Hatshepsut

 Hatshepsut was a female Pharoah of Egypt (c. 1473–58 BCE) who attained unprecedented power for a woman, adopting the full titles and regalia of a pharaoh. She was only the third woman to become pharaoh in 3,000 years of ancient Egyptian history, and the first to attain the full power of the position (only achieved by Cleopatra 14 centuries later).  

At the age of 12, Hatshepsut married her half brother, Thutmose II, who inherited the throne from their father, Thutmose I, and made Hatshepsut chief his consort. The couple had one daughter, Neferure. Thutmose II died young, around 1479 B.C., and the throne went to his infant son, born to a secondary wife. According to custom, Hatshepsut began acting as Thutmose III’s regent, handling affairs of state until her stepson came of age, and eventually the two became co-rulers of Egypt. Interestingly, we can see from the surviving art that Hatshepsut was the dominant king in this partnership. In representations, she wears regalia traditionally only shown on male rulers – a marked difference from the feminine attire she wears during pictures of her husband’s reign. She is even depicted with a beard and large muscles to bolster her masculine energy. Egyptiolists stress that this is not an attempt to pass herself off as a biological man, but rather to show that she had the necessary qualities of a traditional king.  

Though past Egyptologists held that it was merely the queen’s ambition that drove her, more recent scholars have suggested that the move might have been due to a political crisis, such as a threat from another branch of the royal family, and that this was the best way to ensure a clean succession. Knowing that her power grab was highly controversial, Hatshepsut fought to defend its legitimacy, pointing to her royal lineage and claiming that her father had appointed her his successor. In other images, however, she appeared in traditional female regalia. Hatshepsut surrounded herself with supporters in key positions in government, including Senenmut, her chief minister. Some have suggested Senenmut might also have been Hatshepsut’s lover, but little evidence exists to support this claim. 

Traditionally, Egyptian kings defended their land against the enemies who lurked at Egypt’s borders. But scenes on the walls of her Dayr al-Baḥrī temple, in western Thebes, suggest that she began with a short, successful military campaign in Nubia.  However, Hatshepsut’s reign was essentially a peaceful one, and her foreign policy was based on trade rather than war. She was personally involved in a trading expedition that brought back vast riches–including ivory, ebony, gold, leopard skins and incense–to Egypt from a distant land known as Punt (possibly modern-day Eritrea). 

 

Restoration and building were important royal duties. Hatshepsut claimed, falsely, to have restored the damage wrought by the Hyksos (Asian) kings during their rule in Egypt. She undertook an extensive building program. In Thebes this focused on the temples of her divine father, the national god Amon-Re (see Amon). At the Karnak temple complex, she remodeled her earthly father’s hypostyle hall, added a barque shrine (the Red Chapel), and introduced two pairs of obelisks. At Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt, she built a rock-cut temple known in Greek as Speos Artemidos. Her supreme achievement was her Dayr al-Baḥrī temple; designed as a funerary monument for herself, it was dedicated to Amon-Re and included a series of chapels dedicated to Osiris, Re, Hathor, Anubis, and the royal ancestors. Hatshepsut was to be interred in the Valley of the Kings, where she extended her father’s tomb so that the two could lie together. 

 

Toward the end of her reign, Hatshepsut allowed Thutmose to play an increasingly prominent role in state affairs. She probably died around 1458 BC, when she was in her forties (an impressive age for those days). Her cause of death is not known, as her mummy was missing from its sarcophagus when Howard Carter (of Tutankhamun fame) excavated her tomb in the 1920s. There are several theories about her death, including that she either suffered from cancer or was murdered, possibly by her stepson. However, no proof has been found for either theory so her death remains a mystery.  Carter also unearthed a separate tomb, known as KV60, which contained two coffins: that of Hatshepsut’s wet nurse–identified as such by an inscription on its cover–and that of an unknown female. In 2006, a team led by Dr. Zahi Hawass set out to determine whether the anonymous woman in KV60 could be the missing queen herself. The vital piece of evidence was a molar tooth found in a wooden box bearing Hatshepsut’s name. When Hawass and his colleagues compared the tooth to a gap in the mummy’s upper jaw, it was a perfect fit, leading the researchers to conclude that the search for Hatshepsut was finally over. 

 

After her death, Thutmose III went on to rule for 30 more years, proving to be both an ambitious builder like his stepmother and a great warrior. Late in his reign, Thutmose III had almost all of the evidence of Hatshepsut’s rule–including the images of her as king on the temples and monuments she had built–eradicated, possibly to erase her example as a powerful female ruler, or to close the gap in the dynasty’s line of male succession (adding fuel to the idea that he was the one who killed her in the first place). As a consequence, scholars of ancient Egypt knew little of Hatshepsut’s existence until 1822, when they were able to decode and read the hieroglyphics on the walls of Deir el-Bahri.  It gives me great joy to know that the patriarchy failed in erasing her from history, and that she is now one of the most famous Pharaohs of Egyptian history, with people saying her name 3000 years later.