Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by M. de Mertens.
This was the head of one of the sphinxes which formed an
avenue at Deîr el-Baharî; it was brought over by Lepsius and
is now in the Berlin Museum. The fragment has undergone
extensive restoration, but this has been done with the help
of fragments of other statues, in which the details here
lost were in a good state of preservation.
She retained, however, the feminine pronoun in speaking of herself, and also an epithet, inserted in her cartouche, which declared her to be the betrothed of Amon—khnûmît Amaûnû.*
* We know how greatly puzzled the early Egyptologists were
by this manner of depicting the queen, and how Champollion,
in striving to explain the monuments of the period, was
driven to suggest the existence of a regent, Amenenthes, the
male counterpart and husband of Hâtshopsîtû, whose name he
read Amense. This hypothesis, adopted by Rosellini, with
some slight modifications, was rejected by Birch. This
latter writer pointed out the identity of the two personages
separated by Champollion, and proved them to be one and the
same queen, the Amenses of Manetho; he called her Amûn-nûm-
hc, but he made her out to be a sister of Amenôthes I.,
associated on the throne with her brothers Thûtmosis I. and
Thûtmosis IL, and regent at the beginning of the reign of
Thûtmosis III. Hineks tried to show that she was the
daughter of Thûtmosis I., the wife of Thûtmosis II. and the
sister of Thûtmosis III.; it is only quite recently that her
true descent and place in the family tree has been
recognised. She was, not the sister, but the aunt of
Thûtmosis III. The queen, called by Birch Amûn-nûm-het, the
latter part of her name being dropped and the royal prenomen
being joined to her own name, was subsequently styled Ha-asû
or Hatasû, and this form is still adopted by some writers;
the true reading is Hâtshopsîtû or Hâtshopsîtû, then
Hâtshopsîû, or Hâtshepsîû, as Naville has pointed out.
Her father united her while still young to her brother Thûtmosis, who appears to have been her junior, and this fact doubtless explains the very subordinate part which he plays beside the queen. When Thûtmosis I. died, Egyptian etiquette demanded that a man should be at the head of affairs, and this youth succeeded his father in office: but Hâtshopsîtû, while relinquishing the semblance of power and the externals of pomp to her husband,* kept the direction of the state entirely in her own hands. The portraits of her which have been preserved represent her as having refined features, with a proud and energetic expression. The oval of the face is elongated, the cheeks a little hollow, and the eyes deep set under the arch of the brow, while the lips are thin and tightly closed.
* It is evident, from the expressions employed by Thûtmosis
I. in associating his daughter with himself on the throne,
that she was unmarried at the time, and Naville thinks that
she married her brother Thûtmosis II. after the death of her
father. It appears to me more probable that Thûtmosis I.
married her to her brother after she had been raised to the
throne, with a view to avoiding complications which might
have arisen in the royal family after his own death. The
inscription at Shutt-er-Ragel, which has furnished Mariette
with the hypothesis that Thûtmosis I. and Thûtmosis IL
reigned simultaneously, proves that the person mentioned in
it, a certain Penaîti, flourished under both these Pharaohs,
but by no means shows that these two reigned together; he
exercised the functions which he held by their authority
during their successive reigns.
She governed with so firm a hand that neither Egypt nor its foreign vassals dared to make any serious attempt to withdraw themselves from her authority. One raid, in which several prisoners were taken, punished a rising of the Shaûsû in Central Syria, while the usual expeditions maintained order among the peoples of Ethiopia, and quenched any attempt which they might make to revolt. When in the second year of his reign the news was brought to Thutmosis II. that the inhabitants of the Upper Nile had ceased to observe the conditions which his father had imposed upon them, he “became furious as a panther,” and assembling his troops set out for war without further delay. The presence of the king with the army filled the rebels with dismay, and a campaign of a few weeks put an end to their attempt at rebelling.
The earlier kings of the XVIIIth dynasty had chosen for their last resting-place a spot on the left bank of the Nile at Thebes, where the cultivated land joined the desert, close to the pyramids built by their predecessors. Probably, after the burial of Amenôthes, the space was fully occupied, for Thutmosis I. had to seek his burying-ground some way up the ravine, the mouth of which was blocked by their monuments. The Libyan chain here forms a kind of amphitheatre of vertical cliffs, which descend to within some ninety feet of the valley, where a sloping mass of detritus connects them by a gentle declivity with the plain.