Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (27 page)

Whichever the port of arrival, we once again see the parade of luxury goods as the expedition disembarks. In fact, more space is devoted to the loading and unloading of the vessels than is given to the mysteries of the land of Punt itself. Egyptian sailors struggle under the weight of incense trees temporarily planted in baskets and slung between two carrying poles while behind them come men carrying ebony and
boomerangs, amphorae filled with precious unguents and curiously shaped blocks of resin. Yet other sailors drive the herds of cattle and one even leads a cynocephalus ape, highly valued as the sacred animal of Thoth, god of wisdom. The precious silver, gold, lapis lazuli and malachite are carefully weighed in the scales of Thoth while a motley collection of foreigners, both Puntites and Nubians, disembarks and kneels before the King.

Fig. 5.6 Tuthmosis III offers before the barque of Amen

Hatchepsut, the ever-dutiful daughter, dedicates the best of the goods to her father Amen:

The King himself, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare, takes the good things of Punt, and the valuables of the divine land, presenting the gifts of the southern countries, the tributes of the vile Kush, the boxes [of gold and precious stones] of the land of the negroes to Amen-Re, the Lord of the Throne of the Two Lands. The King Maatkare, she is living, she lasts, she is full of joy, she rules over the land like Re eternally.
³⁶

Hatchepsut stands proud before the god himself. Senenmut, the king's favourite, prominent in his role of Overseer of the Granaries of Amen, stands with Neshi to praise the king on the success of her mission; all three figures and much of the accompanying text have been hacked off the wall in antiquity. Meanwhile, in the background of just one scene, the figure of Tuthmosis III appears, wearing the regal blue crown and holding out two tubs of incense to the sacred barque of Amen.

6

Propaganda in Stone

I am his daughter in very truth, who works for him and knows what he desires. My reward from my father is life, stability, dominion upon the Horus Throne of all the Living, like Re, for ever.
¹

King Hatchepsut embarked at once upon an ambitious programme of public works, restoring the monuments of past pharaohs and establishing new temples for the glory of the gods. The benefits of this policy were to be felt up and down the Nile, but it is for the monumental work in and around Thebes that her reign is now best remembered. Such a programme was of threefold importance. At its most obvious level it impressed upon the people the economic prosperity of the new regime. Although Hatchepsut, as absolute ruler, had no need to pay for land, labour or materials, she did need to feed her workforce, and only the more affluent pharaohs could afford to dispense the daily rations of bread, beer and grain which were given in lieu of wages. Similarly, only a well-established and well-organized monarch could boast the efficient and far-sighted bureaucracy necessary to implement such labour-intensive plans. The massive stone buildings now starting to rise amidst the mud-brick houses of Thebes and the other major centres of population served as a constant reminder that there was a powerful pharaoh on the throne. They were, as Winlock has remarked, ‘everlasting propaganda in stone’.
²

At the same time the new buildings, literally intended to last as ‘mansions of millions of years’ (temples) or ‘houses of eternity’ (rock-cut tombs), would ensure that the name of their founder would live with them for ever. The preservation of the personal name, always an important consideration for upper-class Egyptians, was particularly important to Hatchepsut, who seems to have understood that she would need to provide constant justifications of her own atypical reign. If her monuments could be larger and more impressive than those of her
predecessors, then so much the better; a flattering comparison with the past was often a useful means of stressing the achievements of the present. Finally, the new temples would serve as perhaps the greatest offering that a king could make to the gods; they would be a tangible and permanent proof of the king's extreme piety, and would ensure that the gods would cooperate in maintaining the success of the reign.

The larger-scale stone buildings possessed one very useful feature which was quickly recognized and exploited. Their walls provided the new monarch with an enormous, obvious and permanent billboard upon which to speak directly to both her present and future subjects. Indeed, there was no other effective means of conveying general propaganda to the people. Word of mouth was doubtless used on a daily basis to communicate more specific and ephemeral matters, but spoken messages would surely perish with time, while the writings preserved on fragile papyri and ostraca would never reach a wide audience. Hatchepsut, never one to miss an opportunity, soon became adept at using the walls of her own buildings to proclaim her own glories and justify her own reign.

In the deserts of Middle Egypt, approximately one mile to the south-east of Beni Hassan, Hatchepsut endowed two temples dedicated to the obscure deity Pakhet, ‘She who Scratches’, a fierce lion-headed goddess of the desert, worshipped locally. Much later the Greeks equated Pakhet with their own goddess Artemis, and her larger temple, cut into a small, steep-sided valley, is now widely known by its classical name of Speos Artemidos, or the ‘Grotto of Artemis’. Its local name is the Istabl Antar (the stable of Antar; Antar was a pre-Islamic warrior poet), while the neighbouring smaller temple of Pakhet is known as the Speos Batn el-Bakarah. The Speos Artemidos survived the reigns of both Tuthmosis III and Akhenaten virtually intact, but was unfortunately ‘restored’ by Seti I who added his own texts to the previously unadorned sanctuary. The Speos Batn el-Bakarah was badly defaced during the reign of Tuthmosis III.

