The World

Egyptian kings had already launched expeditions to ‘hack up Asia’, raiding ‘Iwa’ (Türkiye) and ‘Iasy’ (Cyprus), but Hau-nebut was Crete, with which the Egyptian family had a special relationship. Knossos, Crete’s capital, and its other cities boasted unfortified palatial complexes decorated with ecstatic, playful frescoes of naked male athletes leaping over sacred bulls and bare-chested women in patterned skirts.^* A maze in Knossos was surely the basis for the legend of the monstrous Minotaur said to demand the sacrifice of children, but it was not just a legend: children’s bones found with cooking pots suggest these stories were based on reality; and Labyrinthos, the name of the maze, may have been the name of the city itself. For around 250 years, between 1700 and 1450 BC, these Cretans traded throughout the Mediterranean. They brought home Egyptian artefacts, and Cretan griffins and bull-leaping frescoes decorated the palace at Hutwaret. Ahmose may have married a Cretan princess.

Some time around 1500, a volcanic eruption at Thera, the Greek island of Santorini – the most explosive catastrophe in world history, more powerful than the hydrogen bombs, a boom heard thousands of miles away – shot clouds of poisonous sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and sent a tsunami across the Mediterranean, drowning tens of thousands. It changed the climate, blighted harvests and devastated kingdoms. Crete was wounded by Thera, but regained its vigour for a while before warlords from mainland Greece took control. Egypt recovered.

As soon as he came of age, in 1529, Ahmose married his own sister Ahmose-Nefertari and marched on Hutwaret, finishing off the Asiatics then pursuing them across Sinai. When he faced uprisings, his mother Ahhotep crushed the rebels. ‘Give praise to the Lady of the Land,’ Ahmose wrote on his stela at the Temple of Amun at Ipetsut. ‘She has pacified Upper Egypt.’ Ahhotep’s grave goods included a necklace of golden flies – for courage in battle. When Ahmose died in his thirties, his sister-wife Ahmose-Nefertari ruled for their son, Amenhotep, who also married his sister: these incestuous marriages intensified the sanctity of the family and emulated the gods. But ultimately interbreeding was disastrous, destroying the very family they were meant to strengthen.^* The Ahmoses faced extinction, a problem they solved by adoption: they chose a general, Thutmose, as heir.

Thutmose had crushed the Nubians and invaded Syria, a hoary but tough commoner who married a daughter of Ahmose, though he retained his non-royal wife Ahmes, mother of his favourite daughter, Hatshepsut.

‘Enraged like a panther’, Thutmose was determined to ‘destroy unrest throughout the foreign lands, to subdue the rebels of the desert region’, and invaded Kush. This was no raid but the deliberate devastation of a kingdom and culture: the king, accompanied by his wife and daughter Hatshepsut, led the army himself. While former kings had been stopped by the rapids on the Nile, Thutmose built a fleet and had the boats, including his personal yacht the Falcon, dragged overland. He defeated Kush in battle, burning the splendid capital Kerma – a triumph celebrated in his inscription boasting of ‘extending the frontiers’ on the sacred rock of the Kushites.

The real prize was the gold mines. It was Nubian gold that funded armies, built temples and crafted the sumptuous funerary regalia for the tombs of royalty, to be worn in the afterlife – and it was Nubian prisoners who worked the mines. Thutmose expanded the temple of Ipet-isut (Karnak) and prepared a new location for the royal tomb in the Valley of Kings. Before he returned home, he hunted down the ruler of Kush, whom he killed personally with his bow; then he hung him upside down on the bow of the Falcon, leaving him to decay in the sun, an arrow still stuck in his chest.

Thutmose loved his first non-royal wife, Ahmes, most – she was his chief consort and no doubt their daughter Hatshepsut grew up with the confidence of the favourite child of the favourite wife of a warrior king. But his marriage into the royal family, to Mutneferet, King’s Daughter, was no less important. This had produced an heir, a young Thutmose, whom the king married to his beloved Hatshepsut.

The old paladin died in 1481, and Thutmose II followed him soon afterwards, leaving his half-sister/wife Hatshepsut in charge of a baby stepson. Taking the regency, Hatshepsut – Foremost of Noblewomen – was exceptional in all things.

HATSHEPSUT: FOREMOST OF THE WOMEN – FIRST PHARAOH