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

by Kara Cooney

  Unlike the decentralized political systems in ancient Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome that allowed, encouraged, and even thrived on extreme—and often violent—political aggression, ancient Egyptian society did not tolerate, much less foster, discussions of their ruler’s ineptitude, sexual deviance, mental instabilities, or other causes for removal. Egyptology lacks any intimate discussion of royal failures, intrigue, interor intra-family antagonism. Regicide happened so rarely that in the twenty-eight hundred years before the Ptolemaic period, Egyptologists can count only two verifiable cases—Amenemhet I of the Twelfth Dynasty and Ramses III of the Twentieth Dynasty—and neither was discussed nor recorded except in the most oblique of terms. And it was the same with dynastic usurpation. For example, we have no idea how Hatshepsut’s father, Thutmose I, came to the throne. It is simply assumed that Amenhotep I’s line petered out and that Thutmose I stepped in as a close relative to the stagnant dynastic line. But it remains in the realm of possibility that Hatshepsut’s father took the throne with the backing of his armies, even if we have no evidence of it. In such cases, historians are limited to what the ancient people chose to tell, after all. And the ancient Egyptians were masters at producing selective historical accounts about an unassailable and protected kingship.

  Despite all of this, some problematic evidence suggests that Hatshepsut herself may have been intending to push Thutmose III out of the picture, maybe even completely. Recovered blocks from Karnak Temple indicate that the names of the boy king were replaced with those of Hatshepsut’s dead husband, Thutmose II, after she became king.34 This is the only temple of Hatshepsut’s from which Thutmose III’s images were expelled, but it was located in the core of Amen’s realm at Thebes. Perhaps Hatshepsut was only trying to create a clearer connection to her own political power early in her reign, telling people through stone monuments that she ruled because of her connection to her dead husband, thus removing the bothersome child who also inhabited the throne. But her erasure of his names might instead indicate something more sinister.

  Here we have fascinating evidence of King Hatshepsut in a rare moment of indecision. She seems to waffle a bit—or at least explore different solutions—until, for whatever reason, not long after she had Thutmose III formally erased, she decided to put him back into her official temple reliefs. Perhaps she tried to rule without his presence for a short time, but then realized that this boy was her only political means to keeping the throne. Hatshepsut would have to find another way to solidify her base of ideological power as a female king. Her unconventional reign demanded some Egyptian conventionality. She had just embarked upon the highest-stakes move any woman had made in the history of human politics. With this novel and irregular kingship, she had arguably created more problems than she had solved. She would need to unite all her abilities in the years to come—ideological, economic, military, and political—to maintain what she had wrought.35

  SIX

  Keeping the Kingship

  Temple activity had been bred into Thutmose III, and according to many temple reliefs, Hatshepsut and her co-king performed their royal rituals together in tandem. On great feast days, crowds would have stood in temple courtyards or before mighty pylons, watching aunt and nephew lead enormous processions. The divine barque belonging to Amen followed, with dozens of priests bearing the mighty weight of this sacred portable shrine made of Lebanese cedar, gold, and precious stones. Many times a year, the two monarchs were meant to walk from Karnak down the sacred processional way side by side, each with a staff surmounted by a ram’s head, Amen’s signature animal. Each monarch wore a tiered wig or a crown with a single uraeus on the brow and a shendyt (royal kilt) wrapped around his or her waist. During the sacred Opet festival, when the god was brought from his Karnak home to his place of rejuvenation at Luxor Temple, they had to stop at six different way stations along the route to allow Amen to rest.1 Six times they performed complex rituals of healing and transformation for the gods. All of Egypt turned out to see the spectacle, which featured dancers and musicians along with hundreds of priests and chantresses, and to devour the temple-provided bread, cakes, and beer.

  Nefrure, the King’s Daughter, was likely in the presence of the two kings during most important religious occasions in Thebes. Even though she was only a bit older than Thutmose III (maybe by a year), she had probably been the God’s Wife of Amen for as long as the boy king could remember. Her duties were extensive and connected to his own. Perhaps he saw that Nefrure practiced her role as priestess with great passion—talking to the god, moving for him, and giving him his sexual pleasure. Perhaps Nefrure, like Hatshepsut before her, also believed she could speak with the gods in the heavens and comprehend the wishes of the great ones in the sky. Maybe everyone said she was gifted like her mother had been at this age. But we have little record of what Thutmose III thought of Nefrure as God’s Wife, or even as his half sister. The record keeping was in the hands of King Hatshepsut at this point, and she fashioned the public agenda to her liking and Egyptian traditions.

