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

by Kara Cooney

  A few circumstantial clues point to tensions during the later years of Hatshepsut’s reign. Carved repeatedly at her temple of Djeser Djeseru is the phrase “he who shall do her homage shall live, he who shall speak evil in blasphemy of her Majesty shall die.”16 This statement is not typically found on a New Kingdom funerary temple, leading us to wonder what criticisms people were actually whispering about Hatshepsut’s reign. Despite such a warning, there is no evidence that Hatshepsut killed any of her officials for noncompliance. To the contrary, the fact that Nefrure’s names may have been replaced during Hatshepsut’s reign indicates that she was not able to get her way all the time, and that she may have bent to the will of the majority who longed for traditional models of kingship.

  There can be no doubt that Hatshepsut’s unprecedented power came at a price, literally, and during her reign officials were well compensated, spending more money on conspicuous displays of statuary and tombs than during any previous period in the New Kingdom. The number and size of the elites’ tomb chapels in western Thebes testify to the rapid uptick in wealth among her officials, riches they could only have earned under her watch. Officials commissioned numerous temple statues of themselves and competed with one another for the most unusual and impressive tomb chapel paintings and secret religious inscriptions.17 To be sure, Hatshepsut ruled over a time of prosperity and expansion for Egypt, but this boom of nonroyal construction represented something more. The elites understood the unusual nature of the current kingship, as well as the affluence of the nation’s financial situation; they combined the two to create a perfect recipe for their personal enrichment, one that verged on bureaucratic blackmail. This new breed of king was dependent upon their approval, and collectively they seem to have taken advantage of their clout, asking for more tombs, more statues, more sacred texts—more than previous officials ever felt they could demand. These men formulated new rules of style and convention and reveled in their creativity and one-upmanship.18 Hatshepsut likely created her own monsters—nobles she bought off and had to keep compensating and elevating.19

  Luckily for Hatshepsut, Egypt’s current state of prosperity could support such payoffs to loyal men. Without gold from Nubia and the Eastern Desert, sacred stones from her quarries, turquoise from the Sinai, cedar from Lebanon, ebony from sub-Saharan Africa, electrum from the Eastern Desert, ivory, and panther skins from Punt, stores of grain from rich harvests, and trade with Phoenicians and Cretans of the Aegean, it is unlikely that Hatshepsut ever could have gained as much power as she did. She did not create her position as female king through bullying or charm; she bought it.

  Hatshepsut also commodified her ability to talk to the gods. Many officials had their pious monarch painted into their tomb chapels because she could speak to divinity on their behalf.20 These “loyalist” depictions provide some clue as to the coercions and inducements that transpired during Hatshepsut’s reign, implying that there was something material and political to be gained from having a figure of Hatshepsut in one’s tomb and that an individual would thrive from showing the king such respect and demonstrate his favored status at court. There is no evidence that any officials refused to display such loyalty or, on the other end of the spectrum, that they were compelled to do so by force or threat; rather, it seems an oft-deployed tactic, and royally bestowed honor, to win and keep the king’s favor. Her officials knew that they needed to stay on her good side, or at the very least everyone was happy to ride the gravy train and toe the line.

  For her part, Hatshepsut seemed eager to stay in the gods’ good graces. The empire was growing—extending from parts of Palestine to the Fourth Cataract of the Nile in modern-day Sudan—and its products were designated by Hatshepsut to be the gods’ bounty. Prisoners of war were plentiful, and the institution of slavery had recently been revived as a more significant part of the Egyptian economy. Spoils from the campaigns in Kerma had been extensive.21 Egypt was so prosperous that temples of mud brick, which had previously been periodically rebuilt when the unbaked bricks denuded, were now being constructed entirely of stone. Now, instead of growing vertically as time went on, temples grew horizontally in giant sprawls of stone, at Hatshepsut’s command. With each passing reign, kings continued to add structures and elements to Karnak Temple, eventually turning it into the largest surviving religious complex in the world.

