The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt

by Kara Cooney

  From the very beginnings of her reign, Hatshepsut decided that the best defense was a good offense and conveyed to her people what she was able to do in this kingship that a man could not. She could channel the fierce protective powers of the goddesses who spewed fire at the enemies of Re and devoured the rebels, slaking their thirst with the blood of their adversaries, a fact she alluded to by incorporating these goddesses and their destructive-protective powers into her royal names. Ma’at, Wosret, and Wadjyt were all cobra goddesses who could attach to the brow of their master, ready to protect by spitting heat and poison at enemies. Perhaps these names were even meant to calm the fears of some of her priests and officials, because their meaning suggests that Hatshepsut’s most important role was to safeguard her father, the sun god Re, and by extension her nephew, the boy king Thutmose III. Her names clarify that she was not progenitor, in the strict masculine sense of dynastic succession, but guardian of her family’s continuance. Even dissenters could have little argument with that fact.

  Why, then, did Hatshepsut take this momentous step, given all its religious impediments, if she never intended to rule on her own but only alongside another king? Why not just continue the informal regency? Thutmose III was probably under ten years of age when Hatshepsut was finally crowned. Perhaps she decided to make her move before it was too late, while her co-king was still too young to understand that her coronation meant an implicit demotion for him, cementing the relationship’s inequality before he gained more maturity. Or, more likely, Hatshepsut required the formality of kingship to keep any hold on her authority. Hatshepsut was not directly related to him. She was just his aunt. Her daughter was still not old enough for sexual congress with the young king, so there could be no marriage between them to cement her regency. Indeed, the young king still needed seven or more years until he finally reached maturity—an eternity in ancient lifetimes.

  The how of Hatshepsut’s rise to kingship can be reconstructed, at least partially; the why is cloaked by her own ideological depiction of it and further complicated by our own ambivalent and distrustful understandings of female power. Hatshepsut is often said to have taken steps toward the kingship out of insatiability for more power, and, in particular, for a more precisely defined power. For many Egyptologists of the last generation at least, the reason is ambition—the problematic determination of a woman attempting to take something that did not, by right, belong to her. But if we step back and look at the whole, it is possible to imagine that the Egyptian system of political-religious power itself demanded these deliberate moves. She had the support to climb this high from priests and officials who held key positions but were fearful of losing those offices if a new dynasty came to the throne; these men were apparently so troubled by Thutmose III’s immature kingship that they were ready to support the most unorthodox political move possible to keep Hatshepsut in power.

  We do not know the details that demanded her formal declaration of rule, but if nothing else, Hatshepsut’s rise to the kingship indicates that she was a valued, essential leader, and that people were willing to rewrite the sacred rules of this highest office to accommodate her unconventional rule. She fell into the leadership role early on with the death of her husband, out of necessity, only to see it snowballing into something larger than anyone could have foreseen. She would have had no choice but to keep moving forward. Hatshepsut, and those around her, put all the pieces in place for her unprecedented authority without extravagant scheming or deal making or subterfuge. Her coronation made the change in her status irrevocable: the king died in his holy office, either naturally or unnaturally. There was no such thing as abdication in ancient Egypt.

  However it was decided that Hatshepsut would actually ascend the throne, it happened. Whether it was her idea or that of someone in her retinue—the First High Priest of Amen, or Senenmut, or her own mother—all we have are oracular and ideological texts that tell us the choice was the god Amen’s and that his divine image selected her at his temple at Thebes to rule. It was a radical idea for a woman to even consider, and there must have been good reason for Hatshepsut to make such a bold move. When Thutmose II died, Hatshepsut was left in a real predicament. If she gave up the God’s Wife of Amen duty, she would jeopardize her access to power in Thebes and thus her regency for young Thutmose III. She would have no formal title connecting her to the current king, nothing of value that would allow her to stay in control of Egypt. We cannot forget that Hatshepsut was not the King’s Mother. Perhaps it was at this point that she realized formal steps had to be taken. The new king was simply too young, and her familial connection to him was too indirect. The Thutmoside line was in jeopardy, and she needed to protect it—not for the boy king personally, but for her family and, by extension, for herself. Her accession would create a fixed means of locking down her Thutmoside authority on behalf of her dynasty for another decade or so, all in the hope that Thutmose III could procreate a viable son in the future (not ready himself to rule for another ten years hence, at least). Hatshepsut’s kingship was an unusual solution, to be sure, but she knew there was some precedent for female rule when a family line died out. Why not anticipate the possibility that Thutmose III could also die young or childless? It had certainly happened before.

