The Woman Who Would Be King (23 page)

Hatshepsut’s royal transformation was a success. She had begun her transition years before, culminating with the coronation when everyone gathered in the temple to see her blessed by the gods. Now, in the palace throne room, she presented her people with a more intimate, but still ceremonial, view of her alteration. They could see her plainly now that she was removed from the mysterious temple atmosphere filled with the haze of incense, burnt offerings, and the sharp angles of the rising or setting sun’s rays. Here in the palace there were no lengthy ritual activities that shielded the object of veneration from the viewing audience’s eyes. Within the confines of the throne room, one could address and speak to the king, assuming one used the correct formalities and conventions. Some officials of high rank were allowed even more intimate conversation, to the extent that they could disagree with the royal sovereign if the proper decorum was observed. After the overwrought ritual weight of the coronation, it was probably a relief to Hatshepsut and her officials to get down to the brass tacks of politics and finance.

At her first royal “sitting,” the transformed Hatshepsut graced her throne in the presence of the most elite officials, priests, and courtiers. The gilded chair was placed upon a dais that made her higher than anyone standing in the audience hall; it may have been situated within a gilded pavilion that surrounded her person with divine imagery of ancestor kings. She wore one of the many fabulous crowns in her arsenal and perhaps clutched her royal scepters. This was a woman who had grown up with court protocol and its accoutrements, and even in her unprecedented position as king, it is likely that she felt familiar not only with the weight of her crown and the heft of the religious instruments but also with the way she should hold her body and watch her audience with purpose.

She may have announced some of her royal policies and plans to her elites here for the first time. This formal moment would have been necessary for a legitimization of her new position, so that everyone could see, with their own eyes, what she had become and how she would behave among them. The Egyptians excelled in providing visual trappings that
recast a normal human as an extraordinary, divinized being. Everything about this scene—from the throne and its height to the pavilion and its richness, to her crowns, kilts, sandals, and eye makeup, to the strange confluence of masculine royal regalia on an elite woman—separated her from them, making her seem superhuman and beyond their criticism.

Hatshepsut had already spent years sitting in this very room, discussing strategies with her generals, conferring over the grain tax for a specific region, or reviewing options for dealing with a troublesome new governor in the delta. But now her clothing and regalia had changed. Her names were altered and enhanced. Her place on the dais was superior. Yet these were only surface modifications. In the minds of the ancient Egyptians who served her, her very person had been revealed as a living god, a being that now had one-to-one contact with the mind of Amen. With those crowns now upon her head, it is probable that most of her officials would have treated her differently than they had before.

And the changes rippled through the court as her coronation transformed the stations of those around her. Some moved down, like Thutmose III, demoted to a junior king; others, like her daughter, moved up. Nefrure now assumed the role of God’s Wife of Amen at around nine years of age, possibly just old enough to activate and formalize her sexual duties to the god and certainly old enough for improvement in her economic and political stature. With this position, Nefrure would have gained her own household, her own steward, her own income, and her own responsibilities. As the newly minted King’s Daughter to Hatshepsut and King’s Sister to Thutmose III, her position as God’s Wife was doubly legitimized; she was directly related to both co-kings. Indeed, the young girl must have stood behind her mother during festival encounters with the god, just as Hatshepsut had done during the reign of Thutmose II. If Nefrure and her mother were close, the girl may have enjoyed the intimate company as they performed many rituals together. Or perhaps she now perceived herself to be yet another step removed from the powerful woman who was never allowed the leisure to be a devoted and doting maternal presence in the first place.

Hatshepsut’s mother, Ahmes, was likely still alive to witness the miraculous transformation of the daughter she may have once wished was born a son. After Hatshepsut became king, she named Ahmes as King’s Mother, a title to which the dowager queen could never previously claim
ownership, thus further diminishing the authority of Thutmose III’s mother, Isis. Now there were two women in the royal palaces who held the same title, which was certainly a strange reality for everyone around them; the two co-kings were close enough in age that both King’s Mothers were still living. Although there is absolutely no evidence that Isis had been trying to wrest the regency from Hatshepsut or that she was a competitor for power, Hatshepsut seems to have been happy to demote Isis as she placed her mother, instead of Isis, in important reliefs. Perhaps the women resided in different cities or palaces, thereby limiting any unpredictable emotions—empathy, apathy, or bitterness—Isis may have felt when she beheld Ahmes’s change in status and encroachment on her territory.

If we accept that Ahmes was still alive at this time, as the evidence indeed suggests,
³²
then the older queen had watched as her daughter ascended through the ranks over the years: from young princess to God’s Wife of Amen to King’s Great Wife during the reign of Thutmose II, to regent during the early years of Thutmose III. Her little girl had developed into a skilled stateswoman. Now the unprecedented had happened, and Ahmes can’t have been anything but amazed. Her daughter was sitting on the throne of Egypt beside another king.

Hapuseneb, the First High Priest of Amen, must have approved Hatshepsut’s kingship, given all the support she was able to garner from the Amen priesthood. For all we know, Amen’s oracles were genuinely received, and Hapuseneb truly believed in his heart that the gods wanted Hatshepsut to be king, making it necessary to defy the obvious gender requirement, in order to safeguard the Thutmoside line. Or Hapuseneb may have engineered the oracles that foretold Hatshepsut’s authority by providing the means for the god Amen-Re to actually speak to her and mark her for rule in public. If this high priest was willing to countenance Hatshepsut’s unconventional reign, he was rewarded for doing so. Given that reality, we can imagine that the other high priests throughout the Two Lands—in Heliopolis, in Memphis, in Aswan, in Abydos—may have fallen in step as well.

