4

King of Egypt

He [Tuthmosis II] went forth to heaven in triumph, having mingled with the gods. His son stood in his place as king of the Two Lands, having become ruler upon the throne of the one who begat him. His sister the Divine Consort, Hatchepsut, settled the affairs of the Two Lands by reason of her plans. Egypt was made to labour with bowed head for her, the excellent seed of the god, which came forth from him.¹

During Year 7 of the reign of Tuthmosis III, the Steward of Amen, Senenmut, buried both his parents in a modest tomb cut into the hillside directly beneath the site which had already been selected for his own magnificent funerary monument on the West Bank at Thebes. Following the interment, the entrance to the tomb was closed, and it was subsequently completely covered by the rubble excavated during the construction of Senenmut's own tomb which started slightly later in the same year. The smaller tomb disappeared from view until it was rediscovered by accident during the 1935–6 season of work carried out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The excavators, Ambrose Lansing and William Hayes, were the first to enter the burial chamber of Ramose and Hatnofer in over 3,000 years. Here they found a typical selection of grave goods, including several pottery jars or amphorae, one of which was dated to ‘Year 7’, one which bore the seal of the ‘God's Wife Hatchepsut’ and two which were stamped with the seal of ‘The Good Goddess Maatkare’. Maatkare (literally, maat is the Ka of Re, or Truth is the Soul of the sun god Re) is the throne name of King Hatchepsut. The dating of the amphorae, sealed into the burial chamber by the debris from Senenmut's own tomb, is beyond question, therefore we know that, by Year 7 of her regency, Hatchepsut was acknowledged to be a king of Egypt. She was now the Female Horus of Fine Gold, King of Upper and Lower Egypt Maatkare Khnemet-Amen Hatchepsut (The One who is joined with Amen, the Foremost of Women).

The exact date of the new king's official elevation is, however,

Fig. 4.1 The cartouche of King Maatkare Hatchepsut

unknown, and the subject is greatly complicated by the fact that Hatchepsut always used the same regnal years as Tuthmosis III, effectively dating her own reign from the time of her stepson's accession to the throne. Given her dominant role in the subsequent partnership, we might reasonably have expected to find that Hatchepsut had established her own independent regnal dates. As it seems unlikely that Hatchepsut ever considered herself to be junior to Tuthmosis III, the matching reign dates strongly suggest that she must have regarded herself as a king or co-regent from the moment of her husband's death. However, we know that this was not the case, and the contemporary evidence from the Semna temple already considered in Chapter 3 confirms that Hatchepsut was still, in theory at least, subordinate to Tuthmosis III during the earlier part of his regnal Year 2.

It would be entirely wrong to see Hatchepsut's usurpation of kingly powers as a sudden and unexpected coup. Hers was a gradual evolution, a carefully controlled political manoeuvre so insidious that it might not have been apparent to any but her closest contemporaries. The surviving monumental evidence, scanty though it is, allows us to track Hatchepsut's progress as she moves swiftly from the conventional wife of the Berlin stela, standing placidly in line behind her mother and her husband–brother, to become the most influential woman Egypt has ever known. Shortly before her coronation Hatchepsut is both regal enough to make offerings directly to the gods – hitherto the prerogative of the divine pharaoh – and wealthy enough to become the first non-king to commission a pair of obelisks. By now Hatchepsut is surely king of Egypt in all but name. However, no matter how gradual her assumption of power, there must have come a time when she crossed the line from queen to king and made her changed status public. There was a very great difference between being the person who actually ruled Egypt and becoming the acknowledged king, and her coronation and subsequent assumption of royal titles, albeit merely the formal acknowledgement of a fait accompli, must have had a definite date.

Contemporary documents and monumental inscriptions remain obstinately silent on this subject, while Hatchepsut herself chose to gloss over her periods as consort and regent, rewriting her own history so that she might invent a co-regency with Tuthmosis I which, together with the emphasis which was now to be placed on the myth of the divine birth of kings, would ‘prove’ beyond doubt her absolute right to rule. The legend of the miraculous birth of kings had always been an aspect of Egyptian kingship. The Westcar Papyrus, for example, a Middle Kingdom collection of fantastic stories about the 4th Dynasty royal court, tells us how during the Old Kingdom the Lady Reddjedet, assisted by the divine midwives Isis, Nephthys, Meskhenet and Heket, gave birth to the triplet sons of Re. The three baby boys delivered by the goddess were to become Userkaf, Sahure and Neferirkare, the first three kings of the 5th Dynasty:

Isis placed herself before her, Nephthys behind her, Heket hastened the birth. Isis said, ‘Don't be so mighty in her womb, you whose name is Mighty.’ The child slid into her arms, a child of one cubit, strong boned, his limbs overlaid with gold, his headdress of true lapis lazuli. They washed him, having cut his navel cord, and laid him on a pillow of cloth. Then Meskhenet approached him and said: ‘A king who will assume the kingship in this whole land.’ And Khnum gave health to his body.²