  It is a happy coincidence that Thebes, the best-preserved site for archaeology, was also Hatshepsut’s ancestral home, her most favored holy city, and the focus of most of her building projects. Elite families swirled about in a cheerful concoction of co-option and payoffs; they endorsed Hatshepsut’s nontraditional coregency because it benefited them in the here and now, but ostensibly had no intention of continuing such female kingships in the future. However, during her reign, her courtiers were more than happy to bow to her demands in exchange for jewels, tombs, statues, homes, livestock, lands, and the marriage of their daughters to her male counterpart, the junior king. She communicated her message to her elites—through endless reliefs and obelisks, through her trading expedition to Punt, through celebrations such as the Valley Festival, the Opet festival, the Sed festival—and it was a simple one: I am god, and thus I am also money. Follow me, and you will be rich.

  Many men did follow her. Hapuseneb, the First High Priest of Amen, did not even feel compelled to include the image or name of Thutmose III in his tomb, keeping all his displays of loyalty to Hatshepsut alone.22 Senenmut also focused on his service to Hatshepsut and was allowed to have his image carved into many of her temples, thus displaying to everyone his intimate level of access.23 Her vizier Useramen was granted the privilege of the secret incantations from the Amduat for his burial chamber, a text that the kings after Hatshepsut jealously reserved only for their own use. 24

  It was time for Hatshepsut to prepare for her own final end in the eternal west, and she opted for the grandeur and innovation that we’ve come to expect from the female king. She had long ago abandoned her tomb as King’s Daughter and King’s Wife in the inconspicuous Wadi Sikkat Taka el-Zeida, choosing instead to be buried as a king in the majestic royal cemetery established by her father, Thutmose I. Not only did she follow him to the hidden Valley of the Kings, but in keeping with her father’s creative example, she also separated her tomb from her funerary temple; each was built in a different Theban location. Until the late Seventeenth Dynasty, kings had buried themselves in richly marked graves that were usually topped with gold-capped pyramids, and the temple structures for the cult of the dead king were directly attached to that grave.25 Hatshepsut’s father, however, had hit upon an ingenious solution ostensibly meant to ward off tomb robbery or to create another layer of secrecy and mystery around the king’s tomb. Thutmose I had decided to inter his body in a secret cliff-side tomb within the huge, naturally pyramid-shaped mountain at western Thebes—today we know it as the Valley of the Kings. It was a bold plan conceived by a confident monarch. His son Thutmose II followed suit, it seems, and King Hatshepsut also adopted this new burial scheme. There remains debate over whether she cut a tomb of her own or simply added a new burial chamber to that of Thutmose I.26 Either way, it was in an Amduat-adorned27 burial hall that Hatshepsut intended to share eternity with her father. His coffin would be placed inside the first sarcophagus she had commissioned for herself on becoming king; she had it almost entirely reinscribed for Thutmose. Having so carefully reworked the piece, it must have been a terrible shock when Thutmose’s coffin turned out to be too big to fit inside: the scars of the hurried hacking-out of additional stone to make more space can still be seen. Hatshepsut ordered another sarcophagus for her own ultimate interment alongside Thutmose I, and a near-duplicate was ordered for Senenmut.28

  Her funerary temple of Djeser Djeseru was also finished during her lifetime, so she had the luxury of adding elements that were not completely necessary, little embellishments that she (or Senenmut, the building’s architect) enjoyed. At the foot of the long avenue leading from the funerary
temple to the edge of the desert, Hatshepsut added a valley temple to receive her body before it was to be carried to the funerary temple itself. This valley temple was one of the last structures built by Hatshepsut, and work appears to have been ongoing when she died. Archaeologists found tools lying in the fill, seemingly left by their owners, who abandoned the site the moment they found out that the king had flown to heaven, perhaps sensing that the valley temple would not be finished by Thutmose III.29

  Work on Egyptian royal tombs and temples always seems to have continued to the very last moment of a ruler’s death. It was almost as if the Egyptians thought the process of preparing for the afterlife could stave off the end itself. And when a monarch died, the next king typically did little more than ensure that the previous king’s sepulcher was capable of housing a body—any other outstanding details were left unfinished. The new king’s interests, along with his predecessor’s funds, were now directed toward the new king’s tomb and the new king’s temples. Egyptians were not troubled by the idea of burying a king in an incomplete tomb—that was the last guy’s problem—so the unfinished elements of Hatshepsut’s tomb or temple alone should not make us suspect she met a bad end.

