SEVEN
Around Thutmose III’s fourteenth birthday, some of the wives in his harem were likely beginning to grow with child. Thutmose probably married Nefrure around this time as well. As a King’s Daughter and King’s Sister, Nefrure was expected to join with him and no other man. This union was his sacred duty, as it was her privilege. She was a royal daughter, and their son would be of the purest blood, destined to rule Egypt as his father and grandfather had done before him.
Hatshepsut’s risky plan to keep the Thutmoside family in power was paying off. Thutmose III had turned out to be a vigorous young man, able not only to sire children, but to participate in military campaigns. Hatshepsut’s reign with Thutmose III included several foreign wars to the south of Egypt,1 and Thutmose III probably accompanied such campaigns. No matter what his precise role at this young age, he was growing into a mighty warrior-king before the eyes of his people.
There is no evidence that her femininity made Hatshepsut soft toward her traditional enemies. To the contrary: she knew that foreign suppression was Egypt’s lifeblood, a key source of her country’s great wealth. Nubia’s subjugation was not just to Hatshepsut’s advantage as king but to the economic advantage of her military elite. The notion entertained by some Egyptologists2 that she was a pacifist just because she was a woman is simply wrong. Hatshepsut may have traveled personally with her troops to Kush,3 and there was every reason to bring Thutmose along.4 Hatshepsut likely organized four campaigns to Kush, and Thutmose III may have participated in all of them.
Hatshepsut did not campaign in the north, but that was probably because she was able to maintain active and effective diplomatic connections there. Her father, Thutmose I, had already campaigned in Syria-Palestine, which raised awareness of Egypt’s growing military presence among the kings beyond the Sinai. With no evidence that any kings in northwest Asia decided to become aggressive just because a woman was on the throne, it seems that her gender made little difference in the politics of the region. Egypt’s position in the north, in Syria-Palestine, remained largely unchanged throughout her reign, and Hatshepsut never brought troops there—either because she did not have the strength to do it, or because the mere threat of her military power maintained some tribute payments. Possibly her campaigns to Nubia kept her men busy and rich without the complications of constant war on two fronts. Hatshepsut was smart enough to establish a steady stream of wealth from Nubia and Kerma in the south early in her reign; these were certainly much easier conquests than the urban Syrian centers of Kadesh and Megiddo to the north.
Hatshepsut knew that it was in Egypt’s and her own best interest for her co-king to be trained as a skilled general. There is reason to believe that she sent Thutmose III to the north of Egypt to learn about the system of border fortresses along the Sinai road and to train with the army at the ancient military stronghold of Perunefer, modern-day Tell el-Daba.5 While he was there, his privileged training and military contacts likely helped him appreciate Egypt’s place in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. He would have met leaders from Babylon, Susa, Phoenicia, Anatolia, Canaan, and Crete. The Egyptians called the Cretans Keftiu and depicted them wearing colorful woolen garments and fabulous high looping hairstyles. In fact, everything Cretan was all the rage in Egypt during Thutmose’s adolescence. Artisans from Crete were invited to the royal palace at Perunefer to create frescoes in the colorful style of their people, and bull-leaping demonstrations were likely incorporated into the royal court entertainment.
Thutmose III probably met with the ambassadors sent by kings of the city-states of Phoenicia; these kings were much older than he was, and unlike his, their dynastic lines stretched back many generations. Although they held far less territory than Thutmose, the Phoenicians counted as Egypt’s best trading partners. It was a time of possibilities, at the height of Bronze Age globalization and prosperity, and the young king likely watched the lands to the north of Egypt with a calculating eye, weighing the potential benefits of including some of them in an expanding Egyptian empire of his own. None of these northern territories were under Egypt’s control while he was growing up. He would have known, however, that control of Syria-Palestine implied an imperial force to be reckoned with, allowing him to demand tribute from numerous subjugated vassals even farther afield. Perhaps Thutmose recognized that it fell to him to conquer Syria-Palestine and re-create Egypt’s empire in the north. If Hatshepsut felt threatened by her co-king’s ambitions, she did not betray it. Instead, she seems to have welcomed any future improvements of Egypt’s empire and offered him the most sophisticated military training imaginable, even inspiring in him the lofty goal of fulfilling Egypt’s manifest destiny of hegemony over its traditional enemies.6
Hatshepsut’s young co-king was almost a man. As the king reached fifteen or sixteen years old, we can imagine that his opinions were not only more forcefully expressed but reasoned and educated. His bearing was manly, no longer boyish. He was probably now taller than his female co-king.7 And here Hatshepsut had another problem to put to right, one that good fortune and careful planning had thankfully allowed. It was quickly becoming unseemly for her to stand next to Thutmose III in the senior position during sacred rituals and at court. A woman could outrank a boy but not a man. If she was to continue her dominance in this unequal partnership, something had to change.
Hatshepsut began experimenting in earnest with how to represent her own sexual identity, negotiating between her actual feminine self and the masculine kingship she inhabited, striving to find a more acceptable way to present her unusual rule. Images from the first years of her reign typically depicted her wearing the long dress of a woman and the crown of a king. At some point, Hatshepsut recognized that this honest and obvious depiction had lost its efficacy. Whether it was in the new context of a young man rather than a boy standing beside her, or some other factor, it seems that ultimately a feminine king was too jarring in the context of this coregency, even to the relatively liberated Egyptian mind. Egyptian female kings were rare, ephemeral, temporary solutions to a political crisis, not a long-lasting ideal.
