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

by Kara Cooney

  All the evidence suggests that Hatshepsut’s transformation toward masculinity was a process, not a sudden event, squarely in line with her modus operandi in claiming the kingship. It seems she opportunistically waited for the precise moment to move toward masculinity in her imagery. Just as her transition to kingship was careful and calculated, she did not suddenly appear as a man before her people or in her art. Hatshepsut only went as far as was needed at the time. She constantly negotiated ways to stay in power, and in this case she did whatever it took—eventually showing herself not as a female ruler or a strange hybrid, but simply as a man.

  Hatshepsut did not manipulate her depictions because she lacked manly courage in leading military campaigns or because she was losing the confidence of her generals. Hatshepsut had no problem with subjugating enemies, destroying rebels, and extending the borders of Egypt, and there is no evidence to suggest that her political clout was fading. Hatshepsut’s ongoing gender shifts thus seem to have had little to do with realpolitik or external political pressures and must have been motivated by deeper understandings of kingship and, in particular, her relationship with her co-king.

  Whom did the changes in representation serve? The modifications probably appealed less to Hatshepsut than to others. She began her reign showing her sex, and this first imagery may have been her truest inclination. As the years went on, however, we see doubt creeping in. Her masculinization does not seem to appeal to any narcissistic desire on the part of Hatshepsut, some inner need to claim all aspects of masculine rule no matter the costs. Instead, she was obliging the ritual needs of her gods and allowing a precious and tenuously balanced co-kingship to continue without shaming the junior partner. She was fitting herself to her co-king’s changing agenda. Hatshepsut’s makeover has as much to do with Thutmose III as with anybody else. He no longer needed a motherly figure to watch over him—in life or in temple imagery. Now that he was older, Hatshepsut had to remake herself into something that did not threaten his authority or legitimacy. The public may have demanded her alterations; ideology certainly did. Thutmose III himself may have insisted on it as well, although we cannot know definitively. Because there was no mechanism in place for Hatshepsut to produce the next heir (the question of with whom being the greatest problem), the continuation of her dynasty now depended on Thutmose III’s growing cooperation and acceptance of this ongoing rule.9

  With no mention of her makeover in ancient texts, we have only her changing depictions to tell the story. Hatshepsut soon decided to go all in. As time went on, her images were completely masculinized in face and body, which suggests that even in real life she may have worn a king’s kilt and either bound her breasts or included no shirt at all, at least during temple rituals. Hatshepsut could not force Egyptian kingship to fit her unconventional gender; instead, she had to conform to its sacred tenets. This was not a woman who demanded that the system mold itself to her. All the evidence shows an unusual monarch who continuously fretted about and experimented with her place in the world. Masculinity was a key component of Egyptian kingship, and step by step, as her years of royal authority accrued, she concealed her feminine aspects until there was almost no woman left, except in the sacred texts alongside the pictures that continued referring to “she” and “her.”

  Only in these labels, hieroglyphic texts associated with her depictions, do we see a stubborn refusal to give up her feminine self; she decided on a confusing combination of masculine and feminine markers in the accompanying inscriptions so that sometimes she was called “he” and sometimes “she.” She was on occasion entitled “Son of Re” but more often called “Daughter of Re.” Occasionally she was labeled the “good god,” but in most places, even next to an image that was totally masculine, she was the “good goddess.” Usually Hatshepsut was named with a masculine Horus bird, but sometimes she even feminized this divine element, creating an extraordinary, unprecedented, and abstract feminine version of the god Horus, thus turning herself into a female heir to the gods.

  One title that she never feminized was King of Upper and Lower Egypt, which in Egyptian literally translates as “He Who Belongs to the Sedge Plant and the Bee,” with the sedge being emblematic of Upper Egypt and the bee of Lower Egypt. Likely it was considered too theologically fraught to feminize such an archaic royal title. When Hatshepsut bore this label at the beginning of her reign, she always included some masculine elements in her depiction, even if it was only a king’s wig and headgear. As her kingship continued, she accompanied the title King of Upper and Lower Egypt with a fully masculine figure.

  In inscriptions from Hatshepsut’s reign, we also see a new use of the word for palace (per-aa, which meant “great house”) in association with the king’s authority. This way of referring to the king as “the palace” would later be taken up in the Bible as “pharaoh,” but perhaps Hatshepsut’s advisers created the new meaning expressly to create an easy way out of a complicated situation in which no one knew which king in this strange coregency was responsible for which message or which opinion. Or perhaps Hatshepsut herself invented the new meaning to veil her femininity.

  Her given name, Hatshepsut, was more of a problem when it came to her masculine transformation: “the Foremost of Noble Women” was not an easy name to masculinize. Nonetheless, Hatshepsut and her advisers had already hit upon an ingenious solution. Just after her accession, she had added the phrase “the One United with Amen” to her birth name. When Hatshepsut said she was “united” with Amen, she meant that she had actually joined her feminine self with his essence, taking on Amen’s aspects of divinity, his mind, his intentions, and even, to some extent, his abilities. This particular name modification also suggests that Hatshepsut did not undergo her gender transformation manipulatively or cynically, but piously. It is quite possible that she actually believed Amen had allowed her to transcend her own human body to become an entity greater than herself. In fact, Hatshepsut actually feminized the word khenem, “to unite,” in her inscriptions by adding a -t, so that her name read “Hatshepsut the Female One Who Unites with Amen.”

