Thutmose II

Among the Thutmosid kings, Thutmose II (d. c. 1479 BC) is the least visible, a ruler remembered chiefly for the family members who flanked him. The son of Thutmose I by the secondary wife Mutnofret, he secured his succession in characteristic 18th Dynasty fashion by marrying his half-sister Hatshepsut, daughter of Thutmose I and the Great Royal Wife Ahmose. The marriage joined the two branches of their father's household and produced a daughter, Neferure; his son and heir, Thutmose III, was born instead to Isis, a woman of the harem.

The length of his reign is genuinely uncertain. Estimates have ranged from about three years to thirteen or more, and the question remains open; the relative scarcity of his monuments has often been read as evidence for the shorter figure. What is documented is limited but conventional: a punitive expedition against a rebellion in Kush, recorded in a Aswan inscription and apparently directed by his commanders rather than the king in person, and reports of action against Shasu bedouin in the east. He contributed modestly to building at Karnak, including a festival court later dismantled.

Some Egyptologists have inferred from this thin record that Thutmose II was young, sickly, or dominated by his forceful wife, but such characterizations go beyond the evidence. His mummy, recovered from the Deir el-Bahri cache in 1881, was that of a man who died relatively young, though attempts at more precise diagnosis are speculative. In 2022 a tomb attributed to him was identified west of the Valley of the Kings, the first royal tomb of the dynasty found since Tutankhamun's, though its interpretation is still being assessed.

His death around 1479 BC set up one of the dynasty's defining situations: the throne passed to the child Thutmose III, with Hatshepsut — aunt and stepmother to the new king — acting as regent. Within a few years she had assumed full royal titles herself. Thutmose II thus stands at the hinge of the family's history, the link between the conqueror who fathered him and the two extraordinary rulers, wife and son, who followed him.