5

War and Peace

To look upon her was more beautiful than anything; her splendour and her form were divine; she was a maiden, beautiful and blooming.¹

Hatchepsut lived before the full-length looking glass had been invented. She could examine her features in the highly polished metal ‘see-face’ which, carried in a special mirror-bag designed to be slung over the shoulder, was an essential accessory for every upper-class matron, but she was forced to turn to others for confirmation of her overall beauty. We should perhaps not be too surprised to find that her loyal and prudent courtiers dutifully praised their new king as the most attractive woman in Egypt. Her own words, quoted above, betray a rather touching pride in her own appearance – clearly these things mattered to even the highest-ranking Egyptian female – while incidental finds of her most intimate possessions, such as an alabaster eye make-up container, with integral bronze applicator, engraved with Hatchepsut's early title of ‘God's Wife’, or a pair of golden bracelets engraved with Hatchepsut's name but recovered from the tomb of a concubine of Tuthmosis III, serve as a reminder that Hatchepsut, the semi-divine king of Egypt, was also a real flesh-and-blood woman.

We have no contemporary, unbiased, description or illustration of Hatchepsut, although we can assume that, in common with most upper-class Egyptian women of her time, she was relatively petite with a light brown skin, a relatively narrow skull, dark brown eyes and wavy dark brown or black hair. She may, in fact, have chosen to be completely bald. Throughout the New Kingdom it was common for both the male and the female élite to shave their heads; this was a practical response to the heat and dust of the Egyptian climate, and the false-hair industry flourished as elaborate wigs were de rigueur for more formal occasions. The king's smooth golden body was perfumed with all the exotic oils of Egypt:

His majesty herself put with her own hands oil of ani on all her limbs. Her fragrance was like a divine breath, her scent reached as far as the land of Punt; her skin is made of gold, it shines like the stars…²

Hatchepsut's surviving statues, although always highly idealized, provide us with a more specific set of clues to her actual appearance. The new king evidently had a slender build with an attractive oval face, a high forehead, almond-shaped eyes, a delicate pointed chin – which in some instances is almost a receding chin – and a rather prominent nose which adds character to her otherwise rather bland expression. Towards the beginning of her reign her features show a certain feminine softness, a possible indication of her youth; later statues show her sterner, somehow harder, and more the embodiment of the traditional pharaoh. To some sympathetic observers her face betrays outward signs of her inner struggle: ‘… worn, strong, thoughtful and masculine but with something moving and pathetic in the expression’.³ To Hayes, describing a red granite statue from Deir el-Bahri, the king displays ‘… a handsome face, but not one distinguished by the qualities of honesty and generosity’.⁴ There is a general family resemblance between the statuary of Hatchepsut and Tuthmosis III – large noses obviously ran in the Tuthmoside family – which is not necessarily the result of both kings being sculpted by the same workshop. This can present problems for the unwary student of egyptology, and entire learned papers have been devoted to the question of exactly which monarch is represented by a particular statue.

From the time of her coronation onwards Hatchepsut no longer wished to be recognized as a beautiful or indeed even a conventional woman. She chose instead to abandon the customary woman's sheath dress and queen's crown and be depicted wearing the traditional royal regalia of short kilt, crown or head-cloth, broad collar and false beard. Very occasionally, towards the beginning of her reign, she took the form of a woman dressed in king's clothing; two seated limestone statues recovered from Deir el-Bahri show her wearing the typical king's headcloth and kilt, but with a rounded, almost girlish face, no false beard and a slight, obviously feminine body with an indented waist and unmistakable breasts (see, for example, Plate 5).⁵ More often, however, she was shown not only with male clothing and accessories but performing male actions and with the body of a man (Plates 8, 9 and

Fig. 5.1 Hatchepsut as a man

10). When depicted as a child at the Deir el-Bahri temple, she was presented as a naked boy with unmistakable male genitalia. Her soul, or Ka, was an equally obvious naked boy. To any observer unfamiliar with Egyptian art-history and unable to read hieroglyphic inscriptions, the female queen had successfully transformed herself into a male king. At first sight the explanation for this transvestism seems simple:

The Egyptians were averse to the throne being occupied by a woman, otherwise Hatchepsut would not have been obliged to assume the garb of a man; she would not have disguised her sex under male attire, not omitting the beard… How strong this feeling was in Hatchepsut's own time is shown by the fact that she never dared to disregard it in her sculptures, where she never appears as a woman.⁶

To dismiss Hatchepsut's new appearance as a naive attempt to pose or pass herself off as a man⁷ in order to fool her subjects is, however, to underestimate both the intelligence of the new king and her supporters and the sophistication of Egyptian artistic thought. It is perfectly possible that the vast majority of the population, illiterate, uneducated and politically unaware, were indeed confused over the gender of their new ruler, and Hatchepsut may well have wished to encourage their confusion; if her people felt more secure under a male king, then so be it. However, the lower classes were to a large extent unimportant. There was no Egyptian tradition of popular political activity and the peasants had absolutely no say in the government of their country. Indeed, Egypt was never regarded as ‘their country’; everyone knew that the entire land belonged to the king and the gods. Those who did matter were the male élite and the gods, and both of these were already fully aware of Hatchepsut's sex.

Hatchepsut, former God's Wife and mother of the Princess Neferure, was widely known to be a woman. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that she suddenly came out as a transsexual, a transvestite or a lesbian, and the fact that she retained her female name and continued to use feminine word forms in many of her inscriptions suggests that she did not see herself as wholly, or even partially, male. Although we have absolutely no idea how the new king dressed in private, we should not necessarily assume that she invariably wore a man's kilt and false beard.

