The Woman Who Would Be King

by Kara Cooney

  Retaining royal women in the family would have granted the king a massive amount of economic power, but it also meant that a daughter of the king could only find her place in the world within the palace. If Amenhotep I’s sisters were not allowed to marry wellborn officials’ sons or to move into their own villas as Mistress of the House, they could not have any children unless their destiny tied them to a brother-king of appropriate age who was able and willing to sire them. And any of their offspring were liable to bear signs of the incestuous union. In the Eighteenth Dynasty, the future of a royal woman would have been tied exclusively to the king.

  If Hatshepsut’s mother, Ahmes, was a younger sister of Amenhotep I, perhaps she had been too young to have sexual relations with him. Or possibly she was already married to him and was transferred to Thutmose I when he assumed the kingship. Perhaps Amenhotep I’s entire harem was shifted to the incoming Thutmose I, and it was then that Ahmes was selected as the right age and bloodline to be the highest-ranking wife among them.

  The female progeny of all kings, past and present, would thus have been kept in the palace, awaiting their chance to become mothers. If the king was too young or too infirm to serve as a real husband, many royal women would grow old without one. Some women would share a brother-husband with a hundred other ladies. None of these women, except perhaps the King’s Great Wife, had the slightest chance of a real partnership in marriage.

  Later in the Eighteenth Dynasty, there were other, even less appealing, options for King’s Daughters: they could also become wives of their fathers. (The short life spans of most of the kings of the early Eighteenth Dynasty meant this did not happen to Ahmes, however.) During the reign of a later, long-lived king, Amenhotep III, a royal daughter might marry her father during her limited years of reproductive potential. Two of Amenhotep III’s daughters—Sitamen and Isis—became the King’s Great Wives, thereby demoting their own mother, Tiy, as the older woman reached the end of her reproductive potential. If a royal daughter did not marry her own father during a long reign, she would have no partner whatsoever, it seems, and become a childless spinster.

  Presumably these royal women were conditioned to count themselves blessed to marry the king, but we can also envision the heartache and trauma produced by these limitations on relationships. Queen Ahmes was either born into this system or had to quickly adapt. Royal women likely had entourages made up of commoners—ladies who were mistresses of their own homes when they weren’t at court and who were allowed to marry men other than their brothers or fathers. The royal women may have been envious of their ladies-in-waiting’s freedom to run their own households and forgo competition with their own sisters for one man’s attention. Admittedly, these attendants did not have the power and the money of the King’s Daughters, Wives, and Sisters, but the visibility of this unattainable “normal” life must have been painful for some of the royal women.25

  Whatever Ahmes’s origins, she was now the King’s Great Wife, and everyone looked to her to produce the next heir. There was no marriage ceremony that we know of. In fact, the ancient Egyptians did not seem to celebrate marriage as we do. Rather than engage in a formal, binding relationship marked by a ceremony, people merely talked about founding a household and drew up what amounted to the first prenuptial agreements in the world, legally documenting whose property was whose.26 Marriage was more of an economic-sexual agreement in the ancient world than a romantic commitment. For kings, of course, it was also a political one. Thutmose I was already middle-aged by this point, probably around thirty or forty years old, and his current nonroyal wife and any children he had with her did not fit into this new royal circumstance. We see no record of them whatsoever. He had to start a new life full of new responsibility. As king, he was probably expected to have sexual relations every night he was in residence at the palace—either with his highest-ranking queen, Ahmes, or with one of his other women. He was considered the bull of Egypt: royal sex was linked to the ongoing creation of the cosmos itself. And sons were essential to the continuation of a divinely sanctioned dynasty.

  At some point, probably even in the first year of their marriage, Ahmes faced some competition. Mutnofret, another royal wife, held the titles King’s Daughter (probably the daughter of King Ahmose), King’s Sister (sister of King Amenhotep I?), and after marriage to Thutmose, King’s Wife as well.27 Why she was not Thutmose I’s Great Wife is unclear, because she seems to have had more obvious connections to the Ahmoside family than Queen Ahmes. Perhaps Mutnofret had been too young to be the Great Royal Wife upon his accession. Regardless, any children born by Mutnofret would display an impressive lineage that connected Thutmose I’s offspring to the great Ahmoside family. She might not have been the highest-ranking wife, but she was close.