In her early twenties, Hatshepsut had already taken the first steps in a manly direction by ordering her craftsmen to add some masculine elements to her feminine figures. They widened her shoulders and extended the stance of her legs, even in figures wearing a queen’s long dress, to give her the active pose of a king striding forth for duty. At this point in her reign, Hatshepsut was probably only conceding to add a masculine veneer to what was, at its core, a visibly feminine depiction of herself.
Hatshepsut chose the same blended male-female depictions in her statuary; it seems clear that she wanted to retain her female core at first. Her earliest three-dimensional images show a woman wearing a dress but the headgear of a king. Later she showed herself shirtless, ostensibly bare-chested like a man, but her incongruous retention of female breasts on the naked chest makes for a shocking image. The most famous example shows her wearing a masculine kilt and kingly headscarf with a completely bare chest, accentuated by small, but clearly feminine, breasts. The statue’s body shape betrays a slight and slim woman, not the typical strong shoulders of a masculine king. Most Egyptologists doubt that Hatshepsut wandered about the palace in such attire, with her pert breasts bared for all her courtiers to see, and it should come as no surprise that this statue type, such an experiment in hybrid sexuality, was not replicated, nor displayed openly before the populace, but only kept in the innermost rooms of Hatshepsut’s Djeser Djeseru temple, where the mysteries of Hatshepsut’s female kingship could be appreciated by those intellectual enough to understand it and by the gods who had ordained it.8 This openly feminine representation was deemed too problematic. Soon Hatshepsut would shift all her images to a broad-shouldered man’s body accentuated by strong pectoral muscles and wide shoulders—with no visible breasts.
Her earliest constructions at her Temple of Millions of Years at Djeser Djeseru show the same combinations of masculine and feminine traits. In the first years of her reign, she commissioned dozens of statues showing herself as Osiris, the mummiform god of rebirth. On the whole, the image was a masculine one: a god with crossed arms with Hatshepsut’s portrait. But a closer look revealed the feminine elements on the earliest such statues: her skin tone was rendered in the yellow traditionally employed to depict an elite woman who stayed indoors, not the deep red ocher of a man who was part of the wider world. Her face included feminine aspects, too, such as a small smiling mouth and a delicate, heart-shaped visage with a dainty chin.
Ultimately, such a frank combination of fine womanly features on Osiris’s figure seems to have been insupportable, and Hatshepsut had to further masculinize the next series of images. The ensuing Osiris statues at Deir el-Bahri were painted with both yellow and red pigment, resulting in a strange hybrid orange skin color—not at all a part of the established color scheme for Egyptian art. The statue faces were carved with new masculine features, including a stronger chin, nose, and brow. This image was more in line with expectations, but Hatshepsut still made an undeniable attempt to retain some femininity. One can almost feel the underlying anxiety on her part, an uncertainty about how she should look to please the gods and her people, how much of her own self she could show and how much she had to transform. She may have been king, the most powerful person in the ancient world, but beliefs and expectations greater than she was forced her to perform unending ideological gymnastics to satisfy the sacred role. In the end, Hatshepsut had no choice but to change her outward appearance.
All the evidence suggests that Hatshepsut’s transformation toward masculinity was a process, not a sudden event, squarely in line with her modus operandi in claiming the kingship. It seems she opportunistically waited for the precise moment to move toward masculinity in her imagery. Just as her transition to kingship was careful and calculated, she did not suddenly appear as a man before her people or in her art. Hatshepsut only went as far as was needed at the time. She constantly negotiated ways to stay in power, and in this case she did whatever it took—eventually showing herself not as a female ruler or a strange hybrid, but simply as a man.
Hatshepsut did not manipulate her depictions because she lacked manly courage in leading military campaigns or because she was losing the confidence of her generals. Hatshepsut had no problem with subjugating enemies, destroying rebels, and extending the borders of Egypt, and there is no evidence to suggest that her political clout was fading. Hatshepsut’s ongoing gender shifts thus seem to have had little to do with realpolitik or external political pressures and must have been motivated by deeper understandings of kingship and, in particular, her relationship with her co-king.
