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

by Kara Cooney

  He found her taking her pleasure in the harem of her palace. She awoke because of the fragrance of the god. She smiled at his majesty. And he went right up to her, desiring her and loving her. He let her see him in his form of a god, after which he came with her. She was exultant at seeing his beauties, and love of him overtook her body. The palace was flooded with the fragrance of the god, all his pleasant odors from Punt […] The majesty of this god did all that he wanted with regard to her. She placed his body upon hers. She kissed him.18

  In a later scene, the pregnant Ahmes walks calmly to the birthing room for her labor. When the baby is born, her royal spirit accompanies her. This spark of divinity was what allowed her to rule, and Hatshepsut claims in this account that the royal spirit had always been with her, from her first moment of existence in her mother’s womb.

  Egyptologists once thought that Hatshepsut was the first to depict such a divine birth mythology and that she had created it expressly to justify her extraordinary female kingship, but we now know that Hatshepsut was adapting older narratives of divine connection for her own use.19 She was placing herself in the culturally accepted framework manipulated by Egyptian kings for millennia and explaining how her kingship was indeed a miracle blessed by the gods.

  Also probably derived from older forms were claims that when her father, Thutmose I, was still alive, he had personally introduced her to his courtiers when she was just a child and told them that he had chosen her to rule and selected her royal names himself. A similar narrative survives relating to Ramses II, thus suggesting that such a “presentation” formed part of the usual rituals of nominating an heir to the throne. One wonders if Hatshepsut did indeed attend such a ceremony before her father died—but one at which one of her brothers received his nomination as heir instead.

  Hatshepsut never claimed that Thutmose II’s kingship did not happen, but in her stone monuments with their inscribed histories, she simply ignored her dead husband’s existence and made her link to kingship directly through her father, claiming that she was king in the eyes of the gods even before that kingship was officially recognized by the populace. It was a claim of predestination, a fait accompli from the moment of her conception. Some historians have viewed Hatshepsut’s justification for her kingship as a bald fabrication and the manufacture of ideological fiction to support her selfish whims. However, if viewed from a more practical real-world perspective of Egyptian divine power, Hatshepsut was only recording the political realities and responsibilities with which she had been saddled since childhood. She was relaying a great mystery to her courtiers: a child could be chosen to rule even before it had formally been named king; a girl could contain the royal spirit; and, in her current situation, a woman could be named king alongside a boy. When Hatshepsut celebrated her Sed festival eight years after she officially took the throne, she created a significant vehicle to display and communicate this foreordained kingship.

  Perhaps we should accept that Hatshepsut was intent on telling her unusual story as she knew it to be. She must have truly believed that her father had chosen her to be king and that the gods had placed her in the position of saving her family dynasty. Or maybe, in her mind, the faith her father had placed in her when she was named God’s Wife of Amen and Great Wife of Thutmose II was akin to his personally appointing her for great authority.

  Hatshepsut’s glorification of Thutmose I was an essential tool in her redefinition of her kingship. He was still remembered as the king who pulled Egypt out of a defensive, survivalist mind-set and back toward the riches of expansionist empire building. Any prominence afforded to Thutmose II instead might encourage people to ask why Hatshepsut, wife to a dead king, was still on the throne when that king’s son was successful, vigorous, and able. Albeit now dwelling in the afterlife, Thutmose I was the only linchpin who had ostensibly marked Hatshepsut as chosen by the gods. The fact that Thutmose I was dead made no difference to the Egyptians. As a king reborn, his deified spirit was now more powerful than ever, able to carry good fortune and messages back from the source of creation to the living world. Hatshepsut capitalized on her place as chief communicator with this divinized spirit and built a temple dedicated to him within her Djeser Djeseru temple, where cult activity inside paid homage to a sacred living statue channeling his powers.