Hatchepsut was, however, the first pharaoh to make a feature of the story of her own divine conception and birth, ordering that the tale be told in a cartoon-like sequence of tasteful images and descriptive passages carved on the north side of the middle portico fronting her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri. Her filial relationship with Amen was always extremely important to Hatchepsut and throughout her reign she took every available opportunity to give due acknowledgement to her heavenly father as, by promoting the cult of Amen, she was effectively reinforcing her own position and promoting herself. It would be too simple to see the Deir el-Bahri birth story as merely another example of Hatchepsut's insecurity about her right to rule. The scenes themselves are by no means timid or apologetic; they are miraculous and joyful, and they convey above all a sense of Hatchepsut's pride in her own origins and achievements. It is perhaps no coincidence that the only other complete cycle of divine birth scenes comes from the Luxor temple of the later 18th Dynasty king Amenhotep III, a temple which was dedicated to the celebration of the royal Ka, or the divine royal identity. Amenhotep III, not generally regarded as an insecure monarch, was the first pharaoh to promote himself as a god in his own lifetime. His own birth scenes bear a striking similarity to those of Hatchepsut, and it would appear that, having admired his predecessors’ work, he simply copied it wholesale, substituting the name of his own mother for that of Queen Ahmose.

Nor should the Deir el-Bahri scenes be regarded solely as a propaganda exercise as, from their position in the temple, it seems unlikely that they would have been seen by any but a handful of officiating priests who were already well aware of Hatchepsut's position. As we have already seen, Egyptian temples were not public buildings. They served as the home of the god and, as in any private home, the general public was kept outside the thick mud-brick enclosure walls. Only during the great festivals were the gates of the temple thrown open, and even then the public was only allowed access to the first court. The innermost sanctuary, where the king or the high priest worshipped on behalf of Egypt, was an intensely private place comparable to the master bedroom of a private home. The great temples of Egypt must have been oases of peace and tranquillity, a world apart from the bustling city life immediately outside their gates.

As Egyptian theology held that all kings were born the sons of Amen-Re, logic dictated that all queen mothers must have enjoyed sexual intercourse with Amen-Re. The Egyptians took a surprisingly practical approach to the subject of divine conception. Not for them the asexuality of an impersonal angelic annunciation. They knew that it took a man and a woman to make a baby and they recognized that their gods were capable of a variety of sexual feelings – rape, homosexuality and masturbation all played a part in heavenly life – so they developed the doctrine of theogamy, the physical union of a queen with a god. Amen-Re would come to Egypt and actually sleep with the mother of his future child. In order to preserve the reputation of the queen, for adultery was a heinous social crime, Amen cunningly disguised himself as the king.

At the Deir el-Bahri temple, the story of Hatchepsut's conception starts in heaven where Amen has assembled before him a group of twelve important divinities, including Isis, Osiris, Nephthys, Horus, Seth and Hathor, in order to make a momentous pronouncement. Amen has decided that the time has come to father a princess who will govern Egypt with a glorious reign: ‘I will join for her the Two Lands… I will give her all lands and all countries.’ The god of wisdom, Thoth, here acting Hermes-like as the messenger of Amen, proclaims the name of the chosen mother-to-be: it is Queen Ahmose, wife of Tuthmosis I, for ‘she is more beautiful than any woman.’

We then move to Egypt. Queen Ahmose, sleeping alone in her boudoir, is visited by the god whom she believes to be her husband, and they sit face to face on her bed in a scene which represents one of the few occasions that a queen of Egypt is allowed to communicate directly with a deity. Amen tells Ahmose that she is to bear a daughter whom she will name Khnemet-Amen Hatchepsut (The One who is joined with Amen, the Foremost of Women). This daughter is destined to be the future ruler of Egypt. He then passes Ahmose the ankh, or sign of life and, in the tradition of the best romantic novels, we learn how:

She smiled at his majesty. He went to her immediately, his penis erect before her. He gave his heart to her… She was filled with joy at the sight of his beauty. His love passed into her limbs. The palace was flooded with the god's fragrance, and all his perfumes were from Punt.³

We return briefly to heaven to see the royal baby and her identical soul or Ka being fashioned on the potter's wheel by the ram-headed god Khnum. The creation of the royal Ka alongside the mortal body is of great importance; the royal Ka was understood to be the personification of the office of kingship and therefore its presence was incontrovertible proof of Hatchepsut's predestined right to rule. At the climax of her coronation ceremony she would become united with the Ka which had been shared by all the kings of Egypt, and would lose her human identity to become one of a long line of divine office holders. Hatchepsut consistently placed considerable emphasis on the existence of her royal Ka, even including it in her throne name Maat-ka-re.

