Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (13 page)

The 18th Dynasty was to become remarkable for the number of times that the king was married to a close female relation, often his half- or full sister and occasionally even his daughter. Hatchepsut herself was married to her half-brother Tuthmosis II, bearing him at least one daughter who was herself almost certainly intended to marry her half-brother Tuthmosis III. Nor was this phenomenon confined to the early 18th Dynasty. A century after Hatchepsut's reign, King Amenhotep III married his daughter Sitamen and elevated her to the rank of King's Chief Wife alongside her mother, Queen Tiy. Amenhotep III was followed on the throne by his son Akhenaten who married at least one and possibly three of his six daughters, and he was followed in turn by the boy-king Tutankhamen who married his sister(?) Ankhesenamen who bore him at least two still-born children. It is clear that the tradition of fully consummated incestuous marriages was well established within the royal family, and we must not assume that these unions would have been considered in any way distasteful or even unusual by the parties concerned. Indeed, a Late Period papyrus now housed in the Cairo Museum tells the story of Prince Neneferkaptah and Princess Ahwere who had fallen head over heels in love with each other and who wished to marry despite the opposition of their father, who worried aloud about the situation:

If it so happens that I have only two children, is it right to marry one to the other? Should I not rather marry Neneferkaptah to the daughter of a general and Ahwere to the son of another general, so that our family may increase?
²⁶

The king was concerned about the match not because the bride and groom were brother and sister, but because it was an insular marriage which would not introduce new members into the royal family. Eventually he relented, gave his children his blessing and his daughter a dowry, and, as Ahwere frankly tells us:

I was taken as a wife to the house of Neneferkaptah… He slept with me that night and found me pleasing. He slept with me again and again and we loved each other.
²⁷

To egyptologists working in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of whom had developed their interest in egyptology as a
by-product of their primary interest in Biblical studies, these shamelessly incestuous unions appeared both unnatural and repugnant; ‘a very objectional custom' according to Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson,
²⁸
speaking for many of his contemporaries. Such marriages could only be explained as a necessity which could not be avoided. Already heavily influenced by the erroneous theory of a matriarchal Theban royal family, egyptologists now developed the so-called ‘heiress theory’; a theory which neatly explained the intra-family marriages by deducing that the right to rule must be transmitted downwards through the generations via the royal women. It was not enough to be born a royal prince or to be crowned king as it would be in a western-style monarchy – the true ruler of Egypt had to marry the royal heiress who was always the daughter of a king and his consort and who carried the essence of ‘royalness’ in her veins. The heiress then in turn became queen, and mother of both the next king and the next royal heiress.

More recent research, and perhaps a greater willingness to accept the realities of incestuous unions, shows that this heiress theory must be incorrect. Many of the most successful kings of the 18th Dynasty, including Tuthmosis I, II and III, were clearly not the sons of royal women and yet were fully accepted by their people. Conversely Tuthmosis III, Amenhotep I and Amenhotep III, and possibly Tuthmosis I, had non-royal consorts who were treated with at least as much respect as their better-born sisters. We must, therefore, seek some other explanation for the prevalence of incestuous royal marriages at this time.

The dynastic Egyptians, in contrast to most other peoples, ancient and modern, were remarkably relaxed in their attitudes to marriage. They do not seem to have felt the need to impose any state or religious control over the choice of partners and, although the idea of the family was always an important one, the impression given is that marriage – or, more accurately, a sexual union – was of little interest to any but the immediate families of the couple concerned. Co-habitation with slaves, with foreigners, with brothers or sisters and even with relatively young children were all legally permissible, as was polygamy and, it would appear although we have no known examples, polyandry. Therefore, it was possible for any Egyptian man to openly marry or sleep with his sister or one or all of his unmarried daughters without incurring legal penalties. Whether he would have been allowed to sleep with his mother – indeed whether he would have wished to – is another question.

