The Woman Who Would Be King

by Kara Cooney

  Everyone in the palace depended on this boy king’s virility. If a man from a different branch of the family was chosen to be the next king because of the lack of an heir—as had happened after the reign of Amenhotep I—then everything would be thrown into disarray. Officials would be sacked and lose their income and residence at court, forcing them to move back to their family lands. Other officials would take their place, creating all kinds of political and economic upheaval. A king was nothing without his own loyal stable of bureaucrats, administrators, and warriors. Egypt had seen a change in dynasty not even fifteen years earlier, and the trauma was probably fresh in everybody’s memory—particularly for those who were ousted.

  The need for a male heir probably encouraged Hatshepsut to visit Thutmose’s bedchamber often. The queen essentially found herself in a bizarre race against not just dozens of other women, all striving to breed Egypt’s royal son, but against the king’s failing health as well. Thutmose would have been encouraged to lie with his wives as frequently as his stamina allowed, and his nightly activities were likely monitored and remarked upon. Earlier in the Eighteenth Dynasty, there is little evidence for large harems consisting of hundreds of wives and concubines that would later become de rigueur. But by the reign of Thutmose II, the Egyptians were moving in this direction, placing their faith in the breeding capabilities of at least a few dozen women instead of just two or three. Perhaps after Amenhotep I died without a male heir, family and palace officials became more practical about procuring ever greater numbers of fertile young women to pleasure the king.

  By the Nineteenth Dynasty, these humble beginnings would develop into a massive harem characterized by a new formality of sacred sexual encounters with the king. Twentieth Dynasty temple carvings of Ramses III even formalize the religious purpose of harem sexuality, showing the sovereign playing the board game senet with naked girls or fondling the genitals of his undressed Beauties, all while he is fully dressed and seated on his throne.15 Thutmose II almost certainly did not have hundreds of women at his disposal like the Ramesside kings, but he had enough. And one of them, a woman named Isis, produced a son for the king—once again named Thutmose.

  As far as we can tell, Isis, like Senenmut, began as an absolute nobody, with no family connections worth putting on the one statue that survives of her, and with no titles showing her worth. Isis may have been one of the concubines brought to the palace to entice the king, picked for her appearance rather than her social status. In the end, this woman would make a name for herself at the palace, but only as mother to the King’s Son. We have no idea if Thutmose II produced sons with other women, but there must have been some. Did these lesser sons ratchet up the pressure on Hatshepsut? Did she tell herself that she still had time to gestate another baby before her weak husband succumbed to his ill health?

  For the brother-sister royal couple, there would be no more time. After just three years of rule and the production of only one viable daughter with his Great Wife, Aakheperenre Thutmose, the beneficiary of Ahmes’s and Hatshepsut’s tireless political maneuvering and unlikely savior of his line, succumbed to his illnesses and ascended to the sky.16 Hatshepsut was about sixteen years old and destined to never be another man’s wife; she understood that to maintain her position at court she had to hold tight to the memory of her dead husband and his living sons, even though they were only infants. She had memorial chapels built in Thutmose II’s name while she prepared for the coronation of the son who would be chosen as king, a child who could not have been more than two years old; presumably everyone hoped that his health would be better than his father’s.

  Hatshepsut found herself in yet another moment of crisis. Caught between two kings, one a sickly boy whom she had served as the King’s Great Wife, and the other a toddler monarch who would soon be in need of a regent, Hatshepsut capitalized on her religious training to manufacture a giant leap forward in her authority: she proclaimed to her people that the gods demanded it. Hatshepsut recounted a miracle that she experienced when she was just a girl, in the god Amen’s presence during a public festival. She recorded this event in later documents preserved at her Red Chapel, obelisks, and funerary temple, and Egyptologists are still divided about when in her history it was supposed to have occurred.17 The narrative tells us that the god revealed himself to her in front of the Egyptian populace and marked her for rule. It’s an audacious pronouncement, and Hatshepsut is thus clear in her stance that she was destined for great power from an early age, given such authority by her god. This would be the first of many such revelations for Hatshepsut.