Fig. 4.2 The pregnant Queen Ahmose is led to the birthing bower

Meanwhile, as Amen watches anxiously, Khnum promises that the newly formed baby will be all that any father could desire:

I will shape for thee thy daughter [I will endow her with life, health, strength and all gifts]. I will make her appearance above the gods, because of her dignity as King of Upper and Lower Egypt.⁴

Khnum's work is finished and the frog-headed midwife Heket offers life to the two inert forms. At the same time, back in Egypt, Thoth appears before Queen Ahmose and tells her of the glories which await her unborn child.

Nine months later, the pregnant queen, wearing a vulture headdress and with a rather small ‘bump’ obvious beneath her straight shift dress, is led to the birth bower by Khnum and Heket. Here other deities wait to assist at the birth which, strictly a female-dominated rite of passage, is left to the imagination of the observer. When we next see Ahmose, she is sitting on a throne and holding the newborn Hatchepsut in her arms. Other deities surround the mother and child, while the goddess of childbirth Meskhenet sits in front of the throne. Meskhenet is to be the chief nurse and she seeks to reassure the royal infant: ‘I am protecting thee behind thee like Re.’ Finally Hathor, the royal wet-nurse, takes the newborn baby, and presents her to her father. Amen is overwhelmed with love for the infant. He takes her from Hathor, kisses her and speaks:

Fig. 4.3 The infant Hatchepsut in the arms of a divine nurse

Come to me in peace, daughter of my loins, beloved Maatkare, thou art the king who takes possession of the diadem on the Throne of Horus of the Living, eternally.⁵

Hatchepsut is presented before the assembled gods, who also greet her with great joy. There is only one unusual note: the naked infant Hatchepsut is quite clearly shown as a boy. The message behind the scenes is quite clear. Hatchepsut has been shown to be the child of Amen, and therefore a legitimate pharaoh from the moment of her conception. As Amen is clearly unconcerned about the sex of his child, and indeed as he made clear his specific intention of fathering a girl-child, why should Egypt worry?

The story now slowly starts to slide away from the heavenly towards the real world. Hatchepsut travels north to visit the ancient shrines of the principal gods of Egypt accompanied by her earthly father, Tuthmosis I. This is followed by a coronation before the gods and then by a subsequent earthly coronation by Tuthmosis I who presents his daughter to the court and formally nominates her as his co-regent and intended successor:

Said to her by His Majesty: ‘Come, thou blessed one. I will take thee in my arms that thou mayest see thy directions [carried out] in the palace; thy precious images were made, thou hast received the investiture of the double crown, thou art blessed… When thou risest in the palace, thy brow is adorned with the double crown united on thy head, for thou art my heir, to whom I have given birth… This is my daughter Khnemet-Amen Hatchepsut, living, I put her in my place.⁶

The news is received with universal joy, and the people start to celebrate with gusto. The priests confer to decide on Hatchepsut's royal titulary, and finally her coronation takes place on an unspecified New Year's day; a practical choice of dates which would allow her regnal years and the civil calendar to coincide. Unfortunately, this part of the story is, as far as we can tell, a complete fiction. While it is entirely possible that some public ceremony did occur during Hatchepsut's childhood – perhaps a coming-of-age celebration which involved Hatchepsut being officially presented before the court? – there is absolutely no evidence to show that Tuthmosis I ever regarded Hatchepsut as his formal successor, or that he had the intention of passing over both his son and his grandson in order to honour his daughter. The unchallenged succession of Tuthmosis II, and her own conventional behaviour as queen–consort, confirms that, at the time of her father's death, Hatchepsut did not expect to become king of Egypt.⁷

A slightly different contemporary tale is potentially far more useful in our search for Hatchepsut's coronation date. This text, inscribed on what was once the outside wall of Hatchepsut's Chapelle Rouge at Karnak, hints that the political situation may have already undergone a profound change by the end of Year 2 of the joint reign while stopping short of providing any absolute proof of this.⁸ The Red Chapel, now known more commonly by its French name of Chapelle Rouge, was a large sanctuary of red quartzite endowed by Hatchepsut to house the all-important barque of Amen. Amen's barque, or barge, known as Userhat-Amen (Mighty of Prow is Amen), was a small-scale gilded wooden boat bearing the enclosed shrine which was used to protect the statue of the god from public gaze. When Amen, on the holy days which were also public holidays, left the privacy of his sanctuary to process through the streets of Thebes, he sailed in style concealed within the cabin of his boat-shrine which was carried, supported by wooden poles, on the shoulders of his priests. When Amen was not travelling the barque rested in its own sanctuary or shrine. The sacred barque had always played a minor role in Egyptian religious ritual, but during the early New Kingdom it had become an increasingly important part of theology, and most temples now gave great prominence to the barque sanctuary. Unfortunately, Hatchepsut's shrine was dismantled during the reign of Tuthmosis III and subsequently used as filling for other building projects. Although many of the blocks were rediscovered in the 1950s, the chapel has never been re-assembled, and over three hundred blocks from the Chapelle Rouge are now displayed in the form of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle in the Open-Air Museum at Karnak.

