FIVE
In the ancient world, having a woman at the top of the political pyramid was practically unheard of. Patriarchal systems ruled the day, and royal wives, sisters, and daughters served as members of the king’s harem or as important priestesses in his temples, not as political leaders. Throughout the Mediterranean and northwest Asia, female leadership was perceived with suspicion, if not outright aversion. Mesopotamia, for example, preserves only one example of a female political powerhouse predating Hatshepsut: Kubaba, a tavern keeper, of all things, who, according to The Sumerian King List, consolidated power in the ancient city of Kish in the twenty-fifth century BCE during a time of never-ending war and crisis. Hatshepsut probably had little knowledge of this formidable woman, given her education’s lack of focus on foreign kings. She had models of strong female leadership from her own soil.1
Even though Egyptian cultural and political systems sometimes tolerated women in power, at least when compared to other ancient societies, only a few women were able to climb to the very top and rule all of Egypt. One of the oldest examples was the great queen Merneith, who took charge of the political system when Egypt’s kingship was new, around 2900 BCE. A King’s Mother who likely ruled on behalf of her young son, Den, Merneith was so powerful that she earned a tomb alongside the other First Dynasty kings in the royal cemetery of Abydos, complete with hundreds of human sacrifices, as was the style in those very early days of dynastic rule. She was never associated with the kingship in a formal manner that is preserved for us, but her power was so great that archaeologists uncovering her tomb assumed it belonged to a male ruler, until inscriptions proved otherwise. Merneith used her regency to take on real power, and once she had it, evidence suggests that she did not relinquish her hold on authority until her death. Merneith provided Hatshepsut with a useful case study, and we can only wonder if the Eighteenth Dynasty queen had more details of the historical reality that we lack.
Then there was Sobeknefru, daughter of King Amenemhat III of Dynasty 12, who ruled around 1800 BCE. Three hundred years before Hatshepsut was born, Sobeknefru served as the first true female king of Egypt, an astounding achievement given the odds against it. The Egyptians developed no word for “queen” in the political sense, just the phrase hemet neswt, “wife of the king,” a title with no implications of rule or power in its own right, only a description of a woman’s connection to the king as husband.2 Thus female rulers of Egypt, like Sobeknefru, took on the masculine title of “king.”
Clothing was more problematic, and Sobeknefru depicted herself wearing not only the masculine headdress of kingship but also the male royal kilt over the dress garments of a royal wife, garbing her feminine self with the trappings of a masculine office.3However, Sobeknefru’s reign lasted a mere four years, and she was unable to save her family’s lineage or establish any norms for future female kingship. After her death, Egypt descended into the weak and ephemeral kingships of the Thirteenth Dynasty.
Hatshepsut would have thus known that formally defined female rule was rare, even in Egypt where it was sometimes tolerated. And she likely learned that women in power were usually unsuccessful, born into crisis and ending their time in chaos. Hatshepsut probably did not think of such a position for herself initially. If not inconceivable, it would certainly have seemed unworkable with a king already on the throne. But against all odds, sometime around year 7 of Thutmose III’s reign, the impossible happened. She was crowned as king. Hatshepsut clawed and scraped her way to that end goal, claiming royal prerogatives and powers as she went, until she realized her coronation, an expensive and overwrought affair memorializing the power that she had already amassed. As one Egyptologist describes it, her coronation was “the day on which her de jure iconography caught up with her de facto authority.”4
The “facts” that are left to us concerning Hatshepsut’s reign are far from certain. The exact timing of her ascension has been disputed by Egyptologists, some arguing that it happened as early as year 2, most claiming year 7.5 Almost all of our surviving historical documents concerning Hatshepsut’s rise to kingship are religious in nature, and many date to after her coronation, clouding our understanding of her gradual, competent, and calculating ascension. The evidence does contain clues of political realities nonetheless.
In year 2 of Thutmose III’s reign, while Hatshepsut was acting only as regent, she made her first steps toward more political power. Reliefs carved at Semna temple in Nubia show her in the company of the gods, and here, the description of her actions—as an heir, as a builder, as a ritual officiate—are those of a masculine king. The goddess Satet, the guardian of the Nubian southern lands, says, “She is the daughter who has come forth from your [limbs]. With a loving heart you have raised her, for she is your bodily daughter.”6 Hatshepsut’s titles of God’s Wife and King’s Great Wife are not overreaching; they are suitable, in all respects, for a queen. But this relief still represents a clever step forward for Hatshepsut: she shows herself performing the role of a king, without formally naming herself as such. In year 2, she was already laying the groundwork.
Around the same time, Hatshepsut ordered two grand obelisks for Karnak Temple—an operation that would demand countless man-hours. To document the start of this long-term project, Senenmut had a monumental text carved on the island of Sehel at Aswan, near the site where the stone for the massive needles would be quarried. This inscription marks a transitional moment for Hatshepsut, who was acting as a regent, with all the powers of a monarch, but unrecognized as anything more. In this text, Senenmut refers to her as “the princess, the one great of praise and charm, great of love, the one to whom Re has given the kingship in truth, among the Ennead,7 King’s Daughter, King’s Sister, God’s Wife, Great King’s Wife […] Hatshepsut, may she live, beloved of Satet, lady of Elephantine, beloved of Khnum, lord of the First Cataract region.”8
At this time, Hatshepsut’s claim of a growing, nascent, and informally given kingship is made only in text form, not pictorially, and thus it was accessible exclusively to learned elites and the gods. Everyone else simply saw the figure of their queen. The Sehel relief served dual agendas, recording her power as regent—a position with no formal title of any kind—in the text and her feminine power as God’s Wife in the image. Thus we have documented the moment before Hatshepsut was crowned, before she was in factking, but when she was exercising all the power of the kingship.
Hatshepsut was busy producing an unassailable image of herself, one that further developed her divinity, a seemingly unending process for this woman. From the age of twelve to twenty, she was methodically positioning herself as queen, then regent, and now she was striving for the kingship itself. Along the way, she constantly modified her depictions to support that emergent power. One of the first changes we see on her monuments, just a few years before she formally became king, was her decision to drop the title of God’s Wife of Amen and take up the title of King’s Eldest Daughter. Some Egyptologists see this rejiggering of her personal relationships as the crux of her entire power grab, a shift that moved her from a queen’s role to an heir’s, as the rightful offspring of Thutmose I and one who could make a heritable claim to the throne despite her female gender.9
Another block from Karnak Temple, probably carved sometime after Senenmut’s Sehel inscription, makes the next leap forward.10 It shows Hatshepsut wearing the gown of a queen on her body but the crown of a king upon her head.11 The atef crown—a fabulous and extravagant amalgamation of ram’s horns and tall double plumes—was depicted atop her short masculine wig, probably to the shock of the craftsmen in charge of cutting the decoration. It was a confusing image for the Egyptian viewer to digest: a female king performing royal duties, offering jars of wine directly to the god, and all before any official coronation. If we assume that she appeared at public rituals wearing this crown, it would have been the first time in history that a woman wore such a headpiece in public. With this block, Hatshepsut had finally decided to document her changing powers in pictorial—not just textual—form. And she took her display of power much further in the text, calling herself the One of the Sedge and of the Bee, or as Egyptologists translate it, King of Upper and Lower Egypt.