  Hatshepsut now styled herself not only as the heir of her superhuman father, Thutmose I, but also as the divine offspring of Amen-Re, King of All the Gods, everywhere that she could—on her obelisks, on her sacred shrine at Karnak, on her new pylon gateway at Karnak, and at her funerary temple of Djeser Djeseru. This was no different from what other kings did, but Hatshepsut’s plan was more concentrated on the powers of the sun god than earlier examples. She definitively linked her kingship to the worship of Re in all his manifestations. She erected more pairs of red granite obelisks in Karnak Temple than any known Egyptian king, all of them partly covered with electrum (beaten silver-gold sheets that were attached to the top halves of the monoliths). In fact, Hatshepsut’s devotion to the Egyptian solar cult was something that later New Kingdom monarchs would model and follow,20 and for good reason. Association with Egypt’s powerful solar rays granted the king a new and impressive public display in temple spaces. When the early morning or late afternoon sun hit these colossal objects, they were thought to channel the powers of the sun god over her graven images on each obelisk and into the core of Karnak Temple, pulling the solar divine essence into the temple where the god’s statues dwelled. On these obelisks, Hatshepsut associated herself with the rising sun as “the one who has forms like Khepri (scarab beetle representative of dawn sun), who rises like Horakhty (Horus of the Horizon, representative of noon sun), pure egg, splendid seed, whom the Two Magicians nursed; the one whom Amen himself made appear on the throne of Southern Heliopolis (Thebes).”21 In public ceremonies, Hatshepsut may have appeared between her obelisk pairs when they shone in the most dramatic and blinding sunlight, displaying herself as a golden god to her people, an offspring of divinity, a superhuman being like her father. If she appeared between these obelisks as a man, complete with kilt, beard, wig, and crown, holding her crooks and staves, her gender transformation could be considered blessed and facilitated by the sun god himself.

  When she wasn’t claiming to be a god with solar manifestations, she styled herself as a sun priest who welcomed, worshipped, and aided the sun god’s many forms, calling herself “the one who knows”—the only human capable of fathoming and facilitating the sun’s mysteries. She modeled her family’s native city of Thebes on the ancient city of Heliopolis, up north, building obelisks and associating her worship of Amen with the sun god Atum-Re.22 Heliopolis was believed to be where the world was first created. Hatshepsut was turning her beloved hometown of Thebes into an originator of creation itself. And everywhere we see her ability to connect with divinity in a way that normal human beings could not. At Djeser Djeseru, she created an open-air altar to the sun god with texts expressing her ability to join the solar orb as he traveled through the day and night sky. Spells that granted Hatshepsut authority over time itself and allowed her to rise and set with the sun for eternity were carved into the walls, including one example in which Hatshepsut joins the ranks of the solar baboons, who were believed to speak the secret language of the sun god, greeting his triumphant movements through night and day. She likely chanted the following in Egyptian:

  “The baboons who announce Re, when this great god is born at the sixth hour of the underworld. They appear for him only after they have taken on their form. They are at both sides of this god and appear to him until he takes his place in heaven. They dance for him and leap in the air. They sing for him, make music and create ‘joyful sound.’ ”23

  Because Hatshepsut was such a force to be reckoned with, we often have to remind ourselves that she never ruled alone. At the jubilee celebration, her co-king, Thutmose III, would have been roughly seventeen years old. He had come of age, and the Sed festival would have been the best w
ay for Hatshepsut to formally include him in the kingship as an active power. Even if Hatshepsut had tried to remove Thutmose III from the throne during the early years or, at the very least, ignored his existence, she could no longer behave this way. After the jubilee, the coregency was openly acknowledged and celebrated in monuments around Egypt. This Sed festival elevated the status of Thutmose III at the same time that Hatshepsut cemented her image as a masculine king. It may actually have represented an open acknowledgment and acceptance of real joint rule, with Thutmose III now responsible for decision making in the temple and palace.

