Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (22 page)

The new plan means that Tuthmosis I was actually interred twice in Tomb KV 20, firstly during his funeral when he was placed in a traditional wooden sarcophagus (now lost) in the original burial chamber, and later, during Hatchepsut's reign, when he was provided with a splendid quartzite sarcophagus and moved downwards to the new chamber. This would, of course, cast doubt upon the hitherto accepted theory that the tomb was designed to run directly beneath
Djeser-Djeseru
; the unusual length of the passageways may instead represent a fruitless search for the layers of hard rock which would permit the carving of decorations on the tomb walls.

The location of Tomb KV 20 – if not of its original owner – had been known since the Napoleonic Expedition of 1799; in 1804 a gentleman named Ch. H. Gordon had left his mark on the entrance door-jamb; in 1817 Giovanni Battista Belzoni had recorded the tomb on his map of the Valley of the Kings; in 1824 James Burton had gained access to an upper chamber; and in 1844 Karl Richard Lepsius had partially explored the upper passage. However, all the passageways had become blocked by a solidified mass of rubble, small stones and other rubbish which had been carried into the tomb by floodwaters. It was not until 1903–4 that Howard Carter, after two seasons of strenuous work, was able to clear the corridors and make his way along the long and winding passageways to the double burial chamber. This he found to be filled with debris from a collapsed ceiling, and he embarked on a further month's clearance work, labouring under the most trying of conditions:

… the air had become so bad, and the heat so great, that the candles carried by the workmen melted, and would not give enough light to enable them to continue their work; consequently we were compelled to install electric lights, in the form of hand wires… As soon as we got down about 50 metres, the air became so foul that the men could not work. In addition to this, the bats of centuries had built innumerable nests on the ceilings of the corridors and chambers, and their excrement had become so dry that the least stir of the air filled the corridors with a fluffy black stuff, which choked the noses and mouths of the men, rendering it most difficult for them to breathe.
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All the rubbish extracted had to be carried in baskets along almost 200 m (656 ft) of narrow, curving passageways and steep stairways to the surface 100 m (328 ft) above. Overcoming these obstacles with the aid of an air suction pump installed by the excavation's American sponsor, Mr Theodore M. Davis, the intrepid Carter discovered that the tomb followed a fairly simple plan, with four descending stepped passages linked by three rectangular chambers leading to a rectangular burial chamber measuring 11 m × 5.5 m × 3 m (36 ft × 18 ft × 10 ft). The ceiling of the burial chamber was originally supported by a row of three central columns, and there were three very small store rooms opening off the main chamber. Here Carter found not one but two yellow quartzite sarcophagi and Hatchepsut's matching quartzite canopic box. Unfortunately, the tomb had been robbed in antiquity, and the once-magnificent grave goods were reduced to piles of broken sherds, fragments of stone vessels and ‘some burnt pieces of wooden coffins and boxes; a part of the face and foot of a large wooden statue covered in bitumen’.
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It does not seem beyond the bounds of possibility that the burned wooden fragments might be the remains of the original coffins and sarcophagus of Tuthmosis I. Fifteen polished limestone slabs inscribed in red and black ink with chapters from the
Amduat
, a book of royal funerary literature provided during the New Kingdom for the use of the dead king, and here obviously intended to line the burial chamber, were lying on the floor where the builders had abandoned them.

Included amongst the debris of broken pottery and shattered stone vessels recovered from the burial chamber and lower passages were the remains of two vases made for Queen Ahmose Nefertari. These vessels seem to have been regarded as Tuthmoside family heirlooms, and as such were a part of the original funerary equipment of Tuthmosis I. One of the vases gives the name and titles of the deceased queen ‘long may she live’, plus a later inscription which tells us that Tuthmosis
II ‘[made it] as his monument to his father’. Other vessels, this time bearing the name and titles of Tuthmosis I, had also been inscribed by Tuthmosis II and were presumably also a part of the original funerary equipment of Tuthmosis I placed in his tomb by his son. The tomb also contained fragments of stone vessels made for Hatchepsut before she became king – possibly transferred from her previous tomb – and vessels bearing the name of Maatkare Hatchepsut which must have been made after she acceded to the throne.