On this same relief, Hatshepsut also introduced a new name to encapsulate her transforming persona: Maatkare (The Soul of Re Is Truth). Hatshepsut was taking on a second name, a throne name reserved for kings and received through secret revelation. It was standard practice for a male king to do this but inconceivable for a queen with informal power. Hatshepsut was transforming her role into a strange hybrid of rule ordained before it had officially happened. Was Hatshepsut testing the waters with this relief? Or was she monumentalizing what would soon happen officially? She commissioned this scene sometime after year 5 of Thutmose III’s reign, and it was probably finished just before her formal coronation. With the production of this temple relief, Hatshepsut shattered the tenets of traditional Egyptian thinking about divine rule: only the king can act as chief priest and doer of ritual activity. Only he can accept the god’s prosperity on behalf of Egypt. Only he can wear his sacred crown of masculine virility. But here Hatshepsut—a woman—was claiming these holy duties, and all that before she was officially king.
All accounts suggest that Hatshepsut started to construct her new persona in year 2, moving swiftly, completing the process within a five-year period; but as she had done all her life, she moved deliberately, step by step, claiming new titles and names when she thought the time was right, never pushing it beyond what those around her could tolerate. And her people seem to have accepted her unparalleled presumptions.
The Amen priesthood assisted in her unprecedented ascent. We learn from a later inscribed text that she had benefited from another temple oracle from the god Amen in year 2 of an unnamed king. This time, the god foretold her impending kingship outright. The inscription is broken, but because it comes from her Red Chapel, the text must refer to her.
Regnal year 2, month 2 of spring, day 29 the 3rd day of the Festival of Amen corresponding to the 2nd day of the offerings of Sakhmet, when foreseeing for the two lands in the wide hall of the southern Ipet-Sut (Luxor Temple). Lo, his majesty performed omens in the presence of this god. Fine of appearance is the father of his good festival, Amen in the midst of the gods. Then he seized my majesty (ostensibly Hatshepsut) […] of the beneficent king multiplying for him the miracles about me (Hatshepsut) corresponding to the entire land.12
The text is quite vague, as oracular texts are wont to be, and we lack the drama of the earlier revelatory inscription that invested her as God’s Wife. But no matter the details, Hatshepsut was still the first Egyptian monarch to use oracular understanding to solidify and publicly declare her authority to her people, and later in the same text she claims, “He (Amen) has introduced me to be ruler of the two lands while his majesty was declaring oracles.”13
Hatshepsut’s understandings and manipulations of religious ideology were keen. She cloaked all her momentous power grabs through displays of piety. As to her kingly transformation, she tells us it was the King of the Gods himself who instructed her personally to take this step. Her later obelisk inscriptions seem a little more defensive: “He who hears it will not say ‘It is a lie,’ what I have said. Rather say, ‘How like her it is; she is devoted to her father!’ The god knew it in me. Amen, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands, he caused that I rule the Black and Red Lands as reward. No one rebels against me in all lands.”14 In her own mind, Hatshepsut may have seen the situations of her life—as queen, God’s Wife, regent, king—through the lens of divine inspiration and planning by the gods. After all, conditions had put her in this very place and time, able to do what no woman had ever done.
It is likely that for her kingly initiation, she spent many nights and days in the heart of the temple, perhaps consuming intoxicants, suffering sleep deprivation, fasting, chanting, in an attempt to access the innermost workings of Amen’s mind. She may have ascended the pylons at dawn after a long night of trancelike meditation to merge with the sun, witnessing the mysteries and miracles of its regeneration, merging with the machinations of the cosmos that made it possible. And then, exhausted but joyful, she might have appeared before her people transformed, her eyes sparkling with privileged understanding. Initiation lent her great power in the eyes of her elites, especially the priesthood, and it was something she wanted to broadcast.
After her initiation came the crowning. Perhaps she found herself on her knees in the god’s sanctuary, shaking, her thin linen shift the only layer between her knees and the cold stone temple floor as she waited for the choice of the god. Perhaps when she felt the crown settle upon her brow, she began to weep, feeling the crook and scepter thrust into her hands until she grasped them closely, intimately, as if they had clutched these instruments of kingship all her life. However we might imagine the unwritten details of that first, personal moment as king, Hatshepsut herself was clear about her people’s awed reaction:
Then these officials, their hearts began to forget; their faces astounded indeed at events. Their limbs united with fatigue. They saw the enduring king and what the Lord-of-All himself had done. They placed themselves on their bellies. After this, their hearts recovered. Then the majesty of the Lord-of-All fixed the titulary of her majesty as beneficent king in the midst of Egypt.15
And then Hatshepsut spoke to them, claiming:
I am beneficent king, lawgiver who judges deeds.… I am the wild horned bull coming from heaven that he might see her form. I am the falcon who glides over the lands, landing and dividing his borders. I am the jackal who swiftly circles the land in an instant. I am excellent of heart, one who glorifies her father, attentive of deeds to render justice to him.16
The reality of her coronation was likely different from the idealized version that Hatshepsut would later represent on her many monuments—particularly on her quartzite barque chapel at Karnak.17 The first jarring jolt of reality must have been the existence of another king on the throne. Thutmose III was not yet ten years old, but he was still king. Hatshepsut’s presumptions were apparently unprecedented in Egyptian political history, because she claimed a share of the throne while it was already occupied. Her decision to be formally crowned as king, while young Thutmose III still sat on the throne, smacks of great audacity, and yet it happened nonetheless.
Hatshepsut’s coronation was intricate and involved, taking place within Karnak’s courtyards, shrines, and sanctuaries; it was a series of complex rituals that went on for days, involving dozens of different crowns, garments, and scepters, and representing a political-religious investiture of the ultimate gravity. Hatshepsut no longer wore the headgear of a God’s Wife of Amen but that of a king, essentially trading in one position of power for one infinitely higher. She tells us that the gods themselves were participants and indicates that Thutmose I himself, her dead and now-deified father, was the first to place a crown upon her head, announcing that he appointed her as king alongside himself. Hatshepsut tells us that the goddess Hathor was also present, shouting a greeting in welcome and embracing her. The god Amen-Re is said to have personally placed the double crown upon Hatshepsut’s head and invested her with the crook and flail of kingship, saying that he created her specifically to rule over his holy lands, to rebuild his temples, and to perform ritual activity for him.
