The Rise to Power
Hatshepsut and Thutmose iii |Thutmose’s stepmother-aunt, Queen Hatshepsut, governed Egypt as its true “king.” Although Thutmose III had been very young, perhaps only a nursling, when his father died, he was still recognized as the legitimate king and dated his regnal years from his time as an infant.
The effective day-to-day governance of Egypt was then left in the hands of the dead king’s great wife, Hatshepsut, who assumed the role of regent for the young Thutmose.
There were several historical precedents for an Egyptian queen to assume the role of regent. Hatshepsut’s own mother, Ahmose, had been regent for the young Thutmose II for several years. Before that Ahhotep, the mother of Ahmose I, the hero of the Hyksos wars, had played a similar role. But Hatshepsut did something no other female regent had ever done.
The Rise of Hatshepsut: A Female Pharaoh
When Thutmose III was seven years old, Hatshepsut declared herself king, assumed the entire titulary of a pharaoh, and even began to dress in male attire, complete with the false beard of Egyptian royalty.
The two kings, one male and one female, ruled side by side for some fifteen years, but Hatshepsut wielded the real authority of office. No king of Egypt before or since is known to have undergone Thutmose’s experience in which a female regent actually became king and ruled in her own right. It was this unique experience that influenced the first twenty two years of the young king’s life.
A Calculated Risk: Hatshepsut’s Gamble on Thutmose III
The question of Hatshepsut’s motives has puzzled scholars for centuries. It has been argued that Hatshepsut’s assumption of the Egyptian throne was part of a plot to secure the position until she could pass it on to her young daughter.
None of the Thutmosid kings were blood descendants of the royal line of Tao, the great king and founder of the seventeenth Dynasty. But all the females, including Hatshepsut, were Tao descendants and had been used to legitimize the line of the Thutmosids through royal marriage.
If preserving the royal line was her goal, it failed when Hatshepsut’s daughter died while Thutmose was still a young boy. There were, however, plenty of royal cousins and ambitious men who might yet mount a claim to the throne based on bloodlines.
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Hatshepsut may have been trying to protect young Thutmose from rival claimants by assuming the throne outright. her own claim to royal lineage was unassailable, and as long as she remained alive, no others could raise a credible claim to the throne.
Two facts support this interpretation of Hatshepsut’s motives. First, if she really intended to seize power for her own sake, why did she not have the young Thutmose killed? Hatshepsut had her own coterie of court supporters who might have feared their loss of influence and wealth under a regime led by a new king.
Surely an accident could have been arranged to befall the young prince. second, why did she send Thutmose III off to the army as a young boy and when he reached his majority at age sixteen then appoint him commander of the army, a position from which he could easily have threatened her? she even trusted him to command her armies on campaigns in Nubia and Gaza. It would have been a foolish sovereign indeed to place the instrument of her own destruction in her rival’s hands.
If Hatshepsut was protecting Thutmose, why then did she not step down as king when he reached his majority or, if she still had any doubts about his ability, after he had proved himself as a competent general on the battlefields of Nubia and Gaza? There is, of course, no way to know. Perhaps it was part of the queen’s grand design all along that she would continue to look after Egypt’s internal affairs while Thutmose III led the military campaigns against Egypt’s enemies.
And this may have been what happened. From the time of his majority at age sixteen until he became king in his own right at age twenty-two, there is no evidence that Thutmose asserted his claim to the throne with any vigor, if at all.
Hatshepsut and Thutmose III: Warriors and Diplomats
Hatshepsut ruled Egypt with Thutmose for twenty-two years (1504-1482 BCE), all but seven of which as a king in her own right. her reign is noted for constructing a substantial number of public works buildings and monuments, including her great mortuary temple in the Valley of the Kings, and for sponsoring the famous trade expedition to the land of Punt (Somalia), the record of which is preserved on her temple’s walls.
She also contributed to the expansion of the great religious complex at Karnak. under her reign, Egypt was well governed and without civil turbulence, and the general impression from the surviving records is it was a time of general prosperity and peace.
Early in her reign, however, Hatshepsut ordered a military foray into southern Canaan either to put down a small revolt or to deal with the banditry of the Apiru. Later, but still early in her reign, she seems to have personally led a major military expedition into Nubia.
One surviving text describes the queen herself as present on the battlefield and supervising the collection of booty. These events suggest that Hatshepsut was an active pharaoh in both the domestic and foreign arenas and that she was clearly aware of and concerned with events and developments beyond Egypt’s borders.