  In accordance with Egyptian convention, Hatshepsut did not provide many details about the nature of the relationships between any of the major players. But we do know that the situation was more than a little strange—a king still too young to rule and a female king now holding the reins of power for him—and it probably elicited doubts, insecurities, and even anger from Thutmose III when he was old enough to understand the arrangement better. The two kings would share a working relationship for many years to come, but it was an association that Hatshepsut started on her own terms. By the time Hatshepsut was a king alongside him, the eightor nine-year-old boy was probably so used to her authority that her kingship may have seemed rather natural to him. At first, it was all he knew. Only later would he have questioned it.

  As Thutmose III approached his teens and studied Egypt’s history, bureaucracy, and legal system, learned the more complex incantations in the temple, and communed on a deeper level with the gods, he likely would have pondered the strangeness of their joint rule. There is no record anywhere of Hatshepsut’s political transformations having been explained or justified to her young coregent, and so we have little clue as to how he may have reacted (if at all) to the vulnerable state of affairs as a child when his kingship was probably most in jeopardy.

  Perhaps Hatshepsut’s replacement of Thutmose III’s names at Karnak at the beginning of her kingship can provide a small clue into the personal relationship between the two monarchs. At the time of the erasure, Thutmose III was about ten years old. Even if she was only attempting to remove Thutmose III ideologically, the action of cutting out his names seems indicative of a hope that she be recognized as the sole king after the death of her husband. And if she had been willing to consider a kingship independent of Thutmose III, then perhaps she was not emotionally attached to her nephew, or at least not as connected to his ambitions and self-worth as she would have been if he were her own son. Maybe she really was trying to go it alone, working through a trial period, pushing to see the reaction of elites and high priests. But if this was her ultimate goal, it failed. She was never able to remove her co-king entirely. Her kingship would be forever stuck in a strange, hybrid partnership between a woman and a child king. Hatshepsut had to look for new strategies to work within this compulsory relationship, ones that could maintain her superior position as Thutmose III grew older.

  Coregency, or rule by two kings, wasn’t a revolutionary idea—it had long been established in ancient Egyptian politics.2 Usually, the elder king appointed one of his sons to rule alongside him as a junior king, typically serving as the leader of treacherous campaigns in foreign lands. Thus the elder king could depend upon a coregency as a means of establishing a chosen successor and of sharing royal duties, allowing the younger king to direct the army while the senior king stayed at home away from all the risks such journeys entailed. A coregency also permitted on-the-job training of a king’s son in some of the trickier aspects of politi
cal diplomacy and tactics. But most important for the coregency, the elder king always sat on the throne first, typically for many years, before appointing his preferred son to rule alongside him. It was a top-down, unequal relationship.

  The coregency of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, on the other hand, was essentially upside down.3 Leaving aside the most deviant characteristic—that Hatshepsut was a woman—this coregency fits none of the customs. It was the junior king who had come to power first, only to be pushed out of the way by a senior king who ascended the throne after him. The senior king had previously acted as regent of the Two Lands during the junior king’s infancy. For a regent to take such a step and rule senior to the youngster was more than anomalous. Thutmose III’s situation was just as odd: he couldn’t even play the traditional role of the younger co-king once the bizarre new dynamic settled down into day-to-day practice. He wasn’t old enough to head up any campaigns or lead men into battle himself. He couldn’t go off on his own to act as an extension of the “primary” king. What was his practical purpose? If war became a reality, Hatshepsut would have to go herself or appoint a trusted official to oversee it. All the onus of rule was on Hatshepsut, while all the legitimacy of rule lay with Thutmose III.