  Hatshepsut’s account of the story imparts the drama and emotion of the moment. She was in Thebes serving as daughter of the king. Karnak Temple was prepared for a great festival. The statue of the god was carried out of the sanctuary that day in a grand procession to perform biayt, a word usually translated as “oracle” or “miracle,” but which could just as easily mean “revelation”—the moment the god expressed his opinions or ideas to the king and to the watching crowd. Festivals created the moment when the incarnation of the god (i.e., his statue) was brought out of the temple, his priests bearing the weight of his veiled shrine on two long carrying poles, to communicate with his people. These were important occasions, and many elites would have been pressed into the courtyard of the temple to watch the spectacle. But on this day, something happened that no one, not even Hatshepsut, expected.

  Hatshepsut tells us that during this fateful festival, the god Amen did not perform the oracle where and when he was supposed to, which caused such anxiety that even the elites in attendance were afraid to look at the god in his portable shrine. The text says that no miracle happened in any location of the king, perhaps suggesting a kind of vacuum of ideological and political leadership. Whatever the reason behind the inaction, the god was momentarily powerless, directionless. Deep silence fell on the crowd, and people started to wonder what they should do. Palace courtiers bent their heads as in mourning. Someone there, or perhaps it was the god himself, claimed that the wise men had become ignorant. And all around the god’s statue there was stunned silence and profound fear, as if the god had abandoned them utterly. Then suddenly, a great power took over the god’s statue and he was moved by the priests through some miraculous force. His barque was propelled toward the river, and then, abruptly, toward the gates of the royal palace adjacent to Karnak. As the unwieldly shrine began to swing around, the god Amen unexpectedly commanded his bearers to turn back and move northward. Then, just as unpredictably, he wanted to move eastward—until finally the god passed through the western gateway of the king’s palace called I Am Not Far from Him. Each sudden change of direction must have raised a gasp in the crowd of onlookers, unsure of what they were witnessing but aware that only the god could be responsible for such unprecedented motion. At last the god found himself in the forecourt of the palace adjacent to the temple. And upon seeing him, Hatshepsut appeared. Leaving the palace, she threw herself to the ground in his presence, with her arms upraised in praise. She proclaimed that the plans of his majesty were indeed great, that he was her father, the being who created everything that exists. And then, seemingly understanding the gravity of the moment, she asked him openly, “What is it that you desire to happen? I will do according to all that you have ordered.” Hearing this, the god is said to have performed another miracle, one presumably witnessed by the entire populace there that day: somehow he controlled Hatshepsut’s movements, communicating which way she was to go. It seems that the god placed Hatshepsut before his sacred barque, propelling her toward the Great Chapel of Truth (ma’at) in the temple’s core. It was here, the narrative says, that she received the investiture of her majesty and her equipment of the God’s Wife, granting her authority as a great queen on the one hand and as a priestess on the other.

  During festival processions, the god was known to make pronouncements of importance, but nothing like this had happened before, we are told. Onlookers must have stood with mouths ag
ape when the bearers of Amen’s portable barque suddenly moved toward the palace and Hatshepsut threw her body into its path, speaking to the god directly. How Amen “answered” her is still an enigma, as is the exact political meaning of her investiture of power. But such is the mysterious nature of divine revelation. Precise details would take away its power. Perhaps Hatshepsut entered into a trancelike state that allowed only her to understand his epiphany. Or perhaps the priestly bearers of the portable shrine moved in such a way that showed Amen’s support for his daughter’s authority. Or was the whole oracle a stunt set up ahead of time by the priests of Amen, who were happy to have Hatshepsut’s continued support? Even the timing of the oracle is uncertain—was it during the reign of her father or her brother? Hatshepsut preferred to keep the whole thing vague, using the word king in the oracle texts without naming anyone specifically.

