Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh by Joyce Tyldesley Read Free Book Online Page A

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 officeholder, 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