Hatchepsut
Page 13
At the Deir el-Bahri temple, the story of Hatchepsut's conception starts in heaven where Amen has assembled before him a group of twelve important divinities, including Isis, Osiris, Nephthys, Horus, Seth and Hathor, in order to make a momentous pronouncement. Amen has decided that the time has come to father a princess who will govern Egypt with a glorious reign: ‘I will join for her the Two Lands… I will give her all lands and all countries.’ The god of wisdom, Thoth, here acting Hermes-like as the messenger of Amen, proclaims the name of the chosen mother-to-be: it is Queen Ahmose, wife of Tuthmosis I, for ‘she is more beautiful than any woman.’
We then move to Egypt. Queen Ahmose, sleeping alone in her boudoir, is visited by the god whom she believes to be her husband, and they sit face to face on her bed in a scene which represents one of the few occasions that a queen of Egypt is allowed to communicate directly with a deity. Amen tells Ahmose that she is to bear a daughter whom she will name Khnemet-Amen Hatchepsut (The One who is joined with Amen, the Foremost of Women). This daughter is destined to be the future ruler of Egypt. He then passes Ahmose the ankh, or sign of life and, in the tradition of the best romantic novels, we learn how:
She smiled at his majesty. He went to her immediately, his penis erect before her. He gave his heart to her… She was filled with joy at the sight of his beauty. His love passed into her limbs. The palace was flooded with the god's fragrance, and all his perfumes were from Punt.3
We return briefly to heaven to see the royal baby and her identical soul or Ka being fashioned on the potter's wheel by the ram-headed god Khnum. The creation of the royal Ka alongside the mortal body is of great importance; the royal Ka was understood to be the personification of the office of kingship and therefore its presence was incontrovertible proof of Hatchepsut's predestined right to rule. At the climax of her coronation ceremony she would become united with the Ka which had been shared by all the kings of Egypt, and would lose her human identity to become one of a long line of divine office holders. Hatchepsut consistently placed considerable emphasis on the existence of her royal Ka, even including it in her throne name Maat-ka-re.
Fig. 4.2 The pregnant Queen Ahmose is led to the birthing bower
Meanwhile, as Amen watches anxiously, Khnum promises that the newly formed baby will be all that any father could desire:
I will shape for thee thy daughter [I will endow her with life, health, strength and all gifts]. I will make her appearance above the gods, because of her dignity as King of Upper and Lower Egypt.4
Khnum's work is finished and the frog-headed midwife Heket offers life to the two inert forms. At the same time, back in Egypt, Thoth appears before Queen Ahmose and tells her of the glories which await her unborn child.
Nine months later, the pregnant queen, wearing a vulture headdress and with a rather small ‘bump’ obvious beneath her straight shift dress, is led to the birth bower by Khnum and Heket. Here other deities wait to assist at the birth which, strictly a female-dominated rite of passage, is left to the imagination of the observer. When we next see Ahmose, she is sitting on a throne and holding the newborn Hatchepsut in her arms. Other deities surround the mother and child, while the goddess of childbirth Meskhenet sits in front of the throne. Meskhenet is to be the chief nurse and she seeks to reassure the royal infant: ‘I am protecting thee behind thee like Re.’ Finally Hathor, the royal wet-nurse, takes the newborn baby, and presents her to her father. Amen is overwhelmed with love for the infant. He takes her from Hathor, kisses her and speaks:
Fig. 4.3 The infant Hatchepsut in the arms of a divine nurse
Come to me in peace, daughter of my loins, beloved Maatkare, thou art the king who takes possession of the diadem on the Throne of Horus of the Living, eternally.5
Hatchepsut is presented before the assembled gods, who also greet her with great joy. There is only one unusual note: the naked infant Hatchepsut is quite clearly shown as a boy. The message behind the scenes is quite clear. Hatchepsut has been shown to be the child of Amen, and therefore a legitimate pharaoh from the moment of her conception. As Amen is clearly unconcerned about the sex of his child, and indeed as he made clear his specific intention of fathering a girl-child, why should Egypt worry?
