This lack of more intimate information perhaps explains in part why Cleopatra VII, a transient and far less successful but infinitely better documented queen of Egypt, has attracted the attention of biographers from the time of her death onwards while Hatchepsut has been virtually ignored by all but the most devoted of specialists. Similarly Queen Nefertiti, short-lived consort to an unconventional king, has, on the basis of one remarkable portrait-head, become immortal, her name synonymous with Egyptian beauty throughout the western world. Hatchepsut herself would almost certainly approve of our inability to pry into her private affairs. All Egyptian kings aspired to conform to the accepted stereotype, and she was no exception. She had no wish to be remembered merely for her sex, which she regarded as an irrelevance; she had demanded – and for a brief time won - the right to be ranked as an equal amongst the pharaohs.
Hatchepsut was a member of the close-knit Theban royal family, a family which had struggled to unite Egypt at the end of the Second Intermediate Period and whose reigns straddled the artificial division between the 17th and 18th Dynasties. To understand the motivation of this family – its fierce militarism, its promotion of the new state god Amen and its liberal treatment of royal women – it is necessary to delve further back, to the period when, for a century, Egypt had been a fragmented country partially ruled by foreigners. Hatchepsut needs to be studied within her own context, and I make no apology for the fact that Egyptian history takes up most of Chapters 1 and 2. Hatchepsut herself was deeply aware of – some might even say obsessed by – her country's recent past, and her reign is characterized by a burning desire to re-create the splendours of the 12th Dynasty, a golden age when Egypt had prospered under a succession of strong kings.
Hatchepsut was by no means the only king of Egypt to attempt to replicate the glories of the past. To the Egyptians, always a highly conservative people, stability and continuity were vitally important signs that all was well within their world. History, correctly interpreted to show Egypt and her rulers in the best possible light, provided an idealized blueprint for the present, so that any pharaoh who could be seen to be emulating the successes of his illustrious predecessors became by definition a good monarch. Although the early 18th Dynasty was a time of architectural, artistic, theological and technological advances, New Kingdom Egypt remained tied to Middle and Old Kingdom Egypt by an unparalleled continuity of language, religion and artistic/architectural convention, and by the idiosyncratic Egyptian view of the world, and the position of Egypt, her people and her gods within that world, which had remained basically unchanged for over a thousand years. The 18th Dynasty monarchs therefore felt the need not only to emulate the physical deeds of their predecessors but also to replicate – on as grand a scale as possible – their rituals, paintings, sculpture and architecture, all of which had become generally accepted as the true and, indeed, the only way of doing things. Throughout her reign Hatchepsut, more than any other New Kingdom pharaoh, stressed the validity of her rule by linking it with both selective aspects of the past – albeit a past reinvented to fit neatly with contemporary concerns – and with the state religion. Thus she was able to justify her unique position to the people, increasing their confidence in her unusual reign.
The Dynastic Period lasted from the beginning of the 1st Dynasty in approximately 3000 BC to the end of the 31st Dynasty in 332 BC. Throughout this period of well over two thousand years, it remained a fundamental principle of religious belief that there should always be a pharaoh, or king, on the throne of Egypt. The modern word pharaoh is a metonymy which has evolved from the Egyptian words per-a'a, literally ‘great house’, a term which was used by the Egyptians when referring to their monarch in much the same way that the modern British refer to ‘the Crown’ or ‘a statement from the Palace’, and contemporary Americans speak about ‘the White House’. (The words king and pharaoh are used interchangeably throughout this book to avoid stylistic monotony.) Usually there was only one male, native-born king of Egypt at any given time, although occasionally some chose to share their power with a co-regent, and on at least four separate occasions a woman rather than a man officially held the reins of power. During the three decentralized Intermediate Periods there were often two or more contemporary kings ruling over the various regions of the temporarily fragmented country; some of these kings were foreigners who were prepared to abandon their own cultural identity and adopt the traditional pharaoh's regalia in order to conform to the accepted stereotype of an Egyptian king. The king was a necessity. He may not always have been popular with his contemporaries, and indeed a few kings were even assassinated, but these unfortunate individuals were immediately replaced by a new king and there was never any move to establish any other form of government in Egypt.
In the west we have grown used to the idea of the figurehead monarch as nominal head of state; the present Queen of England, for example, remains the theoretical head of both secular and religious life in Britain, although her actual powers are fairly minimal and her existence is in no way vital to the functioning of her country. The abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic would have very little real effect on the day-to-day lives of the majority of the British people. In ancient Egypt, however, things were very different. The pharaoh was accepted without question as an absolute ruler who owned both the land and its people. He was entitled to demand that his subjects worked for him as and when he liked, and the people were bound to serve their master in whatever way he required. At any time the pharaoh could call upon his subjects to abandon their daily tasks and participate in labour-intensive royal projects such as the building of a public monument, for which ignominious and physically demanding work they were paid only subsistence rations. Only the educated upper classes, and those wealthy enough to pay substantial bribes, could hope to avoid this hated conscripted labour.