Whom did the changes in representation serve? The modifications probably appealed less to Hatshepsut than to others. She began her reign showing her sex, and this first imagery may have been her truest inclination. As the years went on, however, we see doubt creeping in. Her masculinization does not seem to appeal to any narcissistic desire on the part of Hatshepsut, some inner need to claim all aspects of masculine rule no matter the costs. Instead, she was obliging the ritual needs of her gods and allowing a precious and tenuously balanced co-kingship to continue without shaming the junior partner. She was fitting herself to her co-king’s changing agenda. Hatshepsut’s makeover has as much to do with Thutmose III as with anybody else. He no longer needed a motherly figure to watch over him—in life or in temple imagery. Now that he was older, Hatshepsut had to remake herself into something that did not threaten his authority or legitimacy. The public may have demanded her alterations; ideology certainly did. Thutmose III himself may have insisted on it as well, although we cannot know definitively. Because there was no mechanism in place for Hatshepsut to produce the next heir (the question of with whom being the greatest problem), the continuation of her dynasty now depended on Thutmose III’s growing cooperation and acceptance of this ongoing rule.9
With no mention of her makeover in ancient texts, we have only her changing depictions to tell the story. Hatshepsut soon decided to go all in. As time went on, her images were completely masculinized in face and body, which suggests that even in real life she may have worn a king’s kilt and either bound her breasts or included no shirt at all, at least during temple rituals. Hatshepsut could not force Egyptian kingship to fit her unconventional gender; instead, she had to conform to its sacred tenets. This was not a woman who demanded that the system mold itself to her. All the evidence shows an unusual monarch who continuously fretted about and experimented with her place in the world. Masculinity was a key component of Egyptian kingship, and step by step, as her years of royal authority accrued, she concealed her feminine aspects until there was almost no woman left, except in the sacred texts alongside the pictures that continued referring to “she” and “her.”
Only in these labels, hieroglyphic texts associated with her depictions, do we see a stubborn refusal to give up her feminine self; she decided on a confusing combination of masculine and feminine markers in the accompanying inscriptions so that sometimes she was called “he” and sometimes “she.” She was on occasion entitled “Son of Re” but more often called “Daughter of Re.” Occasionally she was labeled the “good god,” but in most places, even next to an image that was totally masculine, she was the “good goddess.” Usually Hatshepsut was named with a masculine Horus bird, but sometimes she even feminized this divine element, creating an extraordinary, unprecedented, and abstract feminine version of the god Horus, thus turning herself into a female heir to the gods.
One title that she never feminized was King of Upper and Lower Egypt, which in Egyptian literally translates as “He Who Belongs to the Sedge Plant and the Bee,” with the sedge being emblematic of Upper Egypt and the bee of Lower Egypt. Likely it was considered too theologically fraught to feminize such an archaic royal title. When Hatshepsut bore this label at the beginning of her reign, she always included some masculine elements in her depiction, even if it was only a king’s wig and headgear. As her kingship continued, she accompanied the title King of Upper and Lower Egypt with a fully masculine figure.
In inscriptions from Hatshepsut’s reign, we also see a new use of the word for palace (per-aa, which meant “great house”) in association with the king’s authority. This way of referring to the king as “the palace” would later be taken up in the Bible as “pharaoh,” but perhaps Hatshepsut’s advisers created the new meaning expressly to create an easy way out of a complicated situation in which no one knew which king in this strange coregency was responsible for which message or which opinion. Or perhaps Hatshepsut herself invented the new meaning to veil her femininity.
Her given name, Hatshepsut, was more of a problem when it came to her masculine transformation: “the Foremost of Noble Women” was not an easy name to masculinize. Nonetheless, Hatshepsut and her advisers had already hit upon an ingenious solution. Just after her accession, she had added the phrase “the One United with Amen” to her birth name. When Hatshepsut said she was “united” with Amen, she meant that she had actually joined her feminine self with his essence, taking on Amen’s aspects of divinity, his mind, his intentions, and even, to some extent, his abilities. This particular name modification also suggests that Hatshepsut did not undergo her gender transformation manipulatively or cynically, but piously. It is quite possible that she actually believed Amen had allowed her to transcend her own human body to become an entity greater than herself. In fact, Hatshepsut actually feminized the word khenem, “to unite,” in her inscriptions by adding a -t, so that her name read “Hatshepsut the Female One Who Unites with Amen.”
She had already found an intellectual solution for her feminine kingship that was much more elegant than just putting on masculine garb. The texts betrayed Hatshepsut’s femininity even when the associated images showed her as a man. It is almost as if she knew the sacred inscriptions had to carry her true nature, while her depictions could cloak and transform it when necessary. Just as she did during her regency when she was depicted as God’s Wife but referred to herself as a ruler in the text, Hatshepsut was broadcasting different messages to different sets of people. To those elites who could read hieroglyphic text and participate in complex theological discourse, she presented the full complexity of gender-ambiguous kingship. There was no need to hide her feminine self from these learned men and women anyway because of their close access to her and her palace. But for the common man or woman who could not read and who might not understand such academic explanations, Hatshepsut presented a simplified and unassailable image of idealized and youthful masculine kingship. For them, she became what everyone expected to see—a strong man able to protect Egypt’s borders and a virile king able to build temples and perform the cult rituals for the gods.
Hatshepsut was a realist at her very core, a negotiator. Despite the innovations implicit in her very existence as a ruler, she does not seem to have been a romantic idealist willing to break rules and destroy relationships just to forward her own interests. She masculinized herself when expectations for it were insurmountable. And she never tried officially, before god and all the people of Egypt, to remove Thutmose III from the throne. She always, throughout her whole reign, ruled with him, alongside him, notinstead of him. Her monuments and images may have ignored his existence when he was a young child, but through all of that indecision about how to proceed, Hatshepsut never attempted to rule on her own, in her own right. This woman had learned that she couldn’t change the system; she had to work with it. Thutmose III’s manhood could have been perceived as a threat to her kingship, but only if she had intended to have it all for herself. Apparently Hatshepsut was skilled enough to see the eventuality of Thutmose III’s coming adulthood, and there’s every reason to believe that she engineered this situation so that Thutmose III could become an asset to her rather than competition. This was the way that Hatshepsut worked. Thutmose III the infant king had lived, against all odds, saving the Thutmoside line. She modified herself partly to fit his growing abilities—because, one day, his son would carry on her proud legacy.