  She had already found an intellectual solution for her feminine kingship that was much more elegant than just putting on masculine garb. The texts betrayed Hatshepsut’s femininity even when the associated images showed her as a man. It is almost as if she knew the sacred inscriptions had to carry her true nature, while her depictions could cloak and transform it when necessary. Just as she did during her regency when she was depicted as God’s Wife but referred to herself as a ruler in the text, Hatshepsut was broadcasting different messages to different sets of people. To those elites who could read hieroglyphic text and participate in complex theological discourse, she presented the full complexity of gender-ambiguous kingship. There was no need to hide her feminine self from these learned men and women anyway because of their close access to her and her palace. But for the common man or woman who could not read and who might not understand such academic explanations, Hatshepsut presented a simplified and unassailable image of idealized and youthful masculine kingship. For them, she became what everyone expected to see—a strong man able to protect Egypt’s borders and a virile king able to build temples and perform the cult rituals for the gods.

  Hatshepsut was a realist at her very core, a negotiator. Despite the innovations implicit in her very existence as a ruler, she does not seem to have been a romantic idealist willing to break rules and destroy relationships just to forward her own interests. She masculinized herself when expectations for it were insurmountable. And she never tried officially, before god and all the people of Egypt, to remove Thutmose III from the throne. She always, throughout her whole reign, ruled with him, alongside him, not instead of him. Her monuments and images may have ignored his existence when he was a young child, but through all of that indecision about how to proceed, Hatshepsut never attempted to rule on her own, in her own right. This woman had learned that she couldn’t change the system; she had to work with it. Thutmose III’s ma
nhood could have been perceived as a threat to her kingship, but only if she had intended to have it all for herself. Apparently Hatshepsut was skilled enough to see the eventuality of Thutmose III’s coming adulthood, and there’s every reason to believe that she engineered this situation so that Thutmose III could become an asset to her rather than competition. This was the way that Hatshepsut worked. Thutmose III the infant king had lived, against all odds, saving the Thutmoside line. She modified herself partly to fit his growing abilities—because, one day, his son would carry on her proud legacy.

  Now that her cohort was ready to become a full partner, Hatshepsut hit upon an age-old strategy to cement her new role with Thutmose III: the oldest festival in the Egyptian arsenal, the Sed festival, a rare renewal of kingship that occurred only after thirty years of continuous rule.10 Preparations including extensive temple construction were ordered years in advance of a king’s jubilee. Courtiers and villagers alike would receive gifts of the king’s favor. The royal palaces spent inordinate amounts of money brewing beer and fermenting wine from their vineyards. It would be a time of ongoing revelry and celebration. Most Egyptian kings did not reign long enough to celebrate a jubilee; indeed, none of Hatshepsut’s or Thutmose III’s subjects could remember a jubilee in their lifetime. But Hatshepsut was going forward with the Sed festival, even though she had only ruled for fifteen years as regent and king. Granted, the timing was off. But she probably needed the legitimacy of the Sed now, and she may have engaged in some tricky calculations to justify such an early date for her jubilee: Hatshepsut combined the thirteen or so years of her father’s reign with the two to three years of her husband’s with the seven years of her regency on behalf of Thutmose III with the seven years of her own reign as king, which totaled thirty years, the ideal and traditional number.11 Her Sed festival was thus held at the thirty-year anniversary of Thutmose I’s accession. Hatshepsut marked thirty years of Thutmoside rule with the biggest celebration Egypt had seen in generations.12 She organized the jubilee not just for herself but for her family’s lineage and her place in it. Hatshepsut’s Sed festival was part of a larger political agenda.

  Hatshepsut’s jubilee still confuses Egyptologists: many think that her claim to a Sed festival is a fabrication manufactured to support an illegitimate kingship or that her inscriptions could be interpreted as the hope to celebrate a jubilee in the future, not as a record of actual festivities.13 But if we take her at her word, this Sed festival becomes another part of Hatshepsut’s innovative methodology of maintaining balance in an unprecedented kingship and publicly claiming god-given providence within it. If nothing else, the decision to hold a jubilee was a clever political move.

  The Sed festival rituals themselves must have been long and overwrought affairs, their archaic incantations barely understandable to the New Kingdom public: never-ending processions of divine standards, which showed that the many gods and geographical regions of Egypt supported the king’s rule; presentation of dozens of different garments, crowns, staffs, and weapons, which invested the king with their nuanced and varied kinds of sacred power; and the formal seating on the thrones of both Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, which demonstrated the king’s ability to unify these different lands. Rituals of running displayed the king’s renewed energy, and both Hatshepsut and Thutmose III would have had to sprint in distinctive races while holding a variety of strange and ritually charged objects, such as vases, live birds, oars, rudders, document chests, staffs, and flails. One scene even shows Hatshepsut running alongside the sacred Apis bull as if in a sacred rodeo. Hatshepsut’s celebrations also included the erection of another pair of obelisks.14

  During the jubilee, the king was the lead actor in a complex and sacred stage production that continued for weeks, if not months, and required a number of supporters. It seems the ever-present Senenmut performed the duties of the “stolist” of Horus, a title denoting the purification and adornment of statues and even of the king herself, a title he was proud enough to incise onto multiple statues. He was also named as the One Who Covered the Double Crown with Red Linen,15 which suggests that he was part of the coronation rituals and handled the sacred crowns before and after they were placed on the head of the king.

