Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (10 page)

It is certainly not hard to find parallels for a ruling family where the influence of the royal women is both acknowledged and respected. African kingships have traditionally allowed their royal women to play a conspicuous part in state affairs and it should be remembered that the city of Thebes was geographically close to Nubia whose royal family also included powerful women. However, if we really need a parallel for the Theban royal family we should perhaps look closer to our own time; Kennedy-like clans where the women, although themselves not the holders of supreme office, play an important role in the functioning of the family as a single effective unit of government are not particularly rare, while the British monarchy itself has recently found that a suitable spouse, correctly presented, can help to boost the status of the entire royal family.

Respect for mothers was already a long-established Egyptian custom and not necessarily one which needed to be imported from further south. The Egyptian mother was both loved and revered by her children, particularly her sons, and New Kingdom scribes were constantly stressing the obligation which a young man owed to his long-suffering mother:

Double the food that your mother gave you, and support her as she supported you, for you were a heavy burden to her yet she did not abandon you. When you were born after your months she was still tied to you as her breast was in your mouth for three years. As you grew and your excrement was disgusting she was not disgusted.
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Nor were the royal family the only family to emphasize the importance
of the female line at this time. We have already met Ahmose, son of Ibana, the mighty warrior from el-Kab. His grandson, Paheri, also a native of el-Kab, was a bureaucrat who rose to become a respected Scribe of the Treasury and Mayor of both el-Kab (ancient Nekheb) and Esna (ancient Iunyt). His magnificent tomb lacks an autobiography like that provided by his grandfather, but includes conventional images of agriculture and feasting which are considerably enhanced by the inclusion of the comments of the participants in each scene. The banqueting scene is particularly illuminating; here we have the opportunity to eavesdrop on the female members of the Paheri family as they relax after a hard day's work. Their comments are perhaps not all we would expect from a collection of well-bred young ladies:

In the third row are the daughters of Kem, viz. [Thu]pu, Nub-em-heb and Amen-sat; also Paheri's second cousin Nub-Mehy, and his three nurses… Amen-sat refuses the bowl, and the servant says jestingly, ‘For thy Ka, drink to drunkenness, make holiday; O listen to what thy companion is saying, do not weary of taking (?).’

Her companion and distant cousin Nub-Mehy is saying to the servant ‘Give me eighteen cups of wine, I want to drink to drunkenness; my throat is as dry as straw.’
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Paheri's tomb provides us with details of his descent which is always traced through the female line; it is his mother, Kam, who is the child of Ahmose while his father, Itruri, was apparently tutor to Crown Prince Wadjmose, son of Tuthmosis I, a post which may also have been held by Paheri himself. Ahmose's father is recorded as Baba, son of Reant (his mother), and the maternal ancestors and cousins are recorded in preference to the paternal line. So striking is this preference for the female branch of the family that the tomb of Paheri was for a long time cited in support of the theory of a Theban matriarchal tradition. It is now accepted, however, that Paheri was simply following human nature, and claiming kinship with the highest-ranking members of his family, regardless of their sex.

To some modern observers – writing with the obvious benefit of hindsight – this sudden change in policy was a disaster waiting to happen, as a newly powerful queen would be unable to resist making an attempt on the throne itself:

The stubbornness and driving ambition of the queens could not help but precipitate a conflict with the males of the family, at least if the women persisted in grasping after what must have been the ultimate aspiration, viz. the crown. After five generations of rule this is precisely what happened.
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Perhaps a move from queen to king would seem an obvious promotion to a modern consort dissatisfied with her secondary function. However, it is doubtful whether an Egyptian queen, particularly one who held a secure and influential role of her own, would ever under normal circumstances consider such a dramatic step. The Egyptian abhorrence of change, the ingrained belief in a correct way of doing things which always included a divinely appointed male pharaoh on the throne, and the fact that the king was more than likely to be a close relation (brother, son or father) all make a female
coup
, under normal conditions, highly unlikely.

It can be no coincidence that the queen acquired her enhanced status at exactly the time that the king was throwing open the doors of the royal harem to welcome increased numbers of secondary wives and concubines into the shelter of his protecting arms. Indeed, it may well be that the queen needed her new titles and regalia simply to distinguish her, as the consort and mother of the future king, from all the other women who could now with some justification claim to be a wife of the king and even, given a bit of good luck, a future King's Mother. Polygamy had always been something of a royal tradition; it was an easily affordable luxury and in many ways it made sense to ensure that the king had as much opportunity as possible to father a male successor. However, the kings of the Old and Middle Kingdom seem to have been satisfied with one queen consort plus a rather discreet harem of concubines about whom we know very little, and it is only during the 13th Dynasty that we encounter the use of the title ‘King's Chief Wife’ which suggests the need to distinguish the queen consort from a host of other, lesser, wives. With the advent of the New Kingdom there came a dramatic increase in royal brides and, we must assume, a corresponding increase in the numbers of royal children, until the 19th Dynasty King Ramesses II was able to boast of fathering seventy-nine sons and fifty-nine daughters by his various wives who included his sister, three of his daughters and at least five foreign princesses.