Egyptian Foreign Policy in the Shadow of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III
While we still ponder Hatshepsut’s motives for serving as king, the circumstances surrounding Thutmose’s accession to full kingship in 1482 or 1481 BCE remain unclear.
It has been suggested that Hatshepsut had been unwilling to resist the encroachments upon Egyptian influence fostered by the Canaanite states. This show of weakness only encouraged additional attempts, including the powerful mitannian kings’ use of proxies to weaken Egypt’s hold on the strategic land bridge.
Over some time, these encroachments had forced Egypt to withdraw most of its garrisons to the southern fringe of Canaan itself. This move placed Egypt’s strategic position and commerce at risk, and it might have raised the fears of the powerful Amun priesthood that the royal revenues and gifts that were the mainstay of its wealth might be diminished.
Sometime late in Hatshepsut’s reign, she sent Thutmose III in command of an army to regain Gaza, long the lynchpin to Egypt’s strategic position in Canaan. shortly thereafter, Hatshepsut was forced to send another army under Thutmose’s command to put down a revolt in Nubia.
This campaign took two campaign seasons to accomplish, indicating that the situation was serious. Egyptian foreign policy and its strategic position were under assault, and a strong hand was needed to guide the country.
Thutmose III: The Pharaoh Who Followed Hatshepsut
We do not know the circumstances under which Thutmose assumed his rightful position as sole king of Egypt sometime in 1482 or 1481 BCE or What happened to Hatshepsut, who then would have been older than fifty years of age.
It is not unimaginable by year 22 of Hatshepsut’s reign that Thutmose III, commander of the army and the rightful male king, found it appropriate to press his claim to the throne with the support of the army and court elites and removed his aunt.
That many of the important personages of Hatshepsut’s court were permitted to continue in office under the new regime suggests as much. It may also be that Hatshepsut had fulfilled her mission to protect the throne for Thutmose III, and she handed over the reigns of power to her nephew as she had planned to do all along.
It is likely that she continued to live for years while retired from governmental responsibilities. There is no good reason to suspect that she was killed in a palace coup, as some have suggested. Hatshepsut may have simply reached the end of her life and died. Within six months of coming to the throne of Egypt, Thutmose III saw Canaan explode in revolt. Egypt was threatened with another foreign invasion.
The Art of Erasure: Thutmose III’s Campaign Against Hatshepsut
At the beginning of his third decade of rule, or regnal year 42, Thutmose III was still actively campaigning in Syria, this time against the cities of Kadesh and Tunip. his program of domestic public works was in full swing, and the great shipyard at Perunefer north of Memphis was producing the new seagoing ships to transport Egyptian troops and supplies to Asiatic battlefields.
At the height of his power Thutmose began to think about the problem of succession. None of the Thutmosids were of Tao blood, and each had legitimized his rule by marrying a woman of the royal line.
Now Thutmose faced the same problem. As a young boy Thutmose was probably married to hatshepsut’s daughter, Neferure, but she died soon after the union. He then married Queen satiah, probably of royal blood. She bore him a son, Amenenhet, who would have been a legitimate heir had the boy not died around age eight.
Thutmose III then took another wife, meryetre-hatshepsut, who was a commoner. She bore him four girls— Nefertari, Isis, Baket, and meryetamun—and a son, Amenhotep II, who eventually became heir to the throne.
But just as all Thutmosids before him, because Amenhotep II’s mother was not of royal blood, the legitimacy of his succession was in question and raised the ambitions of royal cousins and others who had married royal women.
To forestall any challenge to that succession, in year 42 Thutmose embarked on a systematic campaign to erase the official memory of Hatshepsut in all Egyptian texts and monuments. He attempted to rewrite the account of his reign by carrying out history’s first great political purge of the official record and deleting Hatshepsut.
Thutmose III ordered artisans to remove all representations of Hatshepsut in reliefs, texts, cartouches, and wherever else they appeared and to recut the resulting blank spaces with other images, usually those of offering tables.
Where possible, these spaces were replaced with the names of the first two Thutmosids and in some instances even with Thutmose’s name itself. All of the freestanding portraits, sphinxes, and statues of Hatshepsut were smashed and the pieces buried.
Thutmose III even ordered Hatshepsut’s tomb opened and had the body of her father, Thutmose I, which she had moved to a sarcophagus in her tomb, reinterred in his original tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Thutmose I was the first king to have been buried there and to have his tomb located apart from his mortuary temple.
