Thutmose I

• 1. Introduction

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  Thutmose I came to the throne of Egypt as an outsider. He never called himself "Son of the King," which tells us something important: he was almost certainly not of royal blood. His mother was a woman named Senseneb; his father is unknown. Yet this common-born man would extend Egypt's reach farther north and south than it had ever gone before. He would be the first confirmed king to build his tomb in a remote desert valley that would later become known as the Valley of the Kings. And the story of what happened to his body after death is one of the more extraordinary puzzles of Egyptology. Who was this man? How did he get the throne? And why, more than three thousand years after his reign, is there still genuine doubt about where his mummy actually is?

• 2. A Commoner's Ascent

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  Thutmose received the throne after the death of Amenhotep I, the pharaoh who preceded him. His wife, Queen Ahmose, held the title of Great Royal Wife, and was probably a daughter of Ahmose I and sister of Amenhotep I. That would have made her royal by blood in a way her husband was not. Some historians have interpreted the marriage as a deliberate elevation of Thutmose's status, a way to anchor him to the dynasty he was about to lead. But that interpretation has a problem. His first-born son, Amenmose, appears to have been born well before Thutmose's coronation, which complicates the idea that marriage to a royal woman was a precondition for his rise. Amenmose can be seen on a stela from his father's fourth regnal year hunting near Memphis, and he later bore the title of great army-commander of his father, though whether this title was ceremonial or genuine is uncertain. Amenmose died no later than his father's twelfth regnal year. Thutmose also had a son named Wadjmose by an unknown woman, and another son by a woman named Mutnofret, who was likely a daughter of Ahmose I herself. It was this son by Mutnofret who would inherit the throne as Thutmose II.

• 3. Wars at the Edges of the World

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  On the day Thutmose was crowned, Nubia revolted. The account comes from the tomb autobiography of a soldier named Ahmose, son of Ebana, who recorded that the new pharaoh traveled up the Nile and fought in the battle personally, killing the Nubian king with his own hand. Then Thutmose had the dead king's body hung from the prow of his ship as he sailed back to Thebes. In his third regnal year, he launched a second expedition into Nubia. On the first month of the third season, day 22, he ordered the canal at the first cataract to be dredged; the canal had originally been cut under Sesostris III of the 12th Dynasty but had since become blocked with stones. Two inscriptions by a royal son named Thure mark both the order to dredge and the victorious return from "overthrowing the wretched Kush." That same year, Thutmose cut a stele at Tombos and built a fortress there, near the third cataract, pushing Egypt's military presence south beyond its previous limit at Buhen. A fourth-year rebellion in Nubia pushed his influence even further south. An inscription from his reign has been found at Kurgus, south of the fourth cataract. There he carved a large tableau on a quartz outcrop known as the Hagar el-Merwa, roughly 1200 meters from the Nile, overwriting earlier local inscriptions. That site marks the furthest south the Egyptian presence is attested. He also campaigned north, into the Levant and Syria. Textual sources from his time reference Retenu, Naharin, and a place called the land of Mitanni. That last name is believed to be the first historical reference to the Mitanni kingdom. As many as twenty sites in the Levant suffered destruction around this period, and many of those destructions have been attributed to Thutmose I or his predecessor. The fiery destruction of Stratum XVIII at Gezer, for instance, has been dated to the second half of the sixteenth century BC based on pottery and scarabs found in the debris.

• 4. Karnak Transformed

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  Ineni was the architect who oversaw Thutmose's greatest building project, the Temple of Karnak. Before Thutmose arrived, Karnak was relatively modest: a long road to a central platform, with shrines for the solar bark along the sides. Thutmose was the first king to drastically enlarge it. He built the fifth pylon along the main road, added a wall around the inner sanctuary, and placed two flagpoles at the gateway. Further out, he built a fourth pylon and another enclosure wall. Between pylons four and five he constructed a hypostyle hall, its columns made from cedar wood. This structure, common in Egyptian temple architecture, was meant to evoke a papyrus marsh, an Egyptian symbol of creation. Along the edges of that hall he placed colossal statues, each one alternating between the crown of Upper Egypt and the crown of Lower Egypt. Outside the fourth pylon he erected four more flagpoles and two obelisks. One of those obelisks was not inscribed until about fifty years later, when Thutmose III had his name carved on it. Hatshepsut later erected two obelisks of her own inside her father's hypostyle hall. Ineni was also commissioned to dig Thutmose's tomb. That tomb, designated KV38, makes Thutmose the first king confirmed to have been buried in the Valley of the Kings, though Amenhotep I may have preceded him there. Beyond Karnak, Thutmose built statues of the Ennead at Abydos, structures at Armant, Ombos, el-Hiba, Memphis, and Edfu, and smaller expansions in Nubia at Semna, Buhen, Aniba, and Quban.

