The Woman Who Would Be King

by Kara Cooney

  Why had Amen-Re, the king of the gods, not blessed Egypt with a son of pure royal blood? Why had he only given Hatshepsut a daughter? A man could spread his seed and produce offspring in profusion. A woman’s womb could give but one child a year. And Hatshepsut’s womb had been blessed only with a girl—or at least Nefrure was the only child that had lived.

  Her husband did have some boys in the royal nursery—but from other mothers. The kingship should always pass from father to son; however, these boys were mere babies. The king had only been on the throne for three short years, not long enough to sire a stable of healthy potential heirs. And worse than that, the mothers of these children were nothing more than Ornaments of the King—pretty young things brought in to arouse the king’s pleasure, with faces and bodies that would excite even the most sickly of monarchs. These girls had no family connections of any importance. How could one of these women be elevated to King’s Mother? The idea was insupportable.

  Hatshepsut understood that she wielded great power as queen. Her husband had never been in good health. His kingship had never been expected, but his two elder brothers died before they could take the throne. Thus Thutmose was not trained for kingship as he should have been. When they married, it was Hatshepsut who advised her brother on which officials to trust, which families to avoid, and how to make his mark as a monarch. It still seemed to her as if he had been plucked from the royal nursery one day, called to be king, to his own horror as much as anyone else’s. The heartbreaking death of one brother after another had brought the crown to young Thutmose and the queenship to Hatshepsut. From as far back as she could remember, Hatshepsut understood that she was training for a life of great power and influence. But now it was all over. With no direct connection to the next king, she would be shut out of worldly affairs, her life’s journey confined within luxurious palace walls.

  But Hatshepsut still walked the halls of power as the God’s Wife of Amen. And she sensed that it might be difficult for people to support the claim of an infant to the crowns of the Two Lands. Would their subjects watch passively as a young prince without connections, the son of one of the King’s Beauties, was propped up as king? Such a vulnerable monarch could only be maintained if Hatshepsut stood behind him as his regent and made the decisions; otherwise, all would be lost; her father’s Thutmoside line would be broken after only two generations. Many great men of the court were emphasizing their connections back to the Ahmoside family—the kings who had ruled before her father—in an attempt to lay claim to the thrones of Upper and Lower Egypt; if the White and Red crowns passed to one of them instead of to a son of her brother, then all that her parents had entrusted to her would be lost. It would be a shameful end to her father’s dynasty: dying out after only two Thutmoside kings—her father and her brother. Somehow she had to create the circumstances for a third Thutmoside king.

  Hatshepsut was not only the King’s Great Wife but also the God’s Wife of Amen, and she understood how to use that position. She served as the most important priestess in all of Egypt and had been trained from childhood by Ahmes-Nefertari, the most revered and aged royal queen and priestess in the land. As Hatshepsut prepared for her duties at the temple, she decided to ask the god what to do. She would place the burden in his hands.

  Somewhere beyond the palace, she heard the beating of drums and the shaking of sistra. It was time to awaken Amen.

  Hatshepsut hurried into the temple of Ipet-Sut, the Chosen Place for the gods of Thebes, moving through a series of majestic plastered gateways, light-filled courtyards, cool columned halls, and dark, smoke-filled inner sanctuaries, to her own robing rooms. As was her daily custom, she bathed in the sacred lake within the temple walls; the dawn air chilled her flesh. Having been thus purified in preparation for the morning meal with the god, she was anointed with oils by her Divine Adoratrices and then dressed in a pure linen robe pleated with hundreds of folds pressed into the gauzy fabric. This particular morning was not a festival day, so the temple staff had to complete only the simplest of preparations, which included the slaughter of a bull for the god’s meal of a few dozen courses of milk, cakes, breads, and meats. To Hatshepsut, this temple was a second home. She found comfort in the juxtaposition of its frenetic activity against a calm, divine presence. Frantic priests ran through their preparations in the outer rooms as she walked with her ladies deep into the very heart of the temple. The chanting and drumbeats now sounded more distant as she entered the small, dark, windowless sanctuary where Amen dwelled—a room filled with brightly painted relief whose low ceiling and close walls acted as a womb of rebirth for the god. Finally, she stood before the shrine of Amen himself; in the lamplight, gold and lapis gleamed through the incense smoke, a sight that never failed to set her heart pounding.

  The First High Priest of Amen joined Hatshepsut in the sanctuary while the Second High Priest arranged the sacred texts and instruments. After all the offerings of food and drink were arrayed, the lower-ranked priest retreated from the sanctuary, wiping away his footprints as he backed out of the room. The next moments of the ritual involved waking the vulnerable god from his sleep of death. All but the most important priests waited outside in the offering hall, shaking their sistra and beating drums to calm the god and to keep danger at bay. Only Hatshepsut and the First High Priest were able to witness the god’s visage and exposed body. The high priest was the first to approach the shrine of Amen. With cool and reverent hands, he removed veils covering the unknowable and hidden image. The fact that the Great God was an immobile statue of gold did not make him any less real.

  Closing her eyes, Hatshepsut began the incantations to awaken the god, calling him to his meal. Shuffling behind her, the First High Priest burned wax figures of the enemies of Egypt, so that the sanctuary would be clear of any danger. All around them incense burned in profusion, narrowing her vision in the lamp-lit room to a tunnel with the god’s image at the end. Hatshepsut then reached for her golden sistrum, ready to shake the sacred tambourine of Hathor to awaken the god.

  As she chanted and shook the sistrum, she opened her linen robe, revealing her naked body to the Great God’s eyes. Meanwhile, the high priest offered him food, starting with milk, because the newly awakened divinity was as weak as an infant, and then building up to great bloody cuts of freshly sacrificed beef as he gained strength. After the last course, Hatshepsut moved closer to the statue so that the god could complete his morning renewal. As the God’s Wife of Amen, Hatshepsut was also known as the God’s Hand, the instrument of his sexuality. Reverently, she took his phallus into her palm, allowing him to re-create himself through his own release. Outside the sanctuary, her Divine Adoratrices were chanting, their voices rising higher and faster with the urgency of the moment. She stood before his statue, opened her linen robe wide to reveal her young body, and chanted praise of Amen, King of All the Gods, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands, the Lord of All, until she felt his orgasm.

  Her eyes were closed. Her head was dizzy from the incense, herbs, and chanting. She felt herself fall to the floor before him—something neither she nor the high priest expected. With her eyes closed and her head bowed down before his shrine, she began to talk to her sacred husband, the god Amen-Re. She told him of the king’s great sickness and impending death. She told him that a young Horus had not yet been chosen, and that all the candidates were merely nestlings, puppies. She told him that she had served him faithfully and would do as he asked. But all of Egypt would soon be in mourning and silence. She needed to know what to do to maintain the Black Land and Amen’s rule in it. She was young, but she could hold and keep power. She needed his guidance.

  In return she received a revelation. He spoke to her. Amen-Re, Bull of His Mother, Sacred of Arm, told her that she was elemental to the plans in his mind: he had chosen her, Hatshepsut, to carry them out; he would reveal his instructions over time, so she must be always ready, listening. And he told her more, too, secrets of power and fearlessness that left her breathless and
weeping.

  And then the revelation was over. In silence and in secret, her voice shaking with emotion, she gave Amen a solemn promise. She would be his instrument.

  We have no historical record of Hatshepsut’s worries and schemes upon the death of her husband, Thutmose II, but by examining her unprecedented choice to ultimately take on the kingship we can imagine how an educated royal woman might have understood and created a place for herself within Egypt’s court. Because the Egyptians enacted their politics through the rituals of religion, we cannot know exactly where the affairs of government ended and the ideology started. Hatshepsut herself tells us in many monumental texts that her assumption of power was decreed by Amen-Re, her father. Indeed, she probably believed this to be true.