Fig. 4.4 Hatchepsut and Amen on a block from the Chapelle Rouge

Carved on block 287 of the Chapelle Rouge is part of an important text, narrated by Hatchepsut herself, in which she describes a religious procession associated with the festival of Amen, held at the nearby Luxor temple during Year 2 of an unspecified king's reign. The Luxor temple, approximately two miles to the south of the Karnak temple and connected to it by a processional route which Hatchepsut herself embellished with a series of barque-shrines, was dedicated to both Amen in the form of the ithyphallic god Min, and to the celebration of the divine royal soul, or Ka.⁹ It played an important role in the cult of the deified king and was the place where, during the celebration of the annual Opet festival, the king re-affirmed his unity with the royal Ka which gave him the right to rule. The Luxor temple was therefore an eminently suitable place for the god to make a pronouncement concerning a future ruler and it was here, during the later 18th Dynasty, that Amen was to recognize General Horemheb as a King of Egypt. During the ceremony described by Hatchepsut, and in the presence of the anonymous king, the oracle makes the momentous announcement that Hatchepsut herself is to become pharaoh:

… very great oracle in the presence of this good god, proclaiming for me the kingship of the two lands, Upper and Lower Egypt being under the fear of me… Year 2,2 peret 29 [that is, Year 2, the 2nd month of Spring, day 29], the third day of the festival of Amen… being the ordination of the Two Lands for me in the broad hall of the Southern Opet [Luxor], while His Majesty [Amen] delivered an oracle in the presence of this good god. My father appeared in his beautiful festival: Amen, chief of the gods.¹⁰

The oracle had been developed during the New Kingdom as a channel of communication between the gods and the common people, and had proved particularly popular as a means of solving the day-to-day petty crimes that baffled the police who were forced to operate without the benefit of divine omniscience. Consulting the oracle provided a quick, cheap and easily accessible alternative to the formal courts. As the statue of the god processed through the streets on his ceremonial boat, it was possible for anyone to step forward and challenge him with a simple yes/no-type question, such as ‘Did Isis steal my washing?’ or ‘Did Hathor kill my duck?’ The god would consider the evidence and then answer by causing his barque-bearers to move either forwards or backwards – a legal system which to modern eyes at least seems to have been open to a great deal of abuse, but one which nevertheless satisfied the ancient Egyptian desire for immediate and public justice. More involved variations on this theme existed; it was, for example, possible to write different options on separate ostraca, lay them before the god, and see whether the god gravitated towards a particular solution, while in more complicated cases a list of suspects could be read out and the god would cause his attendants to move at the mention of the name of the guilty party.

However, those oracles who took the trouble to communicate with the ordinary people were invariably the lesser local gods; the deified Ahmose and Amenhotep I both served as oracles and the judgements of Amenhotep I were particularly well-regarded at Deir el-Medina. The oracles who spoke to kings were the major state gods. Amen, king of the gods, was particularly keen on conveying his wishes via an oracle which could only be translated by the high priest or king, and we should perhaps not be too surprised to find that Amen's commands often coincided exactly with the interests of his interpreter.¹¹

Argument has raged amongst egyptologists as to who the unnamed king of Chapelle Rouge block 287 might be. Some feel that he must be Tuthmosis I and that the text therefore represents Hatchepsut's recollection – presumably fictitious – of a time during her father's reign when the god acknowledged her as the true heir to the crown. If this is the case, the block can be of little help in determining the date when Hatchepsut actually proclaimed herself king and the entire scene must be classified as a further example of Hatchepsut's compulsion to justify her own reign. However, it is always possible that the mystery monarch is Tuthmosis III and that the block is therefore a record of the actual date when Hatchepsut decided to make public her right to the throne. Indeed, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Hatchepsut, a resourceful lady, organized a highly public pronouncement by the oracle at exactly the moment she was proposing to make her plans known.

Unfortunately, block 287 merely describes an oracle, it does not go on to record a coronation. However, details of Hatchepsut's coronation at Karnak are actually included in a third-person narrative carved on several blocks which, from the direction of their hieroglyphs, must have originally formed part of the opposite outside wall of the Chapelle Rouge. The coronation must, therefore, have occurred much later in the text, and presumably much later in time, than the events described on block 287. The coronation inscription is unfortunately undated but, as it is highly unlikely that Hatchepsut would have allowed the date of such a momentous occasion to go unrecorded, there is always the possibility that one of the missing blocks from the Chapelle Rouge will one day reappear to solve the mystery.

If we do not have a specific date for Hatchepsut's coronation, we do at least have a date for her jubilee, or sed-festival, which is recorded on the walls of both the Karnak and Deir el-Bahri temples. The celebration of the heb-sed, a tradition stretching back over athousand years to the dawn of the dynastic age and perhaps even beyond, was a public ritual of rebirth and renewal intended to revivify the ageing king and increase public confidence in his reign. ¹²It marked the start of a new cycle in the monarch's life and was, of course, the excuse for a nationwide celebration; the ancient Egyptians were never ones to deny themselves a good party. Tradition dictated that the jubilee would be proclaimed from Memphis on the first day of spring – the season of rejuvenation – and that there would follow five days of festival culminating in a grand procession of the state and local gods. The more solemn rituals of the heb-sed included a reenactment of the dual coronation, where the monarch was reanointed first with the white crown of the King of the South and then with the red crown of the North, and a ceremonial run where the king, carrying traditional emblems, was required to race four times around a specially prepared arena or pavilion in order to prove his (or in this case her) physical fitness to rule.