Now that her cohort was ready to become a full partner, Hatshepsut hit upon an age-old strategy to cement her new role with Thutmose III: the oldest festival in the Egyptian arsenal, the Sed festival, a rare renewal of kingship that occurred only after thirty years of continuous rule.10 Preparations including extensive temple construction were ordered years in advance of a king’s jubilee. Courtiers and villagers alike would receive gifts of the king’s favor. The royal palaces spent inordinate amounts of money brewing beer and fermenting wine from their vineyards. It would be a time of ongoing revelry and celebration. Most Egyptian kings did not reign long enough to celebrate a jubilee; indeed, none of Hatshepsut’s or Thutmose III’s subjects could remember a jubilee in their lifetime. But Hatshepsut was going forward with the Sed festival, even though she had only ruled for fifteen years as regent and king. Granted, the timing was off. But she probably needed the legitimacy of the Sed now, and she may have engaged in some tricky calculations to justify such an early date for her jubilee: Hatshepsut combined the thirteen or so years of her father’s reign with the two to three years of her husband’s with the seven years of her regency on behalf of Thutmose III with the seven years of her own reign as king, which totaled thirty years, the ideal and traditional number.11 Her Sed festival was thus held at the thirty-year anniversary of Thutmose I’s accession. Hatshepsut marked thirty years of Thutmoside rule with the biggest celebration Egypt had seen in generations.12She organized the jubilee not just for herself but for her family’s lineage and her place in it. Hatshepsut’s Sed festival was part of a larger political agenda.
Hatshepsut’s jubilee still confuses Egyptologists: many think that her claim to a Sed festival is a fabrication manufactured to support an illegitimate kingship or that her inscriptions could be interpreted as the hope to celebrate a jubilee in the future, not as a record of actual festivities.13 But if we take her at her word, this Sed festival becomes another part of Hatshepsut’s innovative methodology of maintaining balance in an unprecedented kingship and publicly claiming god-given providence within it. If nothing else, the decision to hold a jubilee was a clever political move.
The Sed festival rituals themselves must have been long and overwrought affairs, their archaic incantations barely understandable to the New Kingdom public: never-ending processions of divine standards, which showed that the many gods and geographical regions of Egypt supported the king’s rule; presentation of dozens of different garments, crowns, staffs, and weapons, which invested the king with their nuanced and varied kinds of sacred power; and the formal seating on the thrones of both Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, which demonstrated the king’s ability to unify these different lands. Rituals of running displayed the king’s renewed energy, and both Hatshepsut and Thutmose III would have had to sprint in distinctive races while holding a variety of strange and ritually charged objects, such as vases, live birds, oars, rudders, document chests, staffs, and flails. One scene even shows Hatshepsut running alongside the sacred Apis bull as if in a sacred rodeo. Hatshepsut’s celebrations also included the erection of another pair of obelisks.14
During the jubilee, the king was the lead actor in a complex and sacred stage production that continued for weeks, if not months, and required a number of supporters. It seems the ever-present Senenmut performed the duties of the “stolist” of Horus, a title denoting the purification and adornment of statues and even of the king herself, a title he was proud enough to incise onto multiple statues. He was also named as the One Who Covered the Double Crown with Red Linen,15 which suggests that he was part of the coronation rituals and handled the sacred crowns before and after they were placed on the head of the king.
Hatshepsut’s inscriptions plainly state that she celebrated the Sed in year 16 of her joint rule, and all the evidence tells us that she spent massive amounts of capital in preparation for the sacred rituals before her people and her gods. She ordered new temple structures at Karnak, including a massive gateway of stone (later called the eighth pylon by Egyptologists) of a size that had never been seen before in an Egyptian temple. She had already commissioned another pair of obelisks from the Aswan granite quarries to be set up at Karnak Temple. And she had now finished most of her Temple of Millions of Years. It was an astounding building program for any king, let alone an aberrant female one.
The Egyptian Sed festival was traditionally seen as a renewal of kingship for an old monarch who needed a fresh start, a kind of religious tune-up to placate the gods and the people. The Sed’s sacred rituals were conventionally meant to lend the king new youthful vigor and, by placing crowns upon his head, to demonstrate the god’s support for the kingship. Hatshepsut innovated and used these ancient rituals to take on a fixed royal masculinity; after the Sed festival, no temple image ever shows her as a woman. She had left that part of herself behind. In her imagery, she had become the son of Thutmose I.16
With this Sed festival, Hatshepsut tells us something about how she perceived her place in the world—that she had indeed been the power behind the thrones of both her husband-brother, Thutmose II, and her nephew, Thutmose III. Historical records verify that Hatshepsut’s rule of Egypt was quickly established at Thutmose II’s death; thus she likely did exercise real authority before that king died. But we learn something else: by celebrating this jubilee at this time, she was also linking her rule to her father’s in a way she had not done explicitly before. She was essentially claiming a coregency with him, telling her people that his years of kingship, and his successes, were hers as well. The Sed festival therefore redefined her in the guise of her father, Thutmose I, designating her as his true heir.
