Senenmout and the courageous Hatshepsut

Senenmout, was not a noble, he came from a lower background, but he rose to become the man of the utmost importance during the reign of a very determined woman, a God's wife of Amun, who declared herself a pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, Queen Hatshepsut Maatkare ‘Foremost of Noble Ladies, Truth is the Soul of Re'  who ruled as the fifth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty of Egypt. Hatshepsut was the favorite daughter of Tuthmosis 1, but on the walls of her mortuary temple, which was Senenmouts greatest achievement,  Hatshepsut asserted her birth to be divine, as she declared herself to be the daughter of the God Amun who announces on the temple walls  'Fashion for me the body of my daughter and the body of her Ka, a great queen shall I make of her'

After Hatshepsut was crowned pharaoh, Senenmut was given more prestigious titles and became high steward of the king, he was the 'Steward of the God's Wife' , he held many titles including Overseer of the Gardens of Amun', 'Steward of Amun', 'Overseer of all Royal Works' and 'Tutor to the Royal Heiress Neferure', 'Steward of the King's Daughter' (Neferure) Amazingly, during the rule of Hatshepsut Senenmout earned almost one hundred titles, including 'Great Treasurer of the Queen' he was an architect, an astronomer, and a very important government official. Hatshepsut became a Gods Wife of Amun, she knew how to obtain power and a position of strength, as this meant that she was the mortal wife of the God Amun, which is more important than to be the wife of a king

This statue expresses the strength and devotion and all encompassing protection that Senenmout offers the only daughter of Hatshepsut, the Princess Neferure.

Senenmout designed Hatshepsuts Mortuary Temple at Dier El Bahari, it was known as the Splendour of Splendours. This most magnificent mortuary temple  celebrates Hatshepsuts life, accomplishments, and her reign, it is  a masterpiece of architecture, the temple is  on three tiers, it is truly amazing  and is driven into the rock face at Dier El Bahari, the cliff face encloses it and  rises sharply above it. This temple is the  masterpiece of Senenmouts career.

             

It has colonnaded terraces with a row of tall Osiris statues of Hatshepsut that dominate the second teir and look down across the west Bank with her holding the crook and flail, signs of kingship, she is the shepard of her people, and will rule with strength. Apart from declaring Hatshepsut to be of divine birth it also records the first ever expedition to the Land of Punt, known to us as Somalia, it is an exotic country on the Red Sea coast, where  trees animals and incense for the temples were given by the Queen of Punt to Hatshepsut. The terraces of her temple are connected by long ramps which were once surrounded by gardens with frankincense and myrrh trees brought from Punt.

Senenmout was an astronomer and he created the temple axis to aligned to the winter solstice sunrise, when the sunlight penetrates through to the rear wall of the chapel, before moving to the right to highlight one of the Osiris statues that stand on either side of the doorway to the second chamber. Nine months later, at the autumn equinox, the Beautiful Feast of Opet would mark the pharaonic birth. As for the alignment of the 1st of February, it would be a marker of the date on which Amun-Ra pronounced the oracle that enthroned Hatshepsut as a female pharaoh.

Senenmout also  created a very large Red barque chapel for Hatshepsut, the chapel housed the barque to carry the God Amun to festivals from his earthly home at Karnack Temple. One festival was known as the Beautiful Feast of the Valley, and is  recorded on the wall of Hatshepsuts barque chapel, it shows Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis 111 escorting the barque of Amun across the river to make offerings in her mortuary temple that was in direct line with Karnack Temple.

Here was a queen who was obviously determined to transcend all the works of all previous kings and create the most beautiful and unusual gifts for Amun. I was not disappointed as I arrived at Hatshepsut’s creation the imposing barque chapel of Hatshepsut with its burning warm red bricks, in the open air museum inside the precints of Karnack Temple,  again Hatshepsut had deviated from the usual choice of Alabaster that previous kings had used for their barque chapels, it is believed that a sacred barque was used in a nightly journey of Amun Ra, traveling from the western horizon at sunset behind the earth to the eastern horizon where the sunrise would occur. as I looked at the chapel, it occurred  to me the symbolism of  why Hatshepsut had  possibly deviated from traditional materials and chosen  instead  to use this unusual red quartzite, it was simple,  a heart  of a man is a deep warm red, and it pumps the warm blood through the body and sustains the life, and this chapel was ‘The Heart of Amun.