The pharaoh in turn held some responsibilities towards his subjects. As head of the civil service and the judiciary, it was his duty to ensure that the country functioned efficiently: that taxes were collected from the primary producers, surplus food was stored against possible famine, irrigation canals were excavated, building projects were completed and law and order were maintained throughout the land. The king ran the country with the help of a relatively small band of bureaucrats and advisers selected from the élite educated classes, many of whom were his close relations, and his word was law. As head of the armed forces the pharaoh was also responsible for ensuring that Egypt remained at all times safe from foreign invaders. It was the king who planned military campaigns and who protected Egypt's borders, and it was the king who personally led the Egyptian troops into battle.
However, the pharaoh was no mere administrator or politician – any competent bureaucrat could have performed that function. Indeed, the king of Egypt was no simple human; he had a dual personality. Although he was obviously a mortal, born to a mortal mother, who could suffer joys, misfortunes and sickness like any other Egyptian, when in his official persona the pharaoh was recognized to be the holder of a divine office, an ex-officio god on earth. This divinity was inherited along with his title on the death of his predecessor, when the old king became associated with the dead god of the Afterlife, Osiris, and the new king became linked with the living deities Re, the sun god, and Horus, the falcon-headed son of Osiris. His newly acquired divine status separated the king from his subjects and allowed him to speak directly to the Egyptian pantheon, forming a vital link between the humble people and the divine gods and goddesses who controlled their destiny. As the only Egyptian able to communicate effectively with the gods, the king became chief priest of all religious cults; it was the king who took responsibility for ensuring that the gods were served in the appropriate manner. In return the gods agreed to guarantee the prosperity of the land and its people. It was this divine aspect of his role which ensured that the pharaoh became indispensable to his people. Egypt simply could not flourish without a king on the throne.
The lack o
f a legitimate pharaoh was a clear sign that the gods were displeased, and that maat was absent from the land. Maat, a word which may be translated literally as ‘justice’ or ‘truth’, was the term used by the Egyptians to describe an abstract concept representing the ideal state of the universe and everyone in it; the status quo, or correct order, which had been established by the gods at the time of creation and which had to be maintained to placate the gods, but which was always under threat from malevolent outside influences seeking to bring chaos and disruption (or isfet) to Egypt. Modern historians have struggled to find the words which provide an adequate explanation of this concept of ‘rightness’ or ‘the proper way of doing things’; perhaps David O'Connor has come closest to reaching the original meaning of the term when he defines maat as:
The appropriate arrangement of the universe and human affairs – an effort to summarize the Egyptian world-view in coherent, mythic form. Centuries old by the time of the New Kingdom, the concept of maat was a crystallization of a myriad of religious and secular ideas, and its continuity depended upon their continuity; nevertheless, its very existence as a formalized statement of Egyptian beliefs helped to perpetuate the ideas and attitudes on which it was based.9
Uncontrolled chaos was dreaded more than anything else and a kingless period, which was by definition a maat-less period, was therefore something to be avoided at all costs. Times when maat was understood to be absent from Egypt, such as the kingless Intermediate Periods, were cited as awful comparatives designed to stress the virtues of more orthodox times; in the pessimistic and much exaggerated late Middle Kingdom text known as the Admonitions of Ipuwer, for example, we are told how ‘merriment has ceased and is made no more, and groaning is throughout the land… the land is left to its weakness like a cutting of flax’;10 a clear and deliberate contrast to the peaceful and orderly late 12th Dynasty when the text was composed. More awful offences against maat, such as attempted regicide, were simply omitted from the historical record. Such was the power of the written word that by excluding all mention of a specific deed from a text the deed itself could be understood not to have occurred.
The office of the divine king was itself an integral part of the concept of maat, with the king taking personal responsibility for the maintenance of maat throughout the land; it was the duty of the pharaoh to preserve maat for the somewhat temperamental gods of Egypt. Throughout the dynastic age, the concept of maat and the divine nature of the kingship naturally served to reinforce the position of the royal family. By ensuring that the powers and rights of the pharaoh could not be openly questioned without posing a threat to the security of the country (that is, without threatening the presence of maat) the ruling élite remained securely at the top of the social pyramid, while the lower classes continued to labour unquestioningly for the good of the state, and the educated middle classes remained both too dependent on the crown and too bound by the customs that they revered to challenge this traditional allocation of resources.
It is, therefore, not too surprising to find individual pharaohs exploiting the concept of maat to their own particular advantage, using it to reinforce their own right to rule and to justify any action which might otherwise have proved unacceptable or questionable to the highly conservative Egyptians. Hatchepsut, whose unusual succession may itself have been interpreted by some as an offence against maat, instigated a vigorous domestic policy designed to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that maat was firmly established throughout Egypt: her large-scale building programme, obvious devotion to the cult of Amen, successful trading missions and restoration of the monuments which had been destroyed by the Hyksos invaders during the maat-less Intermediate Period, were all actions calculated to demonstrate the presence of prosperity, law and order. Her people could see that the gods, happy with the new regime, were allowing Egypt to flourish, and the tradition of non-interference with the status quo helped to maintain Hatchepsut on her throne.