Despite their legal validity, brother–sister unions are very rare until the Roman period when a complex system of inheritance laws forced families to favour brother–sister marriages in an attempt to keep their property intact. Unfortunately, the Egyptian habit of referring to wives and lovers as ‘sisters’ has caused a great deal of confusion in this area; the New Kingdom poet who sighed, ‘My sister is come, my heart fills with joy as I open my arms to enfold her’, was longing for his girlfriend, who was presumably not a close blood relation, and it would appear that most Egyptian males simply did not fancy their sisters and chose to look outside the nuclear family for a mate. We may suggest a variety of reasons for this: local custom, the wish to extend the basic family group, the wish to extend bonds with other families and perhaps a lack of sexual attraction between children raised together, may well have combined to make non-sibling marriage the preferred choice.

The royal family were, however, in an entirely different position. They were unique, exclusive, and had no desire to either increase in numbers or unite with other families. Indeed, they were even prepared to exclude brothers and sons from the immediate family in order to preserve their select status. Incestuous marriage was therefore a convenient means of ensuring the purity of the royal line and restricting the size of the royal family by concentrating ‘royalness’ within a small group of closely related individuals. As an added advantage, brother-sister marriage ensured that a suitable husband could always be found for the highest-ranking princesses who might otherwise have been unable to marry. Whether they were concerned that the husband of a princess might attempt to seize the throne for his own descendants, or whether they simply felt themselves to be superior to all others, the 18th Dynasty royal family was always very careful when it came to marrying off its daughters. Egyptian princesses never made diplomatic foreign marriages and when the King of Babylon, whose own daughter was married to Amenhotep III, inquired about an Egyptian bride for his own harem he was given short shrift: ‘Since the days of old, no Egyptian king's daughter has been given to anyone.’ Ankhesenamen, the young widow of Tutankhamen, broke with 18th Dynasty tradition when she wrote to Suppiluliuma, King of the Hittites, asking him to send a suitable prince: ‘If you could send me one of your sons I would make him my husband.’ Unfortunately, the bridegroom was murdered on the way to meet his bride, and it was not until the 21st
Dynasty that an Egyptian princess was sent as a bride to the Jewish King Solomon.

Brother–sister marriages were a useful means of reinforcing the links between the pharaoh and the gods while emphasizing the gulf between the immediate royal family and the rest of mankind. Isis and Osiris, Geb and Nut and Seth and Nephthys had all enjoyed brother–sister unions, although as these six existed at a time when there were no other eligible marriage partners this was perhaps less through choice than through necessity. Whatever the reasons, what had been good enough for the gods was good enough for pharaoh. For those who believed that their royal blood made them profoundly different from other mortals, a sister made the logical choice of spouse, while an Egyptian princess was surely the best possible mother for a future king of Egypt.

3

Queen of Egypt

The king [Tuthmosis I] rested from life, going forth to heaven, having completed his years in gladness of heart. The hawk in the nest [appeared as] the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Aakheperenre [Tuthmosis II], he became king of the Black Land and ruler of the Red Land, having taken possession of the Two Regions in triumph
.
¹

The former general Tuthmosis I soon proved himself a worthy successor to the newly established tradition of the mighty Egyptian warrior-king, embarking on a series of flamboyant and highly successful foreign campaigns intended to impress Egyptian superiority on the traditional enemies of the south and north. In his second regnal year Egyptian troops marched southwards into Nubia where, as Ahmose, son of Ibana, tells us, they successfully ‘destroyed insurrection throughout the lands and repelled the intruders from the desert region’, advancing past the Third Cataract of the Nile, where Tuthmosis set up a stela to commemorate his great achievement, and reaching the island of Argo. The new king sailed home in triumph with the body of a Nubian bowman, a dreadful warning to others who might be tempted to rebel, draped ‘head down over the bow of his majesty's ship, the
Falcon
’. He left behind him a subdued land controlled by a chain of Egyptian fortresses stretching across Nubia and the Sudan.

