The Woman Who Would Be King (22 page)

Hatshepsut may have been holding all the cards vis-à-vis her co-king, but even after her initiation into the mysteries, the coronation, the name changes, and the clever masculine-feminine arguments, she still had a problem. She was the senior king, and yet she had come to the throne second.

Hatshepsut had a clever strategy for managing this complication. Much as she co-opted traditional masculine titles by injecting a feminine element, now she cannily played with the way her co-king’s reign was measured, using his established chronology—something sacred and well known to the contemporary Egyptians—to retroactively support her rule. Rather than begin a new sequence of reign dates following her coronation, she simply adopted Thutmose III’s timeline as her own. Thus the date of her coronation was immaterial. His year 7 became her year 7, with the inferred meaning that she had been king even before her own recognized accession, that she had already taken the reins of power in the eyes of the gods from the moment of her husband’s death. Some Egyptologists have seen her dating methods as disingenuous and deceptive—to the Egyptians, and to the gods. How could she claim royal years of rule
before her coronation? But this woman’s informal power was without contest. To date the beginning of her own reign later, within the reign of the young Thutmose III, implied a divine mistake—because, for the ancient Egyptians, to be the king was to be the Good God. Or, put another way, the divinity that had been inside of her since her conception had finally been officially recognized and revealed. But it had always been there.

Hatshepsut was seated upon the throne, holding the instruments of Egyptian kingship and acting as a true, divinely elected Horus over all of Egypt. And Thutmose III had inexorably been transformed into a secondary co-king, a monarch who worked alongside another rather than ruling on his own. Although he was only a boy, this sacred coronation must have signaled to him what he already knew—that Hatshepsut ruled with the gods’ favor and was the most prepared to keep Egypt safe, prosperous, and righteous. After the coronation, when Hatshepsut finally sat on a throne taller than his own, in the place of honor formerly reserved for him, wearing king’s crowns like his, Thutmose most likely noticed the curious and awed looks of courtiers and priests as they entered the audience chamber; he watched, as her majesty conducted business, and saw how his nascent kingship was dependent on her mature authority.

Or perhaps the crowning made no difference to him and to his daily life, except for the demands on his time; weeks of coronation rituals and celebrations in multiple towns throughout Egypt must have annoyed the boy. If Hatshepsut had been making all the decisions during his tenure as king, then some formal changes in thrones and headgear and names might have constituted only superficial changes to this child’s life. But he likely sat on the throne beside her during their first “sitting,” and even though young, he must have perceived that something important in his life had shifted.

If he had previously been bratty and imperial in tone with his aunt, now was the time to change his behavior. There is little indication of any hostilities, but we do see a suggestion of increased distance between the two monarchs. At the inception of Hatshepsut’s kingship, Thutmose III appears only occasionally on her commissioned monumental constructions. Hatshepsut was so intent on laying the ideological foundation for her own odd kingship that she was essentially forced to exclude the king who already occupied the throne. Did the choices visible in her building
program find a way into her policy decisions? Perhaps Thutmose III was sent off to the north to further his education in the ancient cities of Memphis and Heliopolis, away from Hatshepsut, who was busy exploiting the Amen theology of Thebes to support the weight of her new crown.

The coronation was clearly meaningful to Hatshepsut, because she ordered the exclusive and mysterious rites depicted in all their ritual detail in carved stone reliefs at Karnak and Deir el-Bahri, a first for any Egyptian king: image after image shows her kneeling before the different gods while they place the various crowns on her head and arm her with assorted regalia; speeches praising Hatshepsut’s abilities and inherent worth are chiseled into the quartzite, limestone, and sandstone. Hatshepsut ordered her artisans to express her person and action in a rather bland and expected way, in line with two thousand years of royal tradition, but she knew better than anyone that the mere fact that it had happened at all—that a woman was crowned king of Egypt during a time of peace and prosperity, and that she could publicly claim it—was unequaled. Even though she tried to fit herself into previous traditions, Hatshepsut’s multiple and overt representations of this moment reveal that she knew her kingship was not only absolutely unprecedented, but something that needed to be broadcast widely.
²³

As king, Hatshepsut took up her new role as dominant protector with energy, and as such she gave special attention to Egypt’s goddesses. Perhaps believing that her power stemmed from the divine feminine, capable of both great destruction and soft tenderness, she embellished the temples of these goddesses, rebuilding those in ruin, and even elevating some divinities to a higher level with grand buildings and new festivals. The goddess Mut of Thebes was a beneficiary of Hatshepsut’s pious devotion.
Mut
literally means “mother,” but she was also believed to be the consort of the god Amen. Mut had her own temple precinct in the larger Karnak complex, and indeed, the foundations of many stone buildings in Mut’s temple space were created by Hatshepsut.
²⁴
Mut was depicted wearing the double crown, and it is likely that Hatshepsut, as Lady of the Two Lands, felt a kinship with this celestial being, enough to link her own feminine kingship with Mut’s great and ferocious power. Hatshepsut
probably felt a real connection to this lioness divinity, performing countless rituals in the goddess’s sanctuary, offering meals, and, most important, offering the goddess beer, getting her drunk so that she would not unleash her ferocious power on Egypt’s people.

