THREE

King’s Great Wife

Tragedy struck. The fate that everyone feared had come to pass: two princes dead, one after the other. Wadjmose died first, it seems, but then Amenmose, too, was taken up by the gods. The palace was in upheaval. Hushed voices alternated with the wails and lamentations of acute mourning.

The details of these events elude us. The Egyptians superstitiously avoided recounting the minutiae of tragedy in their written accounts, religious or otherwise. Perhaps the same epidemic took both brothers, or more likely Wadjmose died first, leaving Amenmose as the last prince of full blood to save his dynasty’s honor. There is evidence that Amenmose lived in Memphis and hunted on the Giza plateau in the shadow of the pyramids, a convenient location to accompany his father on his Syrian campaigns. It’s possible he was killed in some kind of accident, but we have no way to know. Despite the plans made for the boy—including the title of Great General of the Army and his travels to Nubia—his young life was somehow cut short. It is not clear how Thutmose I was alerted or where he was at the time. Word traveled slowly in ancient Egypt, and perhaps the news reached Thebes a fortnight later, as soon as a ship was able to complete the journey upstream by sail. Given the evidence of his investment in the boys—even recording Amenmose’s name and titles on stelae as his heir—he must have felt deep anxiety at their passing.

While the details of circumstance are lost, the king did express his grief in stone. He placed the images and names of his dead sons Wadjmose and Amenmose in his own funerary temple, which was under construction at the time in western Thebes. He memorialized the princes, both once heirs to the throne, in family shrine rooms.¹ The structure was called Aakheperkare Khenemtankh, or Thutmose United with Life, and is now a very fragmentary and destroyed building near the Ramesseum. Memorializing and concretizing grief in this way was an unusual honor for princes of the Eighteenth Dynasty, most of whom went unmentioned until they became adults with their own offices and their own tomb chapels, but with little mention of their royal father. Thutmose I broke with tradition for his dead sons.

Certainly the mother of the princes grieved, but beyond this, the entire palace structure would have been paralyzed with worry; circumstances had suddenly put the royal succession, and thus their own positions as officials, in doubt. Great hopes had been placed on these princes, and the loss was palpable.² We can imagine the whispers, the scrutiny of the king’s women, the talk of which of their sons was old enough and of the purest lineage, the discussion of the future king’s mother and what kind of influence she could wield. But none of this is preserved for us. The ancient Egyptians were nothing if not discreet, particularly about court activities and intrigue. We know that this dynasty’s royal succession had been jeopardized, but we are left very much in the dark about who was working to rectify the situation and how. The stakes for this new Thutmoside family were high, and elements of the old Ahmoside branch—the children of Amenhotep I’s brothers—were likely waiting in the wings to step in. The human loss was keenly felt by the royal family, but the consequences of that loss were highly political. There would have been precious little time to grieve.

Hatshepsut was probably just twelve years old as she negotiated this formative moment, watching the machinations of a palace lost to uncertainty, witnessing the disquiet and bitterness of her father, the fretting and pain of her mother. She knew that she was now more important than ever to her father, as the single remaining issue of the pure and holy union of Thutmose I and Ahmes, because at some point in her early years, her sister Neferubity had also died. In her own funerary chapel at Deir el-Bahri, Hatshepsut would later memorialize the profound and lasting grief she felt over this loss: a carving in one of her most sacred sanctuaries shows Neferubity worshipping the barque of Amen.

Hatshepsut’s bloodline and position were the highest of the remaining royal children, and she must have sensed the sudden weight of power and responsibility spiraling inexorably toward her. She was now peerless, the highest-born daughter, destined to serve the next king and save her father’s dynasty with a son. But there was more to it than that, and one wonders if twelve-year-old Hatshepsut was aware of her new status: as the most mature and educated surviving child, if she were to marry one of her younger brothers, she would serve as his guide, as a decision maker, perhaps even as the power behind the throne.

King Aakheperkare Thutmose must have had doubts regarding the eldest and most wellborn of his princes left in the royal nursery, one who shared his name but apparently not his strength. If the identification of the mummy of Thutmose II is to be believed, the boy was never in good health. His skin was covered with lesions and raised pustules. He had an enlarged heart, which meant he probably suffered with arrhythmias and shortness of breath.³ It’s fair to say that Thutmose II was no athlete. And yet everyone at court depended on this boy king to continue the Thutmoside line and thus defend their own jobs and livelihoods. This prince lacked Thutmose I’s endurance and vitality; he was possibly cursed with a poor constitution after surviving one of the many scourges that afflicted the royal nursery. We are not sure if there ever was a formal designation of the boy’s new position, or if his mother, Mutnofret, was stunned or smug when she was singled out as the mother of the new crown prince.

The prince was so very young, a mere fledgling in the nest. Given life’s hard realities, Thutmose I must have worried that a wan and unhealthy nine- or ten-year-old could hardly take the reins of Upper and Lower Egypt, let alone keep and enlarge its borders. When word spread of the king’s choice of crown prince, the palace was probably filled with apprehension that everything the king had spent the last dozen years building would unravel in the blink of an eye, and Egypt might once again descend into anarchy, misfortune, and disgrace. Wrapped up in such anxieties, Thutmose I may have looked askance at Hatshepsut and wished fervently that she had been a son. Or perhaps he saw in her a solution to these problems. His eldest eligible sons had just died. At fifty years of age, he would have known that he himself was nearing the end of his time on earth. It is possible that he looked to the brightest and most capable member of his family as a salvation against political shame and ignominy before the gods, perhaps even keeping his clever daughter close, allowing her to train at his side—not to assume the throne, of course, but to provide wisdom and balance to an unready king.

