The Woman Who Would Be King (25 page)

Beyond the ritual challenges, Hatshepsut had to actively find ways to assert her strength and dominance; she was always trying to equal the accomplishments of past kings, most especially her father, Thutmose I, who had campaigned far away in Syria, even hunting elephants at Naharin and bringing ivory tusks back to Karnak as gifts for Amen. Hatshepsut decided against any manly pursuits that would expose her obvious femininity and instead looked back to any deeds of Egypt’s most ancient and revered kings that she could emulate. Whether the idea came from her quiet moments communing with Amen or was a suggestion of an ambitious courtier, Hatshepsut decided to send men to the uncharted south on a dangerous expedition, dragging deconstructed ships from the Nile city of Coptos through the bone-dry Wadi Hammamat, 120 miles to the Red Sea, where the men would rebuild the ships and launch south along the coast, for a perilous sea journey of as many as 1,000 miles—an ancient Egyptian version of a voyage to the New World. Appropriately, she cloaked this journey in religious ideology. Before her team embarked, she asked the oracle of Amen for permission to travel; this semipublic moment was meant to create maximum drama, no doubt. The god replied—either by the movements or speech of the priests holding the god’s barque—that she should “search out the ways to Punt. Open the roads to the terrace of myrrh. Lead the army at sea and on land (…) to bring the miracles from God’s country to this god, who created her beauty.”
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After this divine revelation,
she met with her council and decided to send the expedition under the organization of a northern treasurer named Nehesy, another one of Hatshepsut’s “new men.”
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Punt was located far to the southeast of Egypt, probably somewhere in modern-day Somalia, Djibouti, or Eritrea along the Red Sea coast.
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An expedition to such a faraway land happened rarely in Egyptian history; the trip would have been talked about by every elite family in Egypt. Hatshepsut understood how to prove her kingship’s worth to the people who mattered. She planned the journey not just to procure commodities but also to verify her rule. All previous expeditions to Punt had been ordered by kings thought to be blessed by the gods with good fortune and solid leadership skills: Sahure (Dynasty 5), Pepy I (Dynasty 6), Mentuhotep II (Dynasty 11), Amenemhat I (Dynasty 12), and Senwosret I (Dynasty 12). Hatshepsut was simply placing herself in their august company and using their ideological methods of political legitimization.

The expedition was a success and returned in year 9 of the joint reign with shiploads of incense trees, cargo holds full of incense gum rolled into little balls, precious ebony, and woods, flora, and fauna from the rain forest. The incense was a high-value commodity used for many things—burned in braziers in the temple for the god’s enjoyment, used as a resin when mummifying the elite dead, and even chewed to dispel bad breath. The expedition members came back with amazing stories of the strange little chief of Punt and his massive and deformed wife. They described the bizarre small houses built upon stilts and the new fish and birds they had seen there.

When the ships docked to unload, it must have been an I-told-you-so moment for Hatshepsut that legitimized all her risky decisions thus far. She would later order dozens of images of the triumphant landing carved into her temple walls at Djeser Djeseru. She is shown sitting while the priceless goods are paraded and presented to her. Nehesy, the expedition leader, is there, too, monitoring the unpacking, and Senenmut stands beside him assisting Hatshepsut. The inscription informs the reader that all of these commodities were meant for her heavenly father, the god Amen, but the ideological payoff from this voyage for Hatshepsut, as his agent on earth, cannot be understated. Behind Hatshepsut in this temple relief is an image of her royal
ka
, understood as the spirit of kingship that moved
from ruler to ruler, the sacred entity that allowed this woman to serve in Egypt’s highest office. This royal essence was believed to have permeated her soul since conception, allowing the manifestation of her masculine power in a feminine body and determining the success of all her actions. In the minds of the Egyptians, the entire Punt voyage would have failed if she wasn’t meant to be king. Hatshepsut had gambled the lives of hundreds of men, dozens of ships, and two years of preparation, plus another year or two waiting for the return of the voyage in a high-stakes public wager. If the expedition had failed, it might have given ammunition to her detractors. But the gamble paid off. Hatshepsut even commemorated the receipt of so much incense by rubbing it all over her body in a public temple ceremony: rare resins like the frankincense and myrrh of the Bible, worth their weight in gold.

Thutmose III would have been roughly eleven years old when the voyage came back, the perfect age to find inspiration in the spirit of adventure and fresh knowledge such an expedition spread throughout Egypt. Indeed, this trip seems to have functioned as a kind of Napoleonic voyage for Hatshepsut, as she commissioned artisans to record images of the strange people, jungle huts on posts, forest landscapes, unusual ocean fish, and exotic commodities.

The Punt mission’s success confirmed that Hatshepsut was a shrewd stateswoman and businesswoman. Just two years after her formal accession, she had acquired in one stroke all kinds of exotica that she could use to pay off the Theban priests, her main source of ideological support. In return for the backing of her peculiar feminine kingship, she bestowed more incense on Amen’s temple than Egypt had ever seen. She even brought back incense trees, roots and all, to be planted on temple grounds at Karnak and Deir el-Bahri and probably at temples throughout Egypt, thus ensuring a steady supply for succeeding generations. Hatshepsut had quickly mastered the art of public relations—first creating a splash with her coronation, then with the successful erection of obelisks from Aswan.
Now a voyage had returned from a mythical land overloaded with price less goods for all to see.