But King Hatshepsut never neglected Amen, her father, the god she believed had placed her in this position in the first place; and more than to any divinity in the land, she strengthened her link to the god of Thebes. The name “Amen” means “hidden one,” and his true nature was thought to be concealed. Hatshepsut, too, claimed obliquely that her own true character as king had been hidden, only to be revealed as she gradually moved closer to the throne. One of her later obelisks reads that she is “Maatkare, the shining image of Amen, whom he made appear as King upon the throne of Horus, in front of the holies of the palace, whom the Great Ennead nursed to be mistress of the circuit of the sun’s disk.”
²⁵
She thus claims to be the visible manifestation of the god Amen, who was believed to exist before creation itself; that is, he represented unformed potential that could become anything—mother or father, man or woman, child or adult, animal or human. This god was thought to permeate everything and everyone. Amen’s existence depended on a body created from nothingness, from infinity, from darkness, within the primeval waters. And he did this miraculously, from his own divine plan, from the potentiality of the universe.

The inscriptions on the surface of this same later obelisk clarify Hatshepsut’s new, divine place in the cosmos:

Hatshepsut thus tells her people that she was able to converse personally with the creator god Amen-Re, to witness the circumstances of his First Time—that is, to see and understand his masturbatory creation of himself and of the universe itself. In Egypt, creation was an ongoing process, not a single origin story that happened once at the beginning of history, like the Bible’s Genesis. In Egyptian belief, the king had to construct the right conditions for the god to manifest himself and the world continuously. According to her obelisk texts, Hatshepsut’s kingly transformation allowed her to participate in and absorb mysteries that she could not before. This mystical aspect of her coronation should not be downplayed; it provided one-to-one contact with the god.

These later obelisk inscriptions are clear: Hatshepsut wanted everyone to know that she was only doing as Amen, her father, had commanded, that she would continue to perform any work that he required, and that she would act according to his guidance. She was advertising to her people that she had glimpsed the will of Amen’s heart. She was telling everyone, by building this connection to the sky itself, that she was truly in communion with the workings of the cosmos. For her, Karnak Temple was the epicenter of Amen’s creation, the place where heaven and earth joined, the sacred structure that allowed Amen to manifest himself and his great creative powers in the world of humanity. Hatshepsut was making some bold statements—not of martial powers or financial authority, but of access to the innermost workings of a god’s heart and to the secret nature of the universe itself. She had tapped into the source.

This was a rich ideology that Hatshepsut could exploit. She used the mythology of Amen to support a flexible view of her own hidden and internalized gender, lending a mythical, semidivine connotation to the adaptations demanded for her to manifest kingship. Atum-Re (of Heliopolis) and Osiris (of Abydos) were given their due during her reign, but evidence suggests that Hatshepsut saw in the god Amen an elasticity and an ambiguity that worked well for her own feminine rule.
²⁷
To cement her unconventional kingship, Hatshepsut used her deep theological training to find models that reinforced her own emerging androgyny. In some later texts, Amen was known as a father and a mother simultaneously, and Hatshepsut
fit herself into this indistinctness. Indeed, Amen had a feminine counterpart named Amenet, who was understood to be a kind of consort but, more correctly, was herself a feminine manifestation of the Great God.
²⁸

Hatshepsut was intimately aware of Amen’s many forms and names, many of them invested with great masculine powers of fecundity and creation. She was able to link herself as a feminine complement to each of them, allowing her kingship to force a nuance of gendered royal divinity never seen before, as “Khenemet-Amen Hatshepsut, who lives forever, the daughter of Amen-Re, his beloved, his only one who came from him, shining image of the Lord of All, whose beauty was fashioned by the powers of Heliopolis.”
²⁹
She sometimes represented herself as a ruler with masculine/feminine powers, and in one text she is told: “They allow your borders to reach to the extent of the heavens, to the borders of deep darkness. The Two Lands are filled with the children of your children, great is the count of your seed.”
³⁰

In keeping with her new role as caretaker of divine creation, Hatshepsut was the first known king to publish depictions and texts of the divine Opet festival. During these rites, priests carried the veiled statue of Amen-Re the two miles from Karnak to Luxor Temple to meld with the sexualized forms of the god—Amenkamutef and Amenemipet. Hatshepsut surrounded this procession with excess and embellishments.
³¹
Amen’s connection with the sun god, Re—joined as a kind of superdivinity forming the synchronized Amen-Re at Karnak Temple—also allowed her to tap into the solar aspects of divine kingship as sun priest. Working within this solar theology, Hatshepsut worshipped and built temples for the sun god’s daughters—the Eyes of Re—identifying with their ruthless violence and ferocity in protection of the sun. She underscored the ability of the female divinity to excite the sun god through laughter, love, and sexuality. Hatshepsut understood that it was the goddess who woke the god from his deathlike sleep, who fed him, and who incited him to sexual rebirth. This new, female kingship was nothing if not theological, and Hatshepsut’s interpretations of its difference tapped into the elemental powers present in the Egyptian people’s lives, the forces that dispel darkness, warm the skin, flood the earth, and allow the crops to grow. Her pious connection to Amen-Re allowed access to both
masculine and feminine power, to both visible and hidden authority, unlike any monarch that had come before.