  We can only imagine potential frictions between the King’s Great Wife, Ahmes, and the King’s Wife Mutnofret: Was Mutnofret subservient or ambitious? Was Ahmes overtly competitive? Did they behave like sisters, with real heartfelt love between them? After all, they could have been actual sisters, both married to the king.

  And so the reign of Hatshepsut’s father, Thutmose I, proceeded. He visited the royal women. He campaigned abroad. He rewarded his loyal officials. He ruled for thirteen or fourteen years,28 which is not bad for a man who arrived at the kingship later in life. We can picture the dowager queen Ahmes-Nefertari lingering about the palace, encouraging more and more highborn and beautiful girls to be brought to the household for Thutmose I’s enjoyment and procreation. Nobody would have wished for a crisis in the accession, nor for bloodshed and competition. All that was needed was a son to survive his father, even a very young son, for the status quo of the elite to continue as before. A king too young to rule was a problem that could be solved with a good King’s Mother to act as the power behind the throne. But a king unable to sire any sons with his Great Wife was a trickier issue for the ideology of kingship to sustain. And that was looking to be the situation for Thutmose I.

  Hatshepsut’s birth would have been an occasion of great hope but also great anxiety. Ahmes was the King’s Great Wife, and hopes for a pure and uncontested succession to the throne rested with her. She must have wanted to give birth to a son. Her labor was likely long and hard, since it seems to have been her first birth. We have no idea how old Ahmes was at this important moment, but a more mature wife, around the age of nineteen or twenty, would have had an easier time in the birthing process, at least compared with a twelve-year-old girl.

  Because Ahmes was the King’s Great Wife, it is likely that a special birthing pavilion was prepared for her. The Egyptians created birthing houses decorated with apotropaic images and iconography that were ostensibly set apart from the main living quarters. The pavilion may have been near a garden or a pool, a kind of birthing arbor with a roof of matting and vines supported by pillars.29 Plastered walls were likely decorated with scenes of mothers caring for their infants and breast-feeding or having their hair done (actions that would have taken place after a successful birth) to somehow enable, if not guarantee, a positive outcome to a woman’s most dangerous task. In this pavilion, Ahmes would have knelt and squatted, paced and sweated, perhaps on a cool bench of mud brick, while her baby descended the birth canal. The wise women of the household and perhaps some of her ladies-in-waiting would have helped her squat upon the birthing bricks. They might have used ancient magical implements, like ivory hippo-tusk wands or figurines, to ward off danger, death, and tragedy, creating a perimeter of safety for both the birthing mother and the coming child.

  The women would have urged Ahmes on, chanting things like “Come Down! Come Down!” while placing amulets on her head and limbs, and talking among themselves about her progress between contractions, all the while murmuring incantations to the pregnant hippo goddess Taweret, “the Powerful One,” whose imposing countenance of bared teeth and tongue could frighten away demons that snatched the life force of small children before they left their mother’s womb. They asked Amen to keep the h
eart of Queen Ahmes strong and to sustain the life of the one who was coming. Or they sang songs to the lion-headed dwarf god Bes, whose maniacal grin repelled the diseases that took a child within his first few months. And the goddesses Hathor, Isis, Nephthys, Selket, and Tefnut were always in their prayers and utterances and songs. Ahmes could have pushed for many hours, and she probably hoped with each heave of her belly and hips and thighs that she would give birth to a boy. But in the end, when the moment came, she delivered a girl. The infant was placed on a little platform of mud brick: Hatshepsut, the Foremost of Noble Women.

