Hatchepsut

by Joyce Tyldesley

  The Egyptians divided their year into twelve months of 30 days plus 5 additional days each year, giving an annual total of 365 days. The months in turn were grouped into three seasons based on the agricultural cycle: inundation, spring and summer. However, there was no ancient equivalent of our modern calendar, and year numbers started afresh with every new reign. In order to be sure of their own history, the Egyptian scribes were forced to maintain long chronological lists detailing successive monarchs and their reigns. Fortunately, enough of these so-called king lists have survived to allow us to reconstruct Egypt's past with a fair degree of accuracy. The work of the Egyptian priest and historian Manetho has provided useful corroborative evidence. Manetho, working in approximately 300 BC, compiled a detailed history of the kings of Egypt. This original work is now lost, but fragments have been preserved in the writings of Josephus (AD 70), Africanus (early third century AD), Eusebius (early fourth century AD) and Syncellus (c. AD 800). These preserved extracts do not always agree, and the names given are often wildly incorrect, but students of Egyptian history still acknowledge a huge debt to Manetho, the ‘Father of Egyptian History’. It was Manetho who first divided the various reigns into dynasties, and it was Manetho who preserved the memory, if not the actual name, of King Hatchepsut.

  Another potential source of confusion is the profusion of slightly different personal names attributed by various authors to the same place or person, particularly when older sources are being quoted. Hatchepsut, for example, is also variously referred to as Hatasu, Hashepsowe, Hatshopsitu, Hatshepsut and Hatshepsuit; her father Dhutmose or Thutmose is now more commonly known by the Greek version of his name, Tuthmosis, and the state gods Amen and Re are often rendered as Amun and Ra. Some authorities have devised their own exclusive variants. Sir Alan Gardiner, for example, consistently uses Pwene in place of the more widely accepted Punt, while Naville, Buttles and other turn-of-the-century egyptologists reverse Hatchepsut's throne-name Maatkare to read as Kamara. Unfortunately for modern readers, the ancient Egyptians wrote their hieroglyphic texts with no weak vowels and with an assortment of consonants not found in our modern alphabet, so the correct pronunciation of any Egyptian name must be a matter of educated guesswork. Throughout this book, the most simple and widely accepted version of each proper name has been used, all diacritical marks have been omitted, and the names included in citations within the text have been, as far as possible, standardized in an effort to avoid an unnecessary and confusing muddle for the non-specialist reader.

  1

  Backdrop: Egypt in the Early Eighteenth Dynasty

  I have raised up what was dismembered, even from the first time when the Asiatics were in Avaris of the North Land, with roving hordes in the midst of them overthrowing what had been made; they ruled without Re…1

  Princess Hatchepsut was born into the early 18th Dynasty, at a time when the newly united Egypt was still reeling from the ignominy of seeing foreign kings seated on the divine throne of the pharaohs. Although the 18th Dynasty was to develop into a period of unprecedented Egyptian prosperity, the deep humiliation of a hundred years of Hyksos rule and the widespread civil unrest of the Second Intermediate Period were never fully forgotten, and a concern with replicating the halcyon days of the Old and Middle Kingdoms – and in particular the glorious 12th Dynasty – became a constant underlying theme of early 18th Dynasty political life.

  The 12th Dynasty had represented a truly golden age. Recovering from a somewhat shaky start which included the assassination of its founder, Amenemhat I, there had followed almost two hundred years of internal peace and stability which are now widely regarded as forming one of the classical periods of Egyptian civilization. Throughout the dynasty a succession of strong pharaohs ruled over a united land from the new capital of Itj-Tawy (a northern city lying somewhere between the Old Kingdom capital of Memphis and the mouth of the Faiyum), their position as absolute rulers greatly strengthened by a well-planned series of civil service reforms aimed at restricting the power of the wealthy nobles who, after the local autonomy of the First Intermediate Period, might otherwise have been tempted to establish their own independent local dynasties. Twelfth Dynasty foreign policy was as successful as it was adventurous, and trade and diplomatic links were established with both the Aegean and the Near East as Egypt abandoned her traditional insularity and started to play a more prominent role in the Mediterranean world. There were intrepid expeditions, including a mission to the fabulous land of Punt, and significant military conquests as a new aggressive attitude towards the south pushed Egypt's boundary further into Nubia. Within Egypt's newly strengthened borders the eastern desert was exploited for its natural resources which included gold, the Sinai was mined for turquoise and copper and the Faiyum was developed for agriculture through a series of innovative irrigation techniques.