The story now slowly starts to slide away from the heavenly towards the real world. Hatchepsut travels north to visit the ancient shrines of the principal gods of Egypt accompanied by her earthly father, Tuthmosis I. This is followed by a coronation before the gods and then by a subsequent earthly coronation by Tuthmosis I who presents his daughter to the court and formally nominates her as his co-regent and intended successor:
Said to her by His Majesty: ‘Come, thou blessed one. I will take thee in my arms that thou mayest see thy directions [carried out] in the palace; thy precious images were made, thou hast received the investiture of the double crown, thou art blessed… When thou risest in the palace, thy brow is adorned with the double crown united on thy head, for thou art my heir, to whom I have given birth… This is my daughter Khnemet-Amen Hatchepsut, living, I put her in my place.6
The news is received with universal joy, and the people start to celebrate with gusto. The priests confer to decide on Hatchepsut's royal titulary, and finally her coronation takes place on an unspecified New Year's day; a practical choice of dates which would allow her regnal years and the civil calendar to coincide. Unfortunately, this part of the story is, as far as we can tell, a complete fiction. While it is entirely possible that some public ceremony did occur during Hatchepsut's childhood – perhaps a coming-of-age celebration which involved Hatchepsut being officially presented before the court? – there is absolutely no evidence to show that Tuthmosis I ever regarded Hatchepsut as his formal successor, or that he had the intention of passing over both his son and his grandson in order to honour his daughter. The unchallenged succession of Tuthmosis II, and her own conventional behaviour as queen–consort, confirms that, at the time of her father's death, Hatchepsut did not expect to become king of Egypt.7
A slightly different contemporary tale is potentially far more useful in our search for Hatchepsut's coronation date. This text, inscribed on what was once the outside wall of Hatchepsut's Chapelle Rouge at Karnak, hints that the political situation may have already undergone a profound change by the end of Year 2 of the joint reign while stopping short of providing any absolute proof of this.8 The Red Chapel, now known more commonly by its French name of Chapelle Rouge, was a large sanctuary of red quartzite endowed by Hatchepsut to house the all-important barque of Amen. Amen's barque, or barge, known as Userhat-Amen (Mighty of Prow is Amen), was a small-scale gilded wooden boat bearing the enclosed shrine which was used to protect the statue of the god from public gaze. When Amen, on the holy days which were also public holidays, left the privacy of his sanctuary to process through the streets of Thebes, he sailed in style concealed within the cabin of his boat-shrine which was carried, supported by wooden poles, on the shoulders of his priests. When Amen was not travelling the barque rested in its own sanctuary or shrine. The sacred barque had always played a minor role in Egyptian religious ritual, but during the early New Kingdom it had become an increasingly important part of theology, and most temples now gave great prominence to the barque sanctuary. Unfortunately, Hatchepsut's shrine was dismantled during the reign of Tuthmosis III and subsequently used as filling for other building projects. Although many of the blocks were rediscovered in the 1950s, the chapel has never been re-assembled, and over three hundred blocks from the Chapelle Rouge are now displayed in the form of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle in the Open-Air Museum at Karnak.
