The Woman Who Would Be King

by Kara Cooney

  The selection process of Thutmose III was quickly (if not instantly) idealized and mythologized by the political players, but the practicalities of rule still needed a firm hand in the current delicate state of affairs. Thutmose III was a small child at best, more than a decade away from effective rule on his own; he would need a strong regent. His mother, Isis, was apparently an inappropriate choice; although we can assume that as a member of the harem she was beautiful and fertile, it is also probable that she was neither educated nor highborn. She was clearly trumped as candidate for regent by the dowager Great Wife Hatshepsut, who had already been serving as God’s Wife of Amen for almost a decade.2 When the time came to choose the hand that would guide the young king, it was Hatshepsut who took her place as regent. This fact, in and of itself, says all we hope to know about Hatshepsut’s proven leadership abilities and the confidence that the priests, military, and bureaucracy had in her. They all seem to have welcomed the rule of this young queen.

  In fact, an ancient biography of one important official named Ineni tells us quite clearly who took up the reins of power.

  [He (that is Thutmose II)] went to heaven, and he joined with the gods. His son stood in his place as King of the Two Lands as he ruled upon the throne of the one who begat him. His (Thutmose II’s) sister, the God’s Wife, Hatshepsut, was doing the affairs of the Two Lands with her plans. One worked for her; Egypt was with bowed head.3

  Hatshepsut was no longer the wife of the reigning king, but she was still God’s Wife of Amen, which was the true source of her power. She was quickly recognized as the actual ruler of Egypt by courtiers and officials, and in Ineni’s text the name of the living king—the toddler Thutmose III—is not even mentioned.4 For most elites serving in the many palaces, temples, and fortresses around Egypt, Thutmose III’s mere existence cemented the royal succession from father to son, but in practical terms it didn’t matter at all. In all likelihood, Hatshepsut had ruled before Thutmose II’s death. She still ruled. The status quo had been maintained.5

  If Thutmose III had been older at his accession, we can imagine him marrying Hatshepsut’s daughter Nefrure at that time, allowing Hatshepsut to act as regent and mother-in-law, much as her mother, Ahmes, had done for Thutmose II. But marriage in Egypt was a procreative affair, and it would not do to marry two children, both no more than toddlers, as there could be no sexual union. Hatshepsut would have to devise a way to cement her power as a stepmother and an aunt, with no closer connection to her young king than that.

  We have no evidence of any political rejection of this new young king by the Egyptian elite, but, again, we should not expect to see it in the official records. If an insurrection took place, Hatshepsut was able to quash it. And she wasn’t one to mince words: a later text commissioned by her states, “He who will praise her, he will live. He who will speak an evil thing, ignoring her majesty, he will die.”6 What we do witness, and what makes many historians suspect that there was political disagreement at this sensitive juncture, is a concerted and systematic attempt by Hatshepsut to compensate for what this young king lacked: experience and pedigree.

  Thutmose III’s maternal origins were unimpressive; but his father was a king. As daughter of both a king and a Great Royal Wife, Hatshepsut had no such deficiencies. And with her priestly experience, she was able to step into the regency unimpeded. The office of queen-regent was ancient by the time Hatshepsut exercised it. Evidence for the practice of highborn, educated women ruling on behalf of their young male charges goes back to the Old Kingdom at least, almost one thousand years before, and the practice probably stems back even farther, to the Early Dynastic Period, another five hundred years before that. Many Eighteenth Dynasty kings had already come to the throne as boys in need of political guidance: Ahmose, Amenhotep I, Thutmose II, and now Thutmose III. Young kings were so common during this time period that, according to the calculations of one Egyptologist, women had ruled Egypt informally and unrecognized for almost half of the seventy years before the reign of Thutmose III, an astounding feat given Egypt’s patriarchal systems of power.7 Even so, Thutmose III seems the youngest of these kings by far, and everything depended on his coming of age and fathering male offspring. If a disease claimed him, if he was bitten by a snake, or if he took a tumble during chariot exercises, then the political maneuvering would begin again. Likely everyone was holding their breath during Thutmose III’s early childhood, hoping either that he would live to secure their futures or that he would die and give someone else a chance to take the throne.8

  Some Egyptologists suspect that Hatshepsut was too young for the crucial governance demanded in this tricky situation.9 Although we think of adolescence as a time of teenage rebellion and irresponsibility, in the ancient world this age marked entry into adulthood, particularly for a female. Hatshepsut must have been quite a capable young woman, having already been thrust into many difficult situations and learned from strong role models of authority: her father, her mother, and probably even the dowager God’s Wives. If trained and educated properly, a teenager may have been perfectly suitable to act as regent of the richest land in the ancient world and to keep dozens of scheming courtiers at bay.

