Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (39 page)

Fig. 8.4 The High Priestess of Amen-Re, Hatchepsut

Twosret had been the principal wife of the 19th Dynasty King Seti II and, while not a member of the immediate royal family, is likely to have been of royal blood. She bore her husband no living son and, after a brief reign of no more than six years, Seti died and was succeeded on the throne by Ramesses Siptah (later known as Merenptah Siptah), his natural son by a Syrian secondary wife named Sutailja. History was starting to repeat itself as Twosret found herself required to act as regent to a young king who was not her own flesh and blood and whose physical weakness, the legacy of the childhood polio which had withered one of his legs, made him an ineffectual ruler. Once again the inevitable happened. Gradually the already powerful dowager queen started to take control, easing herself into the position of consort and co-ruler. Whether or not she actually married her ward in order to
consolidate her position is unclear; on the wall of her tomb she is depicted standing behind Siptah in a typical wifely pose, but the young king's name has been erased and that of her actual husband Seti II has been substituted.

Following Siptah's early death a wave of discontent spread over the country and Twosret saw her opportunity. With no obvious successor to challenge her authority she clung on to her role as co-regent, reinforcing her position by adopting the full titulary of a male king of Egypt. She undertook the now traditional expeditions to Sinai and Palestine and commenced building works at Heliopolis and Thebes, but her solo rule was destined to be brief, possibly less than two years. She disappeared into obscurity, to be replaced by the rather nondescript pharaoh Sethnakht, founder of the 20th Dynasty, who later claimed to have ‘driven out the usurper’. Manetho preserved the name of a King Thuoris as the final king of the 19th Dynasty.

At first sight there are many obvious points of similarity between the stories of these two female kings. Both were married to relatively short-lived and somewhat ineffectual kings, both failed to produce a male heir to the throne, both were required to act as regent to an unrelated minor and, while neither had a living husband, both came under the influence of a dominant court official (Hatchepsut was supported by Senenmut; Twosret had a less certain relationship with a mysterious individual known as the Great Chancellor Bay). Both must also have been strong-minded and forceful women capable of fighting against well-established traditions and holding their own against the male-dominated establishment. However, there are also some important dissimilarities between the two reigns. Twosret, like Sobeknofru before her, came to power as the last resort of a decaying dynasty lacking any more suitable (that is, male) monarch. In spite of Sethnakht's claim she was never, as far as we know, widely perceived as a usurper, and could even be congratulated on her valiant attempt to prolong a dying line. Furthermore, Twosret's reign was not a spectacular success. It was brief, undistinguished, and left Egypt in a worse political state than it had been before she came to power. It therefore posed no threat to subsequent male rulers. This seems to have made her in many ways far more acceptable as a monarch and, although Sethnakht usurped her tomb and attempted to remove her
name and image from its walls, it seems that Twosret was never subjected to the persecution inflicted on Hatchepsut's memory.
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Queen, or King, Twosret was the last native-born Egyptian queen regnant. However, over one thousand years later Egypt was again to be ruled by a handful of dominant and short-lived women, this time the Greek queens of the Ptolemaic royal family. The last of these, Cleopatra VII, has entered the public imagination not only as the archetypal Egyptian queen but as one of the most widely recognized women of all times. Her story, an intriguing cocktail of incest, passion, and tragedy played out against a louche oriental setting, was fascinating to her more strait-laced Roman contemporaries, while the fact that her actions had a direct effect on the development of the Roman Empire ensured that her history would be recorded for posterity. Plutarch, writing a good many years after her death, was clearly intrigued by reports of the queen's physical charms:

The contact of her presence, if you lived with her, was irresistible; the attraction of her person, joining with the charm of her conversation, and the character that attended all she said or did, was something bewitching. It was a pleasure merely to hear the sound of her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings, she could pass from one language to another.
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The story of Hatchepsut, a far more successful ruler but one who was less well documented, who was less interestingly ‘wanton’ in her behaviour, and who played little or no part in the development of western society, has never had the power to compete with the myths and legends which have grown up around Cleopatra, beautiful ‘Serpent of the Nile’.

Cleopatra was, in spite of the legend, a rather plain woman, a direct descendant of Ptolemy I, the Macedonian general who had been made King of Egypt following the death of Alexander the Great. She ruled over one of the most fertile countries in the Mediterranean world, but it was a dissatisfied Egypt once again torn by civil unrest, chafing under Greek rule and directly influenced by the political infighting endemic in Roman politics. The royal family, heavily in debt, was in a constant state of violent feud, and Cleopatra only became queen following the untimely deaths of her father Ptolemy XII, her sister Cleopatra VI and a second sister Berenike. Her third sister Arsinoe rebelled against her rule
and was eventually killed, her brother and co-regent Ptolemy XIII drowned, and her second brother–husband died in mysterious circumstances soon after their marriage. Cleopatra, the family survivor, proclaimed her infant son Caesarion (allegedly the child of Julius Caesar) co-regent, effectively making herself sole ruler of Egypt. Her reign brought a brief period of internal peace and economic stability. However, her decision to support Mark Anthony, the father of three of her children, in his power struggle with Octavian spelt disaster for Egypt. When Octavian's troops reached Alexandria in 30
BC
Cleopatra and Anthony committed suicide, and Egypt was absorbed into the Roman Empire.

Long before Cleopatra's ill-fated reign, Hatchepsut had been all but forgotten by her people. Although
Djeser-Djeseru
continued to be recognized as a potent religious centre the name of its founder was now a distant memory, and Hatchepsut had been omitted from the king lists of Abydos and Sakkara where the succession was recorded as passing from Tuthmosis I to Tuthmosis II and then directly to Tuthmosis III. Similarly, she was excluded from the celebration of the festival of Min depicted on the wall of the Ramesseum, where again the procession of royal ancestors shows Tuthmosis I, II and III in sequence. This was not solely a royal vendetta; Hatchepsut was also missing from the non-royal tombs dating to the time of Tuthmosis III which might reasonably have been expected to include her name, and she is not even to be found amongst the 19th and 20th Dynasty private monuments of Deir el-Medina which recorded a host of far more ephemeral Tuthmoside princes and princesses. However, her memory must have lingered somewhere – possibly included on king lists which have not survived – as Manetho, writing his history of the kings of Egypt in approximately 300
BC
, was able to include a female ruler named Amense or Amensis, sister of Hebron and mother of Mishragmouthosis (Tuthmosis III) as the fifth ruler of the 18th Dynasty. He accorded this female ruler a reign of either 21 years 9 months (Josephus version) or 22 years (Africanus).

As the centuries passed and all knowledge of hieroglyphic writing faded, Hatchepsut sank even deeper into obscurity. Her name was to be lost for almost two thousand years, during which time her monuments with their unreadable cartouches stood in mute testimony to their
founder. Eventually, however,
Djeser-Djeseru
, now ruined and to a large extent buried under dunes of wind-blown sand and piles of rocks fallen from the cliff above, started to attract the attention of the western tourists who were becoming increasingly fascinated by Egypt's ancient past.
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By the middle of the eighteenth century, Deir el-Bahri had been proved to be a prolific source of mummies, papyri and other exotic oriental desirables, and trade in the stolen antiquities was both brisk and lucrative. A steady trickle of distinguished visitors now started to arrive at the site, and
Djeser-Djeseru
was recorded by the British cleric Richard Pococke (1737), by the Napoleonic Expedition (1798–1802) and by William Beechey and the ex-circus strongman turned antiquarian Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1817). With the decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822 came the first breakthrough in attempts to reconstruct the history of the temple. In 1828, the distinguished philologist and principal decoder of hieroglyphics, Jean François Champollion, paid a visit to Deir el-Bahri. Champollion was able to recognize the cartouche of Tuthmosis III, whom he called Moeris, and he realized that this king's cartouche usurped that of an earlier king whose partially erased name he misread as Amenenthe or Amonemhe.

Champollion firmly believed that his Amenenthe was a man. This caused him endless puzzlement as he noted that the name of the supposedly male king was consistently accompanied by feminine titles and forms. His words on this subject – fascinating to those of us blessed with hindsight – are worth quoting at length as they provide a good illustration of how a subconscious assumption or prejudice on the part of the excavator or translator may have a drastic effect on the interpretation of archaeological evidence:

If I felt somewhat surprised at seeing here, as elsewhere throughout the temple, the renowned Moeris, adorned with all the insignia of royalty, giving place to this Amenenthe, for whose name we may search the royal lists in vain, still more astonished was I to find on reading the inscriptions that wherever they referred to this bearded king in the usual dress of the Pharaohs, nouns and verbs were in the feminine, as though a queen were in question. I found the same peculiarity everywhere. Not only was there the prenomen of Amenenthe preceded by the title of sovereign ruler of the world,
with the feminine affix
, but also his own name immediately following on the title of ‘Daughter of the Sun’. Finally, in all the bas-reliefs representing the gods speaking to this king, he is addressed as a queen, as in the following formula: ‘Behold, thus saith Amen-Re, Lord of the Thrones of the World, to his daughter whom he loves, sun devoted to the truth: the building which thou hast made is like to the divine dwelling.’
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In order to explain this extraordinary situation, Champollion proposed the existence of an 18th Dynasty heiress-queen Amense, a sister of Tuthmosis II, who had first married a man named Tuthmosis and then, after his death, married the mysterious Amenenthe. Both these men ruled Egypt in Queen Amense's name. Following the death of Amense, Amenenthe retained his crown, becoming co-regent with the young Tuthmosis III, who turned out to be a somewhat ungrateful ward who was to spend much of his subsequent solo reign attempting to efface the name of his co-ruler from the walls of the Deir el-Bahri temple.

Niccolo Rosellini, Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Pisa and a close personal friend of Champollion, published a description of
Djeser-Djeseru
in 1844. Rosellini put forward a variant on Champollion's theme; his succession passed from Tuthmosis I to Tuthmosis II, then to his wife Queen Amoutmai, her sister Queen Amense, and finally to Tuthmosis III. At the same time John Gardiner Wilkinson, another distinguished linguist and the first to classify and number the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, took up residence on the West Bank of Thebes where he had plenty of time to read the hieroglyphs for himself. Wilkinson tentatively suggested that the mysterious king should be re-named Amenneitgori or Amun-Noo-Het and should be re-classified not as a man but as a woman ‘not in the list; a queen?’
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It was left to Karl Richard Lepsius, leader of the Prussian expedition of 1842–5, to make some sense of the muddle by confirming that the clue to the king's identity was not to be found in her appearance, which as all agreed was entirely masculine, but in her inscriptions:

In the outermost angle of this rock-cove [Deir el-Bahri, called el-Asasif by Lepsius] is situated the most ancient temple-building of Western Thebes, which belongs to the period of the New Egyptian Monarchy, at the commencement of its glory… It was queen Numt-Amen, the elder sister of Tuthmosis III, who accomplished this bold plan… She never appears on her monuments as a woman, but in male attire; we only find out her sex by the inscriptions. No doubt at that period it was illegal for a woman to govern; for that reason, also, her brother, probably still a minor, appears at a later period as ruler along with her. After her death her Shields [cartouches] were everywhere converted into Tuthmosis Shields, the feminine forms of speech in the inscription were changed, and her names were never adopted in the later lists along with the legitimate kings.
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Lepsius was the first to publish the name of ‘Hat… u Numt-Amen’ although he assigned her to the 17th Dynasty.

However, the situation was still far from clear, and Samuel Sharpe, writing in 1859 and relying on secondary sources including Manetho, Herodotus and Eratosthenes for his information, was fairly typical of many of his fellow authors in his confusion. He knew of the existence of the female Egyptian king, and he even knew many of the salient facts of her reign, but he had her dates and even her name hopelessly jumbled:

… Tuthmosis II followed the first of that name on the throne of Thebes; but he is very much thrown into the shade by Amun-Nitocris, his strong-minded and ambitious wife. She was the last of the race of Memphite sovereigns, the twelfth or eleventh in succession from the builders of the great pyramids; and by her marriage with Tuthmosis, Upper and Lower Egypt were brought under one sceptre. She was handsome among women, and brave among men, and she governed the kingdom for her brother with great splendour… Tuthmosis III, on coming to the throne was a minor: queen Nitocris, who had before governed for her husband, now governed for his successor, and even when the young Tuthmosis came of age, he was hardly king of the whole country till after the death of Nitocris… in her sculptures she is always dressed in men's clothes to indicate that she was a queen in her own right, and not a queen consort…
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