20 Facts About Thutmose II

Thutmose II was the fourth Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, and his reign is generally dated from 1493 to 1479 BC.

Thutmose II died around the age of 30 and his body was found in the Deir el-Bahri Cache above the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut.

Thutmose II was, therefore, a lesser son of Thutmose I and chose to marry his fully royal half-sister, Hatshepsut, in order to secure his kingship.

Thutmose II is depicted in several raised relief scenes from a Karnak gateway dating to Thutmose II's reign both together with her husband and alone.

Ineni, who was already aged by the start of Thutmose II's reign, lived through this ruler's entire reign into that of Hatshepsut.

Consequently, the reign length of Thutmose II has been a much debated subject among Egyptologists with little consensus given the small number of surviving documents for his reign.

Thutmose II's reign is still traditionally given as 13 or 14 years.

Von Beckerath additionally stresses that Egyptologists have no conclusive criteria to statistically evaluate the reign length of Thutmose II based on the number of preserved objects from his reign.

Thutmose II contributed to the decoration of the temple of Khnum at Semna.

Thutmose II's Karnak building projects would imply that his reign was closer to 13 years rather than just 3 years.

The Nubian state had been completely subjugated by Thutmose I, but some rebels from Khenthennofer rose up, and the Egyptian forces retreated into a fortress built by Thutmose I On account of his relative youth at the time, Thutmose II dispatched an army into Nubia rather than leading it himself, but he seems to have easily crushed this revolt with the aid of his father's military generals.

Thutmose II seems to have fought against the Shasu Bedouin in the Sinai, in a campaign mentioned by Ahmose Pen-Nekhbet.

Thutmose II's mummy was discovered in the Deir el-Bahri cache, revealed in 1881.

The body of Thutmose II suffered greatly at the hands of ancient tomb robbers, with his left arm broken off at the shoulder-joint, the forearm separated at the elbow joint, and his right arm chopped off below the elbow.

All of these injuries were sustained post-mortem, though the body showed signs that Thutmose II did not have an easy life, as the following quote by Gaston Maspero attests:.

Thutmose II had scarcely reached the age of thirty when he fell a victim to a disease of which the process of embalming could not remove the traces.

The results of the study determined that the mummy of Thutmose II had a craniofacial trait measurement that is common among Nubian populations.

Thutmose II is one of the more popular candidates for the Biblical story of the Pharaoh of the Exodus.

Alfred Edersheim proposes in his Old Testament Bible History that Thutmose II is best qualified to be the pharaoh of Exodus based on the fact that he had a brief, prosperous reign and then a sudden collapse with no son to succeed him.

Edersheim states that Thutmose II is the only Pharaoh's mummy to display cysts, possible evidence of plagues that spread through the Egyptian and Hittite Empires at that time.