  During this time, Thutmose III’s mother, Isis, seems to have been excluded from any exercise of authority. She had other responsibilities, anyway. The young king must have still needed his mother’s close attention and care, and she was probably busy running after her toddler like any other mother. Given her lack of royal connections and titles, even Isis, mother of the king, may have behaved with great subservience in the presence of Hatshepsut. Although likely close in age to Hatshepsut, she would have been keenly aware of her own lesser abilities in Hatshepsut’s company. No doubt the girl was intimidated by a woman trained in the mysteries and intellectual puzzles of Amen-Re’s rebirth.10

  As Thutmose III grew up, he would have grasped this unfavorable contrast. His mother may have paled in comparison to the great woman who ruled Egypt on his behalf, Hatshepsut who could likely control a recalcitrant official with a glance, who had intimate knowledge of the Lord of All, and who had learned leadership from his grandfather, the great Thutmose I himself. As Hatshepsut grew older, her confidence and authority seem to have been unrivaled. Thutmose III would have learned at a young age that even though his mother was insignificant and his father sickly, Amen had favored them with seed and revelation, respectively. He would have learned that not all people were meant to be powerful, even if the god had chosen them to birth the monarch, or to even serve as king. And maybe he was concerned that his father’s unimpressive legacy might become his own.

  Thutmose III never knew a time in his life when Hatshepsut was not in control of Egypt. To him, her rule was his constant reality. It is unlikely that he ever perceived her as an adversary, at least not during his childhood. She was doing him and Egypt a necessary service. But being the savior of the family dynasty may not have inspired her love for him. Or perhaps it did, so that Hatshepsut instructed and advised the young king as the son she never had, treating him as a mother would. No matter how she felt about him, at the beginning of his education, the young king was likely in awe of her intellectual abilities and political influence. She must have been unlike any other woman known to him.

  Thutmose III was not just a figurehead, despite his age. It was believed that his kingship was developing inside him as the years passed. We can imagine Hatshepsut gently but firmly guiding her charge, a young king with a crown that was too big, through sacred and essential rituals. As the God’s Wife, she occasionally acted on behalf of the king in the temple, but she would have still required his presence for many rituals. He had to learn his place in the world sooner rather than later, and she likely put him to the task of learning his ritual and political responsibilities as young as possible. Throughout it all, Thutmose III watched her interact with officials, priests, administrators, palace women, and palace children; she was his greatest role model for wielding true power.

  Thut
mose III’s bold actions in his later reign do not give the impression that he turned into a spoiled king given to excess or narcissism. Indeed, he seems to have become a controlled and shrewd man, one who knew his own mind and trusted in his own abilities. As a boy, he was likely not given much leniency, and much was expected from him. We can assume that Thutmose III did not get his own way all the time, even though he was king. Hatshepsut must have played a role in this disciplined upbringing.

  In fact, if we step back and look at the situation into which this child was thrust, we can see that the burden placed on him at such a young age was extraordinary, on par with Hatshepsut’s own. Thutmose III assumed a position for which he was simultaneously training. One wonders when he recognized the profound weight of it all—that the universe’s continued creation, the rising and setting of the sun in an organized fashion, the proper flooding and receding of the Nile, the safety of his land, the continued presence of the gods in their temples all depended on him, the rituals that he enacted, on his communication with the gods. At some point in his youth, he became aware that this burden would lay upon his shoulders forever: he was a god, and upon his death he would rise to the heavens and join with the Imperishable Stars in the northern horizon. His heavenly burdens separated him from the people around him, shrouding him in loneliness, perhaps driving him toward activities that were anchored to the dirt and reality of this world.

  Or maybe he never had such a moment of panicked clarity, because Hatshepsut was always there sharing his burden of rule and making sure his officials and priests were behaving, allowing Thutmose III to learn his craft as a ruler without the threat of betrayals or insolence toward a king who was too inexperienced to thwart them. Hatshepsut saw to it that he lived in a prosperous, expanding empire, with obedient vassals and secure sources of revenue. In many ways, Hatshepsut’s regency gave Thutmose III time to breathe, grow up, and foster his own skills. She was probably also the only other person in the palace who felt the depth and complexity of these responsibilities, the only other person in the entire world who could understand his anxieties.

  Most of his education in kingship would have taken place at court, including a great deal of on-the-job training in the throne room or beyond Egypt’s borders in the land of the subjugated enemy. There was no need to make up arithmetic problems: just present the year’s tax revenue and ask him to allocate it. He didn’t have to be encouraged to learn his hieratic: he could read the dispatches from Nubia that had everyone so alarmed. The necessities of execution and punishment didn’t have to be explained to him in painstaking detail: he saw men impaled, staked, mutilated, or exposed firsthand, ostensibly on his orders.