This was followed by an even more spectacular victory. After establishing new military headquarters at the old northern capital of Memphis, Tuthmosis pressed eastwards into Naharin, crossing the River Euphrates and entering the territory ruled by Egypt's new enemy, the King of Mitanni. Here, as the ever-present Ahmose records:

[His Majesty] went to Retenu to vent his wrath throughout foreign lands. His Majesty arrived at Naharin. His Majesty – life, prosperity and health be upon him – found that the enemy was gathering troops. Then his Majesty made a great heap of corpses among them. Countless were the living captives of his Majesty from his victories. Lo, I was at the head of the army and his Majesty saw my bravery. I brought away a chariot, its horse, and the one who was upon it as a living captive to present to his Majesty. I was rewarded with gold yet again.
²

After a great battle and with many of the enemy killed or taken prisoner, Tuthmosis laid down the foundations of what was later to develop into Egypt's Asian empire. Once again a commemorative stela was needed, this time to be set on the bank of the River Euphrates. On his journey home the victorious king paused for a celebratory elephant hunt in the swamps of Syria, thus establishing a family tradition which was to be followed some fifty years later by his grandson, Tuthmosis III, a prolific big-game hunter who was to boast of killing or maiming over a hundred elephants at the same hunting ground.

Tuthmosis I instigated an equally successful domestic policy and his reign saw extensive and innovative building programmes at all the major Theban sites. To Ineni, a high-ranking Theban official, Hereditary Prince, Overseer of Double Granary of Amen and possibly Mayor of Thebes, fell the responsibility for supervising what was to become the first phase of the 18th Dynasty embellishment of the Karnak temple complex. The original Middle Kingdom temple was now enclosed within a sandstone wall, the processional ways were extended, and two magnificent pylons or monumental gateways, complete with towers and flagpoles, were installed, the area between them being roofed over to form a pillared hall. Most impressive of all, two inscribed red-granite obelisks, each standing 19.5 m (64 ft) high and with a gold-leaf coated tip designed to mirror the sun's rays, were erected within the enclosure wall before the main entrance to the temple.

Ineni was evidently an experienced architect and overseer of building projects. He had previously worked on the construction of the gate of Amenhotep I at Karnak, and he was now to be entrusted with the quarrying of the king's secret tomb which was to be the first excavated in the remote Biban el-Muluk, the Valley of the Gates of the Kings, now better known simply as the Valley of the Kings, on the West Bank of the Nile, opposite Thebes. The autobiography preserved in his tomb tells how he:

… supervised the excavation of the cliff-tomb of His Majesty alone, no one seeing, no one hearing… I was vigilant in seeking that which is excellent. I made fields of clay in order to plaster their tombs of the necropolis. It is work such as the ancestors had not which I was obliged to do there.
³

The tomb was to follow the new custom, established by Amenhotep I, of physically separating the actual burial chamber from the mortuary temple. The theological move away from the cult of Re and the associated pyramid form, and the development of mortuary temples which were effectively temples of Amen, caused the architects some problems. It was neither practical nor desirable to site the large and conspicuous mortuary temples in the steep Valley of the Kings while, although the mortuary temple could be constructed on the flatter and more accessible desert fringes, the burial chamber could not be dug underneath the temple without incurring the risk of flooding. Separation was inevitable, and brought a welcome side effect; it was now possible to make a realistic attempt to hide the entrance to the burial chamber from the thieves who were irresistibly attracted by the sumptuous paraphernalia traditionally provided with the burial of a king. The preservation of an intact tomb was vital, not merely to provide storage for the grave goods which the deceased might need in the Afterlife, but to conserve the mummified body itself. Egyptian theology decreed that the soul, or Ka, could not survive if the body was destroyed and, as the prospect of ‘dying the second death’ (that is, the destruction of the body and subsequent death of the soul) seemed almost too horrific to contemplate, the tradition of mummification was developed in a desperate attempt to defeat nature and preserve the deceased for eternity. Unfortunately, the custom of wrapping valuable items under the mummy bandages meant that the bodies of dead kings, once discovered, were treated with scant respect. By the beginning of the New Kingdom tomb-robbery was a major problem, and it had become all too obvious that a large monument placed in close proximity to a wealthy grave simply served as a signpost to buried treasures.