Thutmose III

Thutmose III became king as a child and shared rule with Hatshepsut before ruling alone. His campaigns and building projects are recorded at Karnak, where royal inscriptions present the successes of his reign from the king’s point of view.

At Karnak, his campaign annals and Festival Hall show two sides of kingship: military achievement and religious building. In KV34, the Amduat follows the sun god’s nightly journey. Later royal tombs used this and other funerary compositions in different combinations.

In his twenty-second year, immediately after Hatshepsut disappears from the record, he marched north against a coalition of Syrian and Canaanite rulers assembled at Megiddo, took the narrow route through the hills against his officers’ advice, won the battle and then spent seven months besieging the town. Sixteen further campaigns followed over twenty years, reaching the Euphrates, where he set up his own boundary stela beside his grandfather’s. In the south he pushed the frontier to the Fourth Cataract. Conquered rulers’ sons were brought to Egypt to be raised at court and sent home to govern — an administration rather than a raid.

At home he cleared and rebuilt in the older parts of Karnak, took down Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel and replaced it, and built the Akh-menu, a pillared hall whose columns imitate a tent pole, with a small side room carved with plants and animals that were said to have been brought back from Syria. Late in the reign the removal of Hatshepsut’s names began.

At Karnak: the Akh-menu Festival Hall at the eastern end, the Sixth and Seventh Pylons (a monumental gateway formed by two massive towers), the Annals cut on the walls around the sanctuary, the sanctuary itself, and obelisks — one of which now stands in Rome. A small temple squeezed into the bay at Deir el-Bahari between Mentuhotep II’s complex and Hatshepsut’s. The small Amun temple at Medinet Habu, with Hatshepsut. And KV34 in the Valley of the Kings.

Walk the main axis at Karnak all the way east, past the sanctuary, to the Festival Hall: a hall with two rows of tall columns down the middle that swell towards the top like an inverted tent pole, and lower square pillars around the sides. Find the small room off its north-east corner — the walls are covered with plants and birds, and there is nothing else like it. His tomb, KV34, is at the head of the valley up a metal stair against the cliff, and it is the one that makes every later tomb make sense.