 And then tragedy struck the palace again, even before all the pieces of the game could be set for the next move. The great king Thutmose I, a man who had never been bred to rule, who was not the son of a king himself, died, leaving behind a boy too young to understand any of the complex political realities facing him.

Aakheperenre Thutmose (Thutmose II) indeed took the throne, but it was clear he would need a queen-regent to guide his leadership. Somehow, Thutmose I’s Great Wife, Queen Ahmes, stepped in as regent, ruling for a boy who was not her own son, pushing his highly ranked mother, Mutnofret, aside.⁴ With Ahmes’s own daughter, Hatshepsut, soon to become the King’s Great Wife, it was as if the Thutmoside women had launched a double-pronged attack of feminine political manipulation, as if they saw the threat and rose up, using their remaining influence to shore up enough support to block the new King’s Mother, Mutnofret, from any real power.

The crowning of Thutmose II was probably a tedious affair, given the new boy king’s constitution and inexperience. He may have been too tired to run before the god holding the golden oars, instead jogging along feebly. Perhaps he struggled to remember the proper incantations and motions due to infirmity or youth or lack of training that rendered him a poor study. Courtiers and priests might have looked on apprehensively, wondering if such a child could sire an heir, let alone live to rule effectively himself. Thutmose II’s character is shielded from us, but it didn’t matter if the boy was stupid or lazy or cruel or kind: Hatshepsut stood by his side and assisted with the long coronation ritual as his queen.

And so at the age of twelve or thirteen, Hatshepsut, the Foremost of Noble Women, became King’s Great Wife to her younger half brother, a king no one seems to have expected or even wanted on the throne. And her own mother became regent for the boy. It’s as if the two women surveyed the situation and knew it was up to them to transform a weak heir into a strong king, to create all the pillars needed to support a new Egyptian monarch. There was much to do, and it was up to these royal women to see it was done. To secure and expand the frontiers, Ahmes had to make her military ready for campaigns to put down uprisings in Nubia and Kush to the south. She also commissioned an ambitious building program that locked the new king’s name in sacred stone. Using her position as God’s Wife of Amen, Hatshepsut was tasked to curry the favor of Egypt’s many religious institutions. But more important than these duties, Hatshepsut needed to conceive a male heir to ensure the continuation of their line. There was no room for failure.

For her part, Hatshepsut would not have seen her marriage to the next king as an honor; rather, as King’s Eldest Daughter, she expected it to happen. Her rightful place was as Great Wife to the king, but she was probably as surprised as anybody that the next king turned out to be Thutmose II and not one of her other brothers. In the eyes of many elites, her attachment to young Thutmose II granted him legitimacy, not the other way around.

We don’t know exactly when Hatshepsut married him. Marriages in Egypt were not formal affairs celebrated by revelry, feasts, and teary-eyed handfasting; they were economic contracts. And it doesn’t seem as if royal marriages were formally celebrated at all, except perhaps during coronation rituals that marked the pair as king and King’s Great Wife. Their wedding night was a moment for their sacred intercourse that would invite the god Amen into the physical person of the king, to impersonate him, and thus imbue the next heir with a god’s holy essence. The Egyptians called the legitimate king “King of His Loins” or “King of His Body,” and those loins belonged simultaneously to the previous king and to the creator god Amen-Re. We can only wonder how the night proceeded and what complications may have ensued.

Did Ahmes herself counsel the young Hatshepsut on how to excite her husband and how to effectively catch his seed? She may have been very frank with her daughter—was Hatshepsut embarrassed or not? Or maybe they did not talk about it at all, resorting instead to oblique references. Hatshepsut had been married to the god Amen for some time now, instructed at an early age in at least the mechanics of sexual congress. Mother and daughter both knew that a son was essential to a smooth transition from one Thutmoside king to another. If Hatshepsut bore a prince, and soon, all talk of an heir from a different family might be silenced.⁵

On the wedding night, lamps would have flickered all around a sleeping platform covered with royal embroidered linens. Hatshepsut likely wore a diaphanous pleated linen garment that revealed her youthful breasts, her trim waist, and the growing hips of a thirteen-year-old girl just ready for breeding. The Egyptians knew how to dress a young girl to elicit a sexual response. How did Thutmose II, just a boy, react when his sister approached him in her seductive dress? Perhaps he giggled in embarrassment and nervousness. He and his half sister had grown up in the same royal nursery. They had seen each other in the palaces of Egypt all their lives. Now they were meant to lie together and produce the next heir, the future Golden Horus. He may have worried about performing the act as Amen intended, about being too young, impotent, or sickly.

As much as we might like to know how it all proceeded and how each party felt about the circumstances, the Egyptians never left us with such intimate particulars of kingly succession, of family intrigue, or, to say the least, of wedding nights. It is impossible to know how Hatshepsut envisioned sex with her young half brother or how she felt about becoming the King’s Great Wife. Hatshepsut was probably apprehensive about the wedding night, too, but she followed through with her duty.

The half siblings, both young and inexperienced, knew only what they had seen in the palace apartments between courtiers and their wives or servants. There were no religious strictures about the sinful nature of sex in the ancient world. With no societal qualms about premarital sex or images of gods masturbating, and with many extended Egyptian families living in one-room homes with no protection of privacy, sex was simply more visible, even to a young child of the royal nursery. A short life expectancy meant that people grew up faster and started sexual activity younger than we would think appropriate or even ethical.

Hatshepsut and Thutmose may not even have been alone on their first night together. Perhaps the queen-regent was there to give practical advice, or special priestesses were invited to make the experience more erotic (that is, effective) for Thutmose and his new queen. Servants were probably present, ready to assist with disrobing and preparation for sleep afterward; the queen-regent likely interrogated them about every aspect of the act. It is unlikely that Hatshepsut and Thutmose II had a private, intimate sexual encounter. This union was not a partnership of two people; it was meant to sustain an entire land, and its biological progress was probably closely monitored by those in power.

 Hatshepsut was likely older than Thutmose II, perhaps only by a year or two, just enough to give her an advantage over her brother in terms of maturity.⁶ More to the point, she had likely served as God’s Wife of Amen for some years before her marriage to the king, and had run a complex and wealthy household before Thutmose had even learned to string his bow and arrow effectively. She would have had a head start in experience and training, despite her gender. The evidence suggests that Hatshepsut exercised her influence over him quite early in their relationship by making her position as queen visible and powerful. She was a princess who had been sustained in her own self-worth from childhood, who was probably more self-confident and more educated than her husband, who was not awed in the presence of the public but conducted herself properly and elegantly, who had served at her father’s side in complex rituals that Thutmose II was now having to learn in all their intricacies. Hatshepsut would have known her value. She could likely delegate authority with ease or put a rude noble deftly in his place. She had learned how to command an audience. Thutmose II’s position as a lesser prince probably meant that he did not have the same kind of confidence in himself or his abilities.

Now that she was queen, and even though she had grown up at court and seen her mother perform alongside her father on formal occasions, Hatshepsut likely still benefited from the behind-the-scenes guidance of Ahmes. The dowager-queen’s power was political and family based, less entrenched in the ideologies in which Hatshepsut had been steeped as the God’s Wife of Amen. Now, as regent, Ahmes could teach Hatshepsut how to curry favor among elite clans at court as well as model the traditions and expectations of the throne room and audience hall. She could also teach Hatshepsut the nuanced ways to behave toward the king to get what she wanted, or how to discover and diffuse conspiracies in the harem before they caused any harm. Ahmes and Hatshepsut brought very different spheres of influence and training to a moment when they were needed most. These women were nothing if not survivors.

Ahmes’s position as regent was only immortalized obliquely in Egypt’s sacred temples, as we should expect—because the regency was always an informal post for the Egyptians, a temporary stopgap with no official titles. Since King Thutmose II was considered too young to rule on his own, it was likely Ahmes who ordered reliefs showing the king standing alongside his wife, Hatshepsut, and his mother-in-law, Ahmes. Nowhere to be seen on these new temple monuments is the king’s own mother, Mutnofret. We have no idea if Mutnofret, who was obviously still alive because she gained the title King’s Mother, had an adversarial relationship with the queen-regent and the King’s Great Wife, but we do know that despite her highborn status she was not acting as regent for her own son as we might expect. Thus there is at least some circumstantial evidence of friction among these main players in the palace. Mutnofret had all the connections a royal woman could want: King’s Daughter, King’s Sister, King’s Wife, and now King’s Mother. But despite all this, another queen had grasped control of the Two Lands as queen-regent. It was Ahmes who was given (or claimed) the responsibility of advising young Thutmose II on the best course of action in every given circumstance. Something lay behind that choice, but the messy details are obscured from view.

Hatshepsut’s mother stepped into a situation of great uncertainty, took control, and exercised more power than she had originally been given. She became a King’s Great Wife par excellence. Hatshepsut must have learned a great deal from watching her mother control a throne room for Thutmose II. For Hatshepsut, her mother was a paradigm of regency just as Ahmes-Nefertari, who had acted as regent for Amenhotep I two generations before, had been the example for Ahmes (although of course this is not an exact parallel since Ahmes-Nefertari was acting on behalf of her own son). We can even picture Hatshepsut and Ahmes having closet discussions about how to deal with Thutmose II and his faction of advisers or even his mother. It was up to them to maintain the course they believed best for Egypt, and they probably thought little about their own personal glories and ambitions as they busied themselves putting the new kingship on a firm foundation. It is quite possible that Ahmes asked Hatshepsut to feed information to Thutmose II, or to misdirect him and his allies. Or perhaps the relationship between these formidable queens and the boy king was on sound footing, transparent and aboveboard, with all parties working to advance Egypt’s best interests.

We wonder if Ahmes imparted to Hatshepsut, in words or in gestures, how special she was. To prepare her daughter for more ambitious steps later, she probably instilled in Hatshepsut a dignity which surpassed that of everyone around her. The exact agendas of the women remain obscure, but it is safe to presume that these two resilient queens were able to exercise great authority over their new king, even perhaps bending him to their will. Hatshepsut thus found herself in an interesting position during the reign of Thutmose II. Her own mother was running the regime, with generals and high priests alike doing her bidding; her husband likely fell far behind her in years and maturity. Was it only a matter of time before Hatshepsut took advantage of the situation and took on more power? Likely no one, not even Hatshepsut herself, suspected that the young queen had loftier ambitions than God’s Wife of Amen and King’s Great Wife. In the minds of Egyptian officials, priests, and courtiers, there was no higher place to which she could ascend. As much power as could be imagined was already in the hands of these two royal women.

As for Thutmose II, was he really just a puppet whose strings could be pulled at will? Ahmes’s regency suggests that no one expected this particular prince to become king, and we know from the inscriptions about Wadjmose and Amenmose that others had waited in line for this great honor before him. Thutmose II was probably not just third choice for king, but fourth or even fifth. This prince was likely educated only to hold a high position as some kind of administrator, perhaps in the army, to marry an official’s daughter, and to live well in a villa in the countryside, far away from the complexities of political life. He was probably trained for bureaucracy and perhaps for battle, but not for rule of the Two Lands. And he would have learned early on that his mother, Mutnofret, was always second to Ahmes, the King’s Great Wife. This reality must have affected his own position among his brothers when he was growing up. The focus of the royal family had always been placed on other princes of the Thutmoside line. In all probability, no one really entertained the thought that the young Thutmose would outlive the king’s other sons.