  The nature of the evidence from her reign—her temples and monumental texts, the decorated tombs of her courtiers, her tomb in the Valley of the Kings, all her statuary and painted reliefs, even the recent identification of a possible mummy—has encouraged us to understand Hatshepsut’s story through the things she built and touched. She did not leave us any letters or diaries. We have little access to the human emotions of her story. The difficult part of a biography of any Egyptian king is that we fall into the gaps of the personal history left untold. If the king was meant to be a living god on earth, then naturally he had to be shrouded in ideology and not defined by his personality, schemes, plans, and ambitions. Unlike the Romans, who produced countless lascivious stories about their own emperors and senators, not to mention Cleopatra, that foreign seductress of good Roman generals, the ancient Egyptians played their politics close to the vest, and for good reason. The system of divine kingship and cosmic order mattered most to them, not the individual person who was king at a particular time. The institution of kingship was unassailable even when the dynasty was in jeopardy, when there was competition for the throne, or when a woman dared to take power. Among thousands of often meticulous Egyptian historical documents, hardly a single word betrays any human emotion of delight, heartbreak, jealousy, or disgust concerning political events.1 The Egyptian ideological systems took precedence over the emotions, decisions, wants, and desires of any one individual or family. Gossip among the elite and powerful of ancient Egyptian society was almost unheard of, at least in any recorded form that we can decipher. Formality ruled the day. The drama of a public scandal was swept under the rug, never to be entered into official documents or even unofficial letters. The ancient Egyptians never underestimated the power of the written word; anything that smacked of personal politics or individual opinion was excluded from the formal record. It seems that such things could only be spoken of in hushed tones. Ancient Egyptians preserved the “what” of their history in copious texts and monuments for posterity; the “how” and the “why,” the messy details of it all, are much harder to get at. And, for our modern minds, it is the recording of events that allows them to become real and valid.

  Historians have the materials but lack the intangible substance behind them. We know from temple carvings that Hatshepsut gained power as God’s Wife of Amen at least by the reign of Thutmose II, her husband-brother, in the early fifteenth century BCE (if not before), but we do not know whether she was the real power behind his throne. If she was, did she wield that power cruelly or wisely? We know that Thutmose II ruled for only a short time,2 but history has not preserved the reason why: was he sickly or stupid or mad or lazy, or did he just die unexpectedly? We know from the tomb texts of officials who ruled under Hatshepsut that she acted as regent for the next young king, but we don’t know how that reality came about or what anyone, including Hatshepsut, really thought about the situation of a young girl in charge of the most powerful land in the ancient world.

  The Egyptians preserved Hatshepsut’s body to last for eternity,3 but they recorded little from her mind. Archaeologists have uncovered many temples, ritual texts, administrative documents about trade, quarrying, and mining, and countless statues of her, her daughter, and her favored courtier Senenmut, but we don’t know the intricacies of her relationships. Egyptology has identified the trappings of the kingship, but it is very hard to locate the king among them. Do we even need to discuss Hatshepsut’s thoughts and ambitions? Hatshepsut successfully scaled the mountain to kingship, after all, and perhaps that fact should be enough for us. But women in power are still suspect in the world of modern politics. Glass ceilings loom everywhere. If we can gain just a tiny glimmer into Hatshepsut’s mind as she struggled with her own journey to transcend the strictures of masculine dominance in her society, we might better understand why women are systematically shut out of positions of authority. Given Hatshepsut’s undisputed success as a king, why was the legacy of her rule stricken so quickly from Egyptian history?