Because of the presence of Hatshepsut’s father, not to mention Amen-Re himself, the account of Hatshepsut’s coronation is automatically assumed to be fictitious by most Egyptologists. However, numerous surviving images and texts attest to similar activities by the Egyptian gods for other kings. The Egyptians did not specify in writing the exact mechanisms of the gods’ participation. Nor should we expect them to have pulled the veil from such sacred goings-on. Perhaps confrontations with Amen during festivals, in the innermost sanctuaries of Karnak Temple, could only happen after sleep deprivation, inebriation, or drug use, or by some other method that allowed the participants to perceive the occurrence of a supernatural meeting, even some kind of priestly possession in which the god was believed to enter the living body of a man who took on the role. Religious mysticism created real experiences for the ancient Egyptians, and only a skeptic would say that such sacred rites were the work of cold political manipulation alone. After all, the ideology most useful for maintaining control is always the one people believe.
After the numerous crowns were positioned upon her head and the many instruments of power were placed in her hands, one after another, Amen and her father granted Hatshepsut her royal titulary—the five names with which only a king was honored. To mark her initiation into the profound mysteries of kingship, the new female king formally changed her birth name from “Hatshepsut” to “Khenemetenamen Hatshepsut,” which, although unpronounceable for most of us, essentially meant “Hatshepsut, United with Amen,” communicating that her spirit had mingled with the very mind of the god Amen through a divine communion. Indeed, the grammatical form is instructive, because the verb khenem, “to unite with,” has a feminine -t ending here, indicating that the Egyptians were up-front about the fact that a woman had merged with the masculine god Amen.18 There was no subterfuge about her femininity in her new royal names, but her womanly core was now linked with a masculine god through her kingship. Hatshepsut’s first suggestion of sexual ambiguity was in this name change.
She had already taken on her throne name before the coronation; the precise meaning of Maatkare is still disputed, but it could be read as “the Soul of Re Is Truth,” or even “the Soul of Re Is Ma’at,” meaning that the goddess Ma’at was at the core of the sun god’s essence. The name was enclosed within an oval, what Egyptologists call a cartouche, as was the name Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut was now the proud owner of not one cartouche name, as all other royal women possessed, but two, in the manner of a masculine king.
Whether Hatshepsut herself chose the throne name or it was the invention of her priests and other advisers, she was the first king to incorporate the element Ma’at into a royal name, implying that at the heart of the sun god’s power was a feminine entity, Ma’at, the source that was believed to keep the cosmos straight and true. Names were believed to capture a person’s essence, and with this new label Hatshepsut herself became the force of truth within the sun god, an entity that acted to maintain order in the universe. Indeed, she was not only claiming to be a manifestation of the sun’s life force, as any king might, but also declaring herself to be a female expression of that solarism. Hatshepsut’s throne name communicated to her people that her kingship was undoubtedly feminine, and that feminine justice was necessary to maintain life with proper order, judgment, and continuance.
This Maatkare throne name would forever be linked to Hatshepsut at her most powerful, when she was finally able to transform the unceremonious power of a regent into the formalized power of a king. She received three other throne names at her coronation, and each one clarifies that Hatshepsut was not running away from the issue of her aberrant femininity as king but standing her ground and fighting back with cleverness and theological reason. Traditionally, the Egyptians had formed royal names evocative of masculine abilities, names like Strong Bull (Ka-nakht), which tied Egypt to the sexual potential of its leader. Hatshepsut lacked the required male equipment, of course, to pull off a name like Strong Bull, but she could become Useret-kau (Powerful of Ka Spirits), as in her Horus name, using a similar-sounding word—not ka meaning “bull” but ka meaning “spirit”—to denote the mystical power of a god, if not the physical aspects of that power.
Her nebty name,19 Wadjyt-renput (Green of Years, or Prosperous of Years), is essentially a theological argument that her presence would make everyone rich, but it also astutely includes another female element, the cobra goddess Wadjyt. And her last name, the Golden Horus name, Netjeret-khau (Divine of Appearances), combines her female divinity (netjeret) with the masculine ability to be regenerated (khau, “appear in glory”) like the sun god himself at dawn.
If there were dissenters among the intelligentsia who had the knowledge to dissect and critique Hatshepsut’s feminine kingship, they were up against some clever theologians. Whoever invented her royal names was ingenious enough to take the male elements—ka (spirit), khau (appearances), Re (the sun god)—and attach each to a feminine base. Hatshepsut’s names always retained the feminine -t. She and her priests knew her limitations as a woman and seemed interested in flexibility rather than deceit. She became king in name and title, but she knew that she could not transform into a king’s masculine body. She couldn’t impregnate a harem of women with any divine seed. There was no need for her royal names to point out those deficiencies or to lie about her true nature. Instead, she and her priests focused on how her femininity could coalesce with and complement masculine powers.
An Egyptian king’s masculine sexual abilities likened him to Atum, the god who, through sexual activity with himself, created his own being and the first void in which the civilized universe was placed. Kings were meant to perform the same sexual activity, and although we have no evidence that Egyptian monarchs actually did perform masturbatory rituals in the temples, we know that sexual congress with their many wives took on a similar sacred meaning. A king’s masculinity was also meant to liken him to Osiris, the god who sexually re-created himself after his murder through yet another celebrated act of masturbation. What’s more, the Egyptian king was also believed to be a manifestation of the sun god Re, who was thought to impregnate his own mother with his future selfas he set in the west. It was this power of never-ending renewal that the Egyptian king was meant to embody in his own person, so that when one monarch died, his future self, his son, would take his place in a constant line of rule.
The king’s manly loins allowed him to continue the royal line—the essence of rule for Egypt, with father following son and so on. According to Egyptian belief, a woman was not capable of such regeneration: she could contain and gestate new life, but she could not create it. She could protect her father and brother and son with all the vicious weapons in her arsenal, but, unlike a masculine creator in a harem, she could not engender her future self. Ontologically, Hatshepsut’s feminine kingship was a serious theological obstacle.
