The Woman Who Would Be King (19 page)

While Hatshepsut was shoring up her power with the appointment of trustworthy men, Thutmose III was no longer a baby. Now more than halfway through his first decade, his position as boy king had been protected by Hatshepsut, which gave him the luxury of gently growing into his position. We can imagine him hanging around the palace and watching Hatshepsut work with her loyal and well-rewarded men. He would have spent a great deal of time in the temple and throne room with her as business was being conducted, perhaps a small boy sitting on a gilded throne too big for him, next to his regent’s own, smaller seat.

What was it like to be a child in these formal circumstances and with such high stakes on the line? Thutmose III must have been a healthy boy; he survived when so many died. But we have little insight into his character as a child: Did he laugh often and get into trouble in the audience chamber? Was he scolded by the High Priest of Amen during sacred temple rituals when he swiped a piece of the Great God’s food for his own enjoyment? Did the vizier Useramen take him under his wing and explain complicated tax proceedings during the annual grain count, or did the treasurer Senenmut regale the young king with stories of how difficult it was to quarry stone for the obelisks of Amen’s temple?

Thutmose III’s relationship with all these officials must have been
stimulating and constantly evolving. They knew he was king, a true son of Thutmose II and grandson of the great campaigner Thutmose I, and as such that he must be treated with respect. But a young boy can still act like a brat, a trickster, or a silly fool to be taught a lesson. As he got older and settled into more responsibility and decision making, Thutmose III must have demanded more consideration and authority from his officials. But for now, he was just a child. And it seems he did what he was told to do. Meanwhile, Hatshepsut was negotiating a few more steps forward in her own career.

At about this time, Hatshepsut was laying the delicate groundwork to relinquish the position of God’s Wife of Amen, the very role that had given her access to power few women ever knew. Evidence from early Karnak monuments of this period shows Hatshepsut as the King’s Great Wife offering wine vessels to the god, while behind her Nefrure, her daughter, stands as a high priestess. This is the first time we see Nefrure labeled as God’s Wife of Amen.
³⁴
It’s hard to know when Hatshepsut gave up her God’s Wife title, but it seems to have been within these first five years of regency; perhaps she even shared the position with her daughter during a transitional period.

Hatshepsut was in her early twenties, and strange as it may seem to us, she was probably too old to act as the sexual exciter of the god anymore. Perhaps she was expected to pass this role off to a younger female who could continue to facilitate the rebirth of the god every morning. Hatshepsut’s loss of this vital position may have been the alarm inciting her call for even more power, to claim a defined and definite authority that she could never possess as regent.

Indeed, Hatshepsut’s training of Nefrure may have gone hand in hand with her own future plans to maintain rule. Her choice of Nefrure as the next God’s Wife was politically astute. The girl was her daughter, but she was also Thutmose III’s half sister. Hatshepsut was taking another step forward by transferring the office to her own daughter, linking the holder of the God’s Wife post to the current ruler, Thutmose III. But without that temple office, Hatshepsut was herself left floating in a limbo of ill-defined and poorly justified authority. With Thutmose III growing taller and more aware with every new year, Hatshepsut needed to lay the foundations for another type of power.

In the ancient world, having a woman at the top of the political pyramid was practically unheard of. Patriarchal systems ruled the day, and royal wives, sisters, and daughters served as members of the king’s harem or as important priestesses in his temples, not as political leaders. Throughout the Mediterranean and northwest Asia, female leadership was perceived with suspicion, if not outright aversion. Mesopotamia, for example, preserves only one example of a female political powerhouse predating Hatshepsut: Kubaba, a tavern keeper, of all things, who, according to
The Sumerian King List
, consolidated power in the ancient city of Kish in the twenty-fifth century BCE during a time of never-ending war and crisis. Hatshepsut probably had little knowledge of this formidable woman, given her education’s lack of focus on foreign kings. She had models of strong female leadership from her own soil.
¹

Even though Egyptian cultural and political systems sometimes tolerated women in power, at least when compared to other ancient societies, only a few women were able to climb to the very top and rule all of Egypt. One of the oldest examples was the great queen Merneith, who took charge of the political system when Egypt’s kingship was new, around 2900 BCE.
A King’s Mother who likely ruled on behalf of her young son, Den, Merneith was so powerful that she earned a tomb alongside the other First Dynasty kings in the royal cemetery of Abydos, complete with hundreds of human sacrifices, as was the style in those very early days of dynastic rule. She was never associated with the kingship in a formal manner that is preserved for us, but her power was so great that archaeologists uncovering her tomb assumed it belonged to a male ruler, until inscriptions proved otherwise. Merneith used her regency to take on real power, and once she had it, evidence suggests that she did not relinquish her hold on authority until her death. Merneith provided Hatshepsut with a useful case study, and we can only wonder if the Eighteenth Dynasty queen had more details of the historical reality that we lack.

Then there was Sobeknefru, daughter of King Amenemhat III of Dynasty 12, who ruled around 1800 BCE. Three hundred years before Hatshepsut was born, Sobeknefru served as the first true female king of Egypt, an astounding achievement given the odds against it. The Egyptians developed no word for “queen” in the political sense, just the phrase
hemet neswt
, “wife of the king,” a title with no implications of rule or power in its own right, only a description of a woman’s connection to the king as husband.
²
Thus female rulers of Egypt, like Sobeknefru, took on the masculine title of “king.”

Clothing was more problematic, and Sobeknefru depicted herself wearing not only the masculine headdress of kingship but also the male royal kilt over the dress garments of a royal wife, garbing her feminine self with the trappings of a masculine office.
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However, Sobeknefru’s reign lasted a mere four years, and she was unable to save her family’s lineage or establish any norms for future female kingship. After her death, Egypt descended into the weak and ephemeral kingships of the Thirteenth Dynasty.

Hatshepsut would have thus known that formally defined female rule was rare, even in Egypt where it was sometimes tolerated. And she likely learned that women in power were usually unsuccessful, born into crisis and ending their time in chaos. Hatshepsut probably did not think of such a position for herself initially. If not inconceivable, it would certainly have seemed unworkable with a king already on the throne. But against all odds, sometime around year 7 of Thutmose III’s reign, the impossible happened. She was crowned as king. Hatshepsut clawed and scraped her
way to that end goal, claiming royal prerogatives and powers as she went, until she realized her coronation, an expensive and overwrought affair memorializing the power that she had already amassed. As one Egyptologist describes it, her coronation was “the day on which her de jure iconography caught up with her de facto authority.”
⁴

The “facts” that are left to us concerning Hatshepsut’s reign are far from certain. The exact timing of her ascension has been disputed by Egyptologists, some arguing that it happened as early as year 2, most claiming year 7.
⁵
Almost all of our surviving historical documents concerning Hatshepsut’s rise to kingship are religious in nature, and many date to after her coronation, clouding our understanding of her gradual, competent, and calculating ascension. The evidence does contain clues of political realities nonetheless.

In year 2 of Thutmose III’s reign, while Hatshepsut was acting only as regent, she made her first steps toward more political power. Reliefs carved at Semna temple in Nubia show her in the company of the gods, and here, the description of her actions—as an heir, as a builder, as a ritual officiate—are those of a masculine king. The goddess Satet, the guardian of the Nubian southern lands, says, “She is the daughter who has come forth from your [limbs]. With a loving heart you have raised her, for she is your bodily daughter.”
⁶
Hatshepsut’s titles of God’s Wife and King’s Great Wife are not overreaching; they are suitable, in all respects, for a queen. But this relief still represents a clever step forward for Hatshepsut: she shows herself performing the role of a king, without formally naming herself as such. In year 2, she was already laying the groundwork.

Around the same time, Hatshepsut ordered two grand obelisks for Karnak Temple—an operation that would demand countless man-hours. To document the start of this long-term project, Senenmut had a monumental text carved on the island of Sehel at Aswan, near the site where the stone for the massive needles would be quarried. This inscription marks a transitional moment for Hatshepsut, who was acting as a regent, with all the powers of a monarch, but unrecognized as anything more. In this text, Senenmut refers to her as “the princess, the one great of praise and charm, great of love, the one to whom Re has given the kingship in truth, among the Ennead,
⁷
King’s Daughter, King’s Sister, God’s Wife, Great
King’s Wife […] Hatshepsut, may she live, beloved of Satet, lady of Elephantine, beloved of Khnum, lord of the First Cataract region.”
⁸

At this time, Hatshepsut’s claim of a growing, nascent, and informally given kingship is made only in text form, not pictorially, and thus it was accessible exclusively to learned elites and the gods. Everyone else simply saw the figure of their queen. The Sehel relief served dual agendas, recording her power as regent—a position with no formal title of any kind—in the text and her feminine power as God’s Wife in the image. Thus we have documented the moment before Hatshepsut was crowned, before she was in fact
king
, but when she was exercising all the power of the
kingship
.

Hatshepsut was busy producing an unassailable image of herself, one that further developed her divinity, a seemingly unending process for this woman. From the age of twelve to twenty, she was methodically positioning herself as queen, then regent, and now she was striving for the kingship itself. Along the way, she constantly modified her depictions to support that emergent power. One of the first changes we see on her monuments, just a few years before she formally became king, was her decision to drop the title of God’s Wife of Amen and take up the title of King’s Eldest Daughter. Some Egyptologists see this rejiggering of her personal relationships as the crux of her entire power grab, a shift that moved her from a queen’s role to an heir’s, as the rightful offspring of Thutmose I and one who could make a heritable claim to the throne despite her female gender.
⁹

Another block from Karnak Temple, probably carved sometime after Senenmut’s Sehel inscription, makes the next leap forward.
¹⁰
It shows Hatshepsut wearing the gown of a queen on her body but the crown of a king upon her head.
¹¹
The
atef
crown—a fabulous and extravagant amalgamation of ram’s horns and tall double plumes—was depicted atop her short masculine wig, probably to the shock of the craftsmen in charge of cutting the decoration. It was a confusing image for the Egyptian viewer to digest: a female king performing royal duties, offering jars of wine directly to the god, and all before any official coronation. If we assume that she appeared at public rituals wearing this crown, it would have been the first time in history that a woman wore such a headpiece in public. With this block, Hatshepsut had finally decided to document her changing powers
in pictorial—not just textual—form. And she took her display of power much further in the text, calling herself the One of the Sedge and of the Bee, or as Egyptologists translate it, King of Upper and Lower Egypt.

On this same relief, Hatshepsut also introduced a new name to encapsulate her transforming persona: Maatkare (The Soul of Re Is Truth). Hatshepsut was taking on a second name, a throne name reserved for kings and received through secret revelation. It was standard practice for a male king to do this but inconceivable for a queen with informal power. Hatshepsut was transforming her role into a strange hybrid of rule ordained before it had officially happened. Was Hatshepsut testing the waters with this relief? Or was she monumentalizing what would soon happen officially? She commissioned this scene sometime after year 5 of Thutmose III’s reign, and it was probably finished just before her formal coronation. With the production of this temple relief, Hatshepsut shattered the tenets of traditional Egyptian thinking about divine rule: only the
king
can act as chief priest and doer of ritual activity. Only
he
can accept the god’s prosperity on behalf of Egypt. Only
he
can wear his sacred crown of masculine virility. But here Hatshepsut—a woman—was claiming these holy duties, and all that before she was officially king.