  And so, facing problems that no Egyptian ruler had ever encountered, it fell upon Hatshepsut to manipulate this unusual situation to her own advantage and to the benefit of the Two Lands. The first practical quandary was a technical one: how to place her reign within time. For the Egyptians, counting the hours and years was not a practice of bureaucratic record keeping but of sacred ritual obligation. They were the first to invent the twenty-four-hour clock, and they used it not to record hours of labor or to organize a social calendar (dinner at eight) but to establish the exact moment that a specific incantation should be read, a sistrum rung, or a haunch of beef offered, all to keep the sun god on his onerous journey unscathed through the hours of day and night; the clock was first and foremost a religious tool. Regnal years—the length of rule for each king of Egypt—were used to measure longer stretches of sacred time. There were no absolute dates, no counting of years from the beginning of civilization; instead, time was defined by periods of divinely sanctioned rule. Thus hours of the day were measured as the sun god rose and set, and years were marked with the coming and passing of the chief ritualist—the king—on whom Egypt depended for its beneficial connection to the gods.

  As we’ve already seen, Hatshepsut seems to have known that she could not count the years as her own, as any other Egyptian king would generally have done, and had to defer to Thutmose III’s dating. Thus we see no mention of “Regnal Year 8 of Hatshepsut” or the like.4 The Egyptians inscribed most monuments or stelae with “Year X, day Y of King So-and-So” to place the reader within an understood context. How could Hatshepsut, the senior king, have a regnal year 2 while her junior king, Thutmose III, was in regnal year 9? It was an existential problem for a semidivine ruler whose years of reign represented Egypt’s past, present, and future.

  Hatshepsut found a solution: she diligently circumvented inscribing her own regnal dates on any monuments, including a year date only when a monument or inscription depicted both co-kings together.5 In other words, Hatshepsut required the presence of Thutmose III—in name and figure—on every dated monument and building she ever created. She could never have her own year dates because they did not fit the cultural requirements of the coregency, a reality that may have stung her, the senior partner, with its unfairness. We may see this omission as just a technicality, but to an Egyptian monarch it would mean that he had been removed from the counted and cumulative years of civilization itself.

  Hatshepsut claimed the senior position in this coregency in terms of ability and age, but Thutmose III would always be senior where regnal years were concerned. With the existence of Thutmose III fundamental to her representation of herself as king, his year 5 became her year 5. It worked. In reality, she had only ever ruled as king in his presence. But at the same time, Hatshepsut’s resolution to the problem of how to date her reign was a clever ideological argument, because joint dating implied that Hatshepsut’s kingship began with the death of her husband, Thutmose II. Essentially, she grandfathered in the first seven years of her kingship by using Thutmose III’s dates.

  Hatshepsut was around twenty-four years old when she became king, and as far as we know she was a smart and vigorous woman who was trying to find balance within an unprecedented situation. One of her first strategies as king was to downplay the existence of Thutmose III and attach the legitimacy of her reign to that of his father, Thutmose II. She immediately ordered the alteration of all images showing her as a queen serving Thutmose III into representations of her as the senior king. Craftsmen traveled to temples throughout Egypt carving crowns onto her head, placing her in the position of honor vis-à-vis her nephew, and adding her royal names and titles. No longer would she be depicted as subordinate to Thutmose III. Every sacred space in Egypt was changed, especially in the cultic centers of power, where an image translated into reality and to write or depict something was to make it come into existence.

  Hatshepsut had another unique problem: she had no female partner. According to deeply held ideological precepts and ritual demands, an Egyptian king needed a Great Wife. Obviously, Hatshepsut couldn’t take another woman as a wife. She was one herself, and apparently the flexibility of gender could be stretched only so far in the eyes of the gods and her people. There would be no palace nurseries full of sons and daughters for Hatshepsut, no nightly visitations to the royal women’s living quarters. Some rules could be bent, but the laws of nature were insurmountable. At the very least, Hatshepsut could engage Nefrure’s services as her female counterpoint in ritual activity. And so we see Hatshepsut performing her religious duties in the temple with the God’s Wife—offering up bloody haunches of freshly sacrificed calves, striking ritual chests with sacred implements, or chanting transformational spells to the sun god on the hour—just as the older woman had done for her dead husband and likely for her father before that. Also present in many of these temple scenes is Thutmose III. It is as if Hatshepsut needed the boy king’s presence to add some normalcy to her own strange adaptations, or even to act as a surrogate, just as she required him to make sense of her regnal years. Hatshepsut was constantly reminded that fitting into this manly position of power in ideological terms demanded one clever adaptation after another.