Prince Thutmose would have had little opportunity to know his father. He was a King’s Son, to be sure, but he would have encountered his constantly campaigning father only in the presence of many other young princes during formal, uncomfortable affairs, and not for intimate father-son discussions. Meanwhile, Hatshepsut was the God’s Wife of Amen, or at least in training to become a priestess; her work threw her into close contact with her father. Lengthy and complicated rituals needed to be performed, and on special feast days Hatshepsut and her father might have spent hours together enacting these different rites—offering up milk, then wine, then meat accompanied by the right invocations, or walking in front of a sacred procession, or perhaps watching entertainments while seated on a dais at the temple. We have little notion of the intimacy of royal father-daughter relationships in Egypt, if they ever sat or stood close enough for some whispered quotidian conversations or if lengthy rituals allowed a little down time for them to get to know each other on a more personal level. If nothing else, they were accustomed to each other’s presence, and they experienced the mysteries of Amen in close proximity to one another. Perhaps Thutmose II was even jealous of this relationship as he grew up, feeling threatened by it once he and Hatshepsut married. There are no indications to that effect, but we would not expect there to be in the kinds of records the Egyptians left behind.

 Was there an emotional relationship between Hatshepsut and Thutmose II? Here, again, the Egyptian sources are silent, at least concerning their affection for each other. Whether Hatshepsut was revolted by him or loved him is immaterial. They had a relationship based on politics, ritual, and sex. The ideology of kingship was central. He was chief priest and son of the sun god, and she was meant to be the vessel and protector of the next boy to hold the royal spirit in his heart. Their politics revolved around the demands of officials and priests and the nuances of foreign policy. As for the sex, well, they were probably expected to have it very often. They were told (and likely believed) that they were one step away from the gods, if not gods incarnate, and those mythologies were full of sexual creations and sacred conceptions. They desperately needed to produce an heir to save the Thutmoside dynasty. Thus, at the age of twelve, Hatshepsut found herself between two gods: the Great God Amen, who created himself and the world with his orgasm, and the Good God Aakheperenre Thutmose, who, it was hoped, would conjure up the next living Horus falcon with his own sexual climax.

Ahmes likely advised Hatshepsut on effective pregnancy techniques that had been passed down for generations. Mother and daughter may even have gone to the temple together with prayers and offerings. One day, Hatshepsut’s monthly bleeding stopped. Perhaps her attendants noticed it before she did. Hatshepsut became more aware of the growing life inside her when she felt light-headed and nauseated at palace banquets. Her condition was a great relief to most of the palace courtiers and families whose living depended on continuing the current dynasty, and she was respectfully observed under the lowered lids of her people as she moved to and fro throughout the palace and temple.

When Hatshepsut’s time came to deliver, her ladies-in-waiting accompanied her to the birthing arbor and urged her on, holding her hands tightly. Hatshepsut’s body felt as if it were being ripped apart by her labor pains. Ahmes was there, too, amid the blood and shit and screams of pain, to check the child’s genitals, to see if it was a boy or a girl. And Ahmes’s heart probably fell deep into the pit of her stomach amid the new child’s cries when she saw no little penis or testicles on the royal baby, just the labia of a girl. Hatshepsut gave birth to a princess who would be called Nefrure, the Beauty of Re.

Ahmes had experienced all the same anxieties herself when she had been a young queen. She, too, had served as the King’s Great Wife and felt the profound pressure to bear the next heir. Her daughter Hatshepsut had been the product of such a moment of disappointment and anguish after nine months of waiting and hours of tormented labor. Ahmes knew what it meant for Hatshepsut to have survived instead of her brothers: Ahmes was regent to a boy king who was not her own son, whose wife had just given birth to a girl. The cycle of no male heir was repeating itself. Once word of the baby’s sex traveled around Egypt, a new and fresh uncertainty would settle into the hearts of the elite families of the country. Ahmes knew the stakes of such failure intimately.

Still, it is unlikely that Ahmes scolded Hatshepsut for delivering a daughter. The Egyptians believed that the husband’s seed, not the woman’s womb, determined the gender of a child. Thutmose II likely received the brunt of the ill will from courtiers and advisers who now had a new reason to be disappointed with him. Ahmes probably urged Hatshepsut to hand her tiny baby off to a wet nurse so that she could get her body ready for another pregnancy as soon as possible.

In the midst of all these preoccupations about sex and pregnancy and babies and heirs, these women nonetheless found a way to create a strong kingship on behalf of a young, inexperienced king. They exercised Egypt’s power in foreign affairs, and they had to be merciless about it. Rebellion was dealt with swiftly, and from all accounts Ahmes granted no clemency to insurgents. Shortly after Thutmose II’s accession, there was an uprising within the colonial province of Kush in southern Nubia (modern-day Sudan), a region reincorporated into the Egyptian empire by Thutmose I only a decade earlier. A military campaign against the rebel Kushites was quickly organized, with orders to slaughter all male foes, except for one son of the chieftain who would be brought back to Egypt as a captive. Did the young king order this expedition? Thutmose II was only eleven or twelve years old, and Hatshepsut was likely a girl of thirteen. Ahmes was probably the one who instigated this cruel annihilation. It was her husband, Thutmose I, who had conquered southern Nubia in the first place, his first campaign there still famous for his slaughter of their chieftain and that influential display of the bowman’s corpse on the royal barge at Thebes. To her, this was sacred work.