Accusations of ‘deviant personality and behaviour… [and] abnormal psychology’,⁸ levelled by those who have attempted to psychoanalyse Hatchepsut long after her death, are generally lacking any supporting evidence. At least one modern medical expert has attempted to link this perceived ‘deviant’ behaviour with Hatchepsut's devotion to her father:

... Hatchepsut, from her early years, as exemplified by her apparent identification with her father, had a strong ‘masculine protest’ (to use Adler's term), with a pathological drive towards actual male impersonation… The difficulty with her marriage partners [sic] might indicate a maladjustment in hetero-sexuality. The fact that she had children[sic]does not obviate such a maladjustment.⁹

However, such analyses, based on the scanty surviving evidence, betray a profound lack of understanding of the nature of Egyptian kingship.

Similarly, it would be wrong to dismiss these male images as mere propaganda. They were, of course, intended to convey a message, but so were all the other Egyptian royal portraits from the start of the Old Kingdom onwards. None of the images of the pharaohs was entirely faithful to their original, but nor were they intended to be. They were designed instead to convey selected aspects of kingship popular at a particular time. Therefore we find that the kings of the Old Kingdom are generally shown as the remote embodiment of semi-divine authority, the rulers of the Middle Kingdom appear more careworn as they struggle with the burdens of office and the pharaohs of the New Kingdom have acquired a new confidence and security in their role. Conformity was always very important and physical imperfections were generally ignored, to the extent that the 19th Dynasty King Siptah is consistently portrayed as a healthy young man even though we know from his mummified body that he had a deformed foot. The same rule of conformity applied to queens, so we find that the unfortunately buck-toothed Queens Tetisheri and Ahmose Nefertari are never depicted as anything other than conventionally beautiful. If a royal statue or painted portrait happened to look like its subject, so much the better. If not, the all-important engraving of the name would prevent any confusion as the name defined the image. Indeed, it was always possible to alter the subject of a portrait or statue by leaving the features untouched and simply changing its inscription.

Hatchepsut's assumption of power had left her with several unique problems. There was no established Egyptian precedent for a female king or queen regnant and, although there was no specific law prohibiting female rulers – indeed Manetho preserves the name of a King Binothris of the 2nd Dynasty during whose reign ‘it was decided that women might hold kingly office’ - this was purely a theoretical concession. It was generally acknowledged that all pharaohs would be men. This was in full agreement with the Egyptian artistic convention of the pale woman as the private or indoor worker, the bronzed man as the more prominent public figure. Hatchepsut, as a female king, therefore had to make her own rules. She knew that in order to maintain her hold on the throne she needed to present herself before her gods and her present and future subjects as a true Egyptian king in all respects. Furthermore, she needed to make a sharp and immediately obvious distinction between her former position as queen regent and her new role as pharaoh. The change of dress was a clear sign of her altered state. When Marina Warner writes of Joan of Arc, history's best recognized cross-dresser, she could well be describing Hatchepsut:

Through her transvestism, she abrogated the destiny of womankind. She could thereby transcend her sex; she could set herself apart and usurp the privileges of the male and his claims to superiority. At the same time, by never pretending to be other than a woman and a maid, she was usurping a man's function but shaking off the trammels of his sex altogether to occupy a different third order, neither male nor female, but unearthly…¹⁰

Both these women chose to shun conventional female dress in order to challenge the way that their societies perceived them. However, there are clear differences between the two cases. Joan wished to be seen as neither a woman nor a man, but as an androgynous virgin. By taking the (surely unnecessary) decision to adopt male garb at all times, not just on the field of battle where it could be justified on the grounds of practicality, she was making a less than subtle statement about the subordinate role assigned to those who wore female dress. Unfortunately, in choosing to make this statement she was not only flouting convention but laying herself open to the charges of unseemly, unfeminine behaviour which were eventually to lead to her death. Her cropped hair and her transvestism horrified her contemporaries. Cross-dressing, generally perceived as a threat to ordered society, was in fact specifically prohibited by the Old Testament:

The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment; for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord.¹¹

Hatchepsut, living in a far more relaxed society, had a far more focused need. The queen, however well-born, would always be seen as a mere woman who was occasionally permitted to rule Egypt on a temporary basis. The king was male (an irrelevance to Hatchepsut), divine, and able to communicate with the gods. Hatchepsut did not want to be seen as a mere queen who ruled: she wanted to be a king.

To emphasize her changed status, Hatchepsut made full use of the concept of the divine duality of kings. Theology decreed that the king of Egypt should be a god, the son of Amen, who received his divinity on the death of his predecessor. At the same time, however, it was obvious that the king of Egypt was a mere human being born to mortal parents and incapable of performing even the most minor of divine acts in his own lifetime. This duality of existence resulted in the recognition of an important distinction between the office and the person. The office holder (pharaoh) who enjoyed a particular status because of his office was recognized as being a completely separate entity from the human being (Hatchepsut) who was that office holder. It was this con which helped men from outside the immediate royal family, such as Tuthmosis I, to become accepted as the true pharaoh: the coronation confirmed the divinity of the new king, and from that point on he was truly royal. Throughout her reign Hatchepsut strove to emphasize the conventional aspects of the role of pharaoh, a role which she felt she could fill regardless of gender. By so doing, however, she effectively eliminated herself from the archaeological record as an individual in her own right.

