 His skull was pentagonoid in shape. His face was small, narrow, elliptical, and hopeless.
7 He is now in the Cairo Museum.
8 Wazmose and Amenmose had died in infancy. So had Neferubity.
9 Pharaohs wore artificial beards symbolical of artificial wisdom.
10 Manetho places Ahmose I in the Seventeenth Dynasty. Now that is just silly.
11 When they started to argue, something was bound to give, and it wasn’t Hatshepsut.
12 Hatshepsut’s Prime Minister was Hapuseneb, a bald-headed old fellow with a wen on the end of his nose. He died poor.
13 He also raised at Karnak two pink granite obelisks, one of which did not fall down, though it was always slightly askew.
14 Like so many great women, Hatshepsut was a garden fanatic. Always asking for slips.
15 Khesyt wood is a special kind of wood obtained from the Khesyt tree.
16 Senmut did not go to Punt.
17