All three key players—the king, his queen, and his regent—were perhaps in the throne room when the pronouncement of no mercy was made. Both Hatshepsut and Thutmose II would have recognized the intent behind Ahmes’s decision and valued the resolution for what it was: rebellion against the king of Egypt was akin to jeopardizing the cosmos by acting against the sun god himself; such an act could never be permitted. When the Egyptian army reached Kush, they carried out their orders successfully. Egypt’s riches always came upon the backs of such atrocities. War was not just compulsory; it was a gift to the gods.

 Ahmes and Hatshepsut needed to add another pillar to support the new kingship: the immortalization of Thutmose II’s reign in Egypt through new temple construction. The women were not content to give the young king all the credit; indeed, they included their own images in the new structures they created at Karnak Temple, an unprecedented move that hints at just how powerful they really were. On at least one of the surviving monuments, Thutmose II shares equal space with his Great Wife, Hatshepsut, and his mother-in-law, Ahmes.⁷ These two women were responsible for establishing the visual ideology of the young king’s reign. In other reliefs, Hatshepsut even appears without the king, standing alone before the god Amen-Re in one of his temples, perhaps the first time a King’s Wife was depicted with such agency of her own, wholly removed from her husband. She is shown dressed as a traditional queen, wearing an archaic skintight linen dress that had been popular a thousand years before and a vulture headdress (which for all we know was an actual taxidermied vulture) with richly feathered wings that spread about her head like the lappets of a wig. A round crown called a modius sat atop the colorful vulture headdress, and Hatshepsut embellished the crown with two tall ostrich plumes as an extra extravagant touch. From the images on these temple blocks and stelae there is no mistaking Hatshepsut’s power as queen. The reliefs depict her performing rituals that were usually the king’s responsibility: Hatshepsut is shown standing before the god Amen, who is in either his clothed form or his sexualized manifestation; she is holding an offering, and the king is not present as an intermediary.⁸

In addition to these traditional trappings of a strong kingship—waging ruthless military campaigns and building monuments in the king’s name—Ahmes and Hatshepsut added an unexpected twist. Something new emerged from the process of crafting this young boy’s kingship: unprecedented depictions of female power, and their source is likely found in the feminine underpinnings of Thutmose II’s kingship. For millennia Egyptian temples had been places of both ritual and architectural conservatism. Yet these two women not only held the reins of political power but also formally recorded that power in stone. And the remaining evidence suggests that courtiers and priests accepted these images in the most sacred temple of Thebes. Any discussions the elite may have had concerning the audacity of a woman depicted performing such sacred rituals went unrecorded, but tellingly the stone carvings from Hatshepsut’s time as queen remain unmarred. Given that her supremacy on the reliefs produced during her husband’s reign is so overt, many Egyptologists believe that Hatshepsut herself became a kind of regent to Thutmose II, alongside her mother; she told him what to do, ruled for him, stepped in as chief priest for some temple rituals, and used her confidence to sway his decisions. She simply overpowered him. One of the most impressive structures attributed to the king was the Great Festival Court⁹ of Thutmose II. But given the circumstances, perhaps it was really Hatshepsut’s plan to build this massive court at Karnak, as a gift to her lord Amen-Re. As would be expected, Hatshepsut and Ahmes were successfully establishing Thutmose II as a viable king, and whether by design or not, they were creating strong, unprecedented leadership positions for themselves in the process. But could they maintain this power that was only informally defined?

To retain their dominance, Ahmes and Hatshepsut relied on a stable of loyal officials and priests whose families had lived in Thebes for generations and who seem to have been more than happy to accept the status quo. The women had traditional nobles to support them, but they also required a new kind of lieutenant to enact their plans exactly as they wanted. Building programs and military campaigns cost money, and breaking with established traditions probably required a subtle and clever operator. Timing and political circumstance aligned to bring a new player into the political arena, a valuable asset who seemingly came from nowhere. His name was Senenmut. He had no previous palace connections, nor any links to the old Theban families, yet at some point during the reign of Thutmose II he was appointed by one woman—or perhaps both—as Overseer of the Large Hall in Thebes. (This was probably the audience hall in which the thrones of the king and queen were placed to receive visitors.) And he immediately went to work implementing the unprecedented plans of Ahmes and Hatshepsut. Somehow a nobody had managed to snag a position that put him in the company of the top decision makers of the greatest land in the Mediterranean region.¹⁰

In the court of Thutmose II, a savvy operator could have won favor in a number of ways. With access to the Large Hall, Senenmut likely had the opportunity to charm the women behind the throne. Or perhaps a display of tact and strategy while arranging the queens’ formal meetings with courtiers left a strong impression. Whatever his method of ingress, he was favorably received by the royal court, and soon he was promoted once again to the even more powerful position of Overseer of the Two Granaries of Amen, a hugely important office that guaranteed a new source of income for Senenmut and extended his political authority in an economic direction.

Ahmes may have had her own tactics in play as well. Perhaps Senenmut was chosen by the queen-regent as her son-in-law’s administrator because this was a man who had no ties to either the Thutmoside clan or the Ahmoside family, making him the ideal subordinate, one obliged only to the inner circle of the royal family. Soon after his initial appointment, he was also named steward of two more financial powerhouses: the king’s palace and the queen’s palace. Being entrusted with the oversight of the income and expenditures of the richest rulers in the ancient world¹¹ represented a massive step forward in Senenmut’s career, and it was probably engineered to further the plans of Ahmes and Hatshepsut. He now had economic power in the temple as well as in the palace. He was able to wield influence in both the sphere of the king and that of the god Amen, which made him a bridge to temple bureaucracies likely valued by the royal family. Senenmut came from nothing and wound up as the most trusted adviser to the king and queen; as the years passed, he collected more titles and influence. To Hatshepsut, he would soon become indispensable and, in some ways, the closest member of her own family.

