Thutmose I and his viceroy Turi left monuments and inscriptions at a number of sites in Upper and Lower Nubia. Several brick installations may date from his reign in the region of Kenisa (at the fourth cataract) and at Napata. Blocks from buildings (or fragments of blocks) have survived at Sai Island, held at least since Ahmose’s reign, and traces remain at Semna, Buhen, Aniba, Quban, and Qasr Ibrim. The probability is that, apart from stelae, the monuments were small in scale, comprising stone elements within brick structures. Thutmose 111 and Hatshepsut may well have reconstructed brick buildings of this type in sandstone, particularly at Semna and Buhen. Within the traditional borders of Egypt, Thutmose 1 left indications of building at Elephantine, Edfu (probably), Armant, Thebes, Ombos (near the late 17th - to early i8th-Dynasty palace centre at Deir el-Ballas), Abydos, el-Hiba, Memphis, and Giza. Votive objects dedicated in his name have been found in Sinai at the temple of Serabit el-Khadim.
The materials from Thebes, Abydos, and Giza are of particular interest. Giza became a major pilgrimage site during the New Kingdom, as the location of the tombs of Khufu and Khafra, and as the cult place for the god identified with the Great Sphinx, Horemakhet (‘Horns in the horizon’). It is no coincidence that the monuments at Giza, like those at Abydos and Kamak, emphasized the veneration of rulers. Like Ahmose and Amenhotep I before him, as well as the next four mon-archs, Thutmose I chose to embellish cult places that promoted the connections between king and god and between king and king. However, he seems to have associated himself with distant royal precursors rather than immediate ones.
At Abydos, Thutmose I left a stele recording his contributions to the temple of Osiris. Instead of honouring his royal predecessors directly, he donated cult objects and statues. According to the stele, priests then proclaimed him as the offspring of Osiris, whose intended role was to restore the divine sanctuaries with the vast wealth given to him by the earth deities Geb and Tatjenen. Thutmose 1 did not choose to honour the two previous kings, perhaps because their monuments stressed the Ahmosid family line of which he was not a part; instead he wished to claim his kingship from the great gods themselves. As a royal ideology, divine descent was common to the 18th-Dynasty kings, but it may well have received its first emphasis in the reign of Thutmose I. It was subsequently consistently exploited in royal inscriptions from Hatshepsut (1473-1458 Bc) to Amenhotep III (1390-1352 bc).
At Karnak, Thutmose I left an indelible mark. He enlarged and completed an ambulatory worked on by Amenhotep I around the Middle Kingdom court, and he extended its walls westwards to join two new pylon gates (the Fourth and Fifth) which he built as the entrance to the temple. He then finished the court space between the two gateways. He also completed the decoration of Amenhotep I’s alabaster chapel at Karnak, which appears to be his only claim to direct connection with his predecessor. In northern Karnak, he replaced a monument of Ahmose with his ‘treasury’, but appears to have preserved a block from the earlier structure and built it into his own.
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