Ancient Egyptian pharaonic culture stretched for millennia of kingdoms, dynasties, foreign invasions and civil war. The best known period today is the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom (c. 1549 – 1298 BC), thanks to the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. But poor little buck-toothed Tut was a footnote in the history of the pharaohs, overshadowed by his predecessors.
One of his 18th Dynasty predecessors was Hatshepsut. Her father was Thutmose I, a great warrior king and Ahmose, his Chief Royal Wife (yes, it was an official title). Hatshepsut became the wife and queen of her half-brother, Thutmose II. It seems revolting to us today that step-siblings would marry, but the practice is rooted in how the 18th Dynasty pharaohs came to power.
The 18th Dynasty started the New Kingdom after several centuries of civil war and invasion. The new pharaohs wanted to protect their property from usurpers by ensuring their blood kin would inherit the kingdom. Their solution was to marry off the children produced by their assorted wives and concubines. Nepotism worked until the line died out with Tut, his half-sister and the genetic consequences of consanguinity.
So Hatshepsut began her career as the queen of Thutmose II. He soon disappears from the written record and Hatshepsut became a dowager queen with a daughter and a 7-year-old stepson, Thutmose III. Hatshepsut was immediately appointed regent for the boy-king. Before long, she seems to have decided that she should be pharaoh.
That’s when things became interesting. Ancient Egyptian was gender-specific, like modern European Romance languages. Every term for king or pharaoh was male gender. In effect, Hatshepsut wanted to be the (female) male king. If you’re a daughter of a king, you can convince court officials and the priests of Amon to acquiesce.
Hatshepsut also wanted to convince ordinary people that she was the legitimate heir to her father to head off any opposition to her rule. How do politicians overcome inconvenient truths? They tell big, fat lies hoping that ordinary people are too stupid to notice or care.
Hatshepsut created an elaborate lie in which the god Amon disguised himself as Thutmose I and slept with Ahmose, Chief Royal Wife. Voila! Hatshepsut wasn’t just a royal daughter; she was the god’s daughter! She had this tale carved into the wall of her funerary temple at Deir el Bahri.
Hatshepsut’s statues switched from showing her as a female queen to showing her as a male king wearing a pharaoh’s crown and false beard. You can vote on which you prefer, just like people voted on whether the Elvis stamp should show him swivel-hipped in Memphis or pudgy in Las Vegas.
Hatshepsut ruled for twenty years during a time of peace and prosperity. Her biggest foreign adventure was a trip to the land of Punt (possibly in Somalia) for ivory, apes, and gold. Her obelisk at Thebes (modern Luxor) was originally encased in gold. Like all Theban pharaohs she added to the Great Temple of Karnak by building the Chappelle Rouge (Red Chapel).
Her greatest monument is her funerary temple at Deir el Bahri. The temple’s terraces merge with the cliff behind it, drawing the eye upward to the blue sky. The location near the Valley of the Kings may indicate that she had a tomb there like other New Kingdom pharaohs. She also had a separate queen’s tomb from her early days. Hatshepsut’s actual burial site and her mummy have never been identified. We also don’t know when or how she died.
After twenty years in her shadow, Thutmose III officially appears as pharaoh. He disassembled her Red Chapel and used the blocks in his own building projects. He encased her obelisk in stone to hide her achievements. Her funerary temple was also trashed, although it’s not clear that Thutmose III ordered the destruction.
Early archaeologists assumed that Thutmose III was getting even with his evil step-mom by erasing her from the kingship list (almost successfully) and destroying her monuments. More recently, archaeologists have theorized that he was attempting to restore ma’at, or the proper order of things. A gender-bending pharaoh wasn’t normal and Thutmose III wasn’t taking any chances with the gods.
Hatshepsut appears in Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs, by Barbara Mertz (2007 edition). Ms. Mertz (1927 – 2013) also had a fascinating life. She graduated high school early and obtained a doctorate in Egyptology from the University of Chicago in 1952. But back then women were not hired as archaeologists.
She didn’t get mad; she switched professions and became an awarding-winning mystery writer. As Elizabeth Peters, she created an amateur Egyptologist, Amelia Peabody, who solved murder mysteries while managing one of the liveliest families in literature. The series is full of sly commentary on Egyptologists.
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