Why, then, was it so necessary for Hatchepsut to become a king rather than a queen? To modern observers there may appear to be little difference, if any, between the roles of king and queen regnant. If Queen Elizabeth II were suddenly to announce that she wished to be known as King Elizabeth her decision would be viewed as eccentric, but not as a fundamental change of function. It would be a mere playing with words. Hatchepsut was not, however, playing with words. To the ancient Egyptians, a vast and almost unbridgeable gulf separated the king from the rest of humanity, including the closest members of his own family. There was, in fact, no formal Egyptian word for ‘queen’, and all the ladies of the royal household were titled by reference to their lord and master: the consort of the king was either a ‘King's Wife’ or a ‘King's Great Wife’, the dowager queen was usually a ‘King's Mother’ and a princess was a ‘King's Daughter’. An Egyptian queen regnant simply had to be known as ‘king’; she had no other title.

The correct presentation of the king was clearly a matter of great importance to the ancient Egyptians, to the extent that those who invaded and conquered Egypt almost invariably adopted the traditional pharaonic regalia as a means of reinforcing their rule. We therefore find non-Egyptians, such as the Asiatic Hyksos rulers of the Second Intermediate Period or the Greek Ptolemies of the post-Dynastic Period, all dressing as conventional native pharaohs. It may be that the obvious combination of female characteristics and male accessories shown at the start of her reign should be interpreted as a short-lived attempt to present a new image of the pharaoh as an asexual mixture of male and female strengths.¹² If this is the case, the experiment surely failed, as Hatchepsut soon reverted to the all-male appearance of the conventional Egyptian king. These early statues do not suggest a blend of sexual characteristics in the way that the later statuary of Akhenaten does – it is always possible to tell whether Hatchepsut intended to be depicted in the body of a woman or a man – and this may be an indication that they in fact belong to a transitional period when either Hatchepsut or her sculptors was uncertain of the image which the new king wished to project.

The only king who dared to go against established tradition, consistently allowing himself to be depicted as far removed from the accepted idealized stereotype, was the later 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Akhenaten. This unconventional monarch was apparently happy to see himself presented as a virtual hermaphrodite with a narrow feminine face, drooping breasts, a sagging stomach and wide hips, although even he retained the conventional crown, false beard and crook and flail which symbolized his authority. These representations have cast a doubt over the sexuality of Akhenaten, although he is known to have had at least two wives and to have fathered at least six daughters, which is entirely absent from images of Hatchepsut. Many early egyptologists believed, on the basis of his portraits, that the heretic king was a woman, while Manetho's second 18th Dynasty queen regnant, Akhenkheres daughter of Oros (Amenhotep III), is now thought to be Akhenaten.

Hatchepsut's bold decision to throw off the feminine appearance which would for ever classify her as a queen (and therefore by definition as not divine and vastly inferior to the king) was an eminently sensible one which solved several constitutional problems at a stroke. She could now be seen to be the equal of any pharaoh, she could ensure the continuance of the established traditions which were vital to the maintenance of maat, she could become the living embodiment of Horus, a male god and, last but certainly not least, she could replace Tuthmosis III in the religious and state rituals which only a king could perform. It may be that a more secure female monarch would have had the confidence to adapt the traditional masculine garments and accessories to produce a more feminine version for her own use, and indeed the previous queen regnant Sobeknofru had not found it necessary to alter her way of dress when she ascended to the throne, but Hatchepsut clearly felt that it was important to be seen to be as ‘normal’ a king as possible. Sobeknofru in any case does not present an exact parallel to Hatchepsut. She came to the throne at a time when there was no obvious male heir, and therefore she had no need to justify or excuse her rule. She also reigned for less than four years; hardly enough time to construct the impressive monuments and statues which would present her with the opportunity to display large-scale images of herself as king.

Throughout the dynastic period the image was viewed as a powerful force which could, if required, provide a substitute for the person or thing depicted. The image could also be used to reinforce an idea so that, by causing herself to be depicted as a traditional pharaoh in the most regal and heroic form, Hatchepsut was making sure that this is precisely what she would become. Egyptian art is notoriously difficult for modern observers to understand on anything other than a superficial level; it needs a willingness to abandon ingrained ideas of perspective, scale and accuracy of depiction as well as an understanding of contemporary symbolism. However, Hatchepsut's regal scenes must be regarded as highly successful in that they effectively convey a comparatively simple message: here is the legitimate king of her land. Just as Queen Elizabeth I of England, as an old woman in the last decade of her 45-year reign, could be celebrated and painted as ‘Queen of Love and Beauty’ – an ever-young maiden with flowing hair and a smooth complexion and wearing the crescent moon of Cynthia, goddess of the Moon¹³ – so Hatchepsut, a widow and mother, could command her artists and sculptors to depict her as a traditional Egyptian pharaoh, complete with beard.

