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).
[Illustration: FIG. 10. HIERATIC INSCRIPTIONS FROM ‘VALLEY’-TEMPLE.]
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.
[Illustration: Fig. 11. GRAFFITI ON STONES FROM ‘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’.