  Hatshepsut knew how to put on a good show. She went out of her way to create the most expensive, time-consuming, and innovative stone temples Egypt had ever seen as a backdrop for her jubilee. All around Thebes, construction projects commissioned at the start of her reign were nearing completion. At Karnak, she created the first monumental sandstone structure in Egypt: a massive pylon (the eighth), connecting Amen’s temple with the axis of the temples of Mut and Luxor, that was 21 meters high, almost 48 meters wide, and 10 meters thick—so broad that a staircase fit inside.24 The first of the enormous pylons built on the north-south avenue of festival movement, it probably replaced the previous mud-brick version. Just next to her funerary temple she constructed a chapel to the goddess Hathor that played a part in both the Valley Festival and her Sed festival. Hathor was a cow goddess, mistress of the western mountain, simultaneously mother and daughter of the sun god, a violent protector of the king, and goddess of sexuality and beauty. On some of the column capitals, Hatshepsut carved images of herself as a masculine king running in the Sed festival ritual race. These images follow the main temple axis, which suggests that Hatshepsut actually performed some of those running rituals here before the goddess. Other scenes show Hatshepsut interacting with the cow goddess directly, and it is even possible that Hatshepsut visited a worldly manifestation of the goddess Hathor in animal form as a cow here or somewhere nearby. One image shows the sacred animal licking the hand of the enthroned king; in another, a male Hatshepsut kneels underneath the cow goddess’s udders and drinks the divine milk promised only to kings. Hathor was thought to be the mother of the sun god, and to show Hatshepsut suckling from her was to show the king feeding from divinity itself as the predestined son of Re.

  At the nearby small temple at Medinet Habu on the west bank,25 Hatshepsut built a shrine for the eight gods of precreation, male-female pairs of divinities representing darkness, infinity, primeval matter, and hiddenness. Hatshepsut knew the importance of the site. (In Dynasty 20, Ramses III would choose the same location for his grand funerary temple in an attempt to connect with the festival locality.) The god Amen, hiddenness itself, was thought to be buried here in his sexualized form, full of potentiality for new creation of himself and the world. One rite depicted at this sacred burial spot shows Hatshepsut embracing the statue of a god with a massive erect penis. She had to lean in from a distance so as not to come into contact with his enormous manhood peeking out of the god’s mummiform wrappings. For the Egyptians, such an embrace was not sexual, but channeled prosperity through the king by facilitating the king’s connection with the god Amen.

  Back across the river in the realm of Karnak Temple, Hatshepsut paid homage to another ferocious and beautiful goddess: Mut, Mistress of Isheru and consort to the god Amen-Re. A series of sandstone column drums recently uncovered bear the inscription: “[She made it as a monument for her mother Mut] Mistress of Isheru, making for her a columned porch of drunkenness anew, so that she might do [as] one who is given life [forever].” Hatshepsut built a stone portico for an extraordinary ritual during the Valley Festival in which a ferocious and bloodthirsty goddess was given beer colored with red pigment. Rituals encouraged the goddess Mut to drink what she thought was the blood of Egypt’s rebels until her violent temper was calmed. Her worshippers drank alongside the goddess during this feast, purposefully becoming so inebriated that they passed out in the temple space or engaged in sexual activity amid the sounds of priests and priestesses singing and dancing for the goddess.26 There is even the suggestion that the beer was laced with opium, which gave the participants a mystical, hallucinogenic connection with the goddess.27 The entire ritual was meant to break down the barriers of normal human behavior, which would allow divinity to creep into the world and pave the way for the god’s release in the form of the great Nile flood. Hatshepsut built a stone temple (ostensibly tearing down the old mud-brick structure that was there previously) to facilitate Mut’s appearance on the porch of drunkenness—calm, propitiated, sexualized, and beautiful.

  Hatshepsut and her co-king would have been very busy during such state festivals. The offering of the god’s meal was especially time-consuming and tedious on the great feast days. They presented dozens of different foods and drinks to the god’s statue in the right order accompanied by the correct invocations to strengthen him. Other rituals were more challenging and probably required some training. In one rite, the king had to sprint before the god while holding two tall vases for libations. In another, the king had to dash about holding two heavy ship’s oars in each hand. Another ritual had the king driving four live calves before the god Amen in his erect manifestation. The king had to perform all of these rituals while wearing unwieldy and awkward headgear and holding royal instruments, with the ever-present bull’s tail hanging between his legs. If Thutmose was available, Hatshepsut may have asked him to perform the more athletic rituals.