The god knows it of me, Amen, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands. He gave me sovereignty over the Black Land and the Red Land as a reward. None rebels against me in all lands. All foreign lands are my subjects. He made my boundary at the limits of heaven. All that the sun encompasses works for me…¹⁴

Hatchepsut chose to re-invent herself not merely as a king, but as a traditional warrior-king, conqueror of the whole world. To many modern historians this was nothing but a giant fraud. Her reign was perceived as being disappointingly ‘barren of any military enterprise except an unimportant raid into Nubia’,¹⁵ and it therefore followed that ‘the power of Egypt in Syria was much shaken during the regency of Hatchepsut’.¹⁶ This deliberate non-aggressive stance was in marked contrast to the expansionist policies of Tuthmosis I, Amenhotep I and the great warrior Ahmose, and was to put Tuthmosis III at a severe disadvantage when, at the beginning of his solo reign, he was required to quell uprisings amongst the Egyptian client states in Palestine and Syria. The unfortunate tendency towards pacifism was generally considered to be the direct result of Hatchepsut's gender. As a woman, it was reasoned, she was not only unlikely to wish to indulge in wars, but she would also have been physically incapable of leading the army into battle:

Hatchepsut was neither an Agrippina nor an Amazon. As far as we know, violence and bloodshed had no place in her make-up. Hers was a rule dominated by an architect, and the Hapusenebs, Neshis and Djehutys in her following were priests and administrators rather than soldiers.¹⁷

Hatchepsut stands out as one of the great monarchs of Egypt. Though no wars or conquests are recorded in her reign, her triumphs were as great as those of the warrior-kings of Egypt, but they were the triumphs of peace, not war. Her records, as might be expected from a woman, are more intimate and personal than those of a king… This was no conqueror, joying in the lusts of battle, but a strong-souled noble-hearted woman, ruling her country wisely and well.¹⁸

Few historians working in the pre-politically correct 1950s and 1960s, faced with the apparent pacifism of Hatchepsut's reign and the well-documented military activities of Tuthmosis III, were able to resist drawing sweeping conclusions. The two kings, already deadly enemies, were now to be seen as the leaders of two opposing political factions. Hatchepsut the female, with her interest in internal works and foreign trade, belonged to what could be classed as the party of peace. She was supported in her ideas by a party of self-made bureaucrats. Tuthmosis, supported by the traditional male élite including the priesthood of Amen, belonged to the more radical ‘war’ party, his vigorous programme of conquests and expansion being interpreted as a sign that Egypt was attempting to shake off her insular past and become a major world power:

Our theory then is that there was a choice to be made and that two different parties chose differently, Hatchepsut's faction in terms of the lesser effort of earlier times and Tuthmosis III's faction in terms of a new and major international venture.¹⁹

Old-fashioned egyptologists are not the only ones to have assumed that a woman's natural sensitivity, physical frailty and ability to generate life would naturally lead her to shy away from bloodshed. For a long time this, in a slightly altered form, has been the sincerely held belief of many feminist theorists and historians who view extreme violence and aggression as a purely male phenomenon and who associate the peace movement, now seen as a strength rather than a weakness, with women and motherhood. Woman's ability to create life is often seen as incompatible with the wish to order the death of another human being. Various theories have been put forward to explain the phenomenon of male aggression, ranging from the simple biological (the higher testosterone levels found in men) to the complex psychological (men's need for compensation for their inability to bear children), while Freud suggested that male aggression was the natural result of the sexual rivalry between father and son competing for the love of the mother. Freud went on to deduce from this that men had developed civilizations as a means of compensating for the suppression of their childhood sexual instincts, while the feminist theorist Naomi Wolf, discussing the ‘beauty myth’ which she sees as ensnaring modern women, has developed this argument a stage further by suggesting that as ‘Freud believed that the repression of the libido made civilization; civilization depends at the moment on the repression of the female libido…’²⁰

However, the idea that a woman would automatically be less aggressive than a man may appear strange to those who have lived under some of the world's most recent female rulers. Neither Mrs Golda Meir nor Mrs Indira Gandhi was known for her soft and passive femininity while the track record of the ‘Iron Lady’, Margaret Thatcher, speaks for itself. Mrs Thatcher, following a tradition established by Hatchepsut and continued by Elizabeth I, even dressed as a soldier during an official visit to Northern Ireland, a gesture which was presumably intended to express solidarity with the troops as she herself had no intention of taking up arms and fighting on the streets of Belfast. It could almost be argued on this admittedly very small sample that modern women who obtain positions of power normally reserved for men are more and not less likely to resort to military action, particularly if they feel that they still have something to prove. There is certainly nothing in Hatchepsut's character to suggest that she would be frightened of taking the military initiative as and when necessary.

A quick survey of the prominent women of history tends to confirm that being female is not necessarily a bar to taking decisive military action. Societies in general may have prevented their women from fighting but there have been some notable exceptions. Hippolyta, Penthesilea and the other single-breasted warrior Amazons may be dismissed as a legend invented to frighten men but Boadicea, Zenobia of Palmyra and Joan of Arc, real women living in societies which would not traditionally allow females to enlist, all donned masculine battle dress to lead their male soldiers into action. Other queens, including Elizabeth I as she rallied the English fleet at Tilbury, wore the battle dress to show their commitment to the cause but commanded from afar, while Cleopatra, who participated peripherally in the battle of Actium before fleeing ‘true to her nature as a woman and an Egyptian’²¹ never, as far as we are aware, dressed as an Egyptian soldier. All these women seem to have been instinctively aware that the very presence of a fragile woman on the field of battle, far from discouraging the troops, may actually bring out feelings of latent gallantry and thereby inspire their soldiers to greater effort. Antonia Fraser, who dubs this type of woman a ‘Warrior Queen’, notes that:

… a Warrior Queen – or female ruler – has often provided the focus for what a country afterwards perceived to have been its golden age; beyond the obvious example (to the English) of Queen Elizabeth I, one might cite the twelfth-century Queen Tamara of Georgia, or the fifteenth-century Isabella of Spain.²²

The woman who takes up arms on behalf of her country, such as Marianne of France, is often seen as the ultimate patriot. At the same time the enemy who is forced to fight against a woman may be shamed by his unchivalrous actions. He is caught in a classic ‘no-win’ situation; he can never achieve a great victory by defeating a mere woman, while a lost battle could lead to open ridicule by his male contemporaries.