In theory, a king was entitled to celebrate his first jubilee thirty years after his coronation and thereafter as frequently as he desired. Hatchepsut, atypical as always, announced her jubilee during regnal Year 15. This was by no means the first royal tradition to be broken by Hatchepsut, and indeed Hatchepsut was not the first king to bend the heb-sed rules; it is possible that her father had erected his obelisks to mark his own jubilee although he is unlikely to have ruled for more than fifteen years, while five kings later Amenhotep IV, before he became Akhenaten, celebrated a jubilee after a mere four years on the throne. There is no doubt that a national celebration relatively early in her reign would have been a sound political move, boosting national morale and providing a good omen for the future prosperity of the regime, and perhaps Hatchepsut felt that, after fifteen years as ruler of Egypt, she was in need of renewal. However, it remains possible that Year 15 was chosen as a special year because it marked an important thirtieth anniversary. If Hatchepsut had only been fifteen years old at the death of Tuthmosis II, this may well have been her own thirtieth year or, given that she frequently portrayed herself as the immediate successor to Tuthmosis I, it may well have been thirty years since the death of her father. It may even have been, given that Hatchepsut also described herself as her father's co-regent, thirty years since the accession of Tuthmosis I.

Hatchepsut's jubilee must, of course, in theory have also been Tuthmosis’ jubilee, and indeed the young king does appear to enjoy his own rather muted celebrations at this time. On the walls of the Deir el-Bahri temple we see both kings making parallel offerings of milk and water; Hatchepsut offers to the south, Tuthmosis to the north. The northern colonnade of the middle terrace shows Amen embracing Tuthmosis who wears the double crown and carries the ankh or life sign, and a mace, while in the northwest offering hall Tuthmosis presents a table of offerings to Amen who blesses him accordingly:

I give to you the celebrating of millions of sed-festivals on the throne of Horus and that you direct all the living like Re, forever.¹³

However, the occasion appears to have belonged almost entirely to Hatchepsut and she takes pride of place in every scene. Tuthmosis III later celebrated his own independent jubilees on a far grander scale during Years 30 (the correct year for such a celebration), 34 and 37.

We shall probably never know what event precipitated Hatchepsut into proclaiming herself king. It is, of course, possible that she had always intended to seize power, and that following the death of Tuthmosis II she had merely been biding her time, waiting for the politically opportune moment to strike. Hayes is perhaps the most persuasive proponent of this theory:

… at the time of his [Tuthmosis II] death, her every waking thought must have been taken up with the stabilization of the government and the consolidation of her own position…¹⁴

It is, indeed, clear that the longer the move was postponed the more difficult it would have become to accomplish; for Tuthmosis III was all the while growing older, forming his own party and consolidating his own position.¹⁵

However biased his interpretation of Hatchepsut's character, Hayes must be correct in his assumption that such an unconventional move would need to be made sooner rather than later. Not only was Tuthmosis growing up and attracting his own supporters, there was also the possibility that he might die in infancy, lessening Hatchepsut's own claim to the throne by precipitating a dynastic crisis in which the position of the dowager queen might have been compromised by the introduction of a rival male claimant. Why then did Hatchepsut wait for between two and seven years before implementing her plan? Was she too young and inexperienced to act sooner? Or was she simply using the time to gather the support that she would need for her unorthodox actions?

The once popular image of the queen as a scheming and power-hungry woman owes more to the now-discredited theory of the feuding Tuthmosides than to concrete historical evidence. All that we know of her previous life, first as queen consort and then as queen regent, shows Hatchepsut to have been an unexceptional and indeed almost boringly conformist wife and mother paying due honour to both her husband and her stepson, loving her young daughter and contenting herself with the traditional role allotted to royal women. Although abnormal behaviour in a royal princess is unlikely to have been recorded for posterity, it is equally unlikely that an obviously egocentric megalomaniac would have been allowed to rise to the dizzy heights of consort, God's Wife and regent. Tuthmosis II was not compelled by either law or tradition to accept his sister as his chief wife and, even though Hatchepsut was a princess of the royal blood, a speedy banishment to the security of the harem-palace would have left Tuthmosis free to select a more amenable queen and a more suitable guardian for his infant son.