Fig. 4.6 The goddess Isis from the sarcophagus of Hatchepsut

The magnificent sarcophagus of King Hatchepsut was discovered open, with no sign of a body, and with the lid lying discarded on the floor. It is now housed in Cairo Museum along with its matching quartzite canopic chest. Carved from a single block of yellow quartzite, the sarcophagus has a cartouche-shaped plan-form with a rounded head end and a flat foot end, and it has been inscribed, polished and painted. The second sarcophagus, found lying on its side with its almost-undamaged lid propped against the wall nearby, was eventually presented to Mr Davis as a gesture of appreciation for his generous financial support. Mr Davis in turn presented the sarcophagus to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This second sarcophagus had originally been engraved with the name of ‘the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare Hatchepsut’; incontrovertible evidence that it had been intended for the use of the female king. However, just as the sarcophagus was virtually complete, there had been a change of plan. A new sarcophagus was commissioned for Hatchepsut, and the rejected sarcophagus was transferred to Tuthmosis I. The stonemasons made the
best that they could of the situation, restoring the surface of the quartzite so that it could be re-carved with the name and titles of its new owner. In an attempt to erase the original carvings several centi-metres of the outer surface were lost and the sarcophagus was reduced by 6 cm (2½ in) in width and 1.5 cm (½ in) in length, while the lid was made good by the judicious use of painted plaster. Finally, the sarcophagus was re-carved with the name of Tuthmosis I. A dedication text makes Hatchepsut's generosity clear:

… long live the Female Horus… The king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare, the son of Re, Hatchepsut-Khnemet-Amun! May she live forever! She made it as her monument to her father whom she loved, the Good God, Lord of the Two Lands, Aakheperkare, the son of Re, Tuthmosis the justified.
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The sarcophagus finally measured 222.5 cm (7 ft) long x 89 cm (3 ft) wide with walls 13 cm (5 in) thick, and would therefore have been too short to have held the anthropoid coffin of Tuthmosis I which, recovered from the Deir el-Bahri mummy cache, measures 232 cm (7 ft 6 in) long by 72 cm (2 ft 3 in) wide at the elbows and 70 cm (2 ft 3 in) high at the face. The feet, normally the deepest part of the coffin, had been destroyed in antiquity. The 18th Dynasty workmen, realizing that the reconditioned sarcophagus might prove too small for its intended occupant, had attempted to enlarge the cavity by hacking away at the inner surfaces of the end walls. However, even when the inner space had been enlarged twice, it still only measured 210 cm x 64 cm x 64.5 cm (6 ft 10 in x 2ft x 2ft); it would have easily accommodated a mummified body, but not one encased in a nest of two or three wooden coffins. Presumably, when the time came to inter the king, his coffin's) would have been discarded.

At around 155 cm tall (approximately 5 ft) Tuthmosis would certainly not have been considered a giant amongst the ancient Egyptians, but nor would he have been unnaturally short for a New Kingdom man; an average male height of approximately 166 cm (5 ft 5 in) is suggested by the available human remains.
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The Tuthmosides evidently had a family tendency towards shortness; Tuthmosis II was 169 cm (5 ft 6 in) tall and Tuthmosis III, at 161 cm (5 ft 3 in), has often been likened to an ancient Egyptian Napoleon Bonaparte (or, less frequently, to Alexander the Great and even to Horatio Nelson) on account of both his military
prowess and his stocky build. As Hatchepsut's sarcophagus was too short for Tuthmosis I we must assume that she was less tall than her father; presumably her body, wrapped in bandages and encased within at least one wooden coffin, would have fitted into her smallest sarcophagus, that recovered from the Wadi Sikkat Taka ez-Zeida, which would have taken a coffin up to 181 cm (5 ft 11 in) in length.