It should come as no surprise that it was in year 16 of her joint rule with Thutmose III that Hatshepsut began to change the story of her kingship by leaning less on her dead husband and concentrating instead on a new narrative: that her father had chosen her to rule alongside him during his lifetime and after his death, in the tradition of the father-son coregencies of old. If her jubilee did nothing else, it demonstrated to her people, particularly to her courtiers and elites, that Thutmose I was the reason she occupied this throne. For the first time, Hatshepsut claimed that she was the rightful successor as the eldest child of Thutmose I, essentially pushing her husband-brother, Thutmose II, out of the picture entirely and giving herself a clean linear succession. While depicting herself as a son, not a daughter, to Thutmose I, and wearing a king’s kilt, beard, and wig, she used the jubilee to redefine her person to fit the patriarchal system of succession alongside Thutmose III.
Hatshepsut also modified the jubilee to remake her public image as a father figure to Thutmose III. Styled as a man in formal depictions and rituals, she now pivoted 180 degrees from her start as his regent and mother figure when he was a toddler king. The jubilee cemented her role as the senior king in a royal partnership, thereby creating the foundation for further rule in the next generation, as a father would do for his son, and as she claims Thutmose I did for her. Hatshepsut used the festival to maintain her closer ties to the patriarch of their Thutmoside line; after the jubilee, Thutmose III was linked to his grandfather Thutmose I through Hatshepsut, as her heir. She was doing her best to safeguard her family’s legacy by bringing up a co-king from infancy, training him in ritual and war, and, ostensibly, marrying him to her daughter to create an heir. The jubilee demonstrated that Hatshepsut and Thutmose III were not only useful but also necessary to each other. Knowing that she would not rule forever and that Thutmose III would someday be king alone, Hatshepsut was investing her energy in precisely defining the nature of her dynasty, for her co-king and for future Thutmoside kings. Her unusual and aberrant rise to power instantly fit into a classic, well-established mold of continuous royal stability.
But Hatshepsut was not martyring herself for the good of her dynasty; she used her Sed festival to broadcast the miraculousness of her own strange kingship by publishing a number of narratives after the jubilee. Craftsmen carved them onto the stone walls of her temples in sacred areas beyond the public gateways, locations to which only elites would have access. One of these royal narratives, already quite ancient before Hatshepsut included it in her program of jubilee decoration, recounted her divine conception and birth in picture and text.17 It supported the well-accepted mythology that the king’s body and soul derived from the god’s essence, claiming that Hatshepsut’s authority was predestined even before her physical creation. In this narrative, the god Amen-Re is shown visiting the bedchamber of Hatshepsut’s mother, Ahmes. The moment of Hatshepsut’s conception is sweetly and benignly depicted as god and wife sitting across from one another touching hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. Their meeting is more evocative in the text:
He found her taking her pleasure in the harem of her palace. She awoke because of the fragrance of the god. She smiled at his majesty. And he went right up to her, desiring her and loving her. He let her see him in his form of a god, after which he came with her. She was exultant at seeing his beauties, and love of him overtook her body. The palace was flooded with the fragrance of the god, all his pleasant odors from Punt […] The majesty of this god did all that he wanted with regard to her. She placed his body upon hers. She kissed him.18
In a later scene, the pregnant Ahmes walks calmly to the birthing room for her labor. When the baby is born, her royal spirit accompanies her. This spark of divinity was what allowed her to rule, and Hatshepsut claims in this account that the royal spirit had always been with her, from her first moment of existence in her mother’s womb.
Egyptologists once thought that Hatshepsut was the first to depict such a divine birth mythology and that she had created it expressly to justify her extraordinary female kingship, but we now know that Hatshepsut was adapting older narratives of divine connection for her own use.19 She was placing herself in the culturally accepted framework manipulated by Egyptian kings for millennia and explaining how her kingship was indeed a miracle blessed by the gods.
Also probably derived from older forms were claims that when her father, Thutmose I, was still alive, he had personally introduced her to his courtiers when she was just a child and told them that he had chosen her to rule and selected her royal names himself. A similar narrative survives relating to Ramses II, thus suggesting that such a “presentation” formed part of the usual rituals of nominating an heir to the throne. One wonders if Hatshepsut did indeed attend such a ceremony before her father died—but one at which one of her brothers received his nomination as heir instead.
Hatshepsut never claimed that Thutmose II’s kingship did not happen, but in her stone monuments with their inscribed histories, she simply ignored her dead husband’s existence and made her link to kingship directly through her father, claiming that she was king in the eyes of the gods even before that kingship was officially recognized by the populace. It was a claim of predestination, a fait accompli from the moment of her conception. Some historians have viewed Hatshepsut’s justification for her kingship as a bald fabrication and the manufacture of ideological fiction to support her selfish whims. However, if viewed from a more practical real-world perspective of Egyptian divine power, Hatshepsut was only recording the political realities and responsibilities with which she had been saddled since childhood. She was relaying a great mystery to her courtiers: a child could be chosen to rule even before it had formally been named king; a girl could contain the royal spirit; and, in her current situation, a woman could be named king alongside a boy. When Hatshepsut celebrated her Sed festival eight years after she officially took the throne, she created a significant vehicle to display and communicate this foreordained kingship.