Because of Senenmut’s access to the king’s treasury, the queen’s treasury, and, to a large extent, the Amen temple’s treasuries, many people would have reached out to him for favors. It would seem he was perfectly situated to move funds between palace and temple, although there is no surviving record of this type of transaction between royal and divine purses. Ahmes and Hatshepsut likely needed an official who could influence both of these arenas, a man who understood that economic influence was the path to political control and who could exert financial power without creating too many enemies.

His appointment exemplifies the ancient Egyptian system of bureaucratic patronage: as a loyal and effective official serving the king and queen, he was handsomely rewarded, and he would have understood how to reward officials below him in kind. His own landholdings and wealth would have been expanded, and he would have gained the power to do the same for others. Later, after being named to the prestigious office of Overseer of Royal Works, he took blocks of expensive stone from the royal quarries to commission statuary of himself for placement along processional ways in temple spaces. He was able to access gold from the royal mines, probably also turquoise, carnelian, and other precious stones from royal trade routes. Although the details of how this happened are not explicit in the ancient bureaucratic records, Egyptian officials were indeed allowed to skim off the top. The tomb chapels of hundreds of Egyptian bureaucrats make it clear that their offices enriched them—royal treasurers got access to metals and riches, overseers of granaries became rich in commodities and the products of the land, and so on.¹²

There is no doubt that someone in the royal family trusted Senenmut enormously—most likely Ahmes and Hatshepsut. He was given more and more authority during the reign of Thutmose II, and he seems to have been their most effective deputy. His ability to instrument change would become vital to Hatshepsut in the years to come. But how he was brought to the palace in the first place, after having been born, as far as we can tell, to a low-level official in the backwater of Armant, some fifteen miles from Thebes, remains a mystery.¹³

Senenmut had grown up provincial and poor, not as destitute as a peasant, perhaps, but underprivileged enough to ostensibly wonder at how circumstances had transformed him into a man running the economic affairs of the royal palaces. Because he grew up without the advantages of the old elite families, he might have had great feelings of inadequacy when those around him spoke an archaic and fancy language, wrote in ancient forms of Egyptian that no one used anymore, and told tales of faraway lands that he had never visited. He must have been very intelligent to make up for the lack of highborn tutelage or to have inveigled his way into such an education as a boy. But it was not only his cleverness that brought him to the king and queen’s side. We can only guess at his other abilities: proficiency in organization, mathematics, and accounting; political acumen; sharp memory; astute conversationalist; effective at persuasion—and, more than anything else, he must have been ambitious.

Did Senenmut harbor a secret anxiety that he did not fit in at the palace? Was he ashamed when a learned elite from a venerable old family said something at which he knew he should take offense, but which he did not really understand? Did he cover over that disgrace with a witty retort?

Given Senenmut’s humble origins, it’s all the more astounding that toward the end of Thutmose II’s reign, Senenmut was appointed tutor of the king’s firstborn daughter, Nefrure. Hatshepsut would have been almost sixteen years old at this point. Ahmes could have made this appointment, or perhaps Hatshepsut was more than able to see Senenmut as a man to whom she could entrust her own flesh and blood. By appointing him as tutor of her young daughter, probably less than two years old at the time, Hatshepsut was inviting Senenmut, a lowborn man, to share her, or at least her daughter’s, circle, to take part in instruction, meals, and religious rituals with Nefrure, thereby creating the intimacy that a father shares with a daughter.

The title for the royal tutor in Egyptian is mena nesut, which essentially means “male breast for the king”; that is to say, it is the masculine version of a wet nurse whose milk provided an infant with nourishment and protection against disease. The Egyptians believed that a wet nurse became related to her charge through the milk she fed the baby—in a sense, artificially creating blood relations. The tutor “fed” his royal charge from his experience and his knowledge. His careful attention protected the child from harm when his or her parents’ duties kept them away. The notion of family intimacy was meant to be the same for both the male nurse and the wet nurse.

But why was Senenmut chosen? Perhaps other officials, unlike Senenmut, were connected to the old elite families and were too embroiled in political scheming, or maybe Hatshepsut wanted to keep her little daughter close to the money that Senenmut managed. Given that Senenmut had risen to become an economic powerhouse in both temple and state, it was not only clever but also farsighted of Hatshepsut to appoint him as Nefrure’s tutor. Her little girl was destined to be God’s Wife of Amen and to become a great queen, just as she had.

Whether for emotional or worldly reasons, Senenmut clearly valued his relationship with Nefrure. Later he would have at least ten statues carved, each at great expense, depicting him as he cuddled the small princess in his embrace, with her little head and sweet face peeping out of his robes, or seated on his lap like a crown prince. In these statues, she looks to be two or three years of age. Her cheeks are full and cherubic. Senenmut himself looks like the kind tutor we would want him to be, young and happy, almost feminine in his visage. The images are touching and engaging, full of intimacy and notions of protection and safety.

But Senenmut was also openly displaying something else to other Egyptian elites through these statues: that only he had the right to touch this royal child, that only he belonged to this inner sphere of power and they did not, that only he had access to expensive granodiorite stones from the royal quarry and to the gilding that once adorned the statues. He was telling his colleagues that he now belonged to another family, a higher family than the one into which he was born. He was sending a message to his fellow elites: if you want any of these riches or this influence, then you must go through me. At first glance, these stone blocks express a bond with a precious child whom he may very well have loved, but they were also a blatant and open declaration of his royal political connections and access to great wealth. Hatshepsut would have been cognizant of what Senenmut was really doing with his statue program, publicly set up in temple courtyards and festival spaces. And she seems to have had no problem with the open display of his presumptions.

