placed his hand between his thighs, and caught the semen of Seth. 14
By catching the semen before it enters his body and subsequently throwing it into the marsh, Horus has effectively thwarted his uncle's evil plan to discredit him in the eyes of other males. Later, with the help of his mother, he is able to turn the tables on Seth. He sprinkles his own semen over the lettuces growing in the palace garden which he knows that Seth will eat. When the two gods are called to give an account of their deeds, although Seth claims to have done ‘a man's deed’ to Horus, the semen of Horus is discovered within Seth's own body and Seth is totally humiliated.
Nearby on the tomb wall ( Fig. 7.3 ) are shown a couple, naked but for their idiosyncratic headgear, who are indulging in a form of sexual
Fig. 7.3 Hatchepsut and Senenmut? Crude graffito from a Deir el-Bahri tomb
intercourse which has modestly been described as ‘a method of approach from the rear’. 15 As Manniche has noted:
Intercourse from behind (‘dog fashion’)… seems to have been rather popular in Egypt, to judge from the number of extant representations of the position, the man most frequently standing, with the woman bending over. Whether any of these examples indicate anal intercourse cannot be determined from the representations alone, but it seems rather unlikely in that no practical purpose would have been served… 16
The more dominant male figure sports what has been described as an overseer's leather cap, but which may actually be a bad haircut, while his larger and curiously androgynous companion has a dark female pubic triangle but no breasts. She is wearing what has been identified as a royal headdress without the uraeus, and is generally acknowledged to represent Hatchepsut. The whole scene has been interpreted, some might say over-interpreted, as a contemporary political parody intendedto highlight the one way in which Hatchepsut could never be a true king – she could never dominate a man in the way that she is now being dominated. 17 Senenmut is shown quite literally taking his queen for a ride.
Hatchepsut is by no means the first woman in a position of authority to be insulted by this type of graffiti. The deep-rooted feeling that any female who rejects her traditional submissive role is both unfeminine and unnatural has often led to wild charges of wanton behaviour fired at dominant women. Accusations of sexual lust and impropriety are perhaps the only way in which less powerful and therefore, it has been argued, emasculated and frustrated men can attack their more powerful mistresses. Nor is this type of assault the prerogative of men. Women who have not themselves breached social boundaries are often the first to condemn those who have and, as women well know, an attack on a woman's reputation is the most damaging attack of all. Certainly the influential females of history – women who have dominated in a man's world – have consistently attracted prurient speculation concerning their sexual behaviour. These women, who range from Cleopatra of Egypt via Semiramis of Assyria and Livia of Rome to Catherine the Great of Russia, were routinely accused of sexual promiscuity of the grossest and most vivid kind.
It seems that only by making a deliberate feature of her virtue and chastity, often maintained under the most difficult of conditions, can a powerful woman hope to avoid tales of her sexual depravity becoming her main contribution to her country's history. Thus Odysseus's faithful Penelope, Shakespeare's ‘most unspotted lily’ Elizabeth I and Joan of Arc, ‘the Maid of Orleans’, all strong women, deliberately made purity one of their main attributes. We should therefore not be surprised to find that Hatchepsut's subjects, unused to the idea of a strong female ruler, were prepared to speculate on the relationship between the female king and Senenmut, her servant and their immediate boss. Humour would have been the only weapon that
By catching the semen before it enters his body and subsequently throwing it into the marsh, Horus has effectively thwarted his uncle's evil plan to discredit him in the eyes of other males. Later, with the help of his mother, he is able to turn the tables on Seth. He sprinkles his own semen over the lettuces growing in the palace garden which he knows that Seth will eat. When the two gods are called to give an account of their deeds, although Seth claims to have done ‘a man's deed’ to Horus, the semen of Horus is discovered within Seth's own body and Seth is totally humiliated.
Nearby on the tomb wall ( Fig. 7.3 ) are shown a couple, naked but for their idiosyncratic headgear, who are indulging in a form of sexual
Fig. 7.3 Hatchepsut and Senenmut? Crude graffito from a Deir el-Bahri tomb
intercourse which has modestly been described as ‘a method of approach from the rear’. 15 As Manniche has noted:
Intercourse from behind (‘dog fashion’)… seems to have been rather popular in Egypt, to judge from the number of extant representations of the position, the man most frequently standing, with the woman bending over. Whether any of these examples indicate anal intercourse cannot be determined from the representations alone, but it seems rather unlikely in that no practical purpose would have been served… 16
The more dominant male figure sports what has been described as an overseer's leather cap, but which may actually be a bad haircut, while his larger and curiously androgynous companion has a dark female pubic triangle but no breasts. She is wearing what has been identified as a royal headdress without the uraeus, and is generally acknowledged to represent Hatchepsut. The whole scene has been interpreted, some might say over-interpreted, as a contemporary political parody intendedto highlight the one way in which Hatchepsut could never be a true king – she could never dominate a man in the way that she is now being dominated. 17 Senenmut is shown quite literally taking his queen for a ride.
Hatchepsut is by no means the first woman in a position of authority to be insulted by this type of graffiti. The deep-rooted feeling that any female who rejects her traditional submissive role is both unfeminine and unnatural has often led to wild charges of wanton behaviour fired at dominant women. Accusations of sexual lust and impropriety are perhaps the only way in which less powerful and therefore, it has been argued, emasculated and frustrated men can attack their more powerful mistresses. Nor is this type of assault the prerogative of men. Women who have not themselves breached social boundaries are often the first to condemn those who have and, as women well know, an attack on a woman's reputation is the most damaging attack of all. Certainly the influential females of history – women who have dominated in a man's world – have consistently attracted prurient speculation concerning their sexual behaviour. These women, who range from Cleopatra of Egypt via Semiramis of Assyria and Livia of Rome to Catherine the Great of Russia, were routinely accused of sexual promiscuity of the grossest and most vivid kind.
It seems that only by making a deliberate feature of her virtue and chastity, often maintained under the most difficult of conditions, can a powerful woman hope to avoid tales of her sexual depravity becoming her main contribution to her country's history. Thus Odysseus's faithful Penelope, Shakespeare's ‘most unspotted lily’ Elizabeth I and Joan of Arc, ‘the Maid of Orleans’, all strong women, deliberately made purity one of their main attributes. We should therefore not be surprised to find that Hatchepsut's subjects, unused to the idea of a strong female ruler, were prepared to speculate on the relationship between the female king and Senenmut, her servant and their immediate boss. Humour would have been the only weapon that
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