Senenmut also supervised the quarrying, transport, and erection of twin obelisks, for Hatshepsut for  the Temple of Karnak,  the inscription written on the obelisk that stands inside Karnack Temple expresses hatshepsuts  devotion to Amon Ra: 'I have created this work with a heart full of love for Amon, Initiated into his secrets of origin, Instructed through his beneficial power, I have not forgotten what he has ordained, My Majesty recognizes his Divinity, I have acted on his orders, It is he who has guided me, I have never slept because I was pre-occupied with his temple, I have never turned away from what he has commanded, My heart moved intuitively with The Father, I have entered intimately into the plans of his heart, I have never turned my back on the Master of totality, But rather I have turned my face towards him. 

In Ancient Egypt an obelisk was known as a Tekenu, Hatshepsut wanted her creations to be superior to all other kings creations, so she created the tallest two obelisks in all Egypt, to rise in Karnack Temple.  The suns rays hit the pyramideon at the tip of the obelisk which is covered in electrum, a mixture of gold and silver,   and the power of the sun ignites the pyramiddion flashing down the sides of the obelisk, if two obelisks are stood together it would create a powerful force field at the entrance to a temple, this power offers regeneration, and the writing on the obelisk is regenerated and the words invoke the God Amun Ra and offer power to Hatshepsut 

Hatshepsut recognized that true power came from devotion to Amun Ra, she became a God's wife of amun, which meant that she was the mortal wife of the God Amun. Egyptian temples were symbolically created to portray Egypt itself.The temples were a symbolic impression of the universe,  a picture that has been created from stone to describe the first moment of creation, the pylons are the East and Western deserts, the gateway portals represent the path that the River Nile would flow though Egypt giving her life each and every day. Gradually the earth rises in the temple as you reach the mound of creation,  the Hypostyle halls that had huge columns portrayed as the lotus plants that came into being,  at dawn the lotus rises symbolically to worship the sun. At the going down of the sun each evening the Lotus plant submerges beneath the waters of the Nile. It encompasses all the forces of nature and lives in the four elements, its roots are bound to the earth, and its stem rises through water, it flourishes in the air and blooms in the sunlight.

Hatshepsuts Mortuary Temple was used during her lifetime and festivals were held here, In the Opet Festival recorded on the walls of the chapel, The God  Amun is carried by priests in his Barque, all the way down the avenue of sphinx that used to unite the two temples with his wife Mut and their son Khonsu to celebrate the Opet Festival at Luxor Temple which is an unusual temple as it wasnt a mortuary temple, or an earthly home of a God, it had been created  to celebrate the marriage of Amun and Mut, and to regenerate the kings power and Egypt just before the annual flood. 

The beautiful feast of the Valley was also recorded on Hatshepsuts barque chapel, it shows Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis 111 escorting the barque of Amun across the river to her mortuary temple that was in direct line with Karnack Temple.  Hatshepsut had been the royal wife to Tuthmosis 111 father and thereby was Tuthmosis  aunt and stepmother, after Hatshepsuts death he had all her cartouches  and her works vandalized, by doing this he was denying her an eternal life.