  We can also entertain the notion that Hatshepsut believed she deserved the formal recognition of her power, plain and simple, that the kingship was meant to be hers. But this explanation is too easy—too dependent on the demands of one woman and too contingent on an entitled and avaricious character capable of steamrolling past all dissent in her path. It also demands that we believe the ancient Egyptian cultural system could have absorbed such a revolutionary mind-set: happy to go where no woman had gone before, simply because Hatshepsut wanted the credit. Personal self-indulgence was unlikely to be supported by so many for its own sake.

  Hatshepsut’s move to the throne was politically connected to many power players around Egypt, inextricably and profoundly linking her success to that of a core group of loyal courtiers and priests ready to follow her. Instead of seeing her rise to power as the willful and voracious machinations of one woman, we should reevaluate it as a clever tactic that bent, but did not break, the rules of an already millennia-old patriarchal monarchical system that saw father-to-son succession as encoded in the written law of the gods.

  Realistically, Hatshepsut’s kingship was not and could never have been something she planned at the start of her regency. She probably never contemplated this ultimate and immutable change in her fortunes. If we look at what she had already done in her regency—engaging in her day-to-day maintenance of Egypt’s government, keeping the power centralized in the palace, making sure provincial governors and viceroys in Nubia paid into the system, cracking down on rebels abroad, forming ambitious building plans in temples throughout Egypt, acting as chief judge in the highest law court—we see that Hatshepsut was the only person who could now fill the position. The more she performed the duties of the king, the more she was led to the inevitable eventuality of kingship. In many ways, Hatshepsut was only doing what she was best at: running the richest country in the ancient world. In the end, she formally defined that role. Hatshepsut’s kingship provides us with the ultimate case of merit over ambition. It was a collection of smaller, piecemeal decisions that led to the great prize, and she only became king because she was the last, best candidate to see to Egypt’s well-being in a time of dynastic crisis. For Hatshepsut, it was the process of doing kingly things that led to her coronation.

  And now that circumstances had prepared (or propelled) Hatshepsut to take control of Egypt in a lawfully recognized way, she would have to keep control of a more complicated situation than before, using every tool at her disposal and every official in her loyal following to justify a highly unconventional, but soon openly recognized, co-kingship between a woman and a boy. In some ways, Hatshepsut made her job that much harder by officially taking the crowns and scepters of this holy office when it was already occu
pied. This was a profound transitional moment for Egypt, when its power brokers stared down an abyss of uncertainty and emerged with an avant-garde solution. The entire court must have known that a Hatshepsut kingship and a coregency turned on its head would be highly unorthodox, but the priests, viziers, treasurers—everyone who was anyone—seem to have jumped on board anyway. And thus they all, Hatshepsut included, needed to shift responsibility for this crazy decision away from themselves. It was vital that this move be seen as a choice made by the gods, not by men (and certainly not by one woman). Indeed, Hatshepsut’s first steps to the kingship took place in the gods’ presence and with their blessing, through the oracles in the temple and through divine congress with her own dead father, Thutmose I.

  We might hold a dubious view of such a strategy, to be sure, but ideology can contain both political and religious motivations simultaneously. Hatshepsut almost certainly believed in the intervention of the gods in her daily life, as well as in cosmic events, and thus she used what the Egyptians called a biayt, a “miracle” or a “revelation,” to claim her power officially.20 Hatshepsut created some sacred theater so that the sanctity of her rule was legitimized and witnessed before many eyes. In the coming years, she would write many more mythologies about her kingship’s creation—how her father chose her personally, presented her to his courtiers, and gave her the royal names of a king—and about her divine conception through holy union between her mother and the god Amen himself, when he merged into the body of her sacred father, Thutmose I.