  A combination of increasing Egyptian wealth, foreign stimulation and political stability throughout the Middle Kingdom allowed the arts to flourish. This was to become the period of classical Egyptian language and literature when many of the best-known texts, inscriptions and narrative stories were composed. The writings of the Old Kingdom had been brief, formal and very self-conscious in style. Middle Kingdom compositions are both longer and far more fluent; the autobiographies2 recorded on the walls of the private tombs are simultaneously more informative and more imaginative than their Old Kingdom counterparts while the instructive texts, or Instructions in Wisdom, show a new realism in their desire to stress the chaos poised to overwhelm Egypt in the absence of a strong king. However, it is for the development of narrative fiction that the Middle Kingdom literature is most justly celebrated. The Satire of the Trades, The Story of the Eloquent Peasant, The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor and The Story of Sinuhe all date to this period, allowing us to trace the evolution of the genre from simple action-packed adventures taken straight from the oral tradition (for example, The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor – a Boys' Own-style tale of shipwreck and adventure including a fabulous snake-like creature) to more thought-provoking tales told in an increasingly more sophisticated blend of styles (for example, The Story of Sinuhe – the fictional autobiography of a nobleman exiled from Egypt and longing for home).3

  Artists and sculptors were quick to reflect the new mood of combined nostalgia and realism and their work, while still based on the traditional and highly formalized style of the Old Kingdom, demonstrates a willingness to portray subjects as individuals rather than stereotypes. The royal sculptors now felt themselves free to depict a more human pharaoh; when we look at the portrait heads of the 12th Dynasty kings Senwosret III and Amenemhat III we see strong, serious and somewhat weary men striving to conduct their divine role with regal severity, a marked contrast to the more serene and remote all-powerful god-kings of the Old Kingdom. At the same time the range of private sculpture expanded as ordinary individuals started to be represented in a variety of innovative forms rather than the limited range of statues found in Old Kingdom tombs. Few royal paintings have survived from the Middle Kingdom but the private tombs of Beni Hassan vibrate with colourful life as representations of wrestling, warfare and dancing now join the more restrained scenes found in Old Kingdom tombs.

  Large-scale building projects recommenced during the 12th Dynasty, with the form of the pyramid being re-adopted as a means of emulating the Old Kingdom precedent and emphasizing the status of the king and his connection with the sun god, Re. However, there was now to be no single public building on the grand scale of the Giza pyramids. Instead of following their royal predecessors and concentrating their efforts on one solitary mortuary monument, the monarchs of the Middle Kingdom decided to spread their resources rather more widely. The extent to which these kings were willing to construct stone additions to existing mud-brick temples in the provinces is unclear because of the extensive re-modelling which occurred during the 18th Dynasty, but the evidence, where it survives, suggests a construction programme which extended the royal monopoly of stone building
s to the furthest corners of the most distant Egyptian provinces. Unfortunately, many important temples from this period were deliberately destroyed so that their precious stone blocks could be re-used in later buildings, and our knowledge of 12th Dynasty architecture is consequently sadly restricted. Our best-known example is the White Chapel of Senwosret I. This beautiful building, which demonstrates a thorough mastery of stone-working techniques including some impressive relief carving, had been dismantled and used as part of the filling of a pylon built by the New Kingdom Pharaoh Amenhotep III at Karnak. After painstaking reconstruction it is now restored to its former glories and is on permanent display in the Open-Air Museum at Karnak.

  All good things must come to an end. Eventually the royal family, which had until now provided one of the longest continuous lines ever to rule Egypt, found itself without a male heir to the throne. Amenemhat IV, the final king of the 12th Dynasty, was therefore of necessity succeeded by his sister or half-sister Sobeknofru, who ruled as Queen of Upper and Lower Egypt for three years, ten months and twenty-four days before dying a natural death in office. With her death came the end of her dynasty. Although there was, in theory, nothing to prevent a woman from becoming pharaoh and, indeed, there appears to have been no opposition to Sobeknofru assuming this role – although any unsuccessful opposition would, of course, be difficult for us to detect – such an obvious departure from royal tradition was a sure sign that something was very wrong within the royal family, and Sobeknofru's reign is now generally interpreted as a brave but doomed attempt to prolong a dying royal line. An alternative view, that she must have seized the crown as the result of a vicious family quarrel, is now largely discredited on the grounds of lack of evidence. The fact that Sobeknofru's name was included on the Sakkara king list may be taken as a good indication that her reign was acceptable both to her people and to the historians who preserved her memory.

  Sobeknofru was succeeded by an unrelated king, and the 13th Dynasty started to follow very much in the tradition of the 12th. However, no strong royal family was established and there was little apparent continuity between the monarchs traditionally assigned to this period. Instead, a succession of short-lived kings and their increasingly powerful viziers reigned over a slowly fragmenting Egypt, and the country gradually disintegrated into a loose association of semi-independent city states. A series of freak Nile floods at this time, and the resulting strain on the Egyptian economy, must have seemed a very bad omen; the regular rise and fall of the Nile was taken as a general sign that all was well within Egypt and the 13th Dynasty rulers must have been unpleasantly reminded of the very low floods which had heralded the collapse of the Old Kingdom. They would have done well to heed the omen. The end of the 13th Dynasty saw the ‘official’ end of the Middle Kingdom and the beginning of the Second Intermediate Period (Dynasties 14 to 17), a badly recorded phase of national disunity and foreign rule sandwiched between the well-documented stability of the Middle and New Kingdoms.

  Tutimaios. In his reign, for what cause I know not, a blast of god smote us; and unexpectedly from the regions of the east invaders of obscure race marched in confidence of victory against our land… Their race as a whole was called Hyksos, that is ‘king-shepherds’, for Hyk in the sacred language means ‘king’ and sos in common speech is ‘shepherd’.4

  Throughout the Middle Kingdom there had been a persistent influx of ‘Asiatic’ migrants from the east, Semitic peoples who were attracted by Egypt's growing prosperity and who were themselves being pressured westwards by immigrants from further east; this was a time of population shifts throughout the entire Eastern Mediterranean region. The new arrivals were accepted by the locals and merged peacefully into the existing towns and villages of northern Egypt.5 During the 13th Dynasty, however, these groups started to form significant and partially independent communities in the Nile Delta. At the same time the previously emasculated local rulers were gradually gaining in power as national unity began to crumble. Slowly the country resolved itself into three mutually distrustful regions, each ruled concurrently by different dynasties. The Nubian kingdom of Kerma developed in the extreme south, a small group of independent Egyptians controlled southern Egypt from Thebes (17th Dynasty), and the north was ruled by a group of Palestinian invaders known as the Hyksos (15th Dynasty) and their Palestinian vassals (16th Dynasty).6

  It was the Hyksos invaders who made the deepest impression on the historical record, ruling over northern Egypt for over a hundred years and taking the eastern Delta town of Avaris (a corruption of the Egyptian name Hwt W'rt, literally ‘The Great Mansion’ or ‘Mansion of the Administration’, modern Tell ed-Daba) as their capital. To the south the native-born Theban rulers remained independent and relationships between north and south were initially peaceful, if distrustful; the southern kings were able to lease grazing land from their Hyksos neighbours and there is even some evidence to suggest that Herit, a daughter of the final Hyksos king, Apophis, may have married into the Theban royal family. The Hyksos were certainly on good terms with the Nubian rulers of Kerma, to the extent that the same Apophis, towards the end of his 33-year reign and no longer on such friendly terms with his immediate neighbours, felt free to urge the Nubians to invade the Theban kingdom in order to distract the Theban army and so protect his own position in the north. A letter written by Apophis to the King of Kush and fortuitously intercepted by troops loyal to the Theban King Kamose, details his plotting:

