“Now my heart turns this way and that, as I think what the
people will say—those who shall see my monuments in years to come, and who
shall speak of what I have done.”
-
Inscription
on an obelisk in Karnak, raised by Pharaoh Hatshepsut
Great leader or wicked step-mother?
Like many female rulers, Hatshepsut – who ruled Egypt for twenty years (c.
1479-1458 BCE) and was one of only three women to have the title of Pharaoh – was
for centuries erased from the historical record. After being re-discovered in
the 19th century, she has been regarded as an aberration, conniving
and sexually promiscuous, a tyrant and a usurper – with her accomplishments
either downplayed or else awarded to male advisors. (Empress
Wu Zetian and Empress
Dowager Cixi are both prime examples of this same historical phenomenon.)
However, historians have recently been questioning if this is an accurate
portrait of the Lady King.
Hatshepsut was the granddaughter
of Queen
Ahmose Nefertari and the daughter of Thutmose I – a famously ruthless king
whom she idolized. Recall that Egyptian Pharaohs practiced the super-gross
custom of marrying their sisters. Ideally, a royal sibling couple would produce
both male and female children so that their son could become Pharaoh and marry
his sister, therefore keeping the royal lineage “pure.” (The 18th
Dynasty were known for their overbites.) However, as an insurance policy, the
Pharaoh had a harem of wives who were often not
his sisters, and sons by those “lesser” wives could, in a pinch, be his
heirs.
Hatshepsut had two full brothers,
both of whom died before their father Thutmose I. So, when Thutmose I died,
Hatshepsut married her half-brother, Thutmose II. From Hatshepsut’s
perspective, she had much more royal blood than her brother/husband, however,
she could have only ascended the throne if her father had had no sons. So, at
the age of 12, she married her half-brother and became Queen of Egypt. Thutmose
II and Hatshepsut had one child together: a daughter. Thutmose II had a son
with one of his “lesser” wives, and died when the boy, Thutmose III, was still
too young to rule on his own. Although Hatshepsut was not the boy’s mother
(most sources describe her as his step-mother, although, she’s also kind of his
aunt?), she did have the most royal blood of anyone in the court, and as the
primary wife, it was her job to be the young king’s regent. It was not unusual
for women to rule Egypt as regents, given that women tended to outlive their
husbands. However, Hatshepsut far overstepped the bounds of what regents were normally
expected to do, and ruled Egypt in her own right for twenty years, until her
death.
Although we will never know
Hatshepsut’s exact reasons for doing this, it is possible that her perceptions
of the Pharaonic bloodline played a role, as she may have perceived herself as
being a more legitimate heir than her step-son, who had only one royal
grandparent. Even if Hatshepsut did not believe that this gave her more right
to the throne, she certainly emphasized this fact to give herself legitimacy.
It is also possible that she
stepped in to protect Thutmose III’s hold on the throne and that by
establishing herself as king, she kept rival claimants at bay until Thutmose
III was old enough to handle them. Those who support this vision point out that
young Thutmose was not kept imprisoned or executed, but was schooled in the
arts of soldiering and kingship that ultimately allowed him to become the “Napoleon
of Ancient Egypt” after Hatshepsut’s death. His education suggests that
Hatshepsut fully expected and planned for him to ascend the throne. Proponents
of this view also point out Hatshepsut’s other shrewd and kingly behaviors.
Massive building projects (e.g. “YUGE”
border walls) have since time immemorial been ways for leaders to establish
their legitimacy. This is especially true in societies where political
legitimacy was derived from divine sources. Building a grand stupa, cathedral,
mosque, or carving giant statues of the Buddha into mountainsides demonstrated
divine approval. In the case of Ancient Egypt, the Pharaohs were sons of gods,
and often became deified after their deaths. It should come as no surprise,
then, that Hatshepsut put concerted effort into building temples in Deir el
Bahari and emphasizing her relationship with the gods. Such projects had not
only spiritual implications, but also temporal benefits: they provided jobs.
Hatshepsut’s reign is remembered as a time of great artistic flourishing in
Egypt. In fact, the “Thutmoside Style” that began to develop during her reign
was so influential on future Egyptian statuary that it remains the style we
non-Egyptologists now most strongly associate with Ancient Egypt.
It was also a period when the
empire was expanded not through war and conquest (although Hatshepsut did lead
a few military campaigns in Kush and Nubia, present day Sudan), but through
trade. Most famously, Hatshepsut is said to have sent a naval expedition down
the Red Sea to Punt (probably modern Eritrea), establishing a trade relationship
to furnish Egypt with the spices and incense needed for religious rituals.