  Hatshepsut was born around 1500 BCE4 into the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom—although she herself would not have used the term—a time of nascent prosperity and dominance for Egypt. Control over the southern mines and quarries in Nubia had recently been reestablished, and gold was once again pouring into the country. The recent wars with the Hyksos of Syria-Palestine had made every landholder, official, and warrior rich.5 Elite Egyptians who had followed their king on campaigns were rewarded with the wealth that a well-waged war was meant to bring—chariots, horses, live captives, and gold. Not only had the borders been secured by the hawkish early Eighteenth Dynasty kings, but the distasteful invasions of generations of Hyksos from Syria-Palestine had been made invisible—either by violently expelling the foreigners back to the northeast or by allowing their settlement and Egyptianization in the Nile delta. Hatshepsut would have heard dozens of tales about the exploits of elite Egyptian men who besieged great Hyksos cities or met the enemy in open battle, returning with bloody severed hands cut from lifeless corpses, proudly displayed as trophies at court.

  But before Hatshepsut was even born, despite Egypt’s resurgence on the imperial stage, there were storm clouds brewing. King Amenhotep I, who had helped to create all this prosperity, was facing a crisis. Despite twenty years of rule, there is no evidence that he produced any children at all.6 We can imagine the King’s Mother, Ahmes-Nefertari, hovering around him and procuring new queens and concubines for him after marriages to both of his sisters failed to produce the hoped-for boy—or any child for that matter. The Egyptians veiled any reference to disastrous outcomes related to the king in their formal historical texts and monuments, but the fact that Amenhotep I could not sire a living son cannot be disputed. It is possible that Amenhotep I was sterile, but the Egyptian royal family also practiced incest (and at times preferred it for political reasons); sex with his full sisters could have simply created deformed or gravely ill babies.

  Incest is usually taboo, but it can be useful in the bedchambers of the powerful. In the case of ancient Egypt, it was justified by mythology. The very first god in all of creation, Atum, began existence floating weightless in the dark and infinite elements of precreation. Due to the lack of a partner beyond himself, he had sex with a part of himself (his hand7), thus magically producing his own birth and subsequently the first generation of male and female gods. This brother-sister pair, Shu and Tefnut, copulated with each other and produced the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut, another brother-sister pair who in turn produced the next generation of four children, each pairing up into brother-sister marriages: Seth married Nephthys, and Osiris married Isis. The office of the kingship descended directly from this lineage. Horus, king upon earth and the god whom the human king embodied in his palace, was the son of Osiris and Isis.

  From this ancient Egyptian perspective, full brother-sister marriages were divinely inspired, and the Eighteenth Dynasty actually started with a full brother-sister marriage between King Ahmose I and Ahmes-Nefertari. The son they produced was Amenhotep I, and so perhaps we should not be surprised that the progeny of a fully incestuous relationship had trouble siring children, not only with his own sisters but also with other women. Ahmes-Nefertari, a sister-wife, was simult
aneously aunt and mother to her own son. Amenhotep I may have had serious health issues throughout his life, although we cannot expect to find any mention of them in the historical record. He came to the throne quite young, perhaps as a toddler, and his mother probably acted as regent and made decisions for him during much of his reign. Later depictions of Amenhotep I always pair him with his mother instead of his sister-wife Merytamen, perhaps an apt representation of political reality for a king with no offspring of his own.

  We can imagine the throne room during the early years of the reign of Amenhotep I. A boy of perhaps four or five sits on (or near) the throne, being instructed by his tutors when he really wants to be outside playing. A general who needs a decision about a Nubian military campaign or a trading expedition enters. Who answers him? The boy’s mother, Ahmes-Nefertari, who is openly acknowledged to be the power behind his throne. It was common practice to assign the boy’s mother as regent for a king too young to rule, relying on her to make decisions beyond the child’s capabilities. It was a wise and safe practice, as even the most narcissistic mother was unlikely to betray her own son, cause his murder, or otherwise conspire against him. Such behavior would never have been in her own interest, since her power was inextricably connected to that of her child. A queen-regent would also be unlikely to alienate her son by ignoring or mistreating him, because as he grew into his power, any feelings of neglect or betrayal he harbored would only serve to ruin her. The system of queen-regent worked quite well in ancient Egypt, which was fortunate because most of the kings of the early Eighteenth Dynasty came to the throne as children, including Ahmose I and Amenhotep I.8