  Hatshepsut’s inscriptions plainly state that she celebrated the Sed in year 16 of her joint rule, and all the evidence tells us that she spent massive amounts of capital in preparation for the sacred rituals before her people and her gods. She ordered new temple structures at Karnak, including a massive gateway of stone (later called the eighth pylon by Egyptologists) of a size that had never been seen before in an Egyptian temple. She had already commissioned another pair of obelisks from the Aswan granite quarries to be set up at Karnak Temple. And she had now finished most of her Temple of Millions of Years. It was an astounding building program for any king, let alone an aberrant female one.

  The Egyptian Sed festival was traditionally seen as a renewal of kingship for an old monarch who needed a fresh start, a kind of religious tune-up to placate the gods and the people. The Sed’s sacred rituals were conventionally meant to lend the king new youthful vigor and, by placing crowns upon his head, to demonstrate the god’s support for the kingship. Hatshepsut innovated and used these ancient rituals to take on a fixed royal masculinity; after the Sed festival, no temple image ever shows her as a woman. She had left that part of herself behind. In her imagery, she had become the son of Thutmose I.16

  With this Sed festival, Hatshepsut tells us something about how she perceived her place in the world—that she had indeed been the power behind the thrones of both her husband-brother, Thutmose II, and her nephew, Thutmose III. Historical records verify that Hatshepsut’s rule of Egypt was quickly established at Thutmose II’s death; thus she likely did exercise real authority before that king died. But we learn something else: by celebrating this jubilee at this time, she was also linking her rule to her father’s in a way she had not done explicitly before. She was essentially claiming a coregency with him, telling her people that his years of kingship, and his successes, were hers as well. The Sed festival therefore redefined her in the guise of her father, Thutmose I, designating her as his true heir.

  It should come as no surprise that it was in year 16 of her joint rule with Thutmose III that Hatshepsut began to change the story of her kingship by leaning less on her dead husband and concentrating instead on a new narrative: that her father had chosen her to rule alongside him during his lifetime and after his death, in the tradition of the father-son coregencies of old. If her jubilee did nothing else, it demonstrated to her people, particularly to her courtiers and elites, that Thutmose I was the reason she occupied this throne. For the first time, Hatshepsut claimed that she was the rightful successor as the eldest child of Thutmose I, essentially pushing her husband-brother, Thutmose II, out of the picture entirely and giving herself a clean linear succession. While depicting herself as a son, not a daughter, to Thutmose I, and wearing a king’s kilt, beard, and wig, she used the jubilee to redefine her person to fit the patriarchal system of succession alongside Thutmose III.

  Hatshepsut also modified the jubilee to remake her public image as a father figure to Thutmose III. Styled as a man in formal depictions and rituals, she now pivoted 180 degrees from her start as his regent and mother figure when he was a toddler king. The jubilee cemented her role as the senior king in a royal partnership, thereby creating the foundation for further rule in the next generation, as a father would do for his son, and as she claims Thutmose I did for her. Hatshepsut used the festival to maintain her closer ties to the patriarch of their Thutmoside line; after the jubilee, Thutmose III was linked to his grandfather Thutmose I through Hatshepsut, as her heir. She was doing her best to safeguard her family’s legacy by bringing up a co-king from infancy, training him in ritual and war, and, ostensibly, marrying him to her daughter to create an heir. The jubilee demonstrated that Hatshepsut and Thutmose III were not only useful but also necessary to each other. Knowing that she would no
t rule forever and that Thutmose III would someday be king alone, Hatshepsut was investing her energy in precisely defining the nature of her dynasty, for her co-king and for future Thutmoside kings. Her unusual and aberrant rise to power instantly fit into a classic, well-established mold of continuous royal stability.

  But Hatshepsut was not martyring herself for the good of her dynasty; she used her Sed festival to broadcast the miraculousness of her own strange kingship by publishing a number of narratives after the jubilee. Craftsmen carved them onto the stone walls of her temples in sacred areas beyond the public gateways, locations to which only elites would have access. One of these royal narratives, already quite ancient before Hatshepsut included it in her program of jubilee decoration, recounted her divine conception and birth in picture and text.17 It supported the well-accepted mythology that the king’s body and soul derived from the god’s essence, claiming that Hatshepsut’s authority was predestined even before her physical creation. In this narrative, the god Amen-Re is shown visiting the bedchamber of Hatshepsut’s mother, Ahmes. The moment of Hatshepsut’s conception is sweetly and benignly depicted as god and wife sitting across from one another touching hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. Their meeting is more evocative in the text: