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

by Kara Cooney

  Except that it wasn’t. Her nephew and co-king Thutmose III was now thirteen or fourteen years of age and acquiring more knowledge and confidence every day. Hatshepsut’s mother, Ahmes, may have died around this time, leaving her motherless and with no ties to her old life as princess and queen. And her daughter Nefrure would soon grow into a young woman ready to conceive an heir. Changes were coming. Hatshepsut would need to adapt to an extent that she had never imagined when she was scurrying around the royal nurseries as a small girl. Something would soon oblige her to take extraordinary steps with regard to how she depicted her feminine self.

  Enclosed in the protective folds of his cloak in this innovative statue (one of many radically new statue forms that he invented), Senenmut embraces his young charge, the King’s Daughter Nefrure. Senenmut was assigned to act as Nefrure’s tutor, a coveted role he was more than happy to flaunt to his fellow officials. Senenmut knew he couldn’t show himself in Hatshepsut’s sacred presence, but including Nefrure’s image was the next best way to communicate his close relationship with the royal family. And showing Nefrure as a small child granted him the superior position.

  © Trustees of the British Museum

  Striking in its modernity, the multitiered facade of Hatshepsut’s Temple of Millions of Years was positioned majestically in the most dramatic location in western Thebes. It acted as a giant stage for great festivals of divine propitiation, wild celebration, and ritual solemnity. It also linked Hatshepsut’s kingship to accepted traditions, because she built it right next to the funerary temple of Mentuhotep II, the founder of Theban kingship in ancient Egypt hundreds of years before her reign.

  Fly away with your imagination/©2010 Karolina Sus

  Like her father before her, Hatshepsut showed herself as the god Osiris. Here on the facade of her Temple of Millions of Years, she depicted herself with the mummified body and crossed arms of the god of regeneration after death. The first skin color she chose for these statues was yellow ocher, the traditional color of a woman. As time went on, she opted for orange, an androgynous blend. Finally, she decided to fully masculinize her imagery, and the latest statues in the series betray the red ocher of masculinity.

  ©Michelle McMahon via Getty Images

  Hatshepsut practically grew up in the sprawling temple complex dedicated to the god Amen, whom she called her father. When she became king, she dedicated a new chapel, built of deep red quartzite (the first time any king used this expensive stone to build a structure), to house the god’s sacred barque, and placed it immediately in front of the holy and exclusive sanctuary where the god’s statue dwelled. The walls detail her duties and achievements to the god, her coronation, and her ritual activity. The inscriptions record the oracles that marked her as the god’s choice to rule all of Egypt.

  © Kenneth Garrett/National Geographic via Getty Images

  Hatshepsut always took first position in her unorthodox coregency, even though she came to the throne second. Here, the female king and her coregent Thutmose III are in festival procession with the sacred barque of Amen. They are depicted as absolute equals—twins—communicating that both monarchs had the same access to the sacred spirit of kingship.

  © Kenneth Garrett/National Geographic via Getty Images

  This unfinished obelisk was likely produced during Hatshepsut’s dynasty, but after her reign. It was left in the quarry at Aswan after a deep crack developed along the length of the monolith. This is the largest obelisk the Egyptians ever attempted: 42 meters in length, about thirteen stories high. Hatshepsut’s obelisks, at over ten stories in height, came from the same quarries and were products of the same ancient Egyptian engineering techniques that few other civilizations have equaled. All Egyptian obelisks were sheathed (partially or fully) in precious metals.

  © Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Corbis

  Only one of Hatshepsut’s obelisks still stands at Amen’s temple in Karnak. Set up in celebration of her jubilee in year 16, it marked the moment when her kingship moved from carefully calculated audacity to full maturity. She had long since masculinized her images, and her co-king was now a partner in rule, leading Egypt’s armies on campaign. The lengthy text places her unusual kingship within the context of religious ideology, making sure to tell her people that everything she had achieved was the will of her father, the god Amen.

