Quick questions on New Kingdom Egypt - Hatshepsut and Thutmose III: HSC Ancient History

Kingship in Egypt was ideologically male, framed as the living Horus upholding Ma'at. Hatshepsut's central problem was to make a female king appear orthodox, and her propaganda answered it directly.

Late in Thutmose III's reign, Hatshepsut's names and images as king were systematically removed: cartouches at Deir el-Bahri and Karnak were recut with the names of Thutmose I, II or III, her dismantled Chapelle Rouge (Red Chapel) blocks were reused, and her statues were smashed and thrown into a pit near her temple, later excavated by Herbert Winlock for the Metropolitan Museum in the 1920s and 1930s. Older scholarship read this as an act of personal revenge carried out as soon as Thutmose III gained sole power. Epigraphic study by Charles Nims and Peter Dorman, however, dated the systematic erasure to around regnal year 42 (c. 1437 BC), roughly two decades after Hatshepsut's death, which undercuts the revenge theory.

On the middle colonnade at Deir el-Bahri, a relief cycle shows the god Amun taking the form of Thutmose I to visit Hatshepsut's mother, Queen Ahmose, and the ram-headed creator god Khnum fashioning the infant Hatshepsut and her ka on his potter's wheel. The claim is theological: she was conceived by Amun himself and destined by the god to rule.

Accompanying texts assert that Thutmose I presented Hatshepsut to the court as his chosen heir and that an oracle of Amun confirmed her. Historians read this as a retrospective invention, composed after she took the throne, since it conflicts with the actual succession through Thutmose II.

She adopted a full five-part royal titulary with the throne name Maatkare ("Maat is the ka of Re") and had herself depicted in male kingly regalia, the nemes headcloth, kilt and false beard, though inscriptions sometimes retain feminine grammar. This clothed an unprecedented reign in the most conventional royal imagery available.

Hatshepsut dispatched a trading fleet to Punt, a Red Sea land in the region of the Horn of Africa, presented as commanded by an oracle of Amun. The reliefs on the south colonnade at Deir el-Bahri show the Puntite village of reed houses on poles, its ruler and his wife, and the ships loading myrrh, frankincense, ebony, ivory, gold and exotic animals, including living myrrh trees transplanted to the temple terraces. For a king who could not lead armies, a spectacular peaceful trade triumph in the "god's land" was a substitute for military glory.

For her Sed-festival (jubilee), around regnal year 16 (c. 1463 BC), Hatshepsut had a pair of granite obelisks quarried at Aswan and raised at Karnak, between the Fourth and Fifth Pylons. The surviving standing obelisk is about 28.5 m tall and roughly 343 tonnes, the tallest ancient obelisk still standing in Egypt; its base inscription claims it was quarried and erected in seven months, tipped with electrum to catch the sun.

Between regnal years 22 and 42 (c. 1457 to 1437 BC) Thutmose III led seventeen campaigns into Syria-Palestine, converting a loose sphere of influence into a controlled empire.

His first campaign answered a revolt: a coalition of Syro-Palestinian city-states, led by the prince of Kadesh and backed by Mitanni, had massed at Megiddo, which commanded the route through the Jezreel plain. At a council of war at Yehem, his officers urged the two safe roads; Thutmose III insisted on the narrow central Aruna pass, gambling that surprise outweighed the danger of emerging in single file. The gamble worked: the enemy had divided to watch the other roads, and the Egyptians deployed unopposed on the plain.

The campaigns were recorded in the Annals, carved on the walls of the Hall of Annals surrounding the granite sanctuary at Karnak and abridged from the day-book kept by the field scribe Tjaneni. They preserve campaign itineraries, dated events, tribute and booty lists and topographical lists of conquered towns, the fullest military records of any pharaoh, though as temple-inscribed royal propaganda dedicated to Amun they omit defeats and celebrate the crown.

In his eighth campaign (regnal year 33, c. 1446 BC), Thutmose III struck at Mitanni (Naharin) in northern Syria. He transported boats overland from the Phoenician coast, crossed the Euphrates, defeated Mitanni and set up a victory stela beside that of his grandfather Thutmose I, the northern limit reached a generation earlier.