Regardless of likely remuneration for their service and loyalty, Hatshepsut likely maintained an intimate working relationship with her priests, particularly at the Amen temple in Karnak. She had associated with the most powerful members of the priesthood from a young
age and become a king on whom they could depend absolutely. They had fostered her temple building, festival activity, and even theological questions. As God’s Wife, Hatshepsut had been part of the most important creative rituals in their presence, and now that she was king, they trusted her to keep the process of creation ongoing. In return, she trusted them to form a theological means for her to maintain her authority and to create a sacred theatrical stage to display Amen’s acceptance of her rule. She may have even talked with these priests about the precedent of Sobeknefru, the last woman to serve as Egypt’s sovereign, a few hundred years before. Hatshepsut and her priestly supporters seem to have come to an understanding that the gods could indeed accept female power in special circumstances, and her unusual rule forced closer contact with those mysteries of a woman in power.

Palace officials like Senenmut and Ahmose Pennekhbet would have likely been pleased by Hatshepsut’s kingship, despite its unorthodoxy, because their loyalty was abundantly compensated. Both of these men happened to find themselves in the right place at the right time. Senenmut had clawed his way up the social hierarchy to attain his position of authority, while Ahmose Pennekhbet was born to the life of elite officialdom and gentle responsibilities. Their mistress, Hatshepsut, was now the most powerful person in the land, and her eldest daughter and their pupil, Nefrure, was a wealthy priestess, with a palace, a treasury, and servants of her own to be managed. There was no reason for either of them to object to Hatshepsut’s rule on behalf of Thutmose III or on the grounds of gender.

Harder to answer is how the elites beyond Thebes—in cities like Memphis, Heliopolis, and Aswan—who subscribed to their own protocols and cultural understandings, reacted to Hatshepsut’s accession. Presumably Hatshepsut’s reach was long, because apparently she was able to influence officials even hundreds of miles away by rewarding dependability and trustworthiness with prosperous positions, and by punishing dissenters and complainers with neglect and dismissal. Whatever the level of disgruntlement at this female kingship among the elites—and there may certainly have been some real displeasure because Hatshepsut repeatedly had the line “he who shall do her homage shall live, he who shall speak evil in blasphemy of her Majesty shall die”
³³
carved into her later temple at Deir el-Bahri—we know that there were more than enough officials in
cities around Egypt who were willing to work with this new situation and with this new mistress, certainly enough to keep the ranks of nonsupporters suppressed.

Lower-level bureaucrats may not have even understood the political intricacies of Hatshepsut’s rise to power, and it was not their place to question their superiors, let alone their gods. Although many of them may have been shocked by the very notion of a woman taking the throne, none of them left any records of displeasure. Such men were scrappy survivors who aimed to please the boss above them, not the king in a palace far away. With such a young boy on the throne, even these bureaucrats would have seen the value of guaranteeing Hatshepsut’s continued authority for the long years to come while waiting for Thutmose to grow into his office and produce his own new and viable heir. Everybody knew that a change in rule could mean a shake-up in palace positions.

How did the larger population of Thebes, the peasants and craftsmen, react to seeing their mistress crowned as king and appearing before them in festivals or offering to the gods with no intercession from a man? Were they shocked, or did they assume that their betters understood what was needed? Perhaps they could only catch a glimpse of her figure through the throngs of onlookers—slim and regal, wearing a long linen dress, with her crown atop a short, round wig—as she and her young co-king led religious processions of the gilded barque along the sacred pathways, accompanying the god Amen from the temple gates out to the river quay. It was certainly not a sight they were accustomed to, but in the eyes of the peasants Hatshepsut was probably just as unreachable and mystical as any other monarch. Whether she was male or female probably made little difference to them if their crops continued to thrive and they were paid for their work.

We can only scratch the surface of ancient Egyptian opinion about this unprecedented kingship by looking at the elite’s actions vis-à-vis their mistress, Hatshepsut: there is absolutely no evidence of insurrection, rebellion, or coup during her reign. Without a doubt, Hatshepsut’s officials cooperated to keep the royal mythology of divine kingship alive, recognizing that it was in their best interest to do so, given the political structures that rewarded them for staying in line with the program. The systems and incentives weren’t in place in ancient Egypt for a wealthy landowner to raise an army, rise up as a warlord, and claim the throne by force, which
cut down on enticements to plot and conspire against the royal family. Even if people were unhappy about Hatshepsut’s rule, they weren’t so dissatisfied that they were going to do anything about it.

Unlike the decentralized political systems in ancient Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome that allowed, encouraged, and even thrived on extreme—and often violent—political aggression, ancient Egyptian society did not tolerate, much less foster, discussions of their ruler’s ineptitude, sexual deviance, mental instabilities, or other causes for removal. Egyptology lacks any intimate discussion of royal failures, intrigue, interor intra-family antagonism. Regicide happened so rarely that in the twenty-eight hundred years before the Ptolemaic period, Egyptologists can count only two verifiable cases—Amenemhet I of the Twelfth Dynasty and Ramses III of the Twentieth Dynasty—and neither was discussed nor recorded except in the most oblique of terms. And it was the same with dynastic usurpation. For example, we have no idea how Hatshepsut’s father, Thutmose I, came to the throne. It is simply assumed that Amenhotep I’s line petered out and that Thutmose I stepped in as a close relative to the stagnant dynastic line. But it remains in the realm of possibility that Hatshepsut’s father took the throne with the backing of his armies, even if we have no evidence of it. In such cases, historians are limited to what the ancient people chose to tell, after all. And the ancient Egyptians were masters at producing selective historical accounts about an unassailable and protected kingship.