Episode 17 Tuthmosis III – King at Last

The History of Ancient Egypt

Professor Robert Brier

Film Review

The stepson of Egypt’s first female pharaoh, Tuthmosis III (1479-1425 BC), was 36 when Hatshepsut died and he assumed the throne. He was Egypt’s greatest military pharaoh, having adopted a redesigned two-horse chariot from the Hyksos (see Egypt’s Second Intermediate Period and Foreign Rule by the Hyksos). With wheels made from flexible ash or popular, it  was extremely light to improve maneuverability in battle. It carried two men (a driver and archer) who stood on a small platform made of woven leather. Typically the king (pharaoh) would lead the charge in a chariot with a specially trained archer.

The walls of Tuthmosis’s III’s mortuary temple in Karnak (near Thebes) describe a campaign during the second year of his reign (in in which he marched his infantry 15 miles a day to the city of Megiddo (in modern day Israel). There they laid siege for seven months, employing a primitive tank invented by his army engineer,  because the city had ceased sending tribute to Egypt.

Thuthmosis III also marched north to invade Syria every year for 18 years, as well as making war on Nubia. His troops carried round top shields made of a piece of wood stretched with hide and a spear or sword or sometimes both. When they camped, they used their shields to form a picket fence around their campsite.

Despite Egypt’s more or constant state of war under his reign, neither Tuthmosis III nor any other pharaoh ever occupied any of the cities they conquered, owing to their religious belief that one had to die and be buried in Egypt to become immortal.

Tuthmosis III also produced a botanical book describing all the plants and wildflowers he saw in Syria and the presence of snow on the mountains of Lebanon.

Although there’s no written record, historians surmise that Tuthmosis III married his half-sister and Hatshepsut’s daughter Neferure. Three of the women in his harem have been identified as Syrian from the gold necklaces and bracelets found in their tombs.

He had his own tombed carved into a high cliff near the Valley of the Kings. Like most pharaohs, he covered it walls with religious texts. The commoners he ruled covered theirs with scenes from daily life. Only 20% of the population of ancient Egypt was literate.

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