Theban Tomb 353 was the second tomb of Senenmut and is often known as the “secret tomb”. His gift for Astronomy is portrayed on the walls and ceilings.  The tomb consists of three chambers, the decorations in Chamber A consist of spells to help Senenmut’s spirit to pass successfully though the Underworld, and a number of depictions of Senenmut, his brother (Amenemhat), and his pharaoh, Hatshepsut. The ceiling is decorated with astronomical designs incorporating a calendar recording the lunar months, the constellations, and the planets. This tomb portrays the earliest known star map in Egypt.The astronomical ceiling  is divided into two sections, representing the northern and southern skies. Senenmouts tomb was vandalized during the reign of Thutmose III, possibly because he was  so well favoured by Hatshepsut. Tuthmosis 111 had Hatshepsuts gifts for the God Amun vandalized so as to eradicate her memory and deny her an afterlife, the ancient Egyptians believed if a persons name was spoken, it would offer them eternal life. Together Senenmout and His Pharaoh Hatshepsut created the most  amazing gifts for the God Amun.

Tomb DB320 - The Royal Cache of Hidden Mummies - The Discovery of the Great Kings of Egypt from the New Kingdom

During the summer of 1871 Ahmed Abd el Rassul who lived in a 'bab el haggar' - a dwelling in a New Kingdom tomb on the Theban hills with his family, in the Village of Shiek Abd-el-Qurna on the West Bank of Luxor, was wandering the mountain at the side of Hatshepsut's Mortuary Temple at Dier El Bahari looking for one of his lost goats, he heard it bleating so he followed the sound and it lead him to a shaft that was 30ft deep. He fetched a rope and descended to retrieve his goat, once he arrived at the bottom of the shaft it lead him to a series of underground chambers and corridors and to his joy he found an extraordinary cache of mummified remains and funeral equipment of more than fifty kings, queens,royalty,and various nobility. Ahmed was ecstatic, so he retrieved his goat and climbed back up the rope and went in search of his brothers to tell them of his find. The brothers decided it was best to keep the tomb a secret incase any of the villagers became jealous of their new found wealth, and reported them to the moudir of the province or to the Director of Excavations.They threw a dead donkey down the shaft so that it would cause a stink, and put off any other local who might come across the hole. 

Then one night when it was dark the  brothers went back down the shaft to the tomb to steal some of the artifacts, they unwrapped some mummies so that they could remove the amulets that had been placed in the mummy wrappings during the mummification process, for the protection of the mummy in the afterlife. Over a period of ten years they went down the tomb three times to steal treasures. They obviously couldn't remove large objects so they satisfied themselves with stealing funerary figurines, canopic jars, papyri, and anything that was small enough to hide and every winter they would sell these treasures to visiting tourists and collectors. They even sold the mummy of Ramses 1 to a Canadian man who then sold it to a museum at Niagara falls.

In 1874, Gaston Maspero, the head of the Antiquities Service in Cairo, noticed that  figures bearing royal names from the 21st Dynasty, a wooden tablet inscribed in scribal ink, a papyrus belonging to Queen Nedjmet, and other artifacts were being sold. Other important objects like papyri, shabti-figurines, bronze vessels, inscribed wrapping, and perhaps even at least one mummy were also leaking out onto the Luxor antiquities market. Maspero knew these had not come from a licensed excavation, and so it must be an illegal find. He sent investigators to Luxor to try to discover where the artifacts were coming from, but they learned nothing for years, and yet antiquities continued to appear around the world. Finally in 1881 Maspero enlisted the aid of Charles Wilbour, a wealthy American collector, who was known to be willing to pay high prices for authentic antiquities. Within a few days of his arrival in Luxor, Wilbour made contact with a local guide who brought him to the village of Qurna and the house of Ahmed Abd el Rassul. Wilbour was shown a quantity of red leather, looking as fresh as if it had just been opened, and stamped with the titles of an 18th Dynasty king. Wilbour immediately telegraphed Maspero to inform him of the situation.