Tuthmosis I was not, however, destined to lie alongside his daughter as, sometime after the death of Hatchepsut, Tuthmosis III decided to re-inter his grandfather in an even more magnificent tomb. To some modern observers this seems a very natural reaction:

That… upon finding himself supreme master of Egypt he should have permitted the body of his revered ancestor and predecessor on the throne to lie buried in the tomb – in the very sarcophagus – of the accursed usurper is, to the mind of the writer, incredible… One would expect him to have striven to surpass his former co-regent in lavishness and to have scorned the shoddy expedient of ‘doing over’ a second-half [sic] monument or of failing to provide one at all.
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The new tomb (KV 38) contained yet another yellow quartzite sarcophagus dedicated to Tuthmosis I and inscribed by his loving grandson: ‘It was his son who caused his name to live in making excellent the monument of [his] father for all eternity.’
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This time the workmen made sure that the sarcophagus was exactly the right size to accommodate Tuthmosis’ new cedarwood anthropoid coffin; one of a series of three coffins thoughtfully provided by Tuthmosis III.

Unfortunately, Tuthmosis was once again to be denied his eternal rest. During the late 20th Dynasty his new tomb was plundered, the sarcophagus lid was broken, the body was stripped of its precious jewellery and the valuable grave goods were stolen. One of the coffins prepared for Tuthmosis I by Tuthmosis III eventually came to light as part of the Deir el-Bahri mummy cache. As might be expected, this coffin was obviously an early 18th Dynasty artifact and bore the name of Tuthmosis. However the coffin had been ‘borrowed’ by a later king; it had been re-gilded and re-inlaid for use by the Theban ruler Pinedjem I, a monarch who ruled southern Egypt over 400 years after the death of Tuthmosis I. The gold foil carefully applied for Pinedjem's interment had itself been subsequently removed, possibly by the necropolis
officials who stored the coffins in the cache, allowing the original name of Tuthmosis to be seen once again.

It is obvious that Tuthmosis’ body must have been separated from its coffin before Pinedjem was buried. This must cast serious doubt upon the mummy tentatively identified as that of Tuthmosis I at the end of the nineteenth century. Maspero had found this mummy resting, Russian doll-style, in a nest of two coffins, the inner one a Third Intermediate Period coffin originally intended for Pinedjem and the outer coffin that of Tuthmosis I but adapted for the use of Pinedjem. This unlabelled body seemed of the correct size and age to be Tuthmosis I although, like many of the other mummies in the cache, it had been ‘restored’ in antiquity and was now wrapped in late New Kingdom cloth. When the newer wrappings were removed, it was revealed that the original mummy, that of a man with a wrinkled face apparently in his mid-fifties, was badly decomposed and that the hands of the body had been torn away by thieves searching for precious jewellery. The head, however, as described by Maspero ‘presents a striking resemblance to those of Tuthmosis II and III’ while the rather long narrow face displayed ‘refined features… the mouth still bears an expression of shrewdness and cunning’.
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Maspero took this physical similarity to the other Tuthmoside kings as confirmation of the mummy's royal identity and suggested that the body must have been restored to its original coffin by the officials responsible for packing the Deir el-Bahri cache. This, of course, suggests that Pinedjem's body had also become separated from its coffins in antiquity, and indeed Pinedjem later turned up inside the coffin of Queen Ahhotep II. X-ray analysis of the ‘Tuthmosis I’ body, however, indicates that it may in fact be the body of a man in his late teens or early twenties. While there are many problems with the ages suggested by the X-ray analysis of mummies, this does leave us with the tantalizing possibility that the body, if it is not that of Tuthmosis I, may be that of a young male member of the royal family, possibly even one of Hatchepsut's elder brothers, Amenmose or Wadjmose.
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Tuthmosis III furnished his grandfather with his third mortuary chapel, a part of his own cult temple,
Henketankh
, which was situated halfway between the original mortuary temple of Tuthmosis I and the point where the Deir el-Bahri temple causeway reaches the desert's edge. The mortuary chapel which Hatchepsut had built to honour her
father within
Djeser-Djeseru
was abandoned, while Tuthmosis' original mortuary temple,
Khenmetankh
, was left to become a generalized Tuthmoside family chapel; a scene showing Tuthmosis I seated in front of the enigmatic Prince Wadjmose and receiving an offering from Tuthmosis III suggests that Tuthmosis III may have actually restored this chapel as a cult temple dedicated to the memory of his grandfather.
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