DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.55201#0165
>52
EXCAVATIONS AT DEIR EL BAHRI
Moreover, if Neferu-Ret was gone and Sen-Mut’s guardianship
terminated, equally a thing of the past was the boyhood and youth of
Thut-mose. He had grown up a short, stocky young man full of a fiery
Napoleonic energy, suppressed up to now but soon to cause the whole
known world to smart. Long since he should have been sole ruler of
Egypt but for Hat-shepsut, and we hardly have to stretch our imagi-
nations unduly to picture the bitterness of such a man against those
who had deprived him of his rights, or to see the danger in which Sen-
Mut now found himself.
The last definite date in the career of Sen-Mut is that of the
ostrakon which we found in 1926, written about the middle of the
16th Year of the reign. If we assume that another year or so passed
before the decorations of Deir el Bahri were finished and the last of
the doors were hung, behind which he hid his portraits, we may sup-
pose that he survived until the 18th Year—about 1483 b.c. If he was
in charge of Hat-shepsut’s last works at Karnak, then he was alive in
the 19th Year. But scarcely any longer could he have escaped the
impatience of Thut-mose to see an end of him. That he fell, in any
case, before his mistress is one of the interesting new facts to be
gathered from the tomb which we found this year. In it his portraits
are mutilated, while her names are still granted due respect.
The exact circumstances of Sen-Mut’s taking off will have to be
still another of the details left to the reader’s imagination. The monu-
ments are absolutely silent upon it—but we can construct some out-
line of the sequel to the tale.
As soon as news arrived of the end of the Great Steward orders
were given to close up his presumptuous new tomb. The job was done
as quickly as possible. Workmen went down to the decorated chamber
and smashed the faces of Sen-Mut wherever they noticed them and in
passing even scratched the sketch in the corridor. They had no time
to search out Sen-Mut’s name in the inscriptions—or perhaps none
of them could read—and they did not dare to mutilate the cartouches
of the still powerful Hat-shepsut. Hastily gathering together bricks
and stones at the mouth of the tomb, they started to wall it up, but
the work did not go fast enough and before they had finished their
wall they gave it up and raked down dirt just enough to cover over
the doorway. So the tomb stood for the next four or five years. The
sun blazed on the rock above the buried doorway and one of the sud-
den thunderstorms of the desert flooded mud down over it, until the
rock took on a yellowish tint that showed us quite distinctly the line
of this first burying of the tomb (pl. 61).
EXCAVATIONS AT DEIR EL BAHRI
Moreover, if Neferu-Ret was gone and Sen-Mut’s guardianship
terminated, equally a thing of the past was the boyhood and youth of
Thut-mose. He had grown up a short, stocky young man full of a fiery
Napoleonic energy, suppressed up to now but soon to cause the whole
known world to smart. Long since he should have been sole ruler of
Egypt but for Hat-shepsut, and we hardly have to stretch our imagi-
nations unduly to picture the bitterness of such a man against those
who had deprived him of his rights, or to see the danger in which Sen-
Mut now found himself.
The last definite date in the career of Sen-Mut is that of the
ostrakon which we found in 1926, written about the middle of the
16th Year of the reign. If we assume that another year or so passed
before the decorations of Deir el Bahri were finished and the last of
the doors were hung, behind which he hid his portraits, we may sup-
pose that he survived until the 18th Year—about 1483 b.c. If he was
in charge of Hat-shepsut’s last works at Karnak, then he was alive in
the 19th Year. But scarcely any longer could he have escaped the
impatience of Thut-mose to see an end of him. That he fell, in any
case, before his mistress is one of the interesting new facts to be
gathered from the tomb which we found this year. In it his portraits
are mutilated, while her names are still granted due respect.
The exact circumstances of Sen-Mut’s taking off will have to be
still another of the details left to the reader’s imagination. The monu-
ments are absolutely silent upon it—but we can construct some out-
line of the sequel to the tale.
As soon as news arrived of the end of the Great Steward orders
were given to close up his presumptuous new tomb. The job was done
as quickly as possible. Workmen went down to the decorated chamber
and smashed the faces of Sen-Mut wherever they noticed them and in
passing even scratched the sketch in the corridor. They had no time
to search out Sen-Mut’s name in the inscriptions—or perhaps none
of them could read—and they did not dare to mutilate the cartouches
of the still powerful Hat-shepsut. Hastily gathering together bricks
and stones at the mouth of the tomb, they started to wall it up, but
the work did not go fast enough and before they had finished their
wall they gave it up and raked down dirt just enough to cover over
the doorway. So the tomb stood for the next four or five years. The
sun blazed on the rock above the buried doorway and one of the sud-
den thunderstorms of the desert flooded mud down over it, until the
rock took on a yellowish tint that showed us quite distinctly the line
of this first burying of the tomb (pl. 61).