Maspero decided to send M. Émile Brugsch a German born Egyptologist who was the deputy curator of the Musée de Boulaq to Luxor to investigate. He used various tactics to find out more about Ahmed Abd el Rassul.  His investigations were extensive and led him to Ahmed's main buyer, Moustapha Agha Ayat, Consular Agent of England, Belgium, and Russia in Luxor, unfortunately he was covered by diplomatic immunity, and therefore he escaped all prosecution. Having no success here, Emile decided to relentlessly pursue the Rassoul brothers whom he had been told were selling the objects, and so on 1st April 1881 the Chief of Police at Luxor was sent over to the West Bank to the Village of Shiek Abd-el-Qurna to arrest Ahmed. He was  seized the moment he returned home, and was brought on board the boat that Emile was using for an initial interrogation in the hope that he would confess to selling artifacts. Ahmed denied all the facts presented to him and the testimonies of tourists which fall directly under the cut (le coupe) of Ottoman law: Clandestine excavation, unauthorised sale of papyrus and funerary statuettes, destruction of coffins and objects of art and curiosity belonging to the Egyptian State. 

Protesting his innocence Ahmed offered for them to search his house, Ahmed was then imprisoned for two months, and suffered interrogations and severe beatings to the soles of his feet, he told them that he was a servant of Moustapha Agha Ayat, the man that had managed to use his diplomatic immunity to save himself from prosecution.  Ahmed had sold the artifacts to Moustafa Agha Ayat who had led him to believe he would also be covered by diplomatic immunity, but once the Authorities were involved he purposely distanced himself from the investigation and left Ahmed to defend himself.

Ahmed managed to extract many people 
from his village that offered favourable testimonies on his behalf in this close-knit, Saidi community where the chiefs and notables of Qurna repeatedly affirmed under oath, that Ahmed Abd el Rassoul was a most loyal man, who never looted before and would never loot again, who was incapable of stealing the most insignificant object of antiquity, let alone violating a royal tomb, so consequently Ahmed was provisionally released, with the guarantee of two of his friends, Ahmed Serour and Ismail Sayid Nagib. He returned to his home around the middle of May, however his arrest, and the two months of imprisonment that he had suffered, and the vigour with which the investigation of Daoud Pacha had been conducted, had clearly shown the inability of Moustapha Agha Ayat to protect Ahmed with diplomatic immunity, as he had suggested to him when he was selling him the artifacts.

A few months later Emile received some new information from people that were prepared to denounce Ahmed and his brothers. Some of the villagers had received assistance from the Rassoul family, but the police continued harassing them and they became divided on how to deal with the problem, some of them  believed that the danger of prosecution was over, and that Museum would not be pursuing the case any further, whilst others thought that it would be safer to cooperate with the Museum and tell them the about the secret hoard that the Rassoul family had profited from for over ten years.

Meanwhile Ahmed was feeling confident that he was not going to be prosecuted, and thinking the case was dropped, Ahmed told the villagers that they owed him compensation for the months in prison that he endured, and he demanded the majority of the treasure for himself, he told them if they refused to grant his demand, he threatened to go immediately to the director of excavations. After a further month of harassment in the village from the police,  the eldest of the brothers, Mohammed Abd Rassoul, decided to inform on his brother Ahmed to stop the harassment of the Village by the authorities.  In secret on the 5th June he went to inform the Moudir that he knew the location of the Tomb where the artifacts and mummies could be found. Mohammed then took the officials of the Antiquities Society to Deir el Bahri. He led them the actual tomb chamber, which contained coffins of some of ancient Egypts greatest Kings of the New Kingdom. The funerary trappings had disappeared, the gold sarcophagi had been melted down, some of the mummies were on the floor, as the robbers had ripped the bandages apart to get the amulets inside. On descending into the tomb they found it is disarray with sarcophagi piled up one on top of another, but they were covered in inscriptions and had the images of serpents, so together with the ornaments they found, it also proved that it was in fact a royal burial place. 

The Kings that were found in this cache were Seqenenre-Taa, who had fought the Hyksos and bore a great head wound as apparent evidence, his son Ahmose I the founder of the New Kingdom, Amenhotep I,  Tuthmosis 1, 11 and 111, Seti I, Ramesses II, III and IX, and the empty coffin of Ramesses I. Queen Nefertari's sarcophagus was so heavy it took nine men to lift it. Within a matter of days, in great urgency, the tomb was emptied by the authorities.It was strange that all these kings had been removed from their own tombs, and placed in other tombs, and then to finally arrive in this undecorated tomb not fit for a beggar let alone a king. Gaston Maspero speculated that the kings had been moved from their own tombs to avoid the attention of tomb robbers at the end of the New Kingdom period. The last great Ruler of Egypt had been Ramses 111 and after his rule Egypt went into economic decline, then in the 25th dynasty I think it was the High Priest Pinudjem 11 that ordered the removal of the Kings from there original tombs and placed the Kings in his family vault so that he would have the wealth  of the Royal Tombs. 