Evidence is now growing to suggest that Hatchepsut's military prowess has been seriously underestimated due to the selective nature of the archaeological evidence which has been compounded by preconceived notions of feminine pacifism. Egyptologists have assumed that Hatchepsut did not fight, and have become blind to the evidence that, in fact, she did. As has already been noted, ancient battles do not necessarily have a great impact on their immediate environment, and we are dependent upon the preservation of monumental or textual evidence for confirmation that any skirmish took place. Occasionally we may learn of a great battle by chance from a single inscription, and it will already have been noticed that Ahmose's war of liberation, which freed Egypt from Hyksos rule, is only actually recorded in its full detail in the tomb of Ahmose, son of Ibana. As so many of Hatchepsut's texts were defaced, amended or erased after her death, it is entirely possible that her war record is incomplete. Furthermore, Hatchepsut's reign, falling between the reigns of two of the greatest generals Egypt was ever to know (Tuthmosis I and Tuthmosis III), is bound to suffer in any immediate comparison. A more realistic comparison, say with the reign of Tuthmosis II, shows that Hatchepsut's reign was not at all unusual. It is almost certainly a mistake based on hindsight to see the Asiatic empire as a master-plan devised by Tuthmosis I, hindered by Tuthmosis II (who may be excused on the grounds of ill-health) and Hatchepsut and finally brought to fruition by Tuthmosis III.

The Deir el-Bahri mortuary temple, Djeser-Djeseru, provides us with evidence for defensive military activity during Hatchepsut's reign. By the late nineteenth century Naville had uncovered enough references to battles to convince him that Hatchepsut had embarked on the now customary series of campaigns against her vassals to the south and east. These subjects, the traditional enemies of Egypt, almost invariably viewed any change of pharaoh as an opportunity to rebel against their overlords, while the pharaohs themselves seem to have almost welcomed these minor insurrections as a means of proving their military might:

The fragments and inscriptions found in the course of the excavations at Deir el-Bahri show that during Hatchepsut's reign wars were waged against the Ethiopians, and probably also against the Asiatics. Among these wars which the queen considered the most glorious, and which she desired to be recorded on the walls of the temple erected as a monument to her high deeds, was the campaign against the nations of the Upper Nile.²³

Blocks originally sited on the eastern colonnade show the Nubian god Dedwen leading a series of captive southern towns towards the victorious Hatchepsut, each town being represented by a name written in a crenellated cartouche and topped by an obviously African head. The towns all belong to the land of Cush (Nubia). Elsewhere in the temple, Hatchepsut is portrayed as a sphinx, a human-headed crouching lion crushing the traditional enemies of Egypt. There is also a written, but unfortunately badly damaged, description of a Nubian campaign in which Hatchepsut appears to be claiming to have emulated the deeds of her revered father:

… as was done by her victorious father, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Aakheperkare [Tuthmosis I] who seized all lands… a slaughter was made among them, the number [of dead] being unknown; their hands were cut off… she overthrew [gap in text] the gods [gap in text]…²⁴

The evidence from the Deir el-Bahri temple is a mixture of official pronouncements and conventional scenes, and it is therefore possible that the Nubian campaigns may be battles which Hatchepsut has ‘borrowed’ from earlier pharaohs, possibly her father. Such borrowing or usurping, disgraceful cheating to modern eyes, would have been entirely in keeping with Egyptian tradition which stated that the pharaoh had to be seen to defeat the enemies of Egypt; those who did not actually fight simply invented or borrowed victories which, as they depicted them, became real through the power of art and the written word. This means that a formal inscription carved by a king of Egypt and unsupported by independent collaborative evidence can never be taken as the historical truth. However, an unofficial graffito recovered from the Upper Egyptian island of Sehel (Aswan), and written on behalf of a man named Ti who served under both Hatchepsut and Tuthmosis III, confirms that there was indeed some fighting in the south during Hatchepsut's reign:

The Hereditary Prince and Governor, Treasurer of the King of Lower Egypt, the Sole Friend, Chief Treasurer, the one concerned with the booty, Ti. He says: ‘I followed the good god, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Maatkare, may she live! I saw him [i.e. Hatchepsut] overthrowing the Nubian nomads, their chiefs being brought to him as prisoners. I saw him destroying the land of Nubia while I was in the following of His Majesty…’²⁵

Ti goes further than the Deir el-Bahri evidence in suggesting that Hatchepsut was actually present during the fighting in Nubia. He himself was present at the battle not as a soldier, but as a bureaucrat. Further confirmatory evidence for at least one Nubian campaign comes from the tomb of Senenmut, where a badly damaged and disjointed series of inscriptions read ‘I seized…’ and later ‘the land of Nubia’, and from the stela of a man named Djehuty, a witness to the southern fighting, who tells us that he actually saw Hatchepsut on the field of battle, collecting the spoils of war.