  © Vanni Archive/Corbis

  After her coronation, Hatshepsut’s first moments as king likely took place in a throne room, seated on a raised dais, and she may have looked much like this red granite statue depicting her wearing a traditional, tight-fitting linen sheath dress but also the masculine nemes head cloth of an Egyptian king. The sight must have been strange to behold for all those accustomed to the divine system of masculine kingship.

  Rogers Fund, 1929, Torso lent by Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden (L.1998.80), © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  Early on in her kingship, Hatshepsut attempted to add a layer of masculinity to her feminine forms, and halfway measures resulted in strange androgyny. On this life-size limestone statue from her Temple of Millions of Years, she shows herself without a shirt, wearing only a king’s kilt, but she retains her gracile shoulders, delicate facial features, and even the generous hint of feminine breasts. The statue is shocking in its blend of masculinity and femininity. It is unknown if she ever dressed this way in public rituals or in festival procession.

  Rogers Fund, 1929, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  Eventually, Hatshepsut opted for a fully masculinized image in her statuary, showing herself with wide and strong shoulders, firm pectoral muscles, and no sign of breasts. Even her face is altered: the fuller cheeks and a stronger aquiline nose replaced the Barbie-doll nose of previous portraits. This change in depiction accompanied her own aging process, and we can only wonder how Hatshepsut herself dressed as she got older.

  Rogers Fund, 1928, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  Some twenty years after Hatshepsut’s death, Thutmose III sent chisel bearers throughout the land to remove her name and images from Egypt’s sacred temple monuments. Here, in the heart of Karnak temple, artisans so carefully chiseled out her human form that the shadow of her former kingship still haunts Amen’s temple walls.

  De Agostini Picture Library via Getty Images

  This sketch of Hatshepsut’s key lieutenant, Senenmut, looks quite different from the sweet, childlike face shown on his statuary. These portraits betray not only his age, but perhaps also a hint of his shrewd character. His was not the handsome, banal face we see in formal images, but one carved by lines of age. Many such sketches were found in Senenmut’s burial chamber, and on the back of one is the inscription “a lean hairy rat with massively long whiskers,” maybe referring to the reputation of the man himself and betraying the reason so many of his monuments were destroyed after his death.

  Anonymous gift, 1931, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  With the King’s Daughter Nefrure’s tiny head peeking out of Senenmut’s enfolding garments, this statue communicates warmth, love, and protective embrace; by the same token, this publicly displayed stone block constituted an unmistakable and presumptuous communication to all of Senenmut’s peers that his access to Hatshepsut was unrivaled.

  © Werner Forman/Corbis

  Shown as a queen wearing a king’s crown on this limestone block from the heart of Karnak’s Temple, Hatshepsut audaciously names herself as King of Upper and Lower Egypt and includes her newly granted throne name Maatkare (The Soul of Re Is Truth), all of it, it seems, before the coronation that should grant such divine privileges.

  Block discovered by Henri Chevrier at Karnak Temple in 1933, Luxor Museum, drawing by Deborah Shieh

  In this relief from a limestone temple once erected at Karnak, Hatshepsut is depicted as the God’s Wife of Amen, likely when she was the Great Royal Wife of Thutmose II or at the very beginning of her regency for Thutmose III. Her ideological and political powers were clearly communicated to her people in the image
ry because she stands directly before divinities without the king; she acts as her own mistress. Embraced by the goddess Hathor, she is offered life and power through her nostrils by Seth, god of violent power. Wearing feminine dress and a modius crown, this image was not a target of Thutmose III’s later destruction because here she is not claiming the kingship, only her role as high priestess of Thebes.

  Luc Gabolde, via IFAO

  SEVEN

  The King Becomes a Man

  Around Thutmose III’s fourteenth birthday, some of the wives in his harem were likely beginning to grow with child. Thutmose probably married Nefrure around this time as well. As a King’s Daughter and King’s Sister, Nefrure was expected to join with him and no other man. This union was his sacred duty, as it was her privilege. She was a royal daughter, and their son would be of the purest blood, destined to rule Egypt as his father and grandfather had done before him.