  The details of how any Amen oracle worked are vexing to historians.18 We don’t know how questions were put to the god, or how answers were conveyed. But perhaps we should not try to discern facts in this mystical moment, because, for Hatshepsut, this experience may well have been beyond the scope of language, a decisive instant that could not be understood in terms of worldly specifics and political agendas. It did not matter if the oracle was manufactured or authentic. What mattered was the display of her belief in and connection to the god—and that, according to Hatshepsut and the priests of Amen, her rule was decreed by nothing less than a divine revelation.19

  The oracle text is clear on one point: Hatshepsut’s claim to power came not from her own political ambition but from her deep ideological commitment and piety to the god Amen-Re, visible to all in this most public of festival ceremonies. Hatshepsut understood how to demonstrate and wield ideological power, perhaps even at a young age. She was God’s Wife of Amen, yes, but this narrative clarifies that her political authority over Egypt stemmed specifically from this sacred position—not as wife of the king, not as mother of the king, not as sister of the king, but rather as wife and daughter to a god.

  FOUR

  Regent for a Baby King

  The surviving sons of Aakheperenre Thutmose could not have been more than toddlers at the time of his death. While it is true that many earlier kings had been children when they took the throne, they were old enough to ensure that their mothers needed to act for only five or six years as de facto ruler before the boy was able to lead in his own right. The crowning of a baby would require a rare decade and a half of rule by a regent. It was a tenuous situation.

  Hatshepsut likely did not care which one of Thutmose II’s princes was chosen, given that all of them would have been no more than two years old and none had a mother of any standing. Her chief agenda at this most vulnerable moment was to somehow extend her dead husband’s line of succession, not only to ensure her own authority but, more important, to continue the Thutmoside line of her father. All she wanted was the selection of a healthy child, given the years of anxiety she had ostensibly spent with a sickly ruler.

  We don’t know much about how a successor to the king was chosen in ancient Egypt, probably because it served the leadership to keep the process shrouded and exclusive. A general tenet of Egyptian society was that a man in office would be succeeded by his eldest son: it seems extremely likely that this should apply to the king as well, but the fact that a king apparently had the opportunity to formally nominate his heir (something Hatshepsut later tells us had been done for her) suggests that some level of choice among children of equal standing might be possible. A king might also reinforce his heir by naming the son Great General of the Army, a de facto way of naming him crown prince. But, if the candidates were all too young and untried for such a decision to be made, and if the king died without having chosen an heir, then such a momentous decision was made by others. The question is: who made the selection?

  A later autobiographical text of Thutmose III hints that there were a number of princes of Thutmose II to contend for the throne. Of course, the babies themselves were not competing; rather, each would have represented a particular faction of elites and officials who had a connection to the child through the mother’s line. But in this case, none of the women who bore Thutmose II’s sons seem to have been of any importance at all, so perhaps the political fight over their children was limited. Maybe the choice of a particular prince was immaterial, which meant that the real danger—from Hatshepsut’s perspective, at least—came from groups of elites who were willing to ignore a living heir with an unconnected mother and instead push forward their own adult contenders for the throne, perhaps a man with links to the family of Amenhotep I. Although we have little evidence of such maneuvering, there must have been many far-seeing, logical men in Hatshepsut’s court and throughout Egypt who were reluctant to submit themselves to the reign of a toddler, himself descended from a weak king.

  If we assume that Hatshepsut was interested and involved in the decision about who would succeed her dead husband, we can imagine that she would again rely on her most trusted source of power: her connection to the gods and the inviolability of divine decision. Hatshepsut likely understood that Amen-Re had to be the one to select the prince who would rule and that such a revelation must take place in front of many eyes. If she tried to shield the selection, people might suspect that she was interfering with it. But if she opened up the succession decision for all courtiers to see within a religious oracle, she could recast a thorny political issue as the indisputable will of the god, thus enabling her to place one of the Thutmoside babies on the throne of his father and save her dynasty.

