The rediscovery of Thutmose III and Hatshepsut

This article is from Ancient Egypt issue 147

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Today, Thutmose III and Hatshepsut are among the best-known of all the pharaohs, as perhaps the greatest of all conquering kings, and the classic female monarch. However, like almost all pre-Saite rulers of Egypt (up to 664 BC), they had been utterly forgotten for millennia when the proto-Egyptologists of the early 19th century, newly armed with the ability once again to make use of hieroglyphic inscriptions, lifted the veil that had so long hidden them.

Damnatio memoriae

Menkheperra Thutmose III (c.1479-1425 BC) had remained an iconic figure of the past at least until Ptolemaic times. His images were prominent around the temples of Karnak, and were reinstated when walls were affected by restoration work, albeit in contemporary style. In contrast, Maatkara Hatshepsut (c.1473-1458 BC) had been essentially written out of monumental history late in her former co-regent’s reign. Her images were either destroyed or reworked into representations of either her husband, Thutmose II, or her father, Thutmose I.

However, her memory was still alive four centuries later, when Pinedjem I, High Priest of Amun at Karnak (and later king in southern Egypt,1054 BC), decided to name two of his children Menkheperra and Maatkara. Neither name had hitherto been used as anything other than the prenomina of Thutmose III and Hatshepsut, and there seems little question that Pinedjem wished to honour these two rulers together, as an important historical double-act.

That a woman had occupied the Egyptian throne during the early Eighteenth Dynasty was still known a further seven centuries on, when she appears in the 3rd century BC work of Manetho under the name ‘Ame(n)sis’. Her placement is incorrect, being made the sister of Amenhotep I, but this is consistent with the extremely garbled state of the Eighteenth Dynasty section of Manetho’s work. On the other hand, her presence, and that of various Amarna period rulers (including a woman, who can only be Nefernefruaten), shows how much data survived alongside the ‘weeded’ official king lists.

But with the almost-simultaneous end of paganism and the ability to read native Egyptian texts at the end of the 4th century AD, all that was left of Egyptian history was those fragments that endured through the writings of Manetho and other Greek and Latin authors, and also in the Old Testament. These were incomplete, distorted, and sometimes wholly fictional, but they represented all that historians had to work with. As such, they created a received framework that the first Egyptologists assumed was broadly correct, into which their new hieroglyphically derived data could be fitted in a straightforward manner. It would be a while before it became clear that this was not the case.

The first investigators

The first serious examination of ancient Egyptian monuments had begun around a century before the first reliable method of reading hieroglyphs was developed by Jean-François Champollion during the 1820s. One of the first travellers to reach Thebes, and in 1737 make a detailed account of its ruins, was Richard Pococke. Pococke made the first detailed plan of Karnak while, crossing the river, he noted and summarily planned what was visible of the memorial temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri. This included the female king’s mortuary chapel, which was later used as a church with an image of Christ painted on her effaced false-door stela.

Rather more of the site was recorded in 1798 by Prosper Jollois and Édouard de Villiers du Terrage, two of the team of savants attached to Napoleon Bonaparte’s force that had invaded Egypt earlier that year. This included noting the remains of some of the sphinxes that had lined the causeway up to the temple from the edge of the desert. Jollois and de Villiers also examined the Small Temple built at Medinet Habu by Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. Around 1823-1825, Henry Westcar visited Hatshepsut’s temple, becoming apparently the first visitor to call it (in his diary) the ‘Northern Derr’ (deir meaning ‘monastery’; fully, in Arabic, ‘Deir el-Bahri’).

Wilkinson, Rosellini, and Champollion

Probably the most important of the early 19th-century visitors to Deir el-Bahri was John Gardner Wilkinson, who cleared the Amun-chapel and some walls of Hatshepsut’s temple during 1827, and produced the first detailed plan. Champollion and the Italian scholar Ippolito Rosellini visited the site in 1829. Champollion was able to identify the building as a temple dedicated to Amun, and also note the various restorations carried out up to the Ptolemaic Period (when the temple became a sanctuary of the deified architects Imhotep and Amenhotep-son-of-Hapu).

As a result of their observations, Champollion, Rosellini, and Wilkinson were able to establish preliminary hypotheses on the historical implications of what they could see on the standing monuments, not only at Deir el-Bahri, but also at Karnak and other sites in Upper Egypt. These earliest attempts at reconstructing the history of ancient Egypt – with the aid of actual ancient Egyptian sources – focused on reconciling the emerging data from the as-yet-imperfectly understood hieroglyphs with the hitherto-available material noted above. The new material included two hieroglyphic lists of kings: one found at Abydos in 1819 in the temple of Ramesses II by William Bankes; and one that formed part of a tableau of the Min Festival in the Ramesseum.