  Beyond the ritual challenges, Hatshepsut had to actively find ways to assert her strength and dominance; she was always trying to equal the accomplishments of past kings, most especially her father, Thutmose I, who had campaigned far away in Syria, even hunting elephants at Naharin and bringing ivory tusks back to Karnak as gifts for Amen. Hatshepsut decided against any manly pursuits that would expose her obvious femininity and instead looked back to any deeds of Egypt’s most ancient and revered kings that she could emulate. Whether the idea came from her quiet moments communing with Amen or was a suggestion of an ambitious courtier, Hatshepsut decided to send men to the uncharted south on a dangerous expedition, dragging deconstructed ships from the Nile city of Coptos through the bone-dry Wadi Hammamat, 120 miles to the Red Sea, where the men would rebuild the ships and launch south along the coast, for a perilous sea journey of as many as 1,000 miles—an ancient Egyptian version of a voyage to the New World. Appropriately, she cloaked this journey in religious ideology. Before her team embarked, she asked the oracle of Amen for permission to travel; this semipublic moment was meant to create maximum drama, no doubt. The god replied—either by the movements or speech of the priests holding the god’s barque—that she should “search out the ways to Punt. Open the roads to the terrace of myrrh. Lead the army at sea and on land (…) to bring the miracles from God’s country to this god, who created her beauty.”6 After this divine revelation, she met with her council and decided to send the expedition under the organization of a northern treasurer named Nehesy, another one of Hatshepsut’s “new men.”7
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  Punt was located far to the southeast of Egypt, probably somewhere in modern-day Somalia, Djibouti, or Eritrea along the Red Sea coast.8 An expedition to such a faraway land happened rarely in Egyptian history; the trip would have been talked about by every elite family in Egypt. Hatshepsut understood how to prove her kingship’s worth to the people who mattered. She planned the journey not just to procure commodities but also to verify her rule. All previous expeditions to Punt had been ordered by kings thought to be blessed by the gods with good fortune and solid leadership skills: Sahure (Dynasty 5), Pepy I (Dynasty 6), Mentuhotep II (Dynasty 11), Amenemhat I (Dynasty 12), and Senwosret I (Dynasty 12). Hatshepsut was simply placing herself in their august company and using their ideological methods of political legitimization.

  The expedition was a success and returned in year 9 of the joint reign with shiploads of incense trees, cargo holds full of incense gum rolled into little balls, precious ebony, and woods, flora, and fauna from the rain forest. The incense was a high-value commodity used for many things—burned in braziers in the temple for the god’s enjoyment, used as a resin when mummifying the elite dead, and even chewed to dispel bad breath. The expedition members came back with amazing stories of the strange little chief of Punt and his massive and deformed wife. They described the bizarre small houses built upon stilts and the new fish and birds they had seen there.

  When the ships docked to unload, it must have been an I-told-you-so moment for Hatshepsut that legitimized all her risky decisions thus far. She would later order dozens of images of the triumphant landing carved into her temple walls at Djeser Djeseru. She is shown sitting while the priceless goods are paraded and presented to her. Nehesy, the expedition leader, is there, too, monitoring the unpacking, and Senenmut stands beside him assisting Hatshepsut. The inscription informs the reader that all of these commodities were meant for her heavenly father, the god Amen, but the ideological payoff from this voyage for Hatshepsut, as his agent on earth, cannot be understated. Behind Hatshepsut in this temple relief is an image of her royal ka, understood as the spirit of kingship that moved from ruler to ruler, the sacred entity that allowed this woman to serve in Egypt’s highest office. This royal essence was believed to have permeated her soul since conception, allowing the manifestation of her masculine power in a feminine body and determining the success of all her actions. In the minds of the Egyptians, the entire Punt voyage would have failed if she wasn’t meant to be king. Hatshepsut had gambled the lives of hundreds of men, dozens of ships, and two years of preparation, plus another year or two waiting for the return of the voyage in a high-stakes public wager. If the expedition had failed, it might have given ammunition to her detractors. But the gamble paid off. Hatshepsut even commemorated the receipt of so much incense by rubbing it all over her body in a public temple ceremony: rare resins like the frankincense and myrrh of the Bible, worth their weight in gold.