For his assistance of leading the authorities to the tomb Mohammed el-Rassul was offered a job as foreman for the Antiquities Society. In 1891 he led an inspector to yet another site in Deir el Bahri, where bodies of almost 160 successive high priests from Karnak, lay at rest. Since it was suspected that Mohammed had known for quite a while about this cache, he was dismissed from the Society.

Today the descendants of Ahmed Rassoul own the Rammessium Restaurant & Coffee Shop at the Side of the Ramesseum Mortuary Temple of Ramses the Great, it was here that I met Mohamed Rassoul who showed me a tinted photograph of his great great grandfather Ahmed who was an old man of about 90  years of age when the photo was taken in 1907 and was probably taken by Robert de Rustafjaell a phtographer and author who wrote 'The Light of Egypt', and had known Ahmed Abd er Rassoul for many years. Ahmed's mother Fendia dominates the photograph, supporting herself with two strong sticks, they said that she was about 120 when the photograph was taken, she certainly looks old, which means she had been alive when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt bringing with him his army and a huge force of scholars, artists and mathematicians, who recorded all the history of the temples during their Graphic Exploration of Egypt.

I took a photograph of the  tinted photograph and when I came home I painted it. Magnifying and looking closely at the image, I realized that Fendia was wearing a pair of gold earrings and a pharaonic collar! And she had a proper pair of shoes on her feet when normally the villagers walked barefoot,and even some of the children walked around naked. Ahmed's Daughter also wears a beautiful shawl so compared to the rest of the village they were wealthy. 

Hatshepsut’s name had reached as far as the circuit of heaven and encompassed the great circle (the sea)

Hatshepsut's Trading Expedition to the Land of Punt

Hatshepsut had a peaceful reign, she concentrated on trade rather than conquest, the walls of her temple shows her famous trading expedition to the Land of Punt, now known as Somalia. To indicate their willingness to submit to an Egyptian sovereign the people of Punt showered the Egyptians with gifts for Hatshepsut. Their gifts included gold and ivory, great heaps of precious balsams and incense for the temples, animals plants and trees for transplantation on the Egyptian soil,  this is recorded on the punt colonnade, where small African houses are shown standing on wooden stilts, beautiful tropical birds are carved flying across the sky and lots of varieties of fish are recorded

Hatshepsut’s name had reached as far as the circuit of heaven and encompassed the great circle (the sea) the best of myrrh was upon her limbs and her fragrance was of divine dew, whilst her odour was mingled with the land of Punt. Her skin was gilded with electrum that shone like the stars at night

Foreign lands were regarded as the personal property of The Goddess Hathor, and the goods that the Egyptians obtained from these countries were considered to be gifts from Hathor, so the return to Thebes with all the treasures from Punt would have been the cause for great celebrations. Now that her reign was strengthened and successful, Hatshepsut made plans with her architect Senemut to build herself a Mortuary Temple fit for a King, and so her unusual three storied columned temple rose up the side of the Theban Mountains of El Dier El Bahari. When looking at a map I realized that the temple with its entrance ramps is in direct line with Karnack Temple the House of Amun on the East Bank, Sheshat the Goddess of the Cosmos guided the priests with her skills of the stars and heavens, the temple is also aligned to the winter solstice sunrise, which in our modern era occurs around the 21st or 22nd of December each year.

Originally Myrrh trees lined the entrance ramps and its lower terrace up into the temple; these were the trees that had been sent from the expedition to punt and are shown being transported in large baskets on the reliefs in the temple.