However, this reconciliation was hampered by the corruption of Manetho’s list, with the result that Champollion, Rosellini, and Wilkinson all produced different solutions for equating Manetho’s names with the hieroglyphic ones. Nevertheless, the overarching sequence of kings grounded in the Abydos list was agreed between the three scholars. The major issues concerned Manetho’s ‘Ame(n)sis’, as the ‘sister’ of ‘Amenôphis’, and original monuments belonging to a ruler whose nomen was read as ‘Aménenthé’ by Champollion, and ‘Amunneitgori’ by Wilkinson. This was actually Hatshepsut, the readings being based on her epithet ‘Khnemetamun’; indeed, the reading of the first half of her name as ‘Hatshepsut’ (or variants) was not known until late in the 19th century. This woman was clearly linked in some way with the first three kings named Thutmose, but was absent from both the Abydos and the Ramesseum sequences.

Male or female?

Although not yet willing to consider that ‘Aménenthé/Amunneitgori’ might be the same person as Manetho’s ‘Ame(n)sis’, Champollion and Wilkinson were both were fully aware that something was not quite right, with representations of an apparently male king accompanied by titles incorporating the t-ending, already known to be a feminine termination. Champollion produced a rather over-involved reconstruction (of a kind he was liable to do) that made ‘Aménenthé’ the husband of a queen for whom ‘he’ acted as ‘a kind of figurehead of the royal power exercised by the queen’. However, by 1837 Wilkinson finally felt able to recognise that the names, titles, and figures all belonged to the same person:

Between [Thutmose I and II] appears to have intervened a queen, whom I have ventured to call Amun-neit-gori, and who has hitherto given rise to more doubts and questions than any other sovereign of this Dynasty. But whether she was only regent during the minority of Thothmes II and III, or succeeded to the throne in right of Thothmes I, in whose honour she erected several monuments, is still uncertain, and some have doubted her being a queen.

Two years later, Edward Hincks, a key figure in the early study of both the hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts, was able to publish firm proof of joint rule between Hatshepsut (whose name he could not ‘venture to write down’) and Thutmose III, by citing the block-statue of the Viceroy of Nubia, Inebny, in the British Museum, which bore both of their names. The text on this statue, however, calls Thutmose III the ‘brother’ of Hatshepsut, leading to a long-standing assumption regarding their blood-relationship. This would endure, largely unchallenged, until 1892, when the autobiography of the Thutmosid’s architect Ineni was published, making it clear that they were aunt and nephew. This new ‘working hypothesis’ was set out by Hincks in a paper read in February 1844 before the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin:

Queen Amuneth [Hatshepsut], the successor of Thothmos II… governed Egypt for about twenty-nine years, during which her brother, Thothmos III, appears to have had no share in the sovereignty. He possessed, however, the title of king, and appears along with his sister on most of her monuments, as on the great obelisk at Karnac, and on the propylon at El-Assassif [Deir el-Bahri]. It seems that the king was not satisfied with this state of things; and that on his attaining to the sole sovereignty he defaced the name of his sister in a variety of places. He sometimes left a blank space, as on the statue of Onevto [Inebny] in the British Museum…

In other instances, as on the propylon at El-Assassif, he substituted either his own name, or that of his father, for that of his sister, adding a beard to the face of the latter… The feminine pronoun remained unaltered, and its use in reference to a bearded figure completely mystified M Champollion, leading him to adopt a theory respecting these royal cartouches… involving a tissue of absurdities.

Although this scheme was generally accepted by major Egyptologists of the day, there were some eccentric variations, in particular in the popular The Early History of Egypt first published by banker and part-time Egyptologist Samuel Sharpe in 1836, and reprinted with minimal changes into the 1870s. Sharpe’s conceptions thus influenced popular British views of the history of Egypt well after far sounder ideas had been presented elsewhere.

He maintained that Egypt had remained split into northern and southern kingdoms down to the Eighteenth Dynasty, with the union of the two entities achieved by the marriage between Thutmose II and Hatshepsut, whom he calls ‘Amun-Nitocris’ and sees as:

the last of the race of Memphite sovereigns, the twelfth or eleventh in succession from the builders of the great pyramids; and by her marriage with Thothmosis, Upper and Lower Egypt were brought under one sceptre.

This argument was then expanded to make Hatshepsut the builder of the Third Pyramid at Giza!

Towards a standard reconstruction

In 1847, Samuel Birch (of the British Museum) published the first detailed discussion of the blocks on which were carved the Year 29 to 41 Annals of Thutmose III. The blocks had been removed by the collector Henry Salt from Karnak, and acquired by the Louvre in 1826. In his work, Birch set the texts in the context of other military and tributary narratives and depictions available to him, and against the resulting military and political geography of not only Syria–Palestine, but also Nubia.