There is also a great deal of
historical debate about the ways in which Hatshepsut chose to depict herself. In
the earlier parts of her reign, Hatshepsut was depicted as a woman with some
kingly attributes (such as male headdress, or traditionally male stance) and
always used feminine suffixes. Later, her statuary and reliefs started to
depict her entirely as a man without any feminine attributes. While some view
this as Hatshepsut being deceitful or as cross-dressing, Egyptologist Anne Macy
Roth argues,
Traditionally, a king was male,
identified as a manifestation of a male god, the falcon-headed Horus. Publicly,
therefore, Hatshepsut was most often depicted as a male king in the prime of
life. She rarely appears as a woman in either statuary or relief carving. …In
representing herself as male, Hatshepsut was not being deceitful; she was
simply conforming to the conventions of royal representation. Thutmose III was
represented the same way, despite the fact that he was a young child; and older
male kings surely also had physiques markedly different from the trim, youthful
bodies represented in their reliefs.
Put another way, Hatshepsut portraying herself
as a man in her statues was the 15th century BCE equivalent of
donning a pantsuit. Although she was mostly depicted as male, she did not
completely obliterate female aspects of her identity: interestingly, her male
depictions are most prominent in images, whereas
the female aspects are maintained in writing.
Much as a modern museum goer might mistakenly assume that a relief is about a
male king until they read the caption, so a person illiterate in ancient Egyptian
would have made the same assumption.
 |
| In this statue that is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Hatshepsut has a female body and a male headdress. Other statues show her with the Pharaonic beard. |
Hatshepsut probably died in her
40s from an abscess tooth and/or bone cancer, but it is impossible to know for
certain as her body has not yet been positively identified, although a pretty
good candidate for her remains has been found and analyzed.
After her death, Thutmose III (her
step-son/nephew) set about obliterating Hatshepsut’s record, which lead 19th
and early 20th century historians (mostly male) to conclude that she
was a wicked step-mother, and this was Thutmose III’s revenge. However, later
historians have noticed that Thutmose III only
removed references to Hatshepsut as king, but left alone documents
referring to her as queen, leading some historians to now believe that he wasn’t
trying to erase his step-mother, but rather enhance his own legitimacy. In her
kingly provenance, Hatshepsut liked to emphasize that she had far more royal
blood that Thutmose, something he probably wanted to downplay. Additionally, if
this iconoclasm had been a personal quest for revenge, Thutmose III probably
would have done it at the beginning of his reign, when he was a 20-year-old upstart.
But he waited until he had been on
the throne for 20 years, suggesting that something happened at the end of his
reign that made him feel it was necessary to re-invent Hatshepsut’s role. No
one knows for sure why Thutmose III felt the need to erase her two-decade
contribution to Egypt and make it appear that the throne has passed directly
from his father to him. In fact, so complete was his re-writing of the
historical record, that Hatshepsut was effectively forgotten until 19th
century archaeological investigations resurrected her, albeit, laced with the
biases of 19th century White men.
Hatshepsut’s story reveals a lot
of interesting things about the Ancient Egyptians – such as the very conscious way
in which they constructed their own history, leading some historians to argue
that Herodotus was
not the father of history, but rather, Ancient Egyptians were. She is also a
case study of female political power and how it is represented both in its own
time, as well as in the present. Was representing herself as male political
savvy? Or, should she have emphasized her femininity? Should we evaluate her
differently than any other Pharaoh because she was a woman? Personally, I think
that the experiences of female rulers in the ancient world, such as Hatshepsut,
are not only interesting to study for their own sake, and for what they reveal
about their historical milieu, but, they provide us with a fascinating mirror
in which to examine our own current political circumstances.
Sources:
UNESCO General History
of Africa: Vol. II Ancient Civilizations of Africa, Ed. G. Mokhtar.
Hatshepsut also gets a shout out in Jack Turner’s Spice: The History of a Temptation for
her role in the ancient spice trade.
Hatshepsut:
From Queen to Pharaoh edited by
Catharine H. Roehrig with Renée Dreyfus and Cathleen A. Keller, published by
the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2005
This is an AMAZING resource on
Hatshepsut and the New Kingdom. I must admit that I did not read the whole
thing, but this is a collection of academic articles on a variety of topics
relevant to Hatshepsut and her times. If you have any interest in Egyptology, I
highly recommend it. I also recommend exploring the Met’s Heilbrunn
Timeline of Art History – not just for this topic, but for any historical
topic you are interested in.
This list of Ancient Egyptian
Rulers is also a good resource from the Heilbrunn timeline.
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