Archaeological evidence of necessity plays a large part in our reconstruction of ancient Egypt. The shortfalls of the Egyptian archaeological record are by now well known, but they are worth repeating at this point as they have a direct effect on our reconstruction of Egyptian society. Throughout their history, the dynastic Egyptians took the view that, while their temples and tombs should be built to last for ever, their homes, palaces and workplaces were merely temporary structures and should be designed as such. The temples and tombs were either constructed of stone or cut into rock, while less important buildings were built of mud-brick, which was cheap, readily available, easy to work and well suited to the dry Egyptian climate. Unfortunately, while the stone structures have survived relatively intact, the mud-brick villages, towns and cities have crumbled away, collapsing to form mounds of fertile soil that, until the Egyptian government introduced protective legislation, were exploited by local peasant farmers ignorant of their archaeological value. The whole situation has been made even worse by the damp conditions in the Nile floodplain and the Nile Delta, which have hastened the destruction of the mud-brick structures so that the few ancient domestic sites which have survived intact are the atypical purpose-built towns situated away from the damp of the cultivation. The surviving archaeological evidence is therefore strongly biased towards religion and death; we have, for example, two tombs, three sarcophagi and several temples built by Hatchepsut, but little trace of the palaces where she lived her life. Overall, we are left with the misleading impression that the Egyptians were a depressingly gloomy and morbid race.
The history of archaeological excavation in Egypt has also had a direct effect upon our understanding of that country's past. The tendency of early egyptologists to seek out and excavate the more prestigious burial sites, often acting as little more than glorified treasure hunters and grave robbers, has certainly added to the funerary and religious bias in our evidence. Over the past fifty years, with the introduction of more scientific methods of excavation and recording, modern egyptologists have grown to realize just how much valuable evidence was overlooked and even destroyed by their colleagues in the undignified rush to be first to reach the precious ‘treasure’. Even the new generation of scholarly excavators, working to the standards of their day, was capable of inadvertently distorting the archaeological record: when, in 1894, Edouard Naville criticized Auguste Mariette's habit of dumping spoil close to the Deir el-Bahri temple where ‘it sometimes resulted in his covering important sites with earth or sand, and thus led to his overlooking discoveries to which he himself would have attached high value’, 11 he was not to know that some thirty years later an American team led by Herbert E. Winlock would discover a vast number of broken statues of King Hatchepsut directly underneath Naville's own carefully planned spoil heap.
Many of the most productive archaeological expeditions at the turn of the century were funded by wealthy westerners, both individuals and institutions, who were rewarded for their generosity by a share in the finds. This has caused its own problems as valuable collections were routinely split up and dispersed throughout the museums of Egypt, Europe and America. The statuary of Hatchepsut, whose sites have generally been funded by Americans, can now be far better studied in the Metropolitan Museum of New York than in the museums of Luxor or Cairo. While this has almost certainly led to the preservation and display of objects which might otherwise have been condemned to languish in the storerooms of Egypt's over-full museums, it does pose logistical problems for the impoverished student of Hatchepsut-abilia. Hatchepsut herself suffered badly from the fact that the tomb of Tutankhamen, a relatively insignificant king whose burial chamber was stuffed with golden objects, was discovered in 1922, diverting attention away from equally valuable but less obviously exciting work which was just starting at the Deir el-Bahri mortuary temple. From 1922 onwards Tutankhamen entered the public imagination as the instantly recognized symbol of ancient Egypt, and any less spectacular discoveries were generally classified as worthy but dull.
The written evidence used in
the reconstruction of Egyptian history comes from two main sources: the formal monumental inscriptions carved or painted on the temple and tomb walls, and the more informal prayers, administrative records, stories and love poems preserved on papyrus and on broken pieces of pottery or limestone chips now known as ostraca (singular ostracon). Again, this evidence needs to be approached with an appropriate degree of caution; we should never lose sight of the fact that the written record is incomplete, randomly selected, and carries its own biases. The monumental inscriptions, for example, are basically a mixture of religious and propaganda texts which tell the story that the king him- or herself wished to convey, and which cannot be taken as the literal truth. The translators of these inscriptions are faced with problems not just of accuracy but of interpretation; even the most scrupulous of scholars is aware that he or she is likely to read a text through the lens of personal feelings. Nevertheless, and in spite of its obvious drawbacks, this type of evidence, taken in conjunction with the archaeological data and enlivened by the writings of contemporary and later visitors to Egypt, can provide modern historians with an invaluable glimpse into the life of ancient Egypt.
Those unfamiliar with Egyptian history are often puzzled by the use of dynasties and individual regnal years to date events. Rather than providing a specific calendar date, such as 1458 BC, egyptologists will refer to Hatchepsut's regnal Year 21, while her reign is itself counted as part of the early 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom of the dynastic age. This is done not to confuse but to ensure the greatest possible accuracy. We know, for example, that Hatchepsut ruled for twenty-two years, but her precise calendar dates are less certain, and various experts have suggested differing time-spans for her reign (for example, 1504–1482 BC 1490/88–1468 BC; 1479–1457 BC; 1473–1458 BC). The practice of referring to regnal years, followed throughout this book, avoids the complications engendered by this multiplicity of suggested but unproven calendar dates.
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