Perhaps we should accept that Hatshepsut was intent on telling her unusual story as she knew it to be. She must have truly believed that her father had chosen her to be king and that the gods had placed her in the position of saving her family dynasty. Or maybe, in her mind, the faith her father had placed in her when she was named God’s Wife of Amen and Great Wife of Thutmose II was akin to his personally appointing her for great authority.
Hatshepsut’s glorification of Thutmose I was an essential tool in her redefinition of her kingship. He was still remembered as the king who pulled Egypt out of a defensive, survivalist mind-set and back toward the riches of expansionist empire building. Any prominence afforded to Thutmose II instead might encourage people to ask why Hatshepsut, wife to a dead king, was still on the throne when that king’s son was successful, vigorous, and able. Albeit now dwelling in the afterlife, Thutmose I was the only linchpin who had ostensibly marked Hatshepsut as chosen by the gods. The fact that Thutmose I was dead made no difference to the Egyptians. As a king reborn, his deified spirit was now more powerful than ever, able to carry good fortune and messages back from the source of creation to the living world. Hatshepsut capitalized on her place as chief communicator with this divinized spirit and built a temple dedicated to him within her Djeser Djeseru temple, where cult activity inside paid homage to a sacred living statue channeling his powers.
Hatshepsut now styled herself not only as the heir of her superhuman father, Thutmose I, but also as the divine offspring of Amen-Re, King of All the Gods, everywhere that she could—on her obelisks, on her sacred shrine at Karnak, on her new pylon gateway at Karnak, and at her funerary temple of Djeser Djeseru. This was no different from what other kings did, but Hatshepsut’s plan was more concentrated on the powers of the sun god than earlier examples. She definitively linked her kingship to the worship of Re in all his manifestations. She erected more pairs of red granite obelisks in Karnak Temple than any known Egyptian king, all of them partly covered with electrum (beaten silver-gold sheets that were attached to the top halves of the monoliths). In fact, Hatshepsut’s devotion to the Egyptian solar cult was something that later New Kingdom monarchs would model and follow,20 and for good reason. Association with Egypt’s powerful solar rays granted the king a new and impressive public display in temple spaces. When the early morning or late afternoon sun hit these colossal objects, they were thought to channel the powers of the sun god over her graven images on each obelisk and into the core of Karnak Temple, pulling the solar divine essence into the temple where the god’s statues dwelled. On these obelisks, Hatshepsut associated herself with the rising sun as “the one who has forms like Khepri (scarab beetle representative of dawn sun), who rises like Horakhty (Horus of the Horizon, representative of noon sun), pure egg, splendid seed, whom the Two Magicians nursed; the one whom Amen himself made appear on the throne of Southern Heliopolis (Thebes).”21 In public ceremonies, Hatshepsut may have appeared between her obelisk pairs when they shone in the most dramatic and blinding sunlight, displaying herself as a golden god to her people, an offspring of divinity, a superhuman being like her father. If she appeared between these obelisks as a man, complete with kilt, beard, wig, and crown, holding her crooks and staves, her gender transformation could be considered blessed and facilitated by the sun god himself.
When she wasn’t claiming to be a god with solar manifestations, she styled herself as a sun priest who welcomed, worshipped, and aided the sun god’s many forms, calling herself “the one who knows”—the only human capable of fathoming and facilitating the sun’s mysteries. She modeled her family’s native city of Thebes on the ancient city of Heliopolis, up north, building obelisks and associating her worship of Amen with the sun god Atum-Re.22 Heliopolis was believed to be where the world was first created. Hatshepsut was turning her beloved hometown of Thebes into an originator of creation itself. And everywhere we see her ability to connect with divinity in a way that normal human beings could not. At Djeser Djeseru, she created an open-air altar to the sun god with texts expressing her ability to join the solar orb as he traveled through the day and night sky. Spells that granted Hatshepsut authority over time itself and allowed her to rise and set with the sun for eternity were carved into the walls, including one example in which Hatshepsut joins the ranks of the solar baboons, who were believed to speak the secret language of the sun god, greeting his triumphant movements through night and day. She likely chanted the following in Egyptian:
“The baboons who announce Re, when this great god is born at the sixth hour of the underworld. They appear for him only after they have taken on their form. They are at both sides of this god and appear to him until he takes his place in heaven. They dance for him and leap in the air. They sing for him, make music and create ‘joyful sound.’ ”23
Because Hatshepsut was such a force to be reckoned with, we often have to remind ourselves that she never ruled alone. At the jubilee celebration, her co-king, Thutmose III, would have been roughly seventeen years old. He had come of age, and the Sed festival would have been the best way for Hatshepsut to formally include him in the kingship as an active power. Even if Hatshepsut had tried to remove Thutmose III from the throne during the early years or, at the very least, ignored his existence, she could no longer behave this way. After the jubilee, the coregency was openly acknowledged and celebrated in monuments around Egypt. This Sed festival elevated the status of Thutmose III at the same time that Hatshepsut cemented her image as a masculine king. It may actually have represented an open acknowledgment and acceptance of real joint rule, with Thutmose III now responsible for decision making in the temple and palace.