  Hatshepsut’s risky plan to keep the Thutmoside family in power was paying off. Thutmose III had turned out to be a vigorous young man, able not only to sire children, but to participate in military campaigns. Hatshepsut’s reign with Thutmose III included several foreign wars to the south of Egypt,1 and Thutmose III probably accompanied such campaigns. No matter what his precise role at this young age, he was growing into a mighty warrior-king before the eyes of his people.

  There is no evidence that her femininity made Hatshepsut soft toward her traditional enemies. To the contrary: she knew that foreign suppression was Egypt’s lifeblood, a key source of her country’s great wealth. Nubia’s subjugation was not just to Hatshepsut’s advantage as king but to the economic advantage of her military elite. The notion entertained by some Egyptologists2 that she was a pacifist just because she was a woman is simply wrong. Hatshepsut may have traveled personally with her troops to Kush,3 and there was every reason to bring Thutmose along.4 Hatshepsut likely organized four campaigns to Kush, and Thutmose III may have participated in all of them.

  Hatshepsut did not campaign in the north, but that was probably because she was able to maintain active and effective diplomatic connections there. Her father, Thutmose I, had already campaigned in Syria-Palestine, which raised awareness of Egypt’s growing military presence among the kings beyond the Sinai. With no evidence that any kings in northwest Asia decided to become aggressive just because a woman was on the throne, it seems that her gender made little difference in the politics of the region. Egypt’s position in the north, in Syria-Palestine, remained largely unchanged throughout her reign, and Hatshepsut never brought troops there—either because she did not have the strength to do it, or because the mere threat of her military power maintained some tribute payments. Possibly her campaigns to Nubia kept her men busy and rich without the complications of constant war on two fronts. Hatshepsut was smart enough to establish a steady stream of wealth from Nubia and Kerma in the south early in her reign; these were certainly much easier conquests than the urban Syrian centers of Kadesh and Megiddo to the north.

  Hatshepsut knew that it was in Egypt’s and her own best interest for her co-king to be trained as a skilled general. There is reason to believe that she sent Thutmose III to the north of Egypt to learn about the system of border fortresses along the Sinai road and to train with the army at the ancient military stronghold of Perunefer, modern-day Tell el-Daba.5 While he was there, his privileged training and military contacts likely helped him appreciate Egypt’s place in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. He would have met leaders from Babylon, Susa, Phoenicia, Anatolia, Canaan, and Crete. The Egyptians called the Cretans Keftiu and depicted them wearing colorful woolen garments and fabulous high looping hairstyles. In fact, everything Cretan was all the rage in Egypt during Thutmose’s adolescence. Artisans from Crete were invited to the royal palace at Perunefer to create frescoes in the colorful style of their people, and bull-leaping demonstrations were likely incorporated into the royal court entertainment.

  Thutmose III probably met with the ambassadors sent by kings of the city-states of Phoenicia; these kings were much older than he was, and unlike his, their dynastic lines stretched back many generations. Although they held far less territory than Thutmose, the Phoenicians counted as Egypt’s best trading partners. It was a time of possibilities, at the height of Bronze Age globalization and prosperity, and the young king likely watched the lands to the north of Egypt with a calculating eye, weighing the potential benefits of including some of them in an expanding Egyptian empire of his own. None of these northern territories were under Egypt’s control while he was growing up. He would have known, however, that control of Syria-Palestine implied an imperial force to be reckoned with, allowing him to demand tribute from numerous subjugated vassals even farther afield. Perhaps Thutmose recognized that it fell to him to conquer Syria-Palestine and re-create Egypt’s empire in the north. If Hatshepsut felt threatened by her co-king’s ambitions, she did not betray it. Instead, she seems to have welcomed any future improvements of Egypt’s empire and offered him the most sophisticated military training imaginable, even inspiring in him the lofty goal of fulfilling Egypt’s manifest destiny of hegemony over its traditional enemies.6

  Hatshepsut’s young co-king was almost a man. As the king reached fifteen or sixteen years old, we can imagine that his opinions were not only more forcefully expressed but reasoned and educated. His bearing was manly, no longer boyish. He was probably now taller than his female co-king.7 And here Hatshepsut had another problem to put to right, one that good fortune and careful planning had thankfully allowed. It was quickly becoming unseemly for her to stand next to Thutmose III in the senior position during sacred rituals and at court. A woman could outrank a boy but not a man. If she was to continue her dominance in this unequal partnership, something had to change.