  The oracle text that provides us with the basis of reconstructing what happened next is problematic because it deals with the supernatural mechanisms of divine authority. It states that Thutmose II’s princes found themselves in a pillared hall of the temple, presumably brought there for this purpose, and each of them was “still a baby bird in its nest.” The god appeared, his rays somehow shining into the eyes of the princes as he took on the manifestation of Horus on the horizon. Perhaps the rising sun had just slanted into the hall, moving over the floor where the princes sat and blinding them momentarily. The people present in the hypostyle hall were awestruck by the divinity before them. Next, a figure called “his majesty” appears in the written story. The identity of this figure is unclear, but presumably it refers to the king, the designation remaining vague and unnamed as happens so often in Egyptian histories of mystical experiences. Perhaps the majesty in question is meant to be Thutmose II, living or dead, but whoever he was he burned incense and made a great offering of sacrificed animals, including a bull and a calf to the god of the temple. It was at this moment that the god of the oracle makes his appearance, presumably Amen in his barque. The god is said to cross the two sides of the pillared hall, apparently an unexpected move, but part of the god’s revelation. He was searching for the king who would serve him next. Suddenly, the god looked upon his choice, one of the princes before him. The prince in question threw himself to the ground on his belly and bent his arms up toward the god in veneration, dexterous movements for a toddler. Then the god, somehow, placed his chosen prince in front of “his majesty,” presumably the mysterious unnamed king, and made the boy take the place of honor in the hall. Then and there, the god is said to have performed his revelation, ostensibly naming the boy as the next king before all those assembled.

  We can envision the scene as it may have really happened: all the baby princes toddling around the temple, their nurses and mothers running after them, as the sacred shrine of the god, carried by a group of priests, entered the hall. For all we know, this could have been one of the next king’s first memories: seeing his father Amen for the first time in his golden shrine and being plucked from among his brothers to serve. Like Hatshepsut’s oracular histories, Thutmose’s oracle text forgoes specifics. The Egyptians obviously believed that such a sacred event was better seen obliquely.1 The machinations behind such selections are almost irrelevant: to the ancient Egyptians
, political will and religious revelation were completely intertwined at this point in history.

  The chosen prince was a boy named Thutmose, son of Isis, one of his father’s lesser wives. He would become Menkheperre Thutmose, known to us as Thutmose III. Years later, Thutmose III would record this oracle in his annals. He left out many historical details, but he maintained fervently that the account was not a falsehood. To him, Amen’s oracular choice was a miraculous and real event—how the god circled around the temple hall, searching for him, until he finally singled out the young prince to be the next king. Thutmose III later memorialized this event in stone in the heart of Karnak Temple, implying that Amen’s revelation was ironclad and not to be doubted. Like Hatshepsut, he claimed that he was the god’s choice.

  The new king’s mother had no special connections to either the Thutmoside or Ahmoside family. Hatshepsut considered Thutmose III to be one of her nephews, the son of her brother. But because Hatshepsut was also married to her brother, Thutmose III was a stepson to her as well. The god’s choice was meaningful for Hatshepsut. Not only had the dynasty of her father been allowed to continue, but the oracle made a political decision without any indication that Hatshepsut herself was involved. The oracle also avoided the intrigue and subterfuge that would have resulted if the choice had been left to her or her courtiers.

  Thutmose III’s account does not include any mention of Hatshepsut, even though she must have been there at the god’s revelation, perhaps acting as the God’s Wife during the proceedings. It was her family dynasty that benefited most from the oracle, after all. It’s possible that she even carefully organized the events with the First High Priest of Amen to lock down the succession after her husband’s death. Despite the new king’s Thutmoside connections, this transitional period created a problematic balancing act for Hatshepsut, who would now have no direct and formal link to the next king as sister, daughter, or wife, but who still remained as the highest-ranked and, presumably, the most capable member of the royal Thutmoside family in the palace besides her mother. In many ways, Thutmose III ruled as king only because Hatshepsut was there to make it happen. He only took the throne because she had been able to keep all other contenders and threats to her dead husband’s child at bay. Had Hatshepsut not been there, it’s easy to see how the crown would have passed to an experienced man from a different family, thus establishing a new dynasty. The end result was such a believable spectacle that Thutmose III himself later recorded that it was a pure and miraculous choice.