Hatshepsut knew how to put on a good show. She went out of her way to create the most expensive, time-consuming, and innovative stone temples Egypt had ever seen as a backdrop for her jubilee. All around Thebes, construction projects commissioned at the start of her reign were nearing completion. At Karnak, she created the first monumental sandstone structure in Egypt: a massive pylon (the eighth), connecting Amen’s temple with the axis of the temples of Mut and Luxor, that was 21 meters high, almost 48 meters wide, and 10 meters thick—so broad that a staircase fit inside.24 The first of the enormous pylons built on the north-south avenue of festival movement, it probably replaced the previous mud-brick version. Just next to her funerary temple she constructed a chapel to the goddess Hathor that played a part in both the Valley Festival and her Sed festival. Hathor was a cow goddess, mistress of the western mountain, simultaneously mother and daughter of the sun god, a violent protector of the king, and goddess of sexuality and beauty. On some of the column capitals, Hatshepsut carved images of herself as a masculine king running in the Sed festival ritual race. These images follow the main temple axis, which suggests that Hatshepsut actually performed some of those running rituals here before the goddess. Other scenes show Hatshepsut interacting with the cow goddess directly, and it is even possible that Hatshepsut visited a worldly manifestation of the goddess Hathor in animal form as a cow here or somewhere nearby. One image shows the sacred animal licking the hand of the enthroned king; in another, a male Hatshepsut kneels underneath the cow goddess’s udders and drinks the divine milk promised only to kings. Hathor was thought to be the mother of the sun god, and to show Hatshepsut suckling from her was to show the king feeding from divinity itself as the predestined son of Re.
At the nearby small temple at Medinet Habu on the west bank,25 Hatshepsut built a shrine for the eight gods of precreation, male-female pairs of divinities representing darkness, infinity, primeval matter, and hiddenness. Hatshepsut knew the importance of the site. (In Dynasty 20, Ramses III would choose the same location for his grand funerary temple in an attempt to connect with the festival locality.) The god Amen, hiddenness itself, was thought to be buried here in his sexualized form, full of potentiality for new creation of himself and the world. One rite depicted at this sacred burial spot shows Hatshepsut embracing the statue of a god with a massive erect penis. She had to lean in from a distance so as not to come into contact with his enormous manhood peeking out of the god’s mummiform wrappings. For the Egyptians, such an embrace was not sexual, but channeled prosperity through the king by facilitating the king’s connection with the god Amen.
Back across the river in the realm of Karnak Temple, Hatshepsut paid homage to another ferocious and beautiful goddess: Mut, Mistress of Isheru and consort to the god Amen-Re. A series of sandstone column drums recently uncovered bear the inscription: “[She made it as a monument for her mother Mut] Mistress of Isheru, making for her a columned porch of drunkenness anew, so that she might do [as] one who is given life [forever].” Hatshepsut built a stone portico for an extraordinary ritual during the Valley Festival in which a ferocious and bloodthirsty goddess was given beer colored with red pigment. Rituals encouraged the goddess Mut to drink what she thought was the blood of Egypt’s rebels until her violent temper was calmed. Her worshippers drank alongside the goddess during this feast, purposefully becoming so inebriated that they passed out in the temple space or engaged in sexual activity amid the sounds of priests and priestesses singing and dancing for the goddess.26 There is even the suggestion that the beer was laced with opium, which gave the participants a mystical, hallucinogenic connection with the goddess.27 The entire ritual was meant to break down the barriers of normal human behavior, which would allow divinity to creep into the world and pave the way for the god’s release in the form of the great Nile flood. Hatshepsut built a stone temple (ostensibly tearing down the old mud-brick structure that was there previously) to facilitate Mut’s appearance on the porch of drunkenness—calm, propitiated, sexualized, and beautiful.
Hatshepsut and her co-king would have been very busy during such state festivals. The offering of the god’s meal was especially time-consuming and tedious on the great feast days. They presented dozens of different foods and drinks to the god’s statue in the right order accompanied by the correct invocations to strengthen him. Other rituals were more challenging and probably required some training. In one rite, the king had to sprint before the god while holding two tall vases for libations. In another, the king had to dash about holding two heavy ship’s oars in each hand. Another ritual had the king driving four live calves before the god Amen in his erect manifestation. The king had to perform all of these rituals while wearing unwieldy and awkward headgear and holding royal instruments, with the ever-present bull’s tail hanging between his legs. If Thutmose was available, Hatshepsut may have asked him to perform the more athletic rituals.
Hatshepsut’s jubilee preparations gave her old cohort Senenmut even more opportunity to display his close connection to his mistress, because as new temples were ordered, he always found a way to fit himself into the building program. At Hatshepsut’s Djeser Djeseru temple, Senenmut commissioned dozens of small carved images of himself on the walls hidden behind door leaves or in other overlooked places, an act that shocks modern Egyptologists, and presumably shocked the ancient Egyptians, with its audacity. For a private person to inject his own personal presence into some of the most sacred locations in Egypt seems somehow underhanded and immoral. The carving of his name and image in these temples was an extraordinary and unprecedented privilege unlike anything other officials had ever claimed from a king before.