  Hatshepsut began experimenting in earnest with how to represent her own sexual identity, negotiating between her actual feminine self and the masculine kingship she inhabited, striving to find a more acceptable way to present her unusual rule. Images from the first years of her reign typically depicted her wearing the long dress of a woman and the crown of a king. At some point, Hatshepsut recognized that this honest and obvious depiction had lost its efficacy. Whether it was in the new context of a young man rather than a boy standing beside her, or some other factor, it seems that ultimately a feminine king was too jarring in the context of this coregency, even to the relatively liberated Egyptian mind. Egyptian female kings were rare, ephemeral, temporary solutions to a political crisis, not a long-lasting ideal.

  In her early twenties, Hatshepsut had already taken the first steps in a manly direction by ordering her craftsmen to add some masculine elements to her feminine figures. They widened her shoulders and extended the stance of her legs, even in figures wearing a queen’s long dress, to give her the active pose of a king striding forth for duty. At this point in her reign, Hatshepsut was probably only conceding to add a masculine veneer to what was, at its core, a visibly feminine depiction of herself.

  Hatshepsut chose the same blended male-female depictions in her statuary; it seems clear that she wanted to retain her female core at first. Her earliest three-dimensional images show a woman wearing a dress but the headgear of a king. Later she showed herself shirtless, ostensibly bare-chested like a man, but her incongruous retention of female breasts on the naked chest makes for a shocking image. The most famous example shows her wearing a masculine kilt and kingly headscarf with a completely bare chest, accentuated by small, but clearly feminine, breasts. The statue’s body shape betrays a slight and slim woman, not the typical strong shoulders of a masculine king. Most Egyptologists doubt that Hatshepsut wandered about the palace in such attire, with her pert breasts bared for all her courtiers to see, and it should come as no surprise that this statue type, such an experiment in hybrid sexuality, was not replicated, nor displayed openly before the populace, but only kept in the innermost rooms of Hatshepsut’s Djeser Djeseru temple, where the mysteries of Hatshepsut’s female
kingship could be appreciated by those intellectual enough to understand it and by the gods who had ordained it.8 This openly feminine representation was deemed too problematic. Soon Hatshepsut would shift all her images to a broad-shouldered man’s body accentuated by strong pectoral muscles and wide shoulders—with no visible breasts.

  Her earliest constructions at her Temple of Millions of Years at Djeser Djeseru show the same combinations of masculine and feminine traits. In the first years of her reign, she commissioned dozens of statues showing herself as Osiris, the mummiform god of rebirth. On the whole, the image was a masculine one: a god with crossed arms with Hatshepsut’s portrait. But a closer look revealed the feminine elements on the earliest such statues: her skin tone was rendered in the yellow traditionally employed to depict an elite woman who stayed indoors, not the deep red ocher of a man who was part of the wider world. Her face included feminine aspects, too, such as a small smiling mouth and a delicate, heart-shaped visage with a dainty chin.

  Ultimately, such a frank combination of fine womanly features on Osiris’s figure seems to have been insupportable, and Hatshepsut had to further masculinize the next series of images. The ensuing Osiris statues at Deir el-Bahri were painted with both yellow and red pigment, resulting in a strange hybrid orange skin color—not at all a part of the established color scheme for Egyptian art. The statue faces were carved with new masculine features, including a stronger chin, nose, and brow. This image was more in line with expectations, but Hatshepsut still made an undeniable attempt to retain some femininity. One can almost feel the underlying anxiety on her part, an uncertainty about how she should look to please the gods and her people, how much of her own self she could show and how much she had to transform. She may have been king, the most powerful person in the ancient world, but beliefs and expectations greater than she was forced her to perform unending ideological gymnastics to satisfy the sacred role. In the end, Hatshepsut had no choice but to change her outward appearance.