The Speos Artemidos consisted of two chambers: an outer pillared vestibule or hall which led via a short passage to an inner sanctuary cut into the living rock. A niche set into the back wall of the sanctuary, intended to house the cult statue of Pakhet, formed the religious focus of the shrine. The internal walls bore few decorations, although a series of texts and scenes carved on the south wall of the vestibule, around the

Fig. 6.1 Plan of the Speos Artemidos

doorway to the sanctuary, were intended to re-emphasize Hatchepsut's filial bond with Amen, the father who had chosen her as ruler of Egypt. Here we can read Amen's words as he proclaims Hatchepsut's kingship:

Utterance by Amen-Re, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands…, ‘O my beloved daughter Maatkare, I am thy beloved father. I establish for thee thy rank in the kingship of the Two Lands. I have fixed thy titulary.’
³

The accompanying scene shows Hatchepsut kneeling before the seated Amen, while the fierce Pakhet extends her left arm and pledges her support for the new king: ‘my fiery breath being as a fire against thine enemies…’ Thoth then announces the accession of Hatchepsut before the assembly of gods. Finally we see Hatchepsut offering incense
and libations to Pakhet who again extends her rather bloodthirsty blessing: ‘I give thee all strength, all might, all lands and every hill country crushed beneath thy sandals like Re.’

However, it is the lengthy text carved high above the pillars across the front of the temple which is of great interest to students of Egyptian history. Here Hatchepsut makes a bold pronouncement of the policy of her reign; a policy of renewal and restoration. She wishes her readers to understand that, from the very moment of her creation she, Hatchepsut, was destined to restore the purity of the Egyptian temples to their former glories:

I have done these things by the device of my heart. I have never slumbered as one forgetful, but have made strong what was decayed. I have raised up what was dismembered, even from the first time when the Asiatics were in Avaris of the North Land, with roving hordes in the midst of them overthrowing what had been made; they ruled without Re… I have banished the abominations of the gods, and the earth has removed their footprints.
⁴

Here Hatchepsut is deliberately invoking the legend of the dreadful
maa
t-less Second Intermediate Period – a much exaggerated version of real events – in order to underline the peace and stability of her own reign. Indeed, she is the first of the post-Ahmose pharaohs to express a loathing of the Hyksos, establishing a useful tradition of hostility and hatred which many later rulers were to copy. Hatchepsut was not a woman to allow a few factual inaccuracies to hinder her from writing a revised version of history, and she now claims credit for both ridding the land of the detested foreigners and for restoring the monuments and indeed the religion of her ancestors, pious acts which would have met with approval from gods and mortals alike. There can be no truth at all in her boast that she rid Egypt of the Asiatics; Hyksos rule had ended many years before Hatchepsut came to the throne. Similarly, her claim that the Hyksos heathens ‘ruled without Re’ is also untrue; as we have already seen, the Hyksos rulers adapted their own religion to that of their adopted country and several Hyksos kings actually bore names compounded with that of Re. However, in Hatchepsut's eyes, these exaggerations would not have been lies. The role of pharaoh was a permanent one which passed from individual to individual and, as the current office
holder, Hatchepsut was quite entitled to use the achievements of previous pharaohs when and as she saw fit.

There is, however, more than a grain of truth in Hatchepsut's boast that she undertook the restoration of the monuments of her forebears, particularly those of Middle Egypt which had suffered badly during the Second Intermediate Period. Earlier in the inscription we are given specific details of Hatchepsut's repairs to the temple of Hathor at Cusae, a building which had fallen into such disuse that ‘the earth had swallowed up its noble sanctuary, and children danced upon its roof’. Cusae, an Upper Egyptian town approximately forty miles to the south of the Speos Artemidos, had been at the very limit of the Hyksos sphere of influence and had suffered badly during the late 17th Dynasty wars of liberation.

The tradition of preserving or restoring the monuments of the ancestors was one dear to the heart of all Egyptians; the Middle Kingdom text ‘The Instruction for Merykare’ makes the position absolutely clear:

Do not destroy the monuments of another!… Do not build your tomb by demolishing what was already made in order to use it for that which you wish to make… A blow will be repaid in kind.
⁵

A king who respects the monuments of his ancestors will in turn have his own buildings respected; a king who deliberately demolishes an earlier monument is storing up trouble for himself. It is not even acceptable to plunder ancient ruins in order to salvage building materials for the erection of a magnificent new edifice; decayed older buildings should be left alone, and fresh building supplies sought for the new. However, it seems to be enough to merely respect an ancient monument. The king has no particular duty to restore any such ruin although, if he does, this will undoubtedly be interpreted as an act of filial piety pleasing to both the gods and the ancestors. Restoration of a monument, the bringing of order to chaos and the remembrance of the name of a past king, could all be seen as a small echo of the role of the pharaoh as the upholder of
maat
. The principle that monuments should be preserved was never in doubt. Hatchepsut, however, did not always practise what she preached. At Karnak she demolished a gateway built by Tuthmosis II, and she ruined her father's hypostyle hall by removing its wooden roof and erecting a pair of obelisks in the now-open space,
although she claims in mitigation that Tuthmosis I himself ordered her to make this alteration. Potentially more serious was the fact that her workmen dismantled a sanctuary of Amenhotep I and Ahmose Nefertari which stood in the path of the processional way leading to her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri.