The Woman Who Would Be King (20 page)

All accounts suggest that Hatshepsut started to construct her new persona in year 2, moving swiftly, completing the process within a five-year period; but as she had done all her life, she moved deliberately, step by step, claiming new titles and names when she thought the time was right, never pushing it beyond what those around her could tolerate. And her people seem to have accepted her unparalleled presumptions.

The Amen priesthood assisted in her unprecedented ascent. We learn from a later inscribed text that she had benefited from another temple oracle from the god Amen in year 2 of an unnamed king. This time, the god foretold her impending kingship outright. The inscription is broken, but because it comes from her Red Chapel, the text must refer to her.

The text is quite vague, as oracular texts are wont to be, and we lack the drama of the earlier revelatory inscription that invested her as God’s Wife. But no matter the details, Hatshepsut was still the first Egyptian monarch to use oracular understanding to solidify and publicly declare her authority to her people, and later in the same text she claims, “He (Amen) has introduced me to be ruler of the two lands while his majesty was declaring oracles.”
¹³

Hatshepsut’s understandings and manipulations of religious ideology were keen. She cloaked all her momentous power grabs through displays of piety. As to her kingly transformation, she tells us it was the King of the Gods himself who instructed her personally to take this step. Her later obelisk inscriptions seem a little more defensive: “He who hears it will not say ‘It is a lie,’ what I have said. Rather say, ‘How like her it is; she is devoted to her father!’ The god knew it in me. Amen, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands, he caused that I rule the Black and Red Lands as reward. No one rebels against me in all lands.”
¹⁴
In her own mind, Hatshepsut may have seen the situations of her life—as queen, God’s Wife, regent, king—through the lens of divine inspiration and planning by the gods. After all, conditions had put her in this very place and time, able to do what no woman had ever done.

It is likely that for her kingly initiation, she spent many nights and days in the heart of the temple, perhaps consuming intoxicants, suffering sleep deprivation, fasting, chanting, in an attempt to access the innermost workings of Amen’s mind. She may have ascended the pylons at dawn after a long night of trancelike meditation to merge with the sun, witnessing the mysteries and miracles of its regeneration, merging with the machinations of the cosmos that made it possible. And then, exhausted but joyful, she might have appeared before her people transformed, her eyes sparkling with privileged understanding. Initiation lent her great power in the eyes of her elites, especially the priesthood, and it was something she wanted to broadcast.

After her initiation came the crowning. Perhaps she found herself on her knees in the god’s sanctuary, shaking, her thin linen shift the only layer between her knees and the cold stone temple floor as she waited for the choice of the god. Perhaps when she felt the crown settle upon her brow, she began to weep, feeling the crook and scepter thrust into her hands until she grasped them closely, intimately, as if they had clutched these instruments of kingship all her life. However we might imagine the unwritten details of that first, personal moment as king, Hatshepsut herself was clear about her people’s awed reaction:

And then Hatshepsut spoke to them, claiming:

The reality of her coronation was likely different from the idealized version that Hatshepsut would later represent on her many monuments—particularly on her quartzite barque chapel at Karnak.
¹⁷
The first jarring jolt of reality must have been the existence of another king on the throne. Thutmose III was not yet ten years old, but he was still king. Hatshepsut’s presumptions were apparently unprecedented in Egyptian political history, because she claimed a share of the throne while it was already occupied. Her decision to be formally crowned as king, while young Thutmose III still sat on the throne, smacks of great audacity, and yet it happened nonetheless.

Hatshepsut’s coronation was intricate and involved, taking place within Karnak’s courtyards, shrines, and sanctuaries; it was a series
of complex rituals that went on for days, involving dozens of different crowns, garments, and scepters, and representing a political-religious investiture of the ultimate gravity. Hatshepsut no longer wore the headgear of a God’s Wife of Amen but that of a king, essentially trading in one position of power for one infinitely higher. She tells us that the gods themselves were participants and indicates that Thutmose I himself, her dead and now-deified father, was the first to place a crown upon her head, announcing that he appointed her as king alongside himself. Hatshepsut tells us that the goddess Hathor was also present, shouting a greeting in welcome and embracing her. The god Amen-Re is said to have personally placed the double crown upon Hatshepsut’s head and invested her with the crook and flail of kingship, saying that he created her specifically to rule over his holy lands, to rebuild his temples, and to perform ritual activity for him.

Because of the presence of Hatshepsut’s father, not to mention Amen-Re himself, the account of Hatshepsut’s coronation is automatically assumed to be fictitious by most Egyptologists. However, numerous surviving images and texts attest to similar activities by the Egyptian gods for other kings. The Egyptians did not specify in writing the exact mechanisms of the gods’ participation. Nor should we expect them to have pulled the veil from such sacred goings-on. Perhaps confrontations with Amen during festivals, in the innermost sanctuaries of Karnak Temple, could only happen after sleep deprivation, inebriation, or drug use, or by some other method that allowed the participants to perceive the occurrence of a supernatural meeting, even some kind of priestly possession in which the god was believed to enter the living body of a man who took on the role. Religious mysticism created real experiences for the ancient Egyptians, and only a skeptic would say that such sacred rites were the work of cold political manipulation alone. After all, the ideology most useful for maintaining control is always the one people believe.

After the numerous crowns were positioned upon her head and the many instruments of power were placed in her hands, one after another, Amen and her father granted Hatshepsut her royal titulary—the five names with which only a king was honored. To mark her initiation into the profound mysteries of kingship, the new female king formally changed her birth name from “Hatshepsut” to “Khenemetenamen Hatshepsut,” which, although unpronounceable for most of us, essentially meant “Hatshepsut, United with Amen,” communicating that her spirit had mingled
with the very mind of the god Amen through a divine communion. Indeed, the grammatical form is instructive, because the verb
khenem
, “to unite with,” has a feminine
-t
ending here, indicating that the Egyptians were up-front about the fact that a woman had merged with the masculine god Amen.
¹⁸
There was no subterfuge about her femininity in her new royal names, but her womanly core was now linked with a masculine god through her kingship. Hatshepsut’s first suggestion of sexual ambiguity was in this name change.

She had already taken on her throne name before the coronation; the precise meaning of
Maatkare
is still disputed, but it could be read as “the Soul of Re Is Truth,” or even “the Soul of Re Is Ma’at,” meaning that the goddess Ma’at was at the core of the sun god’s essence. The name was enclosed within an oval, what Egyptologists call a cartouche, as was the name Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut was now the proud owner of not one cartouche name, as all other royal women possessed, but two, in the manner of a masculine king.

Whether Hatshepsut herself chose the throne name or it was the invention of her priests and other advisers, she was the first king to incorporate the element Ma’at into a royal name, implying that at the heart of the sun god’s power was a feminine entity, Ma’at, the source that was believed to keep the cosmos straight and true. Names were believed to capture a person’s essence, and with this new label Hatshepsut herself became the force of truth within the sun god, an entity that acted to maintain order in the universe. Indeed, she was not only claiming to be a manifestation of the sun’s life force, as any king might, but also declaring herself to be a female expression of that solarism. Hatshepsut’s throne name communicated to her people that her kingship was undoubtedly feminine, and that feminine justice was necessary to maintain life with proper order, judgment, and continuance.

This Maatkare throne name would forever be linked to Hatshepsut at her most powerful, when she was finally able to transform the unceremonious power of a regent into the formalized power of a king. She received three other throne names at her coronation, and each one clarifies that Hatshepsut was not running away from the issue of her aberrant femininity as king but standing her ground and fighting back with cleverness and theological reason. Traditionally, the Egyptians had formed royal names evocative of masculine abilities, names like Strong Bull (Ka-nakht), which
tied Egypt to the sexual potential of its leader. Hatshepsut lacked the required male equipment, of course, to pull off a name like Strong Bull, but she could become Useret-kau (Powerful of Ka Spirits), as in her Horus name, using a similar-sounding word—not
ka
meaning “bull” but
ka
meaning “spirit”—to denote the mystical power of a god, if not the physical aspects of that power.

Her
nebty
name,
¹⁹
Wadjyt-renput (Green of Years, or Prosperous of Years), is essentially a theological argument that her presence would make everyone rich, but it also astutely includes another female element, the cobra goddess Wadjyt. And her last name, the Golden Horus name, Netjeret-khau (Divine of Appearances), combines her female divinity (
netjeret
) with the masculine ability to be regenerated (
khau
, “appear in glory”) like the sun god himself at dawn.

If there were dissenters among the intelligentsia who had the knowledge to dissect and critique Hatshepsut’s feminine kingship, they were up against some clever theologians. Whoever invented her royal names was ingenious enough to take the male elements
—ka
(spirit),
khau
(appearances), Re (the sun god)—and attach each to a feminine base. Hatshepsut’s names always retained the feminine -
t
. She and her priests knew her limitations as a woman and seemed interested in flexibility rather than deceit. She became king in name and title, but she knew that she could not transform into a king’s masculine body. She couldn’t impregnate a harem of women with any divine seed. There was no need for her royal names to point out those deficiencies or to lie about her true nature. Instead, she and her priests focused on how her femininity could coalesce with and complement masculine powers.

An Egyptian king’s masculine sexual abilities likened him to Atum, the god who, through sexual activity with himself, created his own being and the first void in which the civilized universe was placed. Kings were meant to perform the same sexual activity, and although we have no evidence that Egyptian monarchs actually did perform masturbatory rituals in the temples, we know that sexual congress with their many wives took on a similar sacred meaning. A king’s masculinity was also meant to liken him to Osiris, the god who sexually re-created himself after his murder through yet another celebrated act of masturbation. What’s more, the Egyptian king was also believed to be a manifestation of the sun god Re, who was thought to impregnate his own mother with his future self
as he set in the west. It was this power of never-ending renewal that the Egyptian king was meant to embody in his own person, so that when one monarch died, his future self, his son, would take his place in a constant line of rule.