From the very beginnings of her reign, Hatshepsut decided that the best defense was a good offense and conveyed to her people what she was able to do in this kingship that a man could not. She could channel the fierce protective powers of the goddesses who spewed fire at the enemies of Re and devoured the rebels, slaking their thirst with the blood of their adversaries, a fact she alluded to by incorporating these goddesses and their destructive-protective powers into her royal names. Ma’at, Wosret, and Wadjyt were all cobra goddesses who could attach to the brow of their master, ready to protect by spitting heat and poison at enemies. Perhaps these names were even meant to calm the fears of some of her priests and officials, because their meaning suggests that Hatshepsut’s most important role was to safeguard her father, the sun god Re, and by extension her nephew, the boy king Thutmose III. Her names clarify that she was not progenitor, in the strict masculine sense of dynastic succession, but guardian of her family’s continuance. Even dissenters could have little argument with that fact.
Why, then, did Hatshepsut take this momentous step, given all its religious impediments, if she never intended to rule on her own but only alongside another king? Why not just continue the informal regency? Thutmose III was probably under ten years of age when Hatshepsut was finally crowned. Perhaps she decided to make her move before it was too late, while her co-king was still too young to understand that her coronation meant an implicit demotion for him, cementing the relationship’s inequality before he gained more maturity. Or, more likely, Hatshepsut required the formality of kingship to keep any hold on her authority. Hatshepsut was not directly related to him. She was just his aunt. Her daughter was still not old enough for sexual congress with the young king, so there could be no marriage between them to cement her regency. Indeed, the young king still needed seven or more years until he finally reached maturity—an eternity in ancient lifetimes.
The how of Hatshepsut’s rise to kingship can be reconstructed, at least partially; the why is cloaked by her own ideological depiction of it and further complicated by our own ambivalent and distrustful understandings of female power. Hatshepsut is often said to have taken steps toward the kingship out of insatiability for more power, and, in particular, for a more precisely defined power. For many Egyptologists of the last generation at least, the reason is ambition—the problematic determination of a woman attempting to take something that did not, by right, belong to her. But if we step back and look at the whole, it is possible to imagine that the Egyptian system of political-religious power itself demanded these deliberate moves. She had the support to climb this high from priests and officials who held key positions but were fearful of losing those offices if a new dynasty came to the throne; these men were apparently so troubled by Thutmose III’s immature kingship that they were ready to support the most unorthodox political move possible to keep Hatshepsut in power.
We do not know the details that demanded her formal declaration of rule, but if nothing else, Hatshepsut’s rise to the kingship indicates that she was a valued, essential leader, and that people were willing to rewrite the sacred rules of this highest office to accommodate her unconventional rule. She fell into the leadership role early on with the death of her husband, out of necessity, only to see it snowballing into something larger than anyone could have foreseen. She would have had no choice but to keep moving forward. Hatshepsut, and those around her, put all the pieces in place for her unprecedented authority without extravagant scheming or deal making or subterfuge. Her coronation made the change in her status irrevocable: the king died in his holy office, either naturally or unnaturally. There was no such thing as abdication in ancient Egypt.
However it was decided that Hatshepsut would actually ascend the throne, it happened. Whether it was her idea or that of someone in her retinue—the First High Priest of Amen, or Senenmut, or her own mother—all we have are oracular and ideological texts that tell us the choice was the god Amen’s and that his divine image selected her at his temple at Thebes to rule. It was a radical idea for a woman to even consider, and there must have been good reason for Hatshepsut to make such a bold move. When Thutmose II died, Hatshepsut was left in a real predicament. If she gave up the God’s Wife of Amen duty, she would jeopardize her access to power in Thebes and thus her regency for young Thutmose III. She would have no formal title connecting her to the current king, nothing of value that would allow her to stay in control of Egypt. We cannot forget that Hatshepsut was not the King’s Mother. Perhaps it was at this point that she realized formal steps had to be taken. The new king was simply too young, and her familial connection to him was too indirect. The Thutmoside line was in jeopardy, and she needed to protect it—not for the boy king personally, but for her family and, by extension, for herself. Her accession would create a fixed means of locking down her Thutmoside authority on behalf of her dynasty for another decade or so, all in the hope that Thutmose III could procreate a viable son in the future (not ready himself to rule for another ten years hence, at least). Hatshepsut’s kingship was an unusual solution, to be sure, but she knew there was some precedent for female rule when a family line died out. Why not anticipate the possibility that Thutmose III could also die young or childless? It had certainly happened before.
We can also entertain the notion that Hatshepsut believed she deserved the formal recognition of her power, plain and simple, that the kingship was meant to be hers. But this explanation is too easy—too dependent on the demands of one woman and too contingent on an entitled and avaricious character capable of steamrolling past all dissent in her path. It also demands that we believe the ancient Egyptian cultural system could have absorbed such a revolutionary mind-set: happy to go where no woman had gone before, simply because Hatshepsut wanted the credit. Personal self-indulgence was unlikely to be supported by so many for its own sake.
Hatshepsut’s move to the throne was politically connected to many power players around Egypt, inextricably and profoundly linking her success to that of a core group of loyal courtiers and priests ready to follow her. Instead of seeing her rise to power as the willful and voracious machinations of one woman, we should reevaluate it as a clever tactic that bent, but did not break, the rules of an already millennia-old patriarchal monarchical system that saw father-to-son succession as encoded in the written law of the gods.
Realistically, Hatshepsut’s kingship was not and could never have been something she planned at the start of her regency. She probably never contemplated this ultimate and immutable change in her fortunes. If we look at what she had already done in her regency—engaging in her day-to-day maintenance of Egypt’s government, keeping the power centralized in the palace, making sure provincial governors and viceroys in Nubia paid into the system, cracking down on rebels abroad, forming ambitious building plans in temples throughout Egypt, acting as chief judge in the highest law court—we see that Hatshepsut was the only person who could now fill the position. The more she performed the duties of the king, the more she was led to the inevitable eventuality of kingship. In many ways, Hatshepsut was only doing what she was best at: running the richest country in the ancient world. In the end, she formally defined that role. Hatshepsut’s kingship provides us with the ultimate case of merit over ambition. It was a collection of smaller, piecemeal decisions that led to the great prize, and she only became king because she was the last, best candidate to see to Egypt’s well-being in a time of dynastic crisis. For Hatshepsut, it was the process of doing kingly things that led to her coronation.
And now that circumstances had prepared (or propelled) Hatshepsut to take control of Egypt in a lawfully recognized way, she would have to keep control of a more complicated situation than before, using every tool at her disposal and every official in her loyal following to justify a highly unconventional, but soon openly recognized, co-kingship between a woman and a boy. In some ways, Hatshepsut made her job that much harder by officially taking the crowns and scepters of this holy office when it was already occupied. This was a profound transitional moment for Egypt, when its power brokers stared down an abyss of uncertainty and emerged with an avant-garde solution. The entire court must have known that a Hatshepsut kingship and a coregency turned on its head would be highly unorthodox, but the priests, viziers, treasurers—everyone who was anyone—seem to have jumped on board anyway. And thus they all, Hatshepsut included, needed to shift responsibility for this crazy decision away from themselves. It was vital that this move be seen as a choice made by the gods, not by men (and certainly not by one woman). Indeed, Hatshepsut’s first steps to the kingship took place in the gods’ presence and with their blessing, through the oracles in the temple and through divine congress with her own dead father, Thutmose I.