Hatchepsut's subsequent lengthy reign, characterized by its economic prosperity, monumental building and foreign exploration, seems to confirm her competence and mental stability. This was not, as far as we can tell some three and a half thousand years later, the rule of a semi-deranged obsessive but a carefully calculated period of political manoeuvring which allowed an unconventional pharaoh to become accepted on the throne and which brought peace and prosperity to her people. In all ways bar one, it was a conventional and successful New Kingdom reign. But, if the image of Hatchepsut as a woman motivated purely by ambition and greed is to be toned down or even entirely discarded, what possible explanation could there be for her usurpation of power? And what made her action acceptable to the Egyptian élite? Was there some unrecorded crisis which demanded a swift response and the establishment of a strong pharaoh on the throne? A sudden threat to the security of the immediate royal family, such as an insurrection in the royal harem, might well have prompted Hatchepsut to take drastic action to safeguard her stepson's position.¹⁶ In any such emergency Hatchepsut would have been a natural choice as co-regent as she, already regent and ‘only’ a woman, would not necessarily have been perceived as posing the threat to the authority of the true king.

Hatchepsut's treatment of the young Tuthmosis III indicates that she never regarded his existence as a serious problem even though, as an intelligent woman, she must have realized that every passing year would strengthen his claim to rule alone. She never attempted to establish a solo reign and, instead of hiding the boy-king away or even having him killed, she was careful to accord him all the respect due to a fellow monarch. Indeed, Tuthmosis was even encouraged to spend part of his youth training with the army, the now traditional education of the crown prince but possibly a dangerous decision for one in Hatchepsut's increasingly vulnerable position, as the support of those who controlled the New Kingdom army was vital to the survival of the pharaoh. Although he was represented less often than Hatchepsut, and although he was undoubtedly the junior partner in the co-regency, ‘leading as shadowy an existence as a Japanese Mikado under the Shogunate’,¹⁷ Tuthmosis never entirely disappeared from view. He even had a few monuments of his own, although these are almost invariably to be found outside Egypt's borders, either in Nubia or Sinai. Within Egypt, Hatchepsut was careful never to appear subordinate to Tuthmosis; her image or her cartouche preceded that of her co-ruler on all but one of their shared monuments, and even the private monuments of the time recognized that Hatchepsut was the dominant king:

... by the favour of the Good Goddess, Mistress of the Two Lands [Maatkare], may she live and endure forever like Re – and of her brother, the Good God, master of the ritual Menkheperre [Tuthmosis III] given life like Re forever.¹⁸

A consideration of the character and behaviour of Tuthmosis himself must play an important part in any analysis of Hatchepsut's actions. If we ignore speculation and stick to known facts we see that, whatever his private thoughts, Tuthmosis publicly accepted his aunt as co-regent. Initially, as an infant with a politically insignificant mother and no influential male relations, he can have had little choice in the matter. However, he would have been of an age to challenge Hatchepsut for at least five years prior to her death, and his training in the army would have made a successful military coup a virtual certainty. Reigning alone, Tuthmosis was to prove himself one of the most able warrior-pharaohs that Egypt has ever experienced. It is almost impossible to equate the hero of no fewer than seventeen aggressive Asian campaigns with the image of the impotent wimp who resented his co-regent for twenty years but who was never able to assert his right to rule. Similarly, it is difficult to envisage the two co-rulers remaining locked in deadly enmity for almost a quarter of a century; surely one or other would have taken steps to remove their rival? It has been argued that Hatchepsut felt unable to dispose of Tuthmosis as he was her passport to the kingship although, if she was so secure in her rule that Tuthmosis was unable to challenge her position, it is unlikely that his death would have dislodged her. There is certainly no obvious reason why Tuthmosis should not have attempted discreetly to remove Hatchepsut.¹⁹

Yet, as far as we are aware, Tuthmosis made no such challenge to his stepmother's authority. He seems to have been content to allow the situation to take its course and, again lacking any evidence to the contrary, we must assume that he was relatively happy to accept the co-regency. Perhaps, having grown up under Hatchepsut's guidance, he could not easily envisage removing her from power. Indeed, as we have already seen, it is even possible that Tuthmosis did not regard his own right to the throne as automatic. His need to cite an oracle of Amen in support of his kingship is certainly unusual; the true king generally had no need of such obvious divine support. In any case, Tuthmosis must have realized that the situation could not last indefinitely. All previous co-regencies had ended peacefully, not with an abdication but with a death. Tuthmosis himself, accustomed to the tradition of the co-regency and with no particular political axe to grind, may have found his position easier to accept than the modern observers who today grow angry and indignant on his behalf.