  Ahmes likely had a two-week period of purification, a time when she remained away from the palace and any acquaintances while she was passing the blood of her daughter’s gestation. She would have spent time with her baby and the women of her household as her milk came in. The wise women may have rubbed her back and breasts with oil in which a Nile fish had been boiled to encourage a steady flow of milk for her new baby. Or perhaps they did not. Ahmes was the King’s Great Wife, after all, and she needed to conceive another child as soon as possible. Even ancient people must have known that breast-feeding would impede the process of conception.30

  Ahmes was probably encouraged, or simply told, or maybe just knew instinctively to give up feeding her baby so that she could be impregnated by her lord as soon as possible. After only a few months of closeness, her daughter was likely taken from her and given to a wet nurse, a noblewoman named Satre, who herself may have forgone the chance to have more children with her own husband so that she could raise and nourish this royal daughter with her own breast milk. Or perhaps the tragedy of a stillborn child had placed Satre in this position. The responsibility to hold another woman’s child and nurse her was likely welcomed as a comfort. In ancient Egypt, to nurse a king’s child was a great honor, not an onerous degradation. It may have been bestowed upon elite women who had just weaned their own children or, more poignantly, those who were grieving the loss of babies who had just died.31 Who else would be lactating without a child to feed?

  Satre would have been the person who gave the infant Hatshepsut most of her affection, who held her during countless hours of nursing, who cleaned her of filth and spit-up, who held the baby while she burned with fever or screamed from the pain of erupting teeth, who slept with her during the night, waking to nurse her as much as she liked, cuddling her and murmuring her love, telling her “no” when she began to get out of hand. Satre and Hatshepsut must have grown close to each other in the royal nursery. Ahmes, meanwhile, was probably back in the palace with the other royal wives, getting her figure back, grooming herself to be as alluring and beautiful as possible, so that she could receive visits from King Thutmose I as often as possible until she was pregnant again. A Great Royal Wife would ideally bear one child a year, to ensure a son who survived.

  Most infants did not live long. Half of them died before their first year was finished—from fevers that burned them hotter than the desert sands, from diarrhea that parched their bodies until kissable baby-soft cheeks were parchment thin and stretched close to the skull, from coughs whose spasms wracked the small frames of children desperately seeking a clear breath, or from lung congestion that slowly drowned them until they were blue and lifeless. A baby might be bitten by a scorpion in the home or the garden and die a painful death of vomiting and convulsions from a dose of poison too powerful for such a small body.

  Tragedy was so commonplace that it was just a part of Egyptian life. Royal mothers, who would have keenly felt the responsibility of keeping an infant healthy, might have responded in a number of ways. We can imagine a queen who refused to acknowledge the existence of her infant child because it might not live out the year, as such losses were too painful to take over and over again. For a mother who had already lost two or three babies, we can imagine that it might have been easier to give the baby to a wet nurse and move on, with only a small hope lurking at the back of the mother’s mind that somehow the child would survive. Or as an alternative coping mechanism, a mother might smother a child with attention, monitoring his bodily activities carefully, holding him throughout the night, willing him to take another breath during the hardest nights, believing that only her constant presence kept him in this world.

  The infancy of Hatshepsut must have been a scary time full of little dramas and emergencies that happened under the eyes of only a few anxious women. How much Hatshepsut’s mother, Ahmes, was involved in the everyday care and feeding of the princess, we will never know. But we do know from later references that Hatshepsut and her wet nurse, Satre, were very close.32 Like most babies in ancient Egypt, the princess would have been breast-fed for at least three years.

  If a baby made it to three years of age, weaning was the next danger zone. By this time, Hatshepsut would have been able to walk, talk, even hold a brush and papyrus, or laugh and play jokes on the dozens of other palace children—many of them her half sisters and brothers born of the dozens of women married to Thutmose I. Raised in the finest palaces in the ancient world, the princess Hatshepsut was an important child—so important, in fact, that she may have been fed breast milk for a longer period of time, until she was four or even five, for the safety and nourishment it provided. In the modern world, we know that children who are not breast-fed are deprived of the many immunosuppressant factors in the body of the donor. To the Egyptians, weaning often meant death.