There is less direct evidence for military campaigning to the north-east of Egypt, although again the Deir el-Bahri temple does hint at some skirmishes; in at least one inscription it is said of Hatchepsut that ‘her arrow is amongst the northerners’. However, it is a consideration of the subsequent conquests of Tuthmosis III which provides the best evidence for the maintenance of firm military control over the northeastern territories. When Tuthmosis III eventually became sole ruler of Egypt, the client states in Syria and Palestine seized the traditional opportunity to rebel, a reaction which suggests that the death of Hatchepsut may have been viewed as a potential weakening rather than strengthening of Egypt's power in the Levant. The Egyptian army, however, had been properly maintained, the soldiers were ready, the correct administration was in place, and Tuthmosis was able to launch an immediate and successful counter-attack. Tuthmosis, in his role as head of the army throughout the latter part of the co-regency, had already conducted at least one successful campaign in Palestine, during which he had captured the strategically important town of Gaza; by Year 23, the first year of Tuthmosis solo reign, Gaza is described as ‘the town which the ruler had taken’. Tuthmosis went on to become one of Egypt's most successful generals, pushing back the eastern and southern boundaries of the Egyptian Empire until Egypt became without doubt the dominant force in the Mediterranean world. Would his career have been so brilliant had it not been preceded by the reign of Hatchepsut?²⁶

Hatchepsut's military policy is perhaps best described as one of unobtrusive control; active defence rather than deliberate offence. While either unwilling or unable to actually expand Egypt's sphere of influence in the near east, she was certainly prepared to fight to maintain the borders of her country. Her military record is in fact stronger than that of Tuthmosis II, who did not lead his campaigns in person, and far more impressive than that of Akhenaten, a male king who showed an extreme reluctance to protect his own interests even though he received a stream of increasingly desperate letters from his Levantine vassals begging him for military assistance. It would certainly be very unfair to draw a direct comparison between the campaigns of Tuthmosis I, Tuthmosis III and Hatchepsut, and then criticize the latter for not adopting a more aggressive stance. It is, in fact, Tuthmosis III who is unusual in this line-up; all the other 18th Dynasty pharaohs embarked on the customary campaigns towards the beginning of their reigns, but only Tuthmosis III made fighting his life's work. After all, although a good military record was a desirable aspect of kingship, not all kings could be lucky enough to participate in a decisive military campaign. The fact that Hatchepsut did not need to fight may actually be taken as an indication of strength rather than weakness. The most successful 18th Dynasty monarch, Amenhotep III, a king who ruled over Egypt at a time of unprecedented prosperity, certainly had a less than impressive war record. This was not through personal cowardice or adherence to a deliberate policy of peace; Amenhotep III did not fight because he did not need to. Throughout his rule Egypt remained the greatest power in the Mediterranean world and, rather than rebel, Egypt's vassals and neighbours stood in awe.

We have ample evidence to show that Hatchepsut's wider foreign policy should be classed as one of adventurous trade and exploration. Her famous expedition to Punt, clearly one of the highlights of her reign, should not be seen as an isolated event but as the climax of a series of trading missions which included visits to Phoenicia to collect the wood which Egypt so badly needed to build her ships, and the exploitation of the copper and turquoise mines in Sinai which is attested by stelae and inscriptions at the Wadi Maghara and Serabit el-Khadim. All of these missions were standard indications of a successful rule, comparable to the exploits of the great pharaohs of the past, and as such were recorded with pride on the walls of the Speos Artemidos temple, Middle Egypt:

Roshawet [Sinai] and Iuu [now unknown] have not remained hidden from my august person, and Punt overflows for me on the fields, its trees bearing fresh myrrh. The roads that were blocked on both sides are now trodden. My army, which was unequipped, has become possessed of riches since I arose as king.²⁷

Trade, throughout the 18th Dynasty, was a matter of obtaining luxurious imports rather than, as in the modern western world, the problem of finding markets for exported Egyptian surpluses. The mysterious and exotic Punt, the ‘land of the god’, had been known since Old Kingdom times as a source of such desirable commodities as myrrh, incense, ebony, ivory, gold and even dancing pygmies, who were particularly prized at the Egyptian court:

You said in your dispatch that you have bought a dwarf of the god's dances… like the dwarf whom the god's treasurer Bawerded brought from Punt in the time of King Isesi… Come northward to the residence at once! Hurry, and bring with you this dwarf… If he goes down into a boat with you, choose trusty men to be beside him on both sides of the boat in case he falls overboard into the water. If he lies down to sleep at night, choose trusty men to be beside him in his tent. Inspect him ten times during the night. My Majesty longs to see this dwarf more than the spoils of the mining country and of Punt.²⁸

Expeditions to Punt had been a feature of several Middle Kingdom reigns, and the trading missions of Mentuhotep III, Senwosret I and Amenemhat II had all successfully navigated their way to and from this fabulous land. The exact location of Punt is now a mystery, although the flora and fauna depicted in the reliefs indicate that it must have been an African country, probably situated somewhere along the Eritrean/Ethiopian coast between latitudes 17°N and 12°N. Punt could therefore be reached via the Red Sea port of Quseir which lay at the end of an arduous trek along the desert road from Coptos. The Egyptians, well accustomed to sailing up and down the Nile, were not particularly well versed in the hazards of sea travel, and the long voyage to Punt must have seemed something akin to a journey to the moon for present-day explorers. However, the rewards of such a journey clearly outweighed the risks, and missions to Punt continued during the reigns of Tuthmosis III and Amenhotep III. The tradition of trading with Punt died out during the 20th Dynasty, and by the end of the dynastic period Punt had become an unreal and fabulous land of myths and legends.