Hatshepsut always kept an eye on practical matters, and a strong professional priesthood was a vital foundation of her continued authority. Her strategy included expanding the ministry of Amen to a size Egypt had never seen before. The position of Third High Priest of Amen was created; he would act as a lieutenant to the already existing First and Second High Priests. With riches pouring into her country from conquered territories, there was every reason for her to redistribute this new wealth by giving jobs to many of her elites—to keep them content and to tie her kingship even more closely to the temple cults around the land. Hatshepsut expanded the temples’ economic health by hiring chiefs of the granary, chiefs of cattle, chiefs of the fields, construction supervisors, chiefs of the workshops, treasurers, and a bevy of mid- and low-level administrators, all of them now earning a steady and generous salary for their station under King Hatshepsut. If anyone benefited from her kingship, it was her priests and temple bureaucrats.

The professionalization of the priesthood had already begun under her father, Thutmose I, if not a bit before, but she continued the evolution on an unprecedented scale. Before, temple institutions had been run by only a few professional priests at the very top of the hierarchy. The rest of the personnel positions were filled by part-time priests and administrators who cycled in and out of service. By Hatshepsut’s reign, this system was no longer sufficient for the growing temple machine, which now demanded a complex and extensive hierarchy of priests and administrators to support growing economic holdings, lavish daily rites, and luxurious seasonal festivals. And she was happy to pay for the expansion. Like so many rulers before and after her, Hatshepsut essentially bought her ideological and military base of power.

Hatshepsut was blessed with a keen understanding of the material and ideological sources of her power, but she also benefited from environmental and political circumstances. There is little or no evidence for famine or disastrous Nile floods during her reign (a happy coincidence from a modern perspective, but something that the ancient Egyptians would have seen as directly connected with her powers and legitimacy). What’s more,
her father, Thutmose I, had already established a growing empire in both the north and the south with a strong flow of income. Hatshepsut knew how to tap into established and successful systems, but she also had the acumen to improve them. As king, she managed her investments wisely and distributed high dividends to her people. Relentless and ruthless campaigning kept the mines and quarries open, flooding the land with gold and stones—the lifeblood of a strong Egyptian kingship—which not only advertised the semidivine status of the monarch but were also distributed as royal favors to loyal officials. She reopened exotic trade networks that had been closed for generations, and her courtiers could acquire luxury goods their fathers had never dreamed of: wines and olives from the Aegean, resins from sub-Saharan Africa, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan.

For Egypt’s wealthy families, Hatshepsut supported bureaucratic lineages that could pass from father to son, allowing them to grow fat with dependable income, in addition to the high rents and taxation their tenants already paid on their home estates. Employing more craftsmen than ever before, she initiated massive temple projects throughout the land, relentlessly demanding work of the highest quality, which in turn created a sophisticated system of artisan training not seen for hundreds of years. Hatshepsut was responsible for a jobs program of gigantic proportions. Hatshepsut also professionalized her army, thereby enriching both the sons of elite officials and her own treasuries with the spoils of war.
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She relied on the growth of her administration to maintain her kingship, and Hatshepsut did not always bend to the will of her elites in so doing. In fact, she filled key spots with men who had little connection to the old families whose members usually filled the upper echelons of power. Senenmut was one of these new men, of course; Hatshepsut had been relying on him since she was queen to Thutmose II. Another new appointment but not necessarily a “new man” was Puyemre, the Second High Priest of Amen.
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A third newly appointed administrator was Amenhotep, a man who became Overseer of Construction at the temple of Amen. None of the fathers of these officials had held an influential position;
sab
, “the honorable one,” was their fathers’ only title, and it was probably bestowed on them by their sons retroactively purely as an honorific.

Hatshepsut obviously needed officials without patrician agendas. We do not know how such new men, given their humble origins, were able to train for and land these positions of power, but they formed a key element
in Hatshepsut’s strategy of rule—a new class of elite for a new breed of king.

Whatever tensions may have existed between these new men and the old guard of respected and intellectual Theban families, the political realities made no allowances for petty behavior. All the evidence indicates that elites from established families worked with the new appointees. Patricians like the First High Priest of Amen, Hapuseneb, labored in ritual preparation and enactment alongside his second in command, Puyemre, even though Puyemre’s family was not born patrician. In fact, Puyemre was married to Hapuseneb’s daughter, the Divine Adoratrice Seniseneb.
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Senenmut, his new steward, and Amenhotep, the new construction overseer, attended to temple business even though no evidence connects them to patrician families either. Given all the money pouring in for ostentatious projects and extravagant festivals at Karnak, Hapuseneb needed the men. And they were likely well paid for their accommodating demeanor.