Shortly before, the Prussian expedition to Egypt under Richard Lepsius had spent November 1844 to March 1845 at Luxor planning and copying the principal monuments. In addition, Lepsius identified a structure, noted by Wilkinson as ‘vestiges of a sandst[one] ruin surrounded by a cr[ude] brick, with towers in front’, as a ‘peculiar temple… erected on the border of the desert by Tuthmosis III, [which] can now only be recognised by its ground plan, and by the remains of a brick pylon’ – his memorial temple. In noting the close alignment between the axis of the Deir el-Bahri temple and that of Karnak, Lepsius remarked that:

[i]t was a Queen, Numt Amen, the elder sister of Tuthmosis III, who accomplished this bold plan of a structural connection between the two sides of the valley, the same who had erected the two greatest obelisks in front of the temple of Amun. She never appears on her monuments as a woman, but in male attire; we only find out her sex by the inscriptions. No doubt at that period it was illegal for woman to govern; for that reason, also, her brother, probably still a minor, appears at a later period as a ruler along with her. After her death her Shields [cartouches] were everywhere converted into Tuthmosis Shields, the feminine forms of speech in the inscription were changed, and her names were never adopted in the later lists along with the legitimate kings.

The Prussian team brought much material back to Berlin, including the funerary stela of Senenmut from TT71, and various fragments of statuary found lying on the surface at Deir el-Bahri.

The head and shoulders of a sphinx of Hatshepsut discovered by the team was joined by the rest of the body nearly a century later, having been uncovered by the expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In return, the MMA received the torso and lower part of a seated statue of Hatshepsut found by Lepsius during the 1840s, after discovering the head during their 1920 excavations. These exchanges meant that Berlin ended up with a complete sphinx, and New York with a complete statue.

The first extensive excavations at the Deir el-Bahri temple were begun in 1858 by Auguste Mariette, the first head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service; he continued the work in 1862 and 1866. Mariette’s publication of his work came out in 1877, and included the first paper-reconstruction of the Deir el-Bahri. It contains many errors compared with the results of later work on the building, by the Egypt Exploration Fund (led by Swiss archaeologist Édouard Naville) during the 1890s, the Metropolitan Museum (director Herbert Winlock) during the 1920s and ’30s, and the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology since the 1960s. However, Mariette’s version was but the first attempt to visualise the structure.

In a volume published at the end of his life in 1881, Mariette included a vase of unknown provenance that gave Hatshepsut’s titles as the wife of a king, supporting the view that she had indeed begun her career as wife of Thutmose II.

The ‘Feud of the Thutmosids’

Ineni’s autobiographical text, from his tomb at Thebes (TT81), contains a clear statement of the royal succession following Thutmose I’s death: Thutmose II, followed by his son Thutmose III, with Hatshepsut as regent. Yet four years after its 1892 publication, German Egyptologist Kurt Sethe issued a study in which he proposed a complicated set of coups and counter-coups that yielded the succession: Thutmose I – Thutmose III – Thutmose III & Hatshepsut – Thutmose I & II – Thutmose II & III – Thutmose III & Hatshepsut – Thutmose III. This was based on Sethe’s assessment of the erasures of Hatshepsut’s cartouches on her monuments, and their replacement by the names of, variously, Thutmose I, Thutmose II or Thutmose III. Crucial to his view was the notion that such secondary cartouches could only have been inscribed by the king named. Given Sethe’s standing in Egyptology (he eventually became Professor at Berlin) his reconstruction was embraced in whole or part by a number of colleagues. In particular, it looms large in the relevant chapter of the influential History of Egypt (1908) by James H Breasted. Others, however, were less persuaded, Édouard Naville being a particular antagonist of Sethe over the issue.

However, it was not until 1928 that German Egyptologist Eduard Meyer and the American Herbert Winlock independently published works refuting Sethe’s theories. Sethe hit back with a new book in 1932, which significantly simplified his original scheme, but still insisted on Thutmose I and II returning to power after both had been successively deposed by Hatshepsut. However, the following year, William Edgerton (Oriental Institute, Chicago) published a systematic analysis of all the relevant material, which demonstrated definitively the impossibility of Sethe’s proposals in their entirety.

Since then, the basic structure of the period has been stable as far as Egyptologists are concerned, although in the 1960s new data emerged showing that, rather than acting immediately after her death, Thutmose III’s attempt at ‘cancelling’ his aunt happened two decades later, in the very last years of his reign. Other debates have surrounded the date at which Hatshepsut transitioned from regent to co-regent, the consensus shifting from Year 2 to Year 7 of Thutmose III’s reign. Yet ancient Egyptian history remains a movable feast, with continued scope for new discoveries or new interpretations that can indeed ‘change history’.

Aidan Dodson is honorary Professor of Egyptology at the University of Bristol, a former Simpson Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, and former Chairman of the Egypt Exploration Society. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Thutmose III and Hatshepsut, Pharaohs of Egypt: their lives and afterlives (American University in Cairo Press, 2025).