  … Have you [not] beheld what Egypt has done against me… He [Kamose] choosing the two lands to devastate them, my land and yours, and he has destroyed them. Come, fare north at once, do not be timid. See, he is here with me… I will not let him go until you have arrived.7

  Egyptian legend as typified by Manetho regards the Hyksos as an uncivilized, brutal band of invaders and their reign as a dark, never-to-be-repeated period of chaos and mayhem:

  … By main force they [the Hyksos] easily seized [Egypt] without striking a blow, and having overpowered the rulers of the land, they then burned our cities ruthlessly, razed to the ground the temples of the gods, and treated all the natives with a cruel hostility, massacring some and leading into slavery the wives and children of others…8

  This lament is, to a large extent, merely the conventional expression of horror at the realization that despised and culturally inferior foreigners could actually conquer the mighty Egypt. Exaggeration was an accepted and even expected component of historical narrative and the Egyptians saw no harm in re-interpreting their own past as and when necessary. The deeply held belief that their land could only flourish under a divinely appointed Egyptian pharaoh was certainly strong enough to distort the historical record in this instance. Archaeological evidence, less obviously biased, makes it clear that the hated Hyksos, far from inflicting barbaric foreign practices on their new subjects, made a determined effort to adapt themselves to the customs of their adopted country. The new rulers retained a few of their own traditions: architectural styles and pottery forms now show a distinct Near Eastern influence, the war goddess Anath or Astarte was quickly absorbed into the Egyptian pantheon as ‘Lady of Heaven’ and her consort, the Egyptian god Seth, became the chief deity. However, in most other respects the Hyksos surrendered their own identity as, with the zeal of new converts, they immersed themselves in Egyptian culture, adopting hieroglyphic writing, embellishing local temples, copying Middle Kingdom art-forms, manufacturing scarabs and even transforming themselves into Egyptian-style pharaohs by taking names compounded with ‘Re’, the name of the Egyptian sun god. Far from bringing economic disaster to Egypt, their lands were governed efficiently, making good use of the Middle Kingdom administrative framework which was already in place, and native-born Egyptian bureaucrats worked willingly alongside their new masters to ensure that the Delta region prospered under their rule. The long-term material advantages of the brief interlude of foreign rule now seem very obvious. Under Hyksos rule, Egypt rapidly lost much of her traditional isolation as trading and dip
lomatic links were established with a wide range of Near Eastern kingdoms, and the resulting flood of exotic and practical imports both stimulated the economy and inspired the Egyptian artists and artisans. Egypt benefited from the introduction of new bronze working and pottery and weaving techniques; there were exciting new food crops to be tested, and even a previously unknown breed of humped-back cattle. Most important of all was the Hyksos contribution to Egypt's traditional military equipment; it was their improvements, combined with the early 18th Dynasty reorganization of the army structure, which led directly to the evolution of the efficient and almost invincible fighting troops of the 18th and 19th Dynasty Empire. The Hyksos introduced new forms of defensive forts, new weapon-types (more efficient dagger and sword forms and the strong compound bow which had a far greater range than the old-fashioned simple bow) and the concept of body armour to protect the troops. The soldiers – who during the Old and Middle Kingdoms had marched into battle dressed only in the briefest of kilts or loincloths and protected by a long and cumbersome cow-hide shield – were now issued with protective jackets and a lighter, easier-to-handle tapered shield. Their most important introduction was, however, the harnessed horse and the two-wheeled horse-drawn chariot, a light and highly mobile vehicle which, manned by a driver and a soldier equipped with spear, shield and bow, quickly became one of the most valuable assets of the Egyptian army.