  The truth is that we have no idea how Hatshepsut died. Maybe she fell ill. Perhaps her daughter Nefrure sat with her as she lay prone in her royal bedchamber, burning with fever, attempting to calm her mother’s spirits during this final transformation. Because all the evidence suggests that Hatshepsut was quite pious, she probably believed that the gods were calling for her to ascend to them, to fly up to the solar barque of millions of years and journey with Re through the heavens of day and night. Perhaps her deathwatch was accompanied by solar spells of mourning marking the moment of the sun god’s passing into the west and the underworld:

  They adore the great god after he has reached them. It is their voices which guide them to him. It is their wailing which accompanies him.… They are those who bring the ba-souls to their sleep. What they have to do is to care for the bringing of deep night and to perform sacrifices according to their hours. It is they who guard the day and bring the night until this great god has come out from the Unified Darkness to settle in the gateway of the eastern horizon of the sky. They wail because of this great god. They mourn him after he has passed by them. Whoever knows them will go forth by day and by night. He will be carried off to the trees of the Greatest City.30

  And so, after almost twenty-two years as regent and then as king, ruling from approximately 1479 to 1458 BCE, the woman who started as a King’s Daughter and God’s Wife, who went on to become the greatest female ruler Egypt would ever see, who transformed mud-brick temples into sprawling complexes of stone, who professionalized the priesthood of her gods and the army of her people, was dead. All her plans, all her anxieties, her obsession with succession and political stability—it all was finally out of her hands, and in the firm control of another.

  There is no record of Thutmose III’s emotions at the death of his aunt and co-king. Presumably he visited her on her deathbed, perhaps covering his nose with a linen cloth against the overwhelming stench of coming mortality. Throughout Thebes and beyond, to the priests and elites of Memphis and Heliopolis, word would have spread that Egypt’s mistress was near her end. All of Egypt would have waited until finally the air left her lungs and her body deflated, leaving her lying prone, not in the stillness of sleep but in death. Priests and servants would have chanted and wailed around her, aiding her passage into the beyond.

  We can imagine Nefrure (if she was still alive) directing the servants to bathe Hatshepsut for the last time and to wash and plait her mother’s hair before the royal embalmers arrived to take her to the place of purity within the temple. Once in the house of embalming, Hatshepsut’s body (the extremities perhaps already turning black) would have been laid on a tall bed with legs fashioned to resemble a lion’s, a symbol of kingship, for a long night of incantations and spells. The priests likely chanted out the mechanisms for a successful journey through the heavens, intoning sacred words and phrases that would give her sustenance and strength for the long road ahead, protection against demons along the way, and transformation when she ultimately became an everlasting golden Osiris.

  At one point in the ritual, Nefrure may have stood at her mother’s feet, in the place of the goddess Isis, through the long night, wailing and lamenting. During these rituals, Nefrure would have performed as a Daughter of Re, a ferocious protector against any who might do the king harm. And in her grief, Nefrure likely tore at her linen garments, baring her breasts, ripping and tangling her hair so that when daylight came and the embalmers readied themselves to carry away Hatshepsut’s corpse for mummification, Nefrure had to be restrained, still screaming and crying out for her dead mother. Such was the grief we see depicted in some Eighteenth Dynasty paintings of mourning. Or perhaps Nefrure stood there stoically, watching over her mother, knowing that her circumstances had instantly and irrevocably changed.