We are told that it was actually Amen, not Hatchepsut, who took the decision to send an expedition to Punt during regnal Year 9, and that the king of the gods gave his personal guarantee that the mission would be successful:

Said by Amen, the Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands: ‘Come, come in peace my daughter, the graceful, who art in my heart, King Maatkare… I will give thee Punt, the whole of it… I will lead [your soldiers] by land and by water, on mysterious shores which join the harbours of incense, the sacred territory of the divine land, my abode of pleasure… They will take incense as much as they like. They will load their ships to the satisfaction of their hearts with trees of green [that is, fresh] incense, and all the good things of the land.²⁹

The fact that her expedition proved itself able to emulate the glories of former pharaohs, returning in triumph from Punt with ships bursting with wondrous goods, presented the new king with a marvellous propaganda coup and an irresistible opportunity to advertise the glories of her reign. The undeniable success of the mission must have made it obvious to even the most hardened of sceptics that the gods were not offended by the female monarch, and that maat was indeed present throughout the land. It is therefore no surprise that Hatchepsut deemed the story worthy of inclusion in her mortuary temple. Here the record of the expedition to Punt is preserved in a series of delightful vignettes and brief texts first carved and then painted on the southern half of the middle portico. The prominence of this position (the story of Hatchepsut's divine conception and birth was carved on the opposite side of the same colonnade) gives some indication of the importance which Hatchepsut attached to the tale.

Most unusually, the story of the expedition does not take the form of a sequence of static, lifeless and rather dull images; instead the artists have attempted a realism which is rarely found in monumental Egyptian art. The native people, their animals and even their trees are vibrant with life, providing the viewer with a genuine flavour of this strange foreign land and making it difficult to imagine that the artists who carved the fat queen of Punt or her curious home had not actually left Egypt's boundaries. Unfortunately, the charm and fine workmanship of the individual scenes has attracted the inevitable treasure hunters, and the story is now to a certain extent spoiled by the gaps which mark the position of stolen blocks. The loss of the blocks depicting the remarkable queen of Punt is particularly to be deplored although fortunately one of these blocks, now safely housed in the Cairo Museum, has been replaced in the temple wall by an exact plaster replica.

Throughout the text Hatchepsut maintains the fiction that her envoy, the Chancellor Neshi, has travelled to Punt in order to extract tribute from the natives who admit their allegiance to the distant King Maatkare. In fact the expedition was a simple trading mission to a land which, occupied by a curious mixture of races, seems to have been a well-established trading post. The Puntites traded not only in their own produce of incense, ebony and short-horned cattle, but in goods from other African states including gold, ivory and animal skins. In return for a vast selection of luxury items, Neshi is to offer a rather feeble selection of beads and weapons; as Naville, a man of his time, commented in 1898, he offers the men of Punt ‘… trinkets like those which are used at the present day in trading with the negroes of Central Africa’:³⁰

The necklaces brought to Punt are in great number; they perhaps had only a slight value; but they pleased the Africans, as they now please the Negros, to whom articles of ornament which are in themselves things of no intrinsic value, or cheap stuffs with showy colours, or cowries are often given in exchange, things valueless in themselves, but much in request amongst these African peoples.³¹

Naville forgets to mention that the fact that Neshi was accompanied by at least five shiploads of marines may have encouraged the Puntites to participate in this rather one-sided trade.

Punt had many desirable treasures, but was particularly rich in the precious resins (myrrh, Commiphora myrrha, and frankincense, Boswellia carterii) which Egypt needed for the manufacture of incense. Incense could be made from either a single aromatic tree gum or a mixture of them; a favourite Egyptian incense known as kyphi was said to contain as many as sixteen different ingredients, but the recipe is now unfortunately lost. Incense was burned in great quantities in the daily temple rituals, and employed in the formulation of perfumes, the fumigation of houses, the mummification of the dead and even in medical prescriptions, where those suffering from sour breath – women in particular – were advised to chew little balls of myrrh to relieve their symptoms. This might explain why the odour of Amen, in the legend of the divine birth of kings, is reported to smell like the odours of Punt. The Punt brands of incense were highly prized, but could not be found in any great quantity within Egypt's borders where trees of any kind were rare. Therefore Neshi was dispatched to obtain not only supplies of the incense itself, but living trees complete with roots which could be re-planted in the gardens of the temple of Amen. The thirty or so trees or parts of tree depicted in the Deir el-Bahri scenes seem to represent either two different species or the same tree at different seasons, as one type is covered in foliage while the other remains bare. The trees have been tentatively identified as representing frankincense and myrrh, although it is unfortunate that different experts cannot agree which type of tree is which.

Fig. 5.2 Tree being transported from Punt

Five Egyptian sailing ships equipped with oars are shown arriving at Punt where the sailors disembark into small boats, unload their cargo and make for the shore. Here they find a village set in a forest of ebony, incense and palm trees, its houses curious conical structures resembling large beehives made of plaited palm fronds and set on poles above the ground so that their only means of access is by ladder. The inhabitants of the village are a curiously mixed bunch, some being depicted as black or brown Africans while others are physically very similar to the Egyptian visitors. However, the animals shown are clearly African in origin. There are both long- and short-horned cattle, long-eared domesticated dogs, panthers or leopards, a badly damaged representation of a creature which might possibly be a rhinoceros and tall giraffes, which were considered so extraordinary that they were led to the ships and taken back to Egypt. The tree-tops are full of playful monkeys and there are nesting birds, a clear indication that it is spring.