We might hold a dubious view of such a strategy, to be sure, but ideology can contain both political and religious motivations simultaneously. Hatshepsut almost certainly believed in the intervention of the gods in her daily life, as well as in cosmic events, and thus she used what the Egyptians called a biayt, a “miracle” or a “revelation,” to claim her power officially.20 Hatshepsut created some sacred theater so that the sanctity of her rule was legitimized and witnessed before many eyes. In the coming years, she would write many more mythologies about her kingship’s creation—how her father chose her personally, presented her to his courtiers, and gave her the royal names of a king—and about her divine conception through holy union between her mother and the god Amen himself, when he merged into the body of her sacred father, Thutmose I.
To cement her coronation, Hatshepsut transformed the profundity of the moment into material reality—two granite monoliths erected in Karnak Temple—proof of her god-given grace because the obelisks had been ordered years prior. Hatshepsut made it look as if she had planned her royal transformation far in advance of its occurrence, that she had long foreseen her eventual rise in formally witnessed power. In reality, these obelisks had likely been commissioned to cement the new kingship of her young charge, King Thutmose III, and were only later transferred to her when she was able to step into the kingship. When the monoliths came out of the quarry, Hatshepsut decided to have them inscribed for herself, not Thutmose III, and placed them in one of the most public locations at Egypt’s grandest temple to proclaim her accomplishment.21 It is hard for us to understand, with our rapidly evolving technology and constant invention, but in the Egyptian mind the creation of an obelisk was nothing short of a wonder, an achievement that proved beyond a doubt that the king responsible was truly blessed. Only a king thus graced by gods could have achieved such a feat, to place monoliths of the hardest granite, stone not cut by copper chisels, ten stories high, in the midst of the gods. The obelisks were evocative of masculine virility, to be sure, but also of sunlight itself. Hatshepsut and her world believed them to be shafts of light that linked their temple with the gods of heaven. These obelisks would mark her kingship—officially and publicly.
Hatshepsut did not just remake herself with her unprecedented coronation. She also transformed, and implicitly demoted, her new “co-king.” Thutmose’s name was changed, explicitly transferring his power from one who ruled alone to one who worked with another. Hatshepsut altered her co-king’s name from Menkheperre to MenkheperkaRe, adding the element ka, or “spirit.” Instead of “the Manifestation of Re Is Enduring,” his name was now “the Manifestation of the Soul of Re Is Enduring.” This move was politically and religiously brilliant, at least to the Egyptian intellectuals who could understand it. The new name implied that the boy king was now one step removed from the power of the sun, that he was no longer a direct manifestation of the sun itself but only the embodiment of part of its power, its ka.22 The name change might even imply that the boy king was crowned anew alongside his mistress, a ritual procedure that demanded a downgrading in rank.
Hatshepsut may have been holding all the cards vis-à-vis her co-king, but even after her initiation into the mysteries, the coronation, the name changes, and the clever masculine-feminine arguments, she still had a problem. She was the senior king, and yet she had come to the throne second.
Hatshepsut had a clever strategy for managing this complication. Much as she co-opted traditional masculine titles by injecting a feminine element, now she cannily played with the way her co-king’s reign was measured, using his established chronology—something sacred and well known to the contemporary Egyptians—to retroactively support her rule. Rather than begin a new sequence of reign dates following her coronation, she simply adopted Thutmose III’s timeline as her own. Thus the date of her coronation was immaterial. His year 7 became her year 7, with the inferred meaning that she had been king even before her own recognized accession, that she had already taken the reins of power in the eyes of the gods from the moment of her husband’s death. Some Egyptologists have seen her dating methods as disingenuous and deceptive—to the Egyptians, and to the gods. How could she claim royal years of rule before her coronation? But this woman’s informal power was without contest. To date the beginning of her own reign later, within the reign of the young Thutmose III, implied a divine mistake—because, for the ancient Egyptians, to be the king was to be the Good God. Or, put another way, the divinity that had been inside of her since her conception had finally been officially recognized and revealed. But it had always been there.
Hatshepsut was seated upon the throne, holding the instruments of Egyptian kingship and acting as a true, divinely elected Horus over all of Egypt. And Thutmose III had inexorably been transformed into a secondary co-king, a monarch who worked alongside another rather than ruling on his own. Although he was only a boy, this sacred coronation must have signaled to him what he already knew—that Hatshepsut ruled with the gods’ favor and was the most prepared to keep Egypt safe, prosperous, and righteous. After the coronation, when Hatshepsut finally sat on a throne taller than his own, in the place of honor formerly reserved for him, wearing king’s crowns like his, Thutmose most likely noticed the curious and awed looks of courtiers and priests as they entered the audience chamber; he watched, as her majesty conducted business, and saw how his nascent kingship was dependent on her mature authority.
Or perhaps the crowning made no difference to him and to his daily life, except for the demands on his time; weeks of coronation rituals and celebrations in multiple towns throughout Egypt must have annoyed the boy. If Hatshepsut had been making all the decisions during his tenure as king, then some formal changes in thrones and headgear and names might have constituted only superficial changes to this child’s life. But he likely sat on the throne beside her during their first “sitting,” and even though young, he must have perceived that something important in his life had shifted.
If he had previously been bratty and imperial in tone with his aunt, now was the time to change his behavior. There is little indication of any hostilities, but we do see a suggestion of increased distance between the two monarchs. At the inception of Hatshepsut’s kingship, Thutmose III appears only occasionally on her commissioned monumental constructions. Hatshepsut was so intent on laying the ideological foundation for her own odd kingship that she was essentially forced to exclude the king who already occupied the throne. Did the choices visible in her building program find a way into her policy decisions? Perhaps Thutmose III was sent off to the north to further his education in the ancient cities of Memphis and Heliopolis, away from Hatshepsut, who was busy exploiting the Amen theology of Thebes to support the weight of her new crown.