  The royal place of embalming was likely filled with a haze of incense, a cacophony of priestly incantations and muttered orders among the mummifiers going about their business. The first incision into the royal corpse would have been made with a razor-sharp ritual knife of flaked obsidian—a cut just below the belly on the body’s left side, just long enough for the flesh to gape open and pull away from itself, creating a hole that likely released a puff of methane, hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia gases with a slow hiss. The other embalmers would then turn to the priest who had dared to cut the royal body, and, as was traditionally expected in the ritual, curse him with invectives and throw potsherds at the poor man, driving the priest out of the room under a hail of broken bits of crockery until he himself could undergo a purifying ritual.

  Another embalmer would have then stepped forward and carefully fit his hand into the seam in Hatshepsut’s belly. He probably took his time feeling about until his fingers found the body part he wanted. Perhaps he started with the bowels, slowly pulling the length of Hatshepsut’s intestines out of the cavity, lest they break, snaking the shiny wet mass into a large bronze bowl held up by one of his colleagues. The work was likely slow and smelly. The putrid stench of death would have collided with the sweet, rich fragrance of incense in the room, probably produced from the very same pellets procured on her trading expedition to Punt more than ten years before.

  When the embalming priest inserted his hand into the cavity yet again, he would have reached farther into the corpse to pull out the king’s stomach. Hatshepsut’s last meal of gruel and broth may have still sloshed about inside. When he reached into her abdomen again, he would have had to thrust his entire forearm inside the body of the king. Perhaps he closed his eyes to concentrate as he broke some of the tissue connections, and then, with one hand on top of her belly to guide his movement, the other still inside, he shifted the liver toward the incision. With great care and with the help of more colleagues, he must have stretched the incision by applying lubricating oils so that he could remove the quivering, dark brown-red mass without damage to the body or the organ. Only with skill and patience could the liver be removed in one piece.

  The lungs were always tricky. The embalming priest’s arm would have been thrust beyond his elbow at this point, and maybe with intense concentration and incantations on his lips invoking the gods in protection of the lungs, he could carefully detach the right lung with his fingertips, never able to see what he was doing, but knowing the places where the organ might burst if prodded or where he might snap the tissue holding the mass to her body. The priest had to work around the heart muscle; it had to remain in the body undisturbed as the seat of the king’s soul, a measure of Hatshepsut’s goodness, and the physical tether holding her spirit to her corpse. Once the lobe was free, he could maneuver the lung around the heart with one hand inside the body, the other pressed against her breast, until the organ reached the mouth of the incision. With practiced skill, the organ was removed and placed in a bowl for curing in a dedica
ted room in the embalming house.

  Throughout the process, men assisted with basins of water to allow the chief embalmer to wash his bloody hands. Priests would have chanted spells and kept the incense pellets burning until a new set of instruments was brought. At this point, the embalmer would have selected a long metal hooked tool and approached Hatshepsut’s head, leaning down so that he was face-to-face with the mighty king, his chin at her forehead, before carefully inserting the tool into the nose of the corpse. He likely reached for another tool from the tray—a small mallet, which he could use to smack the metal stick sharply until he heard the crunch of the ethmoid bone giving way. After repeating this gesture on the other nostril, he would have inserted a long-handled spoon into the skull cavity and scooped out bit after bit of brain through the nose, trying to remove large chunks to speed the work, but not so large that his actions would harm the nostrils, certainly knowing that any impatience would result in a dilated and deformed nose.

  When the spoon no longer pushed easily through soft, fatty brain matter but collided with the back of the skull, Hatshepsut’s corpse would have been turned facedown and tilted feet up so that the rest of the brain matter could slide toward the nostrils for removal. With no way to take out the brain in one piece, its removal was laborious and time-consuming. Hatshepsut’s brain tissue was thus not embalmed, but likely saved for burial in a mummification cache, a collection of used embalming materials and bits of human tissue. One did not just throw away the remnants of a pharaoh’s putrefaction; this was a god’s body, after all.