These secondary wives should by no means be regarded as mere
concubines, a term which has almost come to be synonymous with prostitute or harlot in our (theoretically) monogamous society. There was no disgrace in being included amongst the king's wives and, indeed, the occupants of the harem included high-bred Egyptian ladies and the daughters and sisters of Egyptian kings. These ladies could not all become queen consort, but they were all legally the wives or dependants of the king, and all were entitled to a recognized and respected position in Egyptian society. It would be fascinating to learn how the Egyptian harem women were selected – did they volunteer, were they donated by their parents, or were they press-ganged? It is probably fairly safe to assume that to introduce a daughter into the royal palace could bring a family nothing but good, particularly if she managed to attract and hold the attention of the king or crown prince. Parallels have often been drawn with the Chinese Han Dynasty harem, where kings and their high officials occasionally married their concubines and where it was not unknown for a concubine of non-royal birth to become both the wife and the mother of a king. A favourite concubine could use her influence for the good of her family, and for this reason Chinese nobles worked to get at least one daughter accepted into the royal harem.
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However, non-royal Egyptian males seem curiously reluctant to acknowledge association with the palace through a woman, to the extent that Anen, brother of the commoner Queen Tiy, fails to mention this important link on any of his monuments. We have no record of any Egyptian donating his wife or daughter to the king, and no means of ascertaining how useful a daughter or sister in the royal harem could be.

A miracle brought to his Majesty Gilukhepa, daughter of the prince of Naharin, and the members of her entourage, some 317 women.
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By the time of Tuthmosis IV, the harem was also home to a number of important foreign princesses and their not-insubstantial retinues. These princesses, the daughters of strong political allies, travelled to Egypt with a rich dowry which was exchanged for a reciprocal bride price or tribute paid by the groom. They married the king, and sank into obscurity. Other, lesser, princesses were the daughters of vassal states sent as tribute to the Egyptian king; they remained in the royal
harem providing an effective guarantee of their father's loyalty to the pharaoh:

Send your daughter to the king, your lord, and as presents send twenty healthy slaves, silver chariots and healthy horses.
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Yet other foreign women were sent in groups as gifts for the king. We must assume that these women rarely, if ever, saw their new husband/ master. They appear to have lived their whole lives within the harem without the chance of either marriage or returning to their own lands; when they died they were buried in the nearby desert cemetery.

The women of Egypt have the character of being the most licentious in their feelings of all females who lay any claim to be considered as members of a civilised nation… Most of them are not considered safe unless under lock and key.
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While the queen consort seems to have enjoyed the luxury of her own palace and estates, the remaining royal wives and concubines, their young children, wet-nurses, nursemaids and attendants, lived together in the permanent women's palace or the harem. The word harem is today an unfortunate one; a word which instantly conjures up images of spoiled and scantily dressed eastern beauties reclining on silken cushions as they await the bidding of their lord and master. All too often our ideas of the Egyptian harem are based on what we imagine we know of the harem in other oriental monarchies, in particular the harem of the Grand Seraglio, the court of the Ottoman sultans at Istanbul, a harem which functioned from the Middle Ages until the First World War, when the Sultanate itself was deposed on the creation of the modern republic of Turkey. The secret world of the Turkish harem remained an impenetrable mystery for centuries, and rumours rather than facts about life in the Grand Seraglio have fed European notions about all harems. This, combined with a deep-seated belief in the innate decadence of ancient Egypt and its enviably abandoned women, has found expression in many forms of western culture. From Mozart to Mailer, the combination of exotic locations, hot sun and captive women kept for sexual delectation have been used to entertain and titillate supposedly sophisticated audiences.
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This vision is far from the truth. It would be far more correct to regard the Egyptian women's palace as a permanent dormitory used to house all the female dependants of the king, not just those tied to him for sexual purposes. These women, for reason of sheer numbers, could not be expected to travel with the king and his entourage. The harem was therefore home to a varied assortment of wives, daughters, sisters, infant sons, attendants, slaves and anyone else who could be legitimately found in the women's quarters of a private dwelling house. Included amongst the harem staff were a number of male administrators who found themselves responsible for the smooth running of a very large community. These officials bore titles ranging from ‘Overseer of the Royal Harem’ and ‘Inspector of the Harem-Administration’ to ‘Gate-Keeper’; this last appears to have been employed to protect the harem and keep undesirable members of the community out rather than to keep the women in – as yet we have no evidence to suggest that free-born Egyptian women were ever forced to remain in the harem against their will. All the administrators appear to have been married men, and we find no direct evidence for that classic harem servant, and butt of many a tasteless joke, the eunuch. While there might have been obvious advantages in employing castrated men to work with a collection of attractive, isolated, bored and possibly frustrated women, this does not appear to have been standard practice in dynastic Egypt. There is no ancient Egyptian word which has been convincingly demonstrated to mean eunuch, and representations of harem scenes in the Amarna tombs of Ay and Tutu do not show any individuals with classic eunuchoidal appearance. We do have examples of mummified male bodies without testicles, but these seem to be the result of post-mortem damage during mummification itself, rather than a deliberate amputation. The mummified body of Tuthmosis III, known to be a father, was lacking both penis and testicles, while the hard-man military exploits of the Pharaoh Merenptah certainly suggest that he metaphorically possessed what his mummy now lacks.

The food was neither plain nor wholesome. As to the hours spent lolling in Turkish baths, naked and sleek, ladling perfumed water over each other, twisting pearls and peacock feathers in their long hair, nibbling sugary comfits, gossiping, idling away the hours, becalmed in the dreamy, steamy limbo-land…
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So Lesley Blanch describes daily life in the eighteenth-century harem of the Seraglio, a description which must owe a certain amount to imagination, as the harem was strictly out of bounds to all non-inmates, but which is probably correct in its assumption that the Turkish
odalisques
led a life of pampered luxury. Things were very different in Egypt, where the harem-palace itself was a self-contained and self-supporting unit, fully independent of the king's palace and deriving its income from its own endowments of land and the rents paid by tenant farmers. Many of the lesser harem women, far from idling away the hours, were expected to work for their keep; the harem itself must have required numerous cooks, washerwomen, nursemaids and general servants while
Mer- Wer
, a large harem-palace established by Tuthmosis III on the edge of the Faiyum, seems to have been home to a flourishing textile business. Here the finest Egyptian linen was produced under the supervision of the ladies of the harem.