The coronation was clearly meaningful to Hatshepsut, because she ordered the exclusive and mysterious rites depicted in all their ritual detail in carved stone reliefs at Karnak and Deir el-Bahri, a first for any Egyptian king: image after image shows her kneeling before the different gods while they place the various crowns on her head and arm her with assorted regalia; speeches praising Hatshepsut’s abilities and inherent worth are chiseled into the quartzite, limestone, and sandstone. Hatshepsut ordered her artisans to express her person and action in a rather bland and expected way, in line with two thousand years of royal tradition, but she knew better than anyone that the mere fact that it had happened at all—that a woman was crowned king of Egypt during a time of peace and prosperity, and that she could publicly claim it—was unequaled. Even though she tried to fit herself into previous traditions, Hatshepsut’s multiple and overt representations of this moment reveal that she knew her kingship was not only absolutely unprecedented, but something that needed to be broadcast widely.23
As king, Hatshepsut took up her new role as dominant protector with energy, and as such she gave special attention to Egypt’s goddesses. Perhaps believing that her power stemmed from the divine feminine, capable of both great destruction and soft tenderness, she embellished the temples of these goddesses, rebuilding those in ruin, and even elevating some divinities to a higher level with grand buildings and new festivals. The goddess Mut of Thebes was a beneficiary of Hatshepsut’s pious devotion.Mutliterally means “mother,” but she was also believed to be the consort of the god Amen. Mut had her own temple precinct in the larger Karnak complex, and indeed, the foundations of many stone buildings in Mut’s temple space were created by Hatshepsut.24 Mut was depicted wearing the double crown, and it is likely that Hatshepsut, as Lady of the Two Lands, felt a kinship with this celestial being, enough to link her own feminine kingship with Mut’s great and ferocious power. Hatshepsut probably felt a real connection to this lioness divinity, performing countless rituals in the goddess’s sanctuary, offering meals, and, most important, offering the goddess beer, getting her drunk so that she would not unleash her ferocious power on Egypt’s people.
But King Hatshepsut never neglected Amen, her father, the god she believed had placed her in this position in the first place; and more than to any divinity in the land, she strengthened her link to the god of Thebes. The name “Amen” means “hidden one,” and his true nature was thought to be concealed. Hatshepsut, too, claimed obliquely that her own true character as king had been hidden, only to be revealed as she gradually moved closer to the throne. One of her later obelisks reads that she is “Maatkare, the shining image of Amen, whom he made appear as King upon the throne of Horus, in front of the holies of the palace, whom the Great Ennead nursed to be mistress of the circuit of the sun’s disk.”25 She thus claims to be the visible manifestation of the god Amen, who was believed to exist before creation itself; that is, he represented unformed potential that could become anything—mother or father, man or woman, child or adult, animal or human. This god was thought to permeate everything and everyone. Amen’s existence depended on a body created from nothingness, from infinity, from darkness, within the primeval waters. And he did this miraculously, from his own divine plan, from the potentiality of the universe.
The inscriptions on the surface of this same later obelisk clarify Hatshepsut’s new, divine place in the cosmos:
I have made this with a loving heart for my father, Amun, having entered into his initiation of the First Occasion and having experienced his impressive efficacy. I have not been forgetful of any project he has decreed. For My Majesty knows he is divine, and I have done it by his command. He is the one who guides me. I could not have imagined the work without his acting: he is the one who gives the directions.
Nor have I slept because of his temple. I do not stray from what he has commanded. My heart is perceptive on behalf of my father, and I have access to his mind’s knowledge. I have not turned my back on the town of the Lord to the Limit but paid attention to it. For I know that Karnak is heaven on earth, the sacred elevation of the First Occasion, the Eye of the Lord to the Limit—his favorite place, which bears his perfection and gathers his followers.26
Hatshepsut thus tells her people that she was able to converse personally with the creator god Amen-Re, to witness the circumstances of his First Time—that is, to see and understand his masturbatory creation of himself and of the universe itself. In Egypt, creation was an ongoing process, not a single origin story that happened once at the beginning of history, like the Bible’s Genesis. In Egyptian belief, the king had to construct the right conditions for the god to manifest himself and the world continuously. According to her obelisk texts, Hatshepsut’s kingly transformation allowed her to participate in and absorb mysteries that she could not before. This mystical aspect of her coronation should not be downplayed; it provided one-to-one contact with the god.
These later obelisk inscriptions are clear: Hatshepsut wanted everyone to know that she was only doing as Amen, her father, had commanded, that she would continue to perform any work that he required, and that she would act according to his guidance. She was advertising to her people that she had glimpsed the will of Amen’s heart. She was telling everyone, by building this connection to the sky itself, that she was truly in communion with the workings of the cosmos. For her, Karnak Temple was the epicenter of Amen’s creation, the place where heaven and earth joined, the sacred structure that allowed Amen to manifest himself and his great creative powers in the world of humanity. Hatshepsut was making some bold statements—not of martial powers or financial authority, but of access to the innermost workings of a god’s heart and to the secret nature of the universe itself. She had tapped into the source.
This was a rich ideology that Hatshepsut could exploit. She used the mythology of Amen to support a flexible view of her own hidden and internalized gender, lending a mythical, semidivine connotation to the adaptations demanded for her to manifest kingship. Atum-Re (of Heliopolis) and Osiris (of Abydos) were given their due during her reign, but evidence suggests that Hatshepsut saw in the god Amen an elasticity and an ambiguity that worked well for her own feminine rule.27 To cement her unconventional kingship, Hatshepsut used her deep theological training to find models that reinforced her own emerging androgyny. In some later texts, Amen was known as a father and a mother simultaneously, and Hatshepsut fit herself into this indistinctness. Indeed, Amen had a feminine counterpart named Amenet, who was understood to be a kind of consort but, more correctly, was herself a feminine manifestation of the Great God.28
Hatshepsut was intimately aware of Amen’s many forms and names, many of them invested with great masculine powers of fecundity and creation. She was able to link herself as a feminine complement to each of them, allowing her kingship to force a nuance of gendered royal divinity never seen before, as “Khenemet-Amen Hatshepsut, who lives forever, the daughter of Amen-Re, his beloved, his only one who came from him, shining image of the Lord of All, whose beauty was fashioned by the powers of Heliopolis.”29She sometimes represented herself as a ruler with masculine/feminine powers, and in one text she is told: “They allow your borders to reach to the extent of the heavens, to the borders of deep darkness. The Two Lands are filled with the children of your children, great is the count of your seed.”30
In keeping with her new role as caretaker of divine creation, Hatshepsut was the first known king to publish depictions and texts of the divine Opet festival. During these rites, priests carried the veiled statue of Amen-Re the two miles from Karnak to Luxor Temple to meld with the sexualized forms of the god—Amenkamutef and Amenemipet. Hatshepsut surrounded this procession with excess and embellishments.31 Amen’s connection with the sun god, Re—joined as a kind of superdivinity forming the synchronized Amen-Re at Karnak Temple—also allowed her to tap into the solar aspects of divine kingship as sun priest. Working within this solar theology, Hatshepsut worshipped and built temples for the sun god’s daughters—the Eyes of Re—identifying with their ruthless violence and ferocity in protection of the sun. She underscored the ability of the female divinity to excite the sun god through laughter, love, and sexuality. Hatshepsut understood that it was the goddess who woke the god from his deathlike sleep, who fed him, and who incited him to sexual rebirth. This new, female kingship was nothing if not theological, and Hatshepsut’s interpretations of its difference tapped into the elemental powers present in the Egyptian people’s lives, the forces that dispel darkness, warm the skin, flood the earth, and allow the crops to grow. Her pious connection to Amen-Re allowed access to both masculine and feminine power, to both visible and hidden authority, unlike any monarch that had come before.