  Hatshepsut’s jubilee preparations gave her old cohort Senenmut even more opportunity to display his close connection to his mistress, because as new temples were ordered, he always found a way to fit himself into the building program. At Hatshepsut’s Djeser Djeseru temple, Senenmut commissioned dozens of small carved images of himself on the walls hidden behind door leaves or in other overlooked places, an act that shocks modern Egyptologists, and presumably shocked the ancient Egyptians, with its audacity. For a private person to inject his own personal presence into some of the most sacred locations in Egypt seems somehow underhanded and immoral. The carving of his name and image in these temples was an extraordinary and unprecedented privilege unlike anything other officials had ever claimed from a king before.

  There is no evidence that Senenmut was Hatshepsut’s lover, but he was certainly someone who was able to ask for unparalleled dispensations, and this set him apart from her other supporters. Always part lawyer and part entrepreneur, he seems to have foreseen our consternation and made sure to state in the accompanying inscriptions that Hatshepsut gave him explicit permission to carve himself into her temples. Even his tomb chapel copied the tiered facade of his mistress’s funerary temple, Djeser Djeseru, and was located at the top of a steep slope with one of the finest views in the necropolis, meant to be the culmination of his own mini–festival procession at his eventual death. His massive stone sarcophagus was made of the yellow quartzite stone used, as far as we know, only by royalty. It precisely matched the style, design, and workmanship of Hatshepsut’s own final sarcophagus (she commissioned three as her career progressed). As time passed, there would be repercussions to Senenmut’s boldness.

  Depictions of Hatshepsut’s daughter Nefrure on her mother’s now-extensive temple reliefs or stelae show her to be one of her dynasty’s most significant royal women.28 Images of Nefrure focus on her priestess duties as God’s Wife of Amen more than her role as King’s Wife to Thutmose III. The details of Nefrure’s life are almost impossible to elucidate because someone would later attack her name and images, viciously removing almost all trace of her from the many temples and shrines created during this period. Many of these monuments displaying a queen of Thutmose III were later recarved, but some traces of a name underneath—maybe Nefrure’s—remain. If nothing else, circumstantial evidence points to a marriage between Thutmose III and Nefrure.29 For Nefrure, it was likely a decision between marriage to Thutmose III or spinsterhood. She probably had no real choice at all.

  Because she w
as erased from a number of monuments, Nefrure’s history is fragmentary, but generations of Egyptological detective work have given us the veiled outlines of her life. The story may go something like this: Nefrure was married to her brother Thutmose III (in the Egyptian sense—that is, for procreation). Nefrure was his highest-ranking wife. Her life story mirrored that of her mother, Hatshepsut, who was also God’s Wife as a young girl and then Great Wife to her own half brother, Thutmose II. Hatshepsut and courtiers alike hoped that Nefrure would be blessed with a strong and healthy son so that she could someday gain the title King’s Mother and avoid all the dynastic trouble that had been plaguing the court since the early death of Thutmose II.

  We also know that Nefrure was put into the strange position of acting as her own mother’s wife, at least for ritual purposes, in temple rites and in public processions.30 Perhaps it was even Hatshepsut who forbid any inscriptions calling Nefrure King’s Great Wife because she needed the girl for her own political purposes. It would make sense that Hatshepsut, as senior king, would want to play down Nefrure’s union to Thutmose III, thus highlighting her own connection with the God’s Wife. We are left with a very interesting situation: if Nefrure was married to Thutmose III, and there is good reason to believe that she was, then she was also acting as wife to her mother simultaneously, at least for ritual events. Poor Thutmose III: he had to share absolutely everything with his aunt Hatshepsut, even his own Great Royal Wife.

  If this was the reality, the royal family formed a unique political ménage à trois—aunt and nephew both tied to the same girl who, when acting as a consort in either a ritual or a spousal sense, was daughter to one and sister to the other. Nefrure probably had no illusions about her own importance as the only living princess born to Thutmose II and Hatshepsut. She was a key player for both monarchs: she allowed her mother to have a highborn King’s Daughter playing the female role in temple rituals and gave her brother the opportunity to produce offspring of pure royal blood. Nefrure had become the bearer of sacred female sexuality in the royal palace in every sense.