If Tuthmosis was unable or unwilling to take action against his aunt during her lifetime, how did he treat her when she was dead? We know that, following Hatchepsut's death, somebody masterminded a determined attempt to delete the memory of the female pharaoh from the Egyptian historical record. To this end her monuments were desecrated and her name and images were erased, variously being replaced by the name or image of Tuthmosis I, II or III. Initially these attacks were regarded as firm proof of a personal vendetta on the part of Tuthmosis III, and it was assumed that the new king – overcome by his long-suppressed hatred against the usurper who had denied him his rights for so long – must have ordered his henchmen to take action against Hatchepsut's monuments at the very beginning of his solo rule. However, new evidence has started to indicate that the proscription of Hatchepsut's memory did not occur until the very end of Tuthmosis' reign, or perhaps even later in the New Kingdom. This makes it less easy to attribute the attacks to personal spite; if Tuthmosis was really filled with such an uncontrollable hatred, why wait for over twenty years to act? Instead of impulsive actions they start to look like well-calculated political moves, and it would seem that it is no longer safe to cite the attacks on Hatchepsut's memory as proof of Tuthmosis' hatred of his aunt.²⁰

The vast majority of the Egyptian people, the peasants and lower classes, would have been ignorant of any struggle for power within the palace. As long as there was a pharaoh on the throne, and as long as the state continued to function correctly (that is, paying out rations), the people remained remarkably content with their lot. However, no pharaoh could hope to rule without the support of the relatively small circle of male élite who headed the army, the civil service and the priesthood. These were the men who effectively controlled the country and kept the king in power. Again, we must assume that these influential men found their new monarch acceptable even if they did not positively welcome a woman at the helm. Why was she so acceptable? Was her assumption of power so gradual that it went unnoticed until it was too late to act, or was there no one else more suitable? Perhaps Gibbon has provided us with the best explanation for this uncharacteristic departure from years of tradition when he observes that:

In every age and every country, the wiser, or at least the stronger, of the two sexes has usurped the powers of the State, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life. In hereditary monarchies, however… the gallant spirit of chivalry, and the law of succession, have accustomed us to allow a singular exception; and a woman is often acknowledged the absolute sovereign of a great kingdom, in which she would be deemed incapable of exercising the smallest employment, civil or military.²¹

Hatchepsut, the singular exception, had inherited a cabinet of tried and trusted advisers from her brother, many of whom had previously worked under her father and all of whom seem to have been happy to switch their allegiance to the new regime. The two old faithfuls Ahmose-Pennekheb and Ineni were still serving the crown, and Ineni in particular seems to have been especially favoured by the new king:

Her Majesty praised me and loved me. She recognised my worth at court, she presented me with things, she magnified me, she filled my house with silver and gold, with all beautiful stuffs of the royal house… I increased beyond everything.²²

Although Ineni was obviously deeply impressed by Hatchepsut's rule, indeed so impressed that he failed to record the name of the ‘real king’, Tuthmosis III, in his tomb, he never specifically refers to his mistress by her regal name of Maatkare, and it would appear that he died just before she reached the height of her powers. In contrast, Ahmose-Pennekheb omits Hatchepsut from the list of kings whom he has served and offers an unusual combination of her queenly and kingly titles: ‘the God's Wife repeated favours for me, the Great King's Wife Maatkare, Justified’, which would indicate that his autobiography too might have been composed at a time when there was some confusion over Hatchepsut's official title.

Gradually, as her reign progressed, Hatchepsut started to appoint new advisers, many of whom were men of relatively humble birth such as Senenmut, steward of the queen and tutor to Neferure. By selecting officials with a personal loyalty to herself, Hatchepsut was able to ensure that she was surrounded by the most devoted of courtiers; those whose careers were inextricably linked to her own. However, by no means all the new appointees were self-made men and some, like Hapuseneb, High Priest of Amen and builder of the royal tomb, already had close links with the royal family. Hapuseneb may have actually been a distant relation of Hatchepsut; we know that his grandfather Imhotep had been vizier to Tuthmosis I. Other important characters at Hatchepsut's court included Chancellor Neshi, leader of the expedition to Punt, the Treasurer Tuthmosis, Useramen the Vizier, Amenhotep the Chief Steward and Inebni, who replaced Seni as Viceroy of Kush. After Hatchepsut's death, some of her most effective courtiers continued to work for Tuthmosis III, and there is no sign that they suffered in any way from having been linked with the previous regime.

From the day that Hatchepsut acceded to the throne, she started to use the five ‘Great Names’ which comprised the full titulary of a king of Egypt and which reflected some of the divine attributes of kingship. To the ancient Egyptians each of these names had its own significance. The Horus name represented the king as the earthly embodiment of Horus; the Two Ladies or nebty name indicated the special relationship between the king and the goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt; the golden Horus name had a somewhat obscure origin and meaning; the prenomen, which always followed the title ‘he who belongs to the sedge and the bee’ (generally translated as ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’), was the first name to be enclosed within a cartouche; the nomen, also written within a cartouche and preceded by the epithet ‘Son of Re’, was usually the personal name of the king before he or she acceded to the throne. The prenomen was always the more important name, and this was either used by itself, or with the nomen. Thus we often find contemporary texts referring to the new king simply as Maatkare (maat is the Ka of Re), although her full title was Horus ‘Powerful-of-Kas’, Two Ladies ‘Flourishing-of-Years’, Female Horus of Fine Gold ‘Divine-of-Diadems’, King of Upper and Lower Egypt ‘Maatkare’, Daughter of Re, ‘Khenmet-Amen Hatchepsut’. Similarly Tuthmosis III, often accorded only his prenomen of Menkheperre (The Being of Re is Established), was more properly named Horus ‘Strong-bull-arising-in-Thebes’, Two Ladies ‘Enduring-of-kingship-like-Re-in-Heaven’, Golden Horus ‘Powerful-of-strength, holy-of-diadems’, King of Upper and Lower Egypt ‘Menkheperre’, Son of Re ‘Tuthmosis Beautiful-of-Forms’.