Hatshepsut’s royal transformation was a success. She had begun her transition years before, culminating with the coronation when everyone gathered in the temple to see her blessed by the gods. Now, in the palace throne room, she presented her people with a more intimate, but still ceremonial, view of her alteration. They could see her plainly now that she was removed from the mysterious temple atmosphere filled with the haze of incense, burnt offerings, and the sharp angles of the rising or setting sun’s rays. Here in the palace there were no lengthy ritual activities that shielded the object of veneration from the viewing audience’s eyes. Within the confines of the throne room, one could address and speak to the king, assuming one used the correct formalities and conventions. Some officials of high rank were allowed even more intimate conversation, to the extent that they could disagree with the royal sovereign if the proper decorum was observed. After the overwrought ritual weight of the coronation, it was probably a relief to Hatshepsut and her officials to get down to the brass tacks of politics and finance.
At her first royal “sitting,” the transformed Hatshepsut graced her throne in the presence of the most elite officials, priests, and courtiers. The gilded chair was placed upon a dais that made her higher than anyone standing in the audience hall; it may have been situated within a gilded pavilion that surrounded her person with divine imagery of ancestor kings. She wore one of the many fabulous crowns in her arsenal and perhaps clutched her royal scepters. This was a woman who had grown up with court protocol and its accoutrements, and even in her unprecedented position as king, it is likely that she felt familiar not only with the weight of her crown and the heft of the religious instruments but also with the way she should hold her body and watch her audience with purpose.
She may have announced some of her royal policies and plans to her elites here for the first time. This formal moment would have been necessary for a legitimization of her new position, so that everyone could see, with their own eyes, what she had become and how she would behave among them. The Egyptians excelled in providing visual trappings that recast a normal human as an extraordinary, divinized being. Everything about this scene—from the throne and its height to the pavilion and its richness, to her crowns, kilts, sandals, and eye makeup, to the strange confluence of masculine royal regalia on an elite woman—separated her from them, making her seem superhuman and beyond their criticism.
Hatshepsut had already spent years sitting in this very room, discussing strategies with her generals, conferring over the grain tax for a specific region, or reviewing options for dealing with a troublesome new governor in the delta. But now her clothing and regalia had changed. Her names were altered and enhanced. Her place on the dais was superior. Yet these were only surface modifications. In the minds of the ancient Egyptians who served her, her very person had been revealed as a living god, a being that now had one-to-one contact with the mind of Amen. With those crowns now upon her head, it is probable that most of her officials would have treated her differently than they had before.
And the changes rippled through the court as her coronation transformed the stations of those around her. Some moved down, like Thutmose III, demoted to a junior king; others, like her daughter, moved up. Nefrure now assumed the role of God’s Wife of Amen at around nine years of age, possibly just old enough to activate and formalize her sexual duties to the god and certainly old enough for improvement in her economic and political stature. With this position, Nefrure would have gained her own household, her own steward, her own income, and her own responsibilities. As the newly minted King’s Daughter to Hatshepsut and King’s Sister to Thutmose III, her position as God’s Wife was doubly legitimized; she was directly related to both co-kings. Indeed, the young girl must have stood behind her mother during festival encounters with the god, just as Hatshepsut had done during the reign of Thutmose II. If Nefrure and her mother were close, the girl may have enjoyed the intimate company as they performed many rituals together. Or perhaps she now perceived herself to be yet another step removed from the powerful woman who was never allowed the leisure to be a devoted and doting maternal presence in the first place.
Hatshepsut’s mother, Ahmes, was likely still alive to witness the miraculous transformation of the daughter she may have once wished was born a son. After Hatshepsut became king, she named Ahmes as King’s Mother, a title to which the dowager queen could never previously claim ownership, thus further diminishing the authority of Thutmose III’s mother, Isis. Now there were two women in the royal palaces who held the same title, which was certainly a strange reality for everyone around them; the two co-kings were close enough in age that both King’s Mothers were still living. Although there is absolutely no evidence that Isis had been trying to wrest the regency from Hatshepsut or that she was a competitor for power, Hatshepsut seems to have been happy to demote Isis as she placed her mother, instead of Isis, in important reliefs. Perhaps the women resided in different cities or palaces, thereby limiting any unpredictable emotions—empathy, apathy, or bitterness—Isis may have felt when she beheld Ahmes’s change in status and encroachment on her territory.
If we accept that Ahmes was still alive at this time, as the evidence indeed suggests,32 then the older queen had watched as her daughter ascended through the ranks over the years: from young princess to God’s Wife of Amen to King’s Great Wife during the reign of Thutmose II, to regent during the early years of Thutmose III. Her little girl had developed into a skilled stateswoman. Now the unprecedented had happened, and Ahmes can’t have been anything but amazed. Her daughter was sitting on the throne of Egypt beside another king.
Hapuseneb, the First High Priest of Amen, must have approved Hatshepsut’s kingship, given all the support she was able to garner from the Amen priesthood. For all we know, Amen’s oracles were genuinely received, and Hapuseneb truly believed in his heart that the gods wanted Hatshepsut to be king, making it necessary to defy the obvious gender requirement, in order to safeguard the Thutmoside line. Or Hapuseneb may have engineered the oracles that foretold Hatshepsut’s authority by providing the means for the god Amen-Re to actually speak to her and mark her for rule in public. If this high priest was willing to countenance Hatshepsut’s unconventional reign, he was rewarded for doing so. Given that reality, we can imagine that the other high priests throughout the Two Lands—in Heliopolis, in Memphis, in Aswan, in Abydos—may have fallen in step as well.