His relationship with Hatshepsut’s daughter seems to have been quite intimate, even fatherly, so much so that some Egyptologists have whispered that Senenmut could have been Nefrure’s real father and that the sickly Thutmose II was simply not capable of siring a child. Much ink has been spilled on conjectures about the relationship between Hatshepsut and Senenmut; however, there is no clear indication that Senenmut was anything more than Nefrure’s tutor and protector, albeit a very close one.

 While Senenmut was busy creating a spectacular career and working his way into the royal family, Hatshepsut may have given birth to another child; and because we have so little evidence of the baby, it was probably another daughter, one who died young.¹⁴ There is no mention of grief, or how Hatshepsut felt about delivering another girl instead of a boy heir. If Hatshepsut ever bore a son, and there is absolutely no evidence of this, he was stillborn or too weak to survive infancy. The ancient Egyptian royal family never mentioned children in the monumental or historical record until they were a viable and useful part of their political society. If royal children died as infants, they were not declared at all. Hatshepsut likely endured many heartbreaks of which her scribes left no record. And with so much riding on the outcome of her unions with Thutmose II, she must have experienced myriad emotions—guilt, shame, anger, bitterness—none of which leave a trace in our records.

Was Hatshepsut close to Princess Nefrure? Hatshepsut would have been just thirteen or fourteen years old when she bore her. Apparently she took a strong interest in the baby, even though evidence suggests that royal child care was a duty best passed to wet nurses, especially for a woman so burdened with responsibilities. There is no indication whatsoever that she resented the girl because of her gender. In fact, Hatshepsut seems to have kept her daughter by her side, knowing that only an educated child could serve her family well. She must have been profoundly grateful that Nefrure was still alive, not a circumstance any mother could take for granted. Indeed, it is likely that Hatshepsut was training Nefrure in the temple for duties as the next God’s Wife by letting the girl trail after her while she conducted rituals, so that the incantations and movements would become familiar to Nefrure, flowing into her lifeblood like osmosis.

Despite all the appearances of a close bond with her daughter, Hatshepsut had still failed to bring her most important task to completion. Anxiety within the royal palace was likely building over the king’s inability to produce a son with his Great Wife, or with any of his proper wives, for that matter. We must remember that Thutmose II was just a boy himself when he became king. And if he did produce any male children they would have been just infants at this point, not substantial and tested human beings on which to pin anyone’s hopes of future kingship.

Everyone in the palace depended on this boy king’s virility. If a man from a different branch of the family was chosen to be the next king because of the lack of an heir—as had happened after the reign of Amenhotep I—then everything would be thrown into disarray. Officials would be sacked and lose their income and residence at court, forcing them to move back to their family lands. Other officials would take their place, creating all kinds of political and economic upheaval. A king was nothing without his own loyal stable of bureaucrats, administrators, and warriors. Egypt had seen a change in dynasty not even fifteen years earlier, and the trauma was probably fresh in everybody’s memory—particularly for those who were ousted.

The need for a male heir probably encouraged Hatshepsut to visit Thutmose’s bedchamber often. The queen essentially found herself in a bizarre race against not just dozens of other women, all striving to breed Egypt’s royal son, but against the king’s failing health as well. Thutmose would have been encouraged to lie with his wives as frequently as his stamina allowed, and his nightly activities were likely monitored and remarked upon. Earlier in the Eighteenth Dynasty, there is little evidence for large harems consisting of hundreds of wives and concubines that would later become de rigueur. But by the reign of Thutmose II, the Egyptians were moving in this direction, placing their faith in the breeding capabilities of at least a few dozen women instead of just two or three. Perhaps after Amenhotep I died without a male heir, family and palace officials became more practical about procuring ever greater numbers of fertile young women to pleasure the king.

By the Nineteenth Dynasty, these humble beginnings would develop into a massive harem characterized by a new formality of sacred sexual encounters with the king. Twentieth Dynasty temple carvings of Ramses III even formalize the religious purpose of harem sexuality, showing the sovereign playing the board game senet with naked girls or fondling the genitals of his undressed Beauties, all while he is fully dressed and seated on his throne.¹⁵ Thutmose II almost certainly did not have hundreds of women at his disposal like the Ramesside kings, but he had enough. And one of them, a woman named Isis, produced a son for the king—once again named Thutmose.

As far as we can tell, Isis, like Senenmut, began as an absolute nobody, with no family connections worth putting on the one statue that survives of her, and with no titles showing her worth. Isis may have been one of the concubines brought to the palace to entice the king, picked for her appearance rather than her social status. In the end, this woman would make a name for herself at the palace, but only as mother to the King’s Son. We have no idea if Thutmose II produced sons with other women, but there must have been some. Did these lesser sons ratchet up the pressure on Hatshepsut? Did she tell herself that she still had time to gestate another baby before her weak husband succumbed to his ill health?

For the brother-sister royal couple, there would be no more time. After just three years of rule and the production of only one viable daughter with his Great Wife, Aakheperenre Thutmose, the beneficiary of Ahmes’s and Hatshepsut’s tireless political maneuvering and unlikely savior of his line, succumbed to his illnesses and ascended to the sky.¹⁶ Hatshepsut was about sixteen years old and destined to never be another man’s wife; she understood that to maintain her position at court she had to hold tight to the memory of her dead husband and his living sons, even though they were only infants. She had memorial chapels built in Thutmose II’s name while she prepared for the coronation of the son who would be chosen as king, a child who could not have been more than two years old; presumably everyone hoped that his health would be better than his father’s.

