CHAPTER VII

THE ‘VALLEY’-TEMPLE OF QUEEN HATSHEPSÛT

BY HOWARD CARTER

Adjoining the site of Tomb 9 is the ‘Valley’-Temple to the Dromos of Hatshepsût’s Mortuary Chapel at Dêr el Bahari (Site 14, Pl. XXX).

It was first discovered by the excavation of the tomb No. 9, which exposed some of its stone-work, and it was a surprise to find here, in such a well-known place, a finely built limestone construction of considerable proportions quite near to the surface.

At the beginning this building was a puzzle to us, the part revealed in season 1909 being only a long piece of the outside wall which gave but few data, and thus became a source of much speculation as to its meaning. This wall ran east and west, having a base measurement of 2·60 metres broad with its outer faces sloping--their ‘batter’ being 4 cms. in every rise of 25 cms. Its construction consists of two outer skins of small well-made limestone blocks built upon sandstone foundation slabs, with, in the middle, a core of stone and mortar rubble mixed with sand. In it was a doorway, about half-way along the length cleared, which opened out to the north--its door-jambs being on that side. The eastern extremity of the excavation then made, showed that in that direction it descended. Under the doorway a search was made for a deposit but with no result, though at the west end, the part of the wall first discovered, there was a pocket of sand which seemed to have belonged to something of that nature.

The extensive exploration of this site in 1910 clearly determined that it was an unfinished portion of a building of Terrace-Temple form; and that the wall, which had given rise to many theories, was only its northern boundary wall (Pl. XXXI. 1 and 2).

The intended scheme of this unfinished building seems to have been an Upper and a Lower Court, divided by a single Colonnaded Terrace (see plan and section, Pl. XXX), similar somewhat to Hatshepsût’s Mortuary Chapel at Dêr el Bahari. It is, however, all in the very early stages of construction, the wall itself being the only part that shows any signs of completion. Very possibly, in earlier times, a great deal more of the structure existed, for it had been used as a quarry for limestone at some late period.

In detail, the ‘battered’ boundary wall, averaging nearly 6 metres in height, was capped by a coping-stone curved on the top. The base of its outer face declines from the level of the Upper Court down to the level of the Lower Court, a matter of nearly 4·50 metres difference in level; while, on the inner side, the base is horizontal and takes the levels of the two courts. When looking at the plan (Pl. XXX) it will be noticed that the wall gradually swells on the outer face between the two sections, viz. the Upper and Lower Courts, and suddenly returns to its normal thickness. This can be explained by the fact that a ‘battered’ surface must necessarily spread as it descends to a lower level. It was at this point (the level of the Lower Court) blended back to the normal base measurement of the wall by a small angle of masonry (see Pl. XXXI. 1).

The Lower Court, as far as the excavation shows us, seems to be a plain open quadrangle, abutting a raised terrace colonnade, of which one base alone of the square columns of the Terrace still exists. Above this Terrace, the back of which served as a retaining wall, is what we can only suppose to be the Upper Court, and like the lower one is a square open enclosure. On the north side of this Upper Court is a doorway (mentioned above) in the boundary wall. Behind the masonry of the Terrace are the remains of the original mud-brick scaffold for supporting the earth of the Upper Court while building the back stone wall of the Terrace itself. The masonry in some cases is good, while in others it is of the roughest kind, and in many parts the surfaces have been left undressed.

Hieratic inscriptions, written in ink upon the under surfaces of the stone blocks from the walls (see Fig. 10), name the architect ‘the Second Priest of Amen, Pu-am-ra’, whose tomb (dated Thothmes III) is in the Assassif.

This fixed the date of the monument to the reign of Queen Hatshepsût or Thothmes III, but to which of these two reigns, and for what use the edifice was intended, still remained unanswered for want of further data.

Later, in the year 1911, we at last discovered a foundation deposit of the building (see Pl. XXX, marked Hatshepsût’s Deposit A and B), and here a small brick pillar and model tools gave the owner’s name, ‘Maat-ka-ra’ (the prenomen of Queen Hatshepsût), and on the tools themselves was the name of the building ‘_Zeser-zeseru_’. The occurrence of these names shows at once that the building formed part and parcel of the Dêr el Bahari edifice, and from its position it is clear that the building was the termination of the dromos of the famous temple--in fact its Portal or ‘Valley’-Temple--assimilating in idea the older plan of the pyramid chapels and ‘valley’-temples connected by great causeways of the pyramids at Gizeh, the tomb which takes the place of the pyramid being in this case on the opposite side of the cliff in the valley of the Tombs of the Kings.

The foundation deposit, like that of the other end of the dromos found in 1910 (p. 31), was composed of two separate groups, (1) a pillar of ten mud-bricks, each stamped with the Queen’s prenomen [Illustration: hieroglyph] (see Plan, Pl. XXX, marked A); and (2) a few metres from it (see Plan, Pl. XXX, marked B) were found two model adzes in wood inscribed with the following hieroglyphic inscription:--[Illustration: hieroglyph]. These were fully four metres below the pavement level of the Upper Court of the ‘Valley’-Temple.

Objects found during the excavation of, and belonging to this monument, were:--

1. Lying loosely in the rubbish, a very fine specimen of a workman’s hoe (Pl. XXXII. 3).

2. In the masonry of the corner of the terrace colonnade, a mason’s mallet, exactly similar to those found in the Queen’s Temple of Dêr el Bahari by the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1893-1896.

3. Generally distributed about the site were stamped bricks of the Queen (Pl. XXXII. 2), and also two larger bricks stamped with the cartouches of Thothmes I and Maat-ka-ra in conjunction, with the epithets [Illustration: hieroglyph] and [Illustration: hieroglyph] under their names (Pl. XXXII. 4).

4. A red crystalline sandstone tally-stone bearing the prenomen of Hatshepsût (Pl. XXXII. 1).

5. Low down, about the foundation level and half-way along the lower section of the north boundary wall, was a mass of stones with dressed faces for building. These stones, numbering seventy-six in all, were stacked with their faces downwards. Out of these stones thirty-five had painted in black upon their faces the signs [Illustration: hieroglyph], ‘the Good Festival’, with one of the batch having the supplementary word [Illustration: hieroglyph], ‘Brick’. Another had an illegible inscription beginning with the sign [Illustration: hieroglyph] and the word ‘Amen’. Six had peculiar signs or quarry marks scrawled in charcoal (see Fig. 11). That on the fifth stone can be read as [Illustration: hieroglyph], the name of the Queen’s architect Sen-mut. The sign [Illustration: hieroglyph], _Sent_, that occurs on four of the other stones might be interpreted as ‘a ground plan’.