  To cement her coronation, Hatshepsut transformed the profundity of the moment into material reality—two granite monoliths erected in Karnak Temple—proof of her god-given grace because the obelisks had been ordered years prior. Hatshepsut made it look as if she had planned her royal transformation far in advance of its occurrence, that she had long foreseen her eventual rise in formally witnessed power. In reality, these obelisks had likely been commissioned to cement the new kingship of her young charge, King Thutmose III, and were only later transferred to her when she was able to step into the kingship. When the monoliths came out of the quarry, Hatshepsut decided to have them inscribed for herself, not Thutmose III, and placed them in one of the most public locations at Egypt’s grandest temple to proclaim her accomplishment.21 It is hard for us to understand, with our rapidly evolving technology and constant invention, but in the Egyptian mind the creation of an obelisk was nothing short of a wonder, an achievement that proved beyond a doubt that the king responsible was truly blessed. Only a king thus graced by gods could have achieved such a feat, to place monoliths of the hardest granite, stone not cut by copper chisels, ten stories high, in the midst of the gods. The obelisks were evocative of masculine virility, to be sure, but also of sunlight itself. Hatshepsut and her world believed them to be shafts of light that linked their temple with the gods of heaven. These obelisks would mark her kingship—officially and publicly.

  Hatshepsut did not just remake herself with her unprecedented coronation. She also transformed, and implicitly demoted, her new “co-king.” Thutmose’s name was changed, explicitly transferring his power from one who ruled alone to one who worked with another. Hatshepsut altered her co-king’s name from Menkheperre to MenkheperkaRe, adding the element ka, or “spirit.” Instead of “the Manifestation of Re Is Enduring,” his name was now “the Manifestation of the Soul of Re Is Enduring.” This move was politically and religiously brilliant, at least to the Egyptian intellectuals who could understand it. The new name implied that the boy king was now one step removed from the power of the sun, that he was no longer a direct manifestation of the sun itself but only the embodiment of part of its power, its ka.22 The name change might even imply that the boy king was crowned anew alongside his mistress, a ritual procedure that demanded a downgrading in rank.

  Hatshepsut may have been holding all the cards vis-à-vis her co-king, but even after her initiation into the mysteries, the coronation, the name changes, and the clever masculine-feminine arguments, she still had a problem. She was the senior king, and yet she had come to the throne second.

  Hatshepsut had a clever strategy for managing this complication. Much as she co-opted traditional masculine titles by injecting a feminine element, now she cannily played with the way her co-king’s reign was measured, using his established chronology—something sacred and well known to the contemporary Egyptians—to retroactively support her rule. Rather than begin a new sequence of reign dates following her coronation, she simply adopted Thutmose III’s timeline as her own. Thus the date of her coronation was immaterial. His year 7 became her year 7, with the inferred meaning that she had been king even before her own recognized accession, that she had already taken the reins of power in the eyes of the gods from the moment of her husband’s death. Some Egyptologists have seen her dating methods as disingenuous and deceptive—to the Egyptians, and to the gods. How could she claim royal years of rule before her coronation? But this woman’s informal power was without contest. To date the beginning of her own reign later, within the reign of the young Thutmose III, implied a divine mistake—because, for the ancient Egyptians, to be the king was to be the Good God. Or, put another way, the divinity that had been inside of her since her conception had finally been officially recognized and revealed. But it had always been there.

  Hatshepsut was seated upon the throne, holding the instruments of Egyptian kingship and acting as a true, divinely elected Horus over all of Egypt. And Thutmose III had inexorably been transformed into a secondary co-king, a monarch who worked alongside another rather than ruling on his own. Although he was only a boy, this sacred coronation must have signaled to him what he already knew—that Hatshepsut ruled with the gods’ favor and was the most prepared to keep Egypt safe, prosperous, and righteous. After the coronation, when Hatshepsut finally sat on a throne taller than his own, in the place of honor formerly reserved for him, wearing king’s crowns like his, Thutmose most likely noticed the curious and awed looks of courtiers and priests as they entered the audience chamber; he watched, as her majesty conducted business, and saw how his nascent kingship was dependent on her mature authority.