Throughout her reign, Hatchepsut sought to honour her earthly father, Tuthmosis I, in every way possible, while virtually ignoring the existence of her dead husband–brother, Tuthmosis II. It is not particularly unusual to find that a young girl brought up in a female-dominated environment feels a strong desire to emulate and impress her absent father, particularly when he is acknowledged to be the most powerful and glamorous man in the land. However, to some observers this hero-worship went far beyond the natural affection that a young woman might be expected to feel for her dead father:

This [devotion to a dominant father] is a trait which prominent females sometimes show. Anna Freud turned herself into Sigmund's intellectual heir, Benazir Bhutto makes a political platform out of her father's memory, and one is reminded of a recent British prime minister whose entry in Who's Who included a father but no mother. Did Tuthmosis I ever call his daughter ‘the best man in the dynasty’, and is this why Hatchepsut shows no identification with other women?²³

Perhaps the most important point here is that all these women lacked an acceptable female role-model and therefore, once they had made the decision to commit themselves to a career in the public eye, had little choice but to follow their fathers rather than their mothers, sisters, cousins or aunts into what had become the family business. Hatchepsut, as king, had no other woman to identify with. She had already spent at least fifteen years emulating her mother as queen and now wanted to advance to king. Of all the women named above, Mrs Bhutto, a lady who is not afraid to use the name and reputation of her father to enhance her own cause, is perhaps the closest parallel to Hatchepsut. More telling might be a comparison with Queen Elizabeth I of England, a woman who inherited her throne against all odds at a time of dynastic difficulty when the royal family was suffering from a shortage of sons, and who deliberately stressed her relationship with her vigorous and effective father in order to lessen the effect of her own femininity and make her own reign more acceptable to her people: ‘And though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage, answerable to my place, as ever my father had.’

Citing Tuthmosis as the inspiration for Hatchepsut's actions is, however, in many ways putting the chariot before the horse. Tuthmosis I was Hatchepsut's reason to rule, not her motivation, as Egyptian tradition decreed that son should follow father on the throne. Given Hatchepsut's unusual circumstances, she needed to stress her links with her father more than most other kings. Therefore, in order to establish herself as her father's heir – and thereby justify her claim to the throne – Hatchepsut was forced to edit her own past so that her husband-brother, also a child of Tuthmosis I, disappeared from the scene and she became the sole Horus to her father's Osiris. To this end she redesigned her father's tomb in the Valley of the Kings, emulated his habit of erecting obelisks, built him a new mortuary chapel associated with her own at Deir el-Bahri and allowed him prominence on many of her inscriptions.

Nor was Hatchepsut the only 18th Dynasty monarch to revere the memory of Tuthmosis I; Tuthmosis III also sought to link himself with the grandfather whom he almost certainly never met while virtually ignoring the existence of his own less impressive father. As a sign of respect Tuthmosis III, somewhat confusingly, occasionally refers to himself as the son rather than grandson of Tuthmosis I. Fortunately, the autobiography of Ineni specifically tells us that Tuthmosis II was succeeded by ‘the son he had begotten’, removing any doubt as to the actual paternity of Tuthmosis III. The terms ‘father’ and ‘son’ need not be taken literally in these circumstances; ‘father’ was often used by the ancient Egyptians as a respectful form of address for a variety of older men and could therefore be used in a reference to an adoptive father or stepfather, patron or even ancestor. That Tuthmosis I should be regarded as an heroic figure by his descendants is not too surprising. Not only had he proved himself a highly successful monarch, he was also the founder of the immediate royal family. His predecessor Amenhotep I, although officially classified as belonging to the same dynasty, was in fact no blood relation of either Hatchepsut or Tuthmosis III.

As a king of Egypt, Hatchepsut was entitled to a suitably splendid monarch's tomb. Therefore, soon after her accession, work on the rather understated tomb in the Wadi Sikkat Taka ez-Zeida ceased and the excavation of a far more regal monument commenced in the Valley of the Kings. Following recent 18th Dynasty tradition, this tomb was to have two distinct components: a burial chamber hidden away in the Valley (now known as Tomb KV20) and a highly visible mortuary temple, in this case Djeser-Djeseru or ‘Holy of the Holies’, a magnificent temple nestling in a natural bay in the Theban mountain at Deir el-Bahri.²⁴ Two architects were appointed to oversee the essentially separate building projects, and Hapuseneb was placed in charge of work at KV20 while Senenmut is generally credited with the work at Deir el-Bahri.