Fig. 5.3 House on stilts, Punt

The Egyptian envoy Neshi, unarmed but carrying a staff of office and escorted by eight armed soldiers and their captain, is greeted in a friendly manner by the chief of Punt who is himself accompanied by his immediate family of one wife, one daughter and two sons. The slender chief is obviously not of Negro extraction; his skin is painted a light shade of red, he has fine Egyptian-style facial features and an aquiline nose. It is his long thin goatee beard, and the series of bracelets adorning his left leg, which mark him out as a foreigner. However his grotesquely fat wife, with her wobbling, blancmange-like folds of flab and enormous thighs emphasized by her see-through costume, presents a marked contrast to the stereotyped image of the upper-class Egyptian woman as a slender and serene beauty. Her appearance must have seemed extraordinary to the ancient Egyptians and even Naville, normally the most courteous of commentators, found the portrait of the queen and her already plump young daughter highly unnerving:

Fig. 5.4 The obese queen of Punt

Their stoutness and deformity might be supposed at first sight to be the result of disease, if we did not know from the narratives of travellers of our own time that this kind of figure is the ideal type of female beauty among the savage tribes of inner Africa. We can thus trace to a very high antiquity this barbarous taste, which was adopted by the Punites [sic], although they were probably not native Africans.³²

We can only wonder how the queen of Punt, who is evidently too fat to walk and is therefore carried everywhere by a disproportionately small donkey, ever managed to ascend the ladder which led to her home.

The Egyptians present the natives with a small pile of trivia; amongst the trinkets shown we can distinguish beads, bracelets, an axe and a single dagger in its sheath. The Puntites appear to receive these less than impressive offerings with delight, and cordial relations are so well established that Neshi orders that the appropriate preparations be made to entertain the chief of Punt in his tent:

The preparing of the tent for the royal messenger and his soldiers, in the harbours of frankincense of Punt, on the shore of the sea, in order to receive the chiefs of this land, and to present them with bread, beer, wine, meat, fruits and all the good things of the land of Egypt, as has been ordered by the sovereign [life, strength, health].³³

It is possible that the expedition spent several weeks travelling westwards to the interior of Punt escorted by Puntite guides and collecting both ebony and incense. It would almost certainly have been necessary for the ships to wait for the reversal of the winds which would carry them back to Egypt. However, when next we see the expedition the ships are being loaded for the return journey. Egyptians and Puntites labour side by side as baskets of myrrh and frankincense, bags of gold and incense, ebony, elephant tusks, panther skins and a troop of over-exuberant monkeys are all taken aboard. Truly, ‘Never were brought such things to any king, since the world was.’³⁴

The return journey is left to the imagination, presumably because it would not have added to our appreciation of the vast treasure being carried to Egypt. Instead, we skip directly to the unloading of the ships in the presence of Hatchepsut herself. We are told that this momentous event occurred at Thebes although, given that the River Nile was not yet connected to the Red Sea, it seems unlikely that the ships were able to sail directly from Punt to Thebes. There is, however, some evidence to suggest that sea-going ships, originally constructed in the Nile Valley, were dismantled and carried in kit-form overland both to and from the Red Sea port of Quseir. The

Fig. 5.5 Ape from Punt

final leg of the sea–land–river return journey, the voyage from Coptos to Thebes, could therefore indeed have been by boat. Papyrus Harris I, a contemporary text detailing the reign of the 20th Dynasty King Ramesses III, includes an explicit description of a return from Punt:

They arrived safely at the desert-country of Coptos: they moored in peace, carrying the goods they had brought. They [the goods] were loaded, in travelling overland, upon asses and upon men, being re-loaded into vessels on the river at the harbour of Coptos. They [the goods and the Puntites] were sent forward downstream, arriving in festivity, bringing tribute into the royal presence.³⁵

The Red Sea coastal area, with its desert conditions, lack of fresh water and great distance from the known security of the Nile Valley, was not considered a suitable place to live, and no fixed ports were maintained along its length. Quseir, the traditional departure point for voyages south, did not in any case have the satisfactory harbour facilities which would warrant the establishment of a permanent port.

Whichever the port of arrival, we once again see the parade of luxury goods as the expedition disembarks. In fact, more space is devoted to the loading and unloading of the vessels than is given to the mysteries of the land of Punt itself. Egyptian sailors struggle under the weight of incense trees temporarily planted in baskets and slung between two carrying poles while behind them come men carrying ebony and boomerangs, amphorae filled with precious unguents and curiously shaped blocks of resin. Yet other sailors drive the herds of cattle and one even leads a cynocephalus ape, highly valued as the sacred animal of Thoth, god of wisdom. The precious silver, gold, lapis lazuli and malachite are carefully weighed in the scales of Thoth while a motley collection of foreigners, both Puntites and Nubians, disembarks and kneels before the King.

Fig. 5.6 Tuthmosis III offers before the barque of Amen

Hatchepsut, the ever-dutiful daughter, dedicates the best of the goods to her father Amen:

The King himself, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare, takes the good things of Punt, and the valuables of the divine land, presenting the gifts of the southern countries, the tributes of the vile Kush, the boxes [of gold and precious stones] of the land of the negroes to Amen-Re, the Lord of the Throne of the Two Lands. The King Maatkare, she is living, she lasts, she is full of joy, she rules over the land like Re eternally.³⁶

Hatchepsut stands proud before the god himself. Senenmut, the king's favourite, prominent in his role of Overseer of the Granaries of Amen, stands with Neshi to praise the king on the success of her mission; all three figures and much of the accompanying text have been hacked off the wall in antiquity. Meanwhile, in the background of just one scene, the figure of Tuthmosis III appears, wearing the regal blue crown and holding out two tubs of incense to the sacred barque of Amen.