  Or perhaps the crowning made no difference to him and to his daily life, except for the demands on his time; weeks of coronation rituals and celebrations in multiple towns throughout Egypt must have annoyed the boy. If Hatshepsut had been making all the decisions during his tenure as king, then some formal changes in thrones and headgear and names might have constituted only superficial changes to this child’s life. But he likely sat on the throne beside her during their first “sitting,” and even though young, he must have perceived that something important in his life had shifted.

  If he had previously been bratty and imperial in tone with his aunt, now was the time to change his behavior. There is little indication of any hostilities, but we do see a suggestion of increased distance between the two monarchs. At the inception of Hatshepsut’s kingship, Thutmose III appears only occasionally on her commissioned monumental constructions. Hatshepsut was so intent on laying the ideological foundation for her own odd kingship that she was essentially forced to exclude the king who already occupied the throne. Did the choices visible in her building program find a way into her policy decisions? Perhaps Thutmose III was sent off to the north to further his education in the ancient cities of Memphis and Heliopolis, away from Hatshepsut, who was busy exploiting the Amen theology of Thebes to support the weight of her new crown.

  The coronation was clearly meaningful to Hatshepsut, because she ordered the exclusive and mysterious rites depicted in all their ritual detail in carved stone reliefs at Karnak and Deir el-Bahri, a first for any Egyptian king: image after image shows her kneeling before the different gods while they place the various crowns on her head and arm her with assorted regalia; speeches praising Hatshepsut’s abilities and inherent worth are chiseled into the quartzite, limestone, and sandstone. Hatshepsut ordered her artisans to express her person and action in a rather bland
and expected way, in line with two thousand years of royal tradition, but she knew better than anyone that the mere fact that it had happened at all—that a woman was crowned king of Egypt during a time of peace and prosperity, and that she could publicly claim it—was unequaled. Even though she tried to fit herself into previous traditions, Hatshepsut’s multiple and overt representations of this moment reveal that she knew her kingship was not only absolutely unprecedented, but something that needed to be broadcast widely.23

  As king, Hatshepsut took up her new role as dominant protector with energy, and as such she gave special attention to Egypt’s goddesses. Perhaps believing that her power stemmed from the divine feminine, capable of both great destruction and soft tenderness, she embellished the temples of these goddesses, rebuilding those in ruin, and even elevating some divinities to a higher level with grand buildings and new festivals. The goddess Mut of Thebes was a beneficiary of Hatshepsut’s pious devotion. Mut literally means “mother,” but she was also believed to be the consort of the god Amen. Mut had her own temple precinct in the larger Karnak complex, and indeed, the foundations of many stone buildings in Mut’s temple space were created by Hatshepsut.24 Mut was depicted wearing the double crown, and it is likely that Hatshepsut, as Lady of the Two Lands, felt a kinship with this celestial being, enough to link her own feminine kingship with Mut’s great and ferocious power. Hatshepsut probably felt a real connection to this lioness divinity, performing countless rituals in the goddess’s sanctuary, offering meals, and, most important, offering the goddess beer, getting her drunk so that she would not unleash her ferocious power on Egypt’s people.

  But King Hatshepsut never neglected Amen, her father, the god she believed had placed her in this position in the first place; and more than to any divinity in the land, she strengthened her link to the god of Thebes. The name “Amen” means “hidden one,” and his true nature was thought to be concealed. Hatshepsut, too, claimed obliquely that her own true character as king had been hidden, only to be revealed as she gradually moved closer to the throne. One of her later obelisks reads that she is “Maatkare, the shining image of Amen, whom he made appear as King upon the throne of Horus, in front of the holies of the palace, whom the Great Ennead nursed to be mistress of the circuit of the sun’s disk.”25 She thus claims to be the visible manifestation of the god Amen, who was believed to exist before creation itself; that is, he represented unformed potential that could become anything—mother or father, man or woman, child or adult, animal or human. This god was thought to permeate everything and everyone. Amen’s existence depended on a body created from nothingness, from infinity, from darkness, within the primeval waters. And he did this miraculously, from his own divine plan, from the potentiality of the universe.