Thutmose II was born into the early Eighteenth Dynasty, the golden age of the New Kingdom, around 1502 BCE. His father was Thutmose I, the pharaoh who had transformed Egypt from a kingdom into an empire, stretching its borders from Nubia to the Euphrates, and who had chosen the Valley of the Kings as the hidden necropolis for royal burials. His mother was Mutnofret, a minor wife of Thutmose I who may have been a daughter of Ahmose I, the founder of the dynasty, but who was not the Great Royal Wife. Thutmose II was therefore a lesser son, born to a secondary queen, and his path to the throne was not assured. His half-sister Hatshepsut, the daughter of Thutmose I and his principal queen Ahmose, was the child of pure royal blood, and by the customs of Egyptian kingship she was the more legitimate heir. But Egypt had never had a female pharaoh, and the priests and generals preferred a male king, however young, to a queen, however royal.

To secure his claim, Thutmose II married Hatshepsut. The marriage was customary - Egyptian kings routinely married their sisters or half-sisters to keep the bloodline pure - but it was also essential. Hatshepsut brought the legitimacy of the Great Royal Wife's line to a king whose mother had been a minor consort. She was approximately twelve or thirteen when they married, and he was probably of a similar age, perhaps slightly older. The union produced at least one child, a daughter named Neferure, who would later bear the title "King's Eldest Daughter" and who may have had a younger sister who died in infancy. But Hatshepsut bore no son, and the succession would depend on a child born to a lesser wife.

That child was Thutmose III, born to a woman named Iset, a minor queen or concubine of the harem. The boy was probably two or three years old when his father died, too young to rule, and the stage was set for one of the most remarkable successions in Egyptian history. But before that drama unfolded, Thutmose II had a kingdom to govern, however briefly.

His reign is traditionally dated to thirteen or fourteen years, though some scholars argue for a much shorter period of only three or four years. The uncertainty stems from the scarcity of monuments bearing his name - Hatshepsut later replaced his cartouches with her own on several projects, and Thutmose III would later reassign others to his father - and from the ambiguous phrasing of Ineni's tomb autobiography, which calls Thutmose II a "hawk in the nest," suggesting he was still a child when he took the throne. If he reigned thirteen years, he would have reached adulthood and fathered two children. If only three, he would have died barely out of his teens. The debate continues, but the weight of evidence favours a longer reign, perhaps cut short by the illness that left its marks on his mummy.

The military record of Thutmose II is respectable but not personal. He successfully put down rebellions in Upper Nubia, recorded on the Aswan Stela dated to his first year, and sent generals to campaign in the Levant and against the Shasu, a tribe of nomadic Bedouins in the Sinai. But these campaigns were led by his commanders, not by the king himself, a departure from the practice of his father Thutmose I, who had personally killed the Nubian king in battle. Some Egyptologists interpret this as evidence that Thutmose II was a weak or sickly ruler, perhaps already under the influence of Hatshepsut, who is depicted in raised reliefs from his reign at Karnak both beside him and alone, a visual hint of her growing authority. Others argue simply that he was young and inexperienced, delegating to seasoned generals while he learned the arts of kingship.

At Karnak, Thutmose II began the construction of a limestone gateway in the forecourt before the Fourth Pylon, a project that would not be completed until the reign of his son Thutmose III. The gateway was later dismantled by Amenhotep III, its blocks reused in the foundation of the Third Pylon, but fragments survive with Thutmose II's cartouches, proof that he did not merely inherit his father's temple but sought to expand it. He also built at Elephantine in the south and at Semna and Kumma in Nubia, modest programmes that kept the borders secure without the grandiosity of Thutmose I's obelisks or Hatshepsut's terraced temple.

Then, suddenly, he was gone. Thutmose II died around 1479 BCE, before the age of thirty, probably from natural causes. X-ray analysis of his mummy, discovered in the Deir el-Bahri cache in 1881 and now displayed in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Cairo, suggests heart failure as a possible cause of death. The body was scabrous, the skin marked with patches that may have resulted from the embalming process or from a disease that afflicted him in life. His right leg had been completely broken away from the body, perhaps by tomb robbers or during the hasty reburial that moved him to the cache. Unlike other royal mummies, his fingernails and toenails had been trimmed and cleaned, a small detail that suggests care even in death.

His original tomb had been lost for millennia. Egyptologists knew he must have had one - every pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty had been buried in the Theban necropolis - but its location remained one of the great mysteries of Egyptology. In 2022, a British-Egyptian team led by Dr. Piers Litherland discovered a tomb in Wadi C of the Western Wadis, beyond the Valley of the Kings, and in 2025 they confirmed it as Thutmose II's. The tomb, designated C4, had been built beneath a waterfall, and periodic flooding had damaged it throughout the ages, probably prompting the ancient priests to move the king's mummy and burial equipment to a safer location. Alabaster jar fragments inscribed with the names of Thutmose II and Hatshepsut provided the definitive proof. The discovery filled the last gap in the royal necropolis of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and the team believes a second, possibly intact tomb may yet be found, the place where his mummy was reburied after the floods.

With Thutmose II's death, the succession crisis that would define the next two decades of Egyptian history began. His son Thutmose III was an infant, and Hatshepsut stepped forward as regent. For a few years she ruled in the boy's name, then she crowned herself pharaoh, the first woman to claim the full titulary of a king in her own right. She would reign for more than two decades, building temples and trading with Punt, while Thutmose III waited in the shadows. When she died, he emerged to become the greatest conqueror of the ancient world, leading seventeen campaigns and building an empire that stretched from Syria to the Fourth Cataract. Every one of those campaigns followed the roads that Thutmose I had opened, but they were made possible by the vacuum that Thutmose II's early death had created. The Forgotten King was forgotten because his widow and his son were too memorable to share the stage.