There is no evidence that Senenmut was Hatshepsut’s lover, but he was certainly someone who was able to ask for unparalleled dispensations, and this set him apart from her other supporters. Always part lawyer and part entrepreneur, he seems to have foreseen our consternation and made sure to state in the accompanying inscriptions that Hatshepsut gave him explicit permission to carve himself into her temples. Even his tomb chapel copied the tiered facade of his mistress’s funerary temple, Djeser Djeseru, and was located at the top of a steep slope with one of the finest views in the necropolis, meant to be the culmination of his own mini–festival procession at his eventual death. His massive stone sarcophagus was made of the yellow quartzite stone used, as far as we know, only by royalty. It precisely matched the style, design, and workmanship of Hatshepsut’s own final sarcophagus (she commissioned three as her career progressed). As time passed, there would be repercussions to Senenmut’s boldness.
Depictions of Hatshepsut’s daughter Nefrure on her mother’s now-extensive temple reliefs or stelae show her to be one of her dynasty’s most significant royal women.28 Images of Nefrure focus on her priestess duties as God’s Wife of Amen more than her role as King’s Wife to Thutmose III. The details of Nefrure’s life are almost impossible to elucidate because someone would later attack her name and images, viciously removing almost all trace of her from the many temples and shrines created during this period. Many of these monuments displaying a queen of Thutmose III were later recarved, but some traces of a name underneath—maybe Nefrure’s—remain. If nothing else, circumstantial evidence points to a marriage between Thutmose III and Nefrure.29 For Nefrure, it was likely a decision between marriage to Thutmose III or spinsterhood. She probably had no real choice at all.
Because she was erased from a number of monuments, Nefrure’s history is fragmentary, but generations of Egyptological detective work have given us the veiled outlines of her life. The story may go something like this: Nefrure was married to her brother Thutmose III (in the Egyptian sense—that is, for procreation). Nefrure was his highest-ranking wife. Her life story mirrored that of her mother, Hatshepsut, who was also God’s Wife as a young girl and then Great Wife to her own half brother, Thutmose II. Hatshepsut and courtiers alike hoped that Nefrure would be blessed with a strong and healthy son so that she could someday gain the title King’s Mother and avoid all the dynastic trouble that had been plaguing the court since the early death of Thutmose II.
We also know that Nefrure was put into the strange position of acting as her own mother’s wife, at least for ritual purposes, in temple rites and in public processions.30 Perhaps it was even Hatshepsut who forbid any inscriptions calling Nefrure King’s Great Wife because she needed the girl for her own political purposes. It would make sense that Hatshepsut, as senior king, would want to play down Nefrure’s union to Thutmose III, thus highlighting her own connection with the God’s Wife. We are left with a very interesting situation: if Nefrure was married to Thutmose III, and there is good reason to believe that she was, then she was also acting as wife to her mother simultaneously, at least for ritual events. Poor Thutmose III: he had to share absolutely everything with his aunt Hatshepsut, even his own Great Royal Wife.
If this was the reality, the royal family formed a unique political ménage à trois—aunt and nephew both tied to the same girl who, when acting as a consort in either a ritual or a spousal sense, was daughter to one and sister to the other. Nefrure probably had no illusions about her own importance as the only living princess born to Thutmose II and Hatshepsut. She was a key player for both monarchs: she allowed her mother to have a highborn King’s Daughter playing the female role in temple rituals and gave her brother the opportunity to produce offspring of pure royal blood. Nefrure had become the bearer of sacred female sexuality in the royal palace in every sense.
Nefrure was a formidable presence; even as a girl, she had courtiers and a household of her own as God’s Wife of Amen. An inscription placed in the Sinai in year 11, when she was around thirteen years old, shows her offering directly to the goddess Hathor—this level of cultic access was typically reserved for kings.31 Some have even suggested that Nefrure was encouraged to transcend her roles as priestess and queen so that she could emulate the female sovereign her mother had become. One statue found in Rome in 1856 that now resides in the Museo Barracco depicts a female sphinx with a curled wig. It was probably produced during the joint reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III and is the largest sphinx that can be attributed to this period. The name of the woman for whom it was cut has been lost, but some Egyptologists make a convincing argument that it depicts Nefrure at the height of her power.32
Even if she was a wife to her half brother Thutmose III,33 Nefrure may have preferred to use her title God’s Wife of Amen, just as her mother before her had, because of the power associated with it. Or perhaps it was understood that every God’s Wife was also a King’s Wife, given that there is no evidence the royal women could marry anyone else. Or maybe Hatshepsut demanded that Nefrure only be named God’s Wife to keep the powers of this priestly office in her camp instead of under the influence of her co-king and his entourage. Confusion continues to swirl around Nefrure: What was her place in the family? How important was she to both Hatshepsut and Thutmose III? What motivated her: power, religious duty, loyalty to her mother? Our bewilderment is compounded by Nefrure’s later obliteration from temple reliefs: an indication that darker days lay ahead for the female caretakers of the Thutmoside family.