• 5. The Sarcophagus Question

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  Howard Carter had been working for two previous seasons before he finally cleared the corridors of KV20 during the 1903-04 excavation season. The location of KV20 had been known in Europe at least since the Napoleonic expedition of 1799, and in 1844 the Prussian scholar Karl Richard Lepsius had explored its upper passage. But floodwaters had carried rubble, small stones, and rubbish into the tomb, and it took Carter years to break through. When he reached the double burial chamber he found fragments of pottery and shattered stone vessels, along with the remnants of two vases made for Queen Ahmose Nefertari. One of those vases bore a secondary inscription stating that Thutmose II made it as his monument to his father. Carter also found two separate coffins. One was Hatshepsut's sarcophagus, beautifully carved, discovered open with no body inside and the lid lying discarded on the floor; it is now in the Cairo Museum. The second sarcophagus is where the story gets unusual. It measured seven feet long, three feet wide, with walls five inches thick. It had originally been carved with the name of Hatshepsut, but Hatshepsut chose to commission an entirely new sarcophagus for herself and donated the existing one to her father instead. Stonemasons attempted to erase her name and re-carve the surface with Thutmose's titles. The dedication text that Hatshepsut had inscribed still reads, in part, that she made it as her monument to her father whom she loved. That second sarcophagus was eventually given to Theodore M. Davis, who had sponsored the excavation financially, and Davis presented it to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Later, Thutmose III reinterred his grandfather in KV38 in what he intended as a more magnificent resting place. That tomb was plundered late in the 20th Dynasty; the lid of the sarcophagus was broken and all precious grave goods were stolen.

• 6. The Mummy's Uncertain Identity

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  Thutmose I's mummy was found in the Deir el-Bahri Cache, revealed in 1881. It had been placed alongside the mummies of Ahmose I, Amenhotep I, Thutmose II, Thutmose III, Ramesses I, Seti I, Ramesses II, and Ramesses IX, as well as the 21st-dynasty pharaohs Pinedjem I, Pinedjem II, and Siamun. His original coffin had been taken over and reused by pharaoh Pinedjem I of the 21st Dynasty. Egyptologist Gaston Maspero believed he had found Thutmose I's mummy in an otherwise unlabelled body designated number 5283, largely based on its facial resemblance to the mummies of Thutmose II and Thutmose III. Maspero described the mummy as that of a man already advanced in age at the time of death, probably over fifty years old based on the wear of his incisor teeth. He noted the body was small and emaciated but showed evidence of unusual muscular strength, with a bald head, refined features, and a mouth that still bore an expression characteristic of shrewdness and cunning. Subsequent examinations supported the identification on the grounds that the embalming techniques came from the appropriate period. In 1991, James Harris and Fawzia Hussien conducted an X-ray survey and found that the mummy had craniofacial characteristics and what they described as a typical Nubian morphology. Then in 2007, Zahi Hawass announced a different conclusion entirely. The mummy, he said, belonged to a man approximately thirty years old who had died from an arrow wound to the chest. That age and that cause of death make it very unlikely the mummy is Thutmose I. A 2020 genetic study under Hawass placed this mummy in haplogroup L, which is mainly observed in southern, western, and central Asia, with the highest concentration in the Indian subcontinent. The mummy carries the inventory number CG 61065. In April 2021, it was moved to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization as part of an event called the Pharaohs' Golden Parade, alongside seventeen kings and four queens. Where the actual remains of Thutmose I are today, if they survive at all, remains unanswered.