  But Hatshepsut survived, beating the odds facing all Egyptian children, many of whom would have perished before the age of five.33 She was able to consume and thrive on cow’s and goat’s milk, but also beer, wine, gruel, ducks’ eggs, vegetables, and meats. Her body was probably assailed with infections, parasites, and other ailments like that of any Egyptian, rich or poor, but her own immune system was triumphant in carrying her past infancy. Hatshepsut moved on to the next stage of her life. She was three, and she was alive.

  Meanwhile, Ahmes was probably intent on doing everything possible to make a son a reality. Common treatments to speed conception included consuming poppy and pomegranate seeds and burning incense and fresh fat to fumigate the air.34 She likely prayed to the goddesses as well, asking them to make her a safe vessel for her lord’s seed. Ahmes may have obsessed about her grooming—combing, braiding, anointing—so that she would be an alluring companion for her king to visit night after night, until she conceived. She knew that her future place in the palace depended on the power of her sons, and her deepest hope as a mother in a complicated and probably competitive palace environment was to bear the son who would become king—because only then could she become the King’s Mother, and continue in a position of even greater power.

  Not that she would be blamed if she couldn’t conceive a son. In ancient Egypt, the responsibility for infertility was laid at the feet of the man. Just as Atum and Amen created the universe from their own sexual encounters with themselves, allowing their seed to propagate their own being, a human man—or a king—was believed to contain the spark of creation. Documents from ancient Egypt tell us that a woman who cannot conceive is “dry,” thus empty of the semen of a man.35 A woman—or a queen—excited her husband into action and then contained his seed, protecting it and gestating it during its transformation into a child. But she was not the creator of new life, just its container. Thus if Thutmose couldn’t produce a son with Ahmes, perhaps he couldn’t with any of his other wives either.

  While Ahmes was attempting to make herself a fertile field for her lord, Thutmose I could not be content with one wife. His palace was filled with his women and soon with his children. He visited Mutnofret’s bed as well, and all knew that any son of hers would bear powerful connections to the old royal family. Mutnofret was probably the highest-ranking wife among all the king’s ladies, except for Ahmes, the King’s Great Wife. There may have been a strange gestational competition between the two highborn ladies; Ahmes worried that Mutnofret’s child would be a son, thus creating a rivalry with her own offspring. Ahmes witnessed Mutnofret’s preg
nancies, of course, watching week by week as life grew inside the woman. We cannot know how she reacted to the news that Mutnofret finally gave birth to a son, whom she named Thutmose after his father. Ahmes herself now had other children besides Hatshepsut; indeed, she probably bore the king two sons. She also bore a daughter named Neferubity.36 And besides, Mutnofret was far from the only competition for Ahmes. It is likely that many other wives in the king’s palace were also fostering his babies inside of them, and we can picture a whole palace of ladies in breeding. Births would have come hard and fast, a girl one month, a son the next, filling the ranks of the king’s children, most of whom left no trace in the surviving official documentation.

  As a toddler, Hatshepsut would have grown up alongside the children of her father’s other wives. They were her playmates and siblings in the royal nursery. She probably saw her mother in the company of her ladies every day, but the time spent with Ahmes may have been formal and uncomfortable for her, or perhaps far too brief for a young girl in need of a loving mother’s attention. Hatshepsut doubtless encountered her father’s wife Mutnofret from time to time as well, perhaps in her own part of the palace, or when the lady visited her children in the nursery, but Mutnofret was not likely a daily companion for the young princess. Later memorials suggest that Hatshepsut had at least one close confidante in the royal nursery, her sister Neferubity.37

  As for her father, around the time of Hatshepsut’s birth Thutmose I was spending much of his time away from Egypt, on campaigns in Syria-Palestine and Nubia. When the king was home, his duties were to the gods’ upkeep, the law courts, and the servicing of the royal wives. He would have had little time (or inclination) to cuddle and console his many toddlers. It was probably a rare moment when the king felt compelled to visit the royal nursery, with its pandemonium of small children and babies, surrounded by the women who kept them safe, fed, educated, and under control. Thus it is doubtful that Hatshepsut and her father had an affectionate relationship when she was a young child. Getting to know children under the age of four, particularly little girls, must have been very low on the king’s priority list.