  Thutmose III also had formal instruction led by tutors who kept him on task. They taught him the many facets of the ancient and complicated Egyptian language. Although he likely learned no foreign languages, he was busy enough. He needed to master both hieroglyphic sacred inscriptions and hieratic cursive scripts. He learned the Middle and Old Egyptian of five hundred to one thousand years earlier. Even though no one spoke in such an archaic fashion anymore, these were the languages of the Pyramid Texts, the “Tale of Sinuhe,” and the “Instruction of Ptahhotep.” Mastering the oldest language forms would have been akin to learning the Greek of Plato for a Roman patrician or reading Beowulf at Oxford. He never really wrote the common vernacular that was spoken around him; even in letters, his language was formalized and archaic, befitting an immortal king who had ruled for millennia and who would continue to rule Egypt forever. He also studied ethics, as passed down through the instruction texts of his forefathers, as in “Ptahhotep,” and learned to be a wise judge:

  If you are a man who leads, who controls the affairs of the many, seek out every beneficent deed that your conduct may be blameless. Great is justice, lasting in effect, unchallenged since the time of Osiris. One punishes the transgressor of laws, although the greedy one overlooks this.11

  And he learned about the divine responsibilities of kingship from the “Instruction for King Merikare”:

  Work for god, and he will work for you also—with offerings that make the altar flourish, with carvings that proclaim your name. God thinks of him who works for him. Well tended is mankind—god’s cattle. He made sky and earth for their sake. He subdued the water monster. He made breath for their noses to live. They are his images who came from his body. He shines in the sky for their sake. He made for them plants and cattle, fowl and fish to feed them. He slew his foes, reduced his children when they thought of making rebellion. He makes daylight for their sake. He sails by to see them. He has built his shrine around them. When they weep he hears. He made for them rulers in the egg, leaders to raise the back of the weak. He made for them magic as weapons to ward off the blow of events, guarding them by day and by night. He has slain the traitors among them as a man beats his son for his brother’s sake, for god knows every name.12

  He also exercised his body. Thutmose would have been trained in the art of battle—in the athletics of warfare and hunting, archery, charioteering, as well as dagger and scimitar handling. Unlike Hatshepsut, Thutmose III was expected to spend time out of doors, where he wore nothing but a short kilt and allowed his skin to bronze to a dark brown, hunting game in the desert, hippos in the marshes, or fish along the river.

  And, of course, he spent countless hours in the temple, memorizing the secret names of gods that were only revealed to the initiated, absorbing never-ending temple liturgies, and digesting theological treatises, as he worked toward the performance of vital and imperative rituals. He probably started this process as young as three or four years old. As he got older, Thutmose III likely began to ask his priestly instructors questions that led to vibrant theological discourse about the nature of gods and the universe, divinity’s connection to this world, and the king’s place in it. For this boy, temple mysteries became normal and familiar. The grand temples of Egypt, birthplaces of the gods and machines of the universe, were where Thutmose III played, literally, while lengthy festivals and rites were taking place; kind priests might have crafted toys for their young king or encouraged him to find secret passages in the pylons and the crypts. In many ways, he probably felt that the gods’ abode—with its stillness, cool stone walls, inlaid gates, gilded columns, the sounds of chanting, the smell of incense, the cries of the calves, and the acrid tang of sacrificial blood—was his own beloved home as well.

  We do not know how old he was at the time of his official religious initiation to the temple mysteries, but given his position as king, he was probably quite young. According to Thutmose III himself, it occurred just after his selection as king by the oracle. This is clearly an exaggeration—he was only a toddler at the time of his coronation—but the same text in which Thutmose III recollects how Amen chose him to be king tells us that after this ceremony he flew up to heaven as a divine falcon, using the body of his incarnation, Horus upon earth, to come into contact with the divine world. When he arrived in the celestial realm, the gates of heaven were thrown open for him, allowing him to cross the sky. There, he expressed his love for the gods, whose mysterious forms he contemplated. He saw the manifestation of the sun god on his descent in the west and on his rising in the east, and in between the two, in the land of the dead. He was able to understand the true nature of the universe. And then he returned to Egypt to inhabit his earthly body again, to rule Egypt as a divine Horus.13

  This is heady stuff, at any age. From his first memories, Thutmose III knew that he was exceptional, able to commune with the gods in an intimacy and with an intricacy to which few others had access. The only other person who seemed to share those same abilities and duties was his stepmother, his aunt, his regent, the God’s Wife of Amen, Hatshepsut.

  During the early part of her career as regent, Hatshepsut wore the long linen gown of a queen and priestess; her head was covered by a vulture headdress and her forehead decorated with a cobra. Her mother, Ahmes, may still have been alive at this time, although we have litt
le record of her. In many ways, Hatshepsut had simply taken over where her mother had left off, acting as regent for the new male king and relying on memories of her own mother’s regency as her best model for rule.

  Yet Hatshepsut surpassed her mother and built a career not solely connected to a man’s power—because she also maintained her role as Egypt’s highest priestess. Hatshepsut continued her temple duties as God’s Wife of Amen during this time, and she quickly began to lay the groundwork for the future care and satisfaction of her god under this new king. Hatshepsut probably trained her daughter Nefrure for the God’s Wife of Amen position personally and attentively. The young girl likely shadowed her mother in the temple during the daily meals and all festival processions, learning the rituals at a young age just as Hatshepsut had done before her. Nefrure was in training alongside Thutmose III—two small children inhabiting roles much bigger than they could comprehend.