Regardless of likely remuneration for their service and loyalty, Hatshepsut likely maintained an intimate working relationship with her priests, particularly at the Amen temple in Karnak. She had associated with the most powerful members of the priesthood from a young age and become a king on whom they could depend absolutely. They had fostered her temple building, festival activity, and even theological questions. As God’s Wife, Hatshepsut had been part of the most important creative rituals in their presence, and now that she was king, they trusted her to keep the process of creation ongoing. In return, she trusted them to form a theological means for her to maintain her authority and to create a sacred theatrical stage to display Amen’s acceptance of her rule. She may have even talked with these priests about the precedent of Sobeknefru, the last woman to serve as Egypt’s sovereign, a few hundred years before. Hatshepsut and her priestly supporters seem to have come to an understanding that the gods could indeed accept female power in special circumstances, and her unusual rule forced closer contact with those mysteries of a woman in power.
Palace officials like Senenmut and Ahmose Pennekhbet would have likely been pleased by Hatshepsut’s kingship, despite its unorthodoxy, because their loyalty was abundantly compensated. Both of these men happened to find themselves in the right place at the right time. Senenmut had clawed his way up the social hierarchy to attain his position of authority, while Ahmose Pennekhbet was born to the life of elite officialdom and gentle responsibilities. Their mistress, Hatshepsut, was now the most powerful person in the land, and her eldest daughter and their pupil, Nefrure, was a wealthy priestess, with a palace, a treasury, and servants of her own to be managed. There was no reason for either of them to object to Hatshepsut’s rule on behalf of Thutmose III or on the grounds of gender.
Harder to answer is how the elites beyond Thebes—in cities like Memphis, Heliopolis, and Aswan—who subscribed to their own protocols and cultural understandings, reacted to Hatshepsut’s accession. Presumably Hatshepsut’s reach was long, because apparently she was able to influence officials even hundreds of miles away by rewarding dependability and trustworthiness with prosperous positions, and by punishing dissenters and complainers with neglect and dismissal. Whatever the level of disgruntlement at this female kingship among the elites—and there may certainly have been some real displeasure because Hatshepsut repeatedly had the line “he who shall do her homage shall live, he who shall speak evil in blasphemy of her Majesty shall die”33 carved into her later temple at Deir el-Bahri—we know that there were more than enough officials in cities around Egypt who were willing to work with this new situation and with this new mistress, certainly enough to keep the ranks of nonsupporters suppressed.
Lower-level bureaucrats may not have even understood the political intricacies of Hatshepsut’s rise to power, and it was not their place to question their superiors, let alone their gods. Although many of them may have been shocked by the very notion of a woman taking the throne, none of them left any records of displeasure. Such men were scrappy survivors who aimed to please the boss above them, not the king in a palace far away. With such a young boy on the throne, even these bureaucrats would have seen the value of guaranteeing Hatshepsut’s continued authority for the long years to come while waiting for Thutmose to grow into his office and produce his own new and viable heir. Everybody knew that a change in rule could mean a shake-up in palace positions.
How did the larger population of Thebes, the peasants and craftsmen, react to seeing their mistress crowned as king and appearing before them in festivals or offering to the gods with no intercession from a man? Were they shocked, or did they assume that their betters understood what was needed? Perhaps they could only catch a glimpse of her figure through the throngs of onlookers—slim and regal, wearing a long linen dress, with her crown atop a short, round wig—as she and her young co-king led religious processions of the gilded barque along the sacred pathways, accompanying the god Amen from the temple gates out to the river quay. It was certainly not a sight they were accustomed to, but in the eyes of the peasants Hatshepsut was probably just as unreachable and mystical as any other monarch. Whether she was male or female probably made little difference to them if their crops continued to thrive and they were paid for their work.
We can only scratch the surface of ancient Egyptian opinion about this unprecedented kingship by looking at the elite’s actions vis-à-vis their mistress, Hatshepsut: there is absolutely no evidence of insurrection, rebellion, or coup during her reign. Without a doubt, Hatshepsut’s officials cooperated to keep the royal mythology of divine kingship alive, recognizing that it was in their best interest to do so, given the political structures that rewarded them for staying in line with the program. The systems and incentives weren’t in place in ancient Egypt for a wealthy landowner to raise an army, rise up as a warlord, and claim the throne by force, which cut down on enticements to plot and conspire against the royal family. Even if people were unhappy about Hatshepsut’s rule, they weren’t so dissatisfied that they were going to do anything about it.
Unlike the decentralized political systems in ancient Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome that allowed, encouraged, and even thrived on extreme—and often violent—political aggression, ancient Egyptian society did not tolerate, much less foster, discussions of their ruler’s ineptitude, sexual deviance, mental instabilities, or other causes for removal. Egyptology lacks any intimate discussion of royal failures, intrigue, interor intra-family antagonism. Regicide happened so rarely that in the twenty-eight hundred years before the Ptolemaic period, Egyptologists can count only two verifiable cases—Amenemhet I of the Twelfth Dynasty and Ramses III of the Twentieth Dynasty—and neither was discussed nor recorded except in the most oblique of terms. And it was the same with dynastic usurpation. For example, we have no idea how Hatshepsut’s father, Thutmose I, came to the throne. It is simply assumed that Amenhotep I’s line petered out and that Thutmose I stepped in as a close relative to the stagnant dynastic line. But it remains in the realm of possibility that Hatshepsut’s father took the throne with the backing of his armies, even if we have no evidence of it. In such cases, historians are limited to what the ancient people chose to tell, after all. And the ancient Egyptians were masters at producing selective historical accounts about an unassailable and protected kingship.
Despite all of this, some problematic evidence suggests that Hatshepsut herself may have been intending to push Thutmose III out of the picture, maybe even completely. Recovered blocks from Karnak Temple indicate that the names of the boy king were replaced with those of Hatshepsut’s dead husband, Thutmose II, after she became king.34 This is the only temple of Hatshepsut’s from which Thutmose III’s images were expelled, but it was located in the core of Amen’s realm at Thebes. Perhaps Hatshepsut was only trying to create a clearer connection to her own political power early in her reign, telling people through stone monuments that she ruled because of her connection to her dead husband, thus removing the bothersome child who also inhabited the throne. But her erasure of his names might instead indicate something more sinister.
Here we have fascinating evidence of King Hatshepsut in a rare moment of indecision. She seems to waffle a bit—or at least explore different solutions—until, for whatever reason, not long after she had Thutmose III formally erased, she decided to put him back into her official temple reliefs. Perhaps she tried to rule without his presence for a short time, but then realized that this boy was her only political means to keeping the throne. Hatshepsut would have to find another way to solidify her base of ideological power as a female king. Her unconventional reign demanded some Egyptian conventionality. She had just embarked upon the highest-stakes move any woman had made in the history of human politics. With this novel and irregular kingship, she had arguably created more problems than she had solved. She would need to unite all her abilities in the years to come—ideological, economic, military, and political—to maintain what she had wrought.35