Hatshepsut found herself in yet another moment of crisis. Caught between two kings, one a sickly boy whom she had served as the King’s Great Wife, and the other a toddler monarch who would soon be in need of a regent, Hatshepsut capitalized on her religious training to manufacture a giant leap forward in her authority: she proclaimed to her people that the gods demanded it. Hatshepsut recounted a miracle that she experienced when she was just a girl, in the god Amen’s presence during a public festival. She recorded this event in later documents preserved at her Red Chapel, obelisks, and funerary temple, and Egyptologists are still divided about when in her history it was supposed to have occurred.¹⁷ The narrative tells us that the god revealed himself to her in front of the Egyptian populace and marked her for rule. It’s an audacious pronouncement, and Hatshepsut is thus clear in her stance that she was destined for great power from an early age, given such authority by her god. This would be the first of many such revelations for Hatshepsut.

Hatshepsut’s account of the story imparts the drama and emotion of the moment. She was in Thebes serving as daughter of the king. Karnak Temple was prepared for a great festival. The statue of the god was carried out of the sanctuary that day in a grand procession to perform biayt, a word usually translated as “oracle” or “miracle,” but which could just as easily mean “revelation”—the moment the god expressed his opinions or ideas to the king and to the watching crowd. Festivals created the moment when the incarnation of the god (i.e., his statue) was brought out of the temple, his priests bearing the weight of his veiled shrine on two long carrying poles, to communicate with his people. These were important occasions, and many elites would have been pressed into the courtyard of the temple to watch the spectacle. But on this day, something happened that no one, not even Hatshepsut, expected.

Hatshepsut tells us that during this fateful festival, the god Amen did not perform the oracle where and when he was supposed to, which caused such anxiety that even the elites in attendance were afraid to look at the god in his portable shrine. The text says that no miracle happened in any location of the king, perhaps suggesting a kind of vacuum of ideological and political leadership. Whatever the reason behind the inaction, the god was momentarily powerless, directionless. Deep silence fell on the crowd, and people started to wonder what they should do. Palace courtiers bent their heads as in mourning. Someone there, or perhaps it was the god himself, claimed that the wise men had become ignorant. And all around the god’s statue there was stunned silence and profound fear, as if the god had abandoned them utterly. Then suddenly, a great power took over the god’s statue and he was moved by the priests through some miraculous force. His barque was propelled toward the river, and then, abruptly, toward the gates of the royal palace adjacent to Karnak. As the unwieldly shrine began to swing around, the god Amen unexpectedly commanded his bearers to turn back and move northward. Then, just as unpredictably, he wanted to move eastward—until finally the god passed through the western gateway of the king’s palace called I Am Not Far from Him. Each sudden change of direction must have raised a gasp in the crowd of onlookers, unsure of what they were witnessing but aware that only the god could be responsible for such unprecedented motion. At last the god found himself in the forecourt of the palace adjacent to the temple. And upon seeing him, Hatshepsut appeared. Leaving the palace, she threw herself to the ground in his presence, with her arms upraised in praise. She proclaimed that the plans of his majesty were indeed great, that he was her father, the being who created everything that exists. And then, seemingly understanding the gravity of the moment, she asked him openly, “What is it that you desire to happen? I will do according to all that you have ordered.” Hearing this, the god is said to have performed another miracle, one presumably witnessed by the entire populace there that day: somehow he controlled Hatshepsut’s movements, communicating which way she was to go. It seems that the god placed Hatshepsut before his sacred barque, propelling her toward the Great Chapel of Truth (ma’at) in the temple’s core. It was here, the narrative says, that she received the investiture of her majesty and her equipment of the God’s Wife, granting her authority as a great queen on the one hand and as a priestess on the other.

During festival processions, the god was known to make pronouncements of importance, but nothing like this had happened before, we are told. Onlookers must have stood with mouths agape when the bearers of Amen’s portable barque suddenly moved toward the palace and Hatshepsut threw her body into its path, speaking to the god directly. How Amen “answered” her is still an enigma, as is the exact political meaning of her investiture of power. But such is the mysterious nature of divine revelation. Precise details would take away its power. Perhaps Hatshepsut entered into a trancelike state that allowed only her to understand his epiphany. Or perhaps the priestly bearers of the portable shrine moved in such a way that showed Amen’s support for his daughter’s authority. Or was the whole oracle a stunt set up ahead of time by the priests of Amen, who were happy to have Hatshepsut’s continued support? Even the timing of the oracle is uncertain—was it during the reign of her father or her brother? Hatshepsut preferred to keep the whole thing vague, using the word king in the oracle texts without naming anyone specifically.

The details of how any Amen oracle worked are vexing to historians.¹⁸ We don’t know how questions were put to the god, or how answers were conveyed. But perhaps we should not try to discern facts in this mystical moment, because, for Hatshepsut, this experience may well have been beyond the scope of language, a decisive instant that could not be understood in terms of worldly specifics and political agendas. It did not matter if the oracle was manufactured or authentic. What mattered was the display of her belief in and connection to the god—and that, according to Hatshepsut and the priests of Amen, her rule was decreed by nothing less than a divine revelation.¹⁹

The oracle text is clear on one point: Hatshepsut’s claim to power came not from her own political ambition but from her deep ideological commitment and piety to the god Amen-Re, visible to all in this most public of festival ceremonies. Hatshepsut understood how to demonstrate and wield ideological power, perhaps even at a young age. She was God’s Wife of Amen, yes, but this narrative clarifies that her political authority over Egypt stemmed specifically from this sacred position—not as wife of the king, not as mother of the king, not as sister of the king, but rather as wife and daughter to a god.