Fig. 4.4 Hatchepsut and Amen on a block from the Chapelle Rouge
Carved on block 287 of the Chapelle Rouge is part of an important text, narrated by Hatchepsut herself, in which she describes a religious procession associated with the festival of Amen, held at the nearby Luxor temple during Year 2 of an unspecified king's reign. The Luxor temple, approximately two miles to the south of the Karnak temple and connected to it b
y a processional route which Hatchepsut herself embellished with a series of barque-shrines, was dedicated to both Amen in the form of the ithyphallic god Min, and to the celebration of the divine royal soul, or Ka.9 It played an important role in the cult of the deified king and was the place where, during the celebration of the annual Opet festival, the king re-affirmed his unity with the royal Ka which gave him the right to rule. The Luxor temple was therefore an eminently suitable place for the god to make a pronouncement concerning a future ruler and it was here, during the later 18th Dynasty, that Amen was to recognize General Horemheb as a King of Egypt. During the ceremony described by Hatchepsut, and in the presence of the anonymous king, the oracle makes the momentous announcement that Hatchepsut herself is to become pharaoh:
… very great oracle in the presence of this good god, proclaiming for me the kingship of the two lands, Upper and Lower Egypt being under the fear of me… Year 2,2 peret 29 [that is, Year 2, the 2nd month of Spring, day 29], the third day of the festival of Amen… being the ordination of the Two Lands for me in the broad hall of the Southern Opet [Luxor], while His Majesty [Amen] delivered an oracle in the presence of this good god. My father appeared in his beautiful festival: Amen, chief of the gods.10
The oracle had been developed during the New Kingdom as a channel of communication between the gods and the common people, and had proved particularly popular as a means of solving the day-to-day petty crimes that baffled the police who were forced to operate without the benefit of divine omniscience. Consulting the oracle provided a quick, cheap and easily accessible alternative to the formal courts. As the statue of the god processed through the streets on his ceremonial boat, it was possible for anyone to step forward and challenge him with a simple yes/no-type question, such as ‘Did Isis steal my washing?’ or ‘Did Hathor kill my duck?’ The god would consider the evidence and then answer by causing his barque-bearers to move either forwards or backwards – a legal system which to modern eyes at least seems to have been open to a great deal of abuse, but one which nevertheless satisfied the ancient Egyptian desire for immediate and public justice. More involved variations on this theme existed; it was, for example, possible to write different options on separate ostraca, lay them before the god, and see whether the god gravitated towards a particular solution, while in more complicated cases a list of suspects could be read out and the god would cause his attendants to move at the mention of the name of the guilty party.
However, those oracles who took the trouble to communicate with the ordinary people were invariably the lesser local gods; the deified Ahmose and Amenhotep I both served as oracles and the judgements of Amenhotep I were particularly well-regarded at Deir el-Medina. The oracles who spoke to kings were the major state gods. Amen, king of the gods, was particularly keen on conveying his wishes via an oracle which could only be translated by the high priest or king, and we should perhaps not be too surprised to find that Amen's commands often coincided exactly with the interests of his interpreter.11
Argument has raged amongst egyptologists as to who the unnamed king of Chapelle Rouge block 287 might be. Some feel that he must be Tuthmosis I and that the text therefore represents Hatchepsut's recollection – presumably fictitious – of a time during her father's reign when the god acknowledged her as the true heir to the crown. If this is the case, the block can be of little help in determining the date when Hatchepsut actually proclaimed herself king and the entire scene must be classified as a further example of Hatchepsut's compulsion to justify her own reign. However, it is always possible that the mystery monarch is Tuthmosis III and that the block is therefore a record of the actual date when Hatchepsut decided to make public her right to the throne. Indeed, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Hatchepsut, a resourceful lady, organized a highly public pronouncement by the oracle at exactly the moment she was proposing to make her plans known.
Unfortunately, block 287 merely describes an oracle, it does not go on to record a coronation. However, details of Hatchepsut's coronation at Karnak are actually included in a third-person narrative carved on several blocks which, from the direction of their hieroglyphs, must have originally formed part of the opposite outside wall of the Chapelle Rouge. The coronation must, therefore, have occurred much later in the text, and presumably much later in time, than the events described on block 287. The coronation inscription is unfortunately undated but, as it is highly unlikely that Hatchepsut would have allowed the date of such a momentous occasion to go unrecorded, there is always the possibility that one of the missing blocks from the Chapelle Rouge will one day reappear to solve the mystery.
If we do not have a specific date for Hatchepsut's coronation, we do at least have a date for her jubilee, or sed-festival, which is recorded on the walls of both the Karnak and Deir el-Bahri temples. The celebration of the heb-sed, a tradition stretching back over a thousand years to the dawn of the dynastic age and perhaps even beyond, was a public ritual of rebirth and renewal intended to revivify the ageing king and increase public confidence in his reign. 12It marked the start of a new cycle in the monarch's life and was, of course, the excuse for a nationwide celebration; the ancient Egyptians were never ones to deny themselves a good party. Tradition dictated that the jubilee would be proclaimed from Memphis on the first day of spring – the season of rejuvenation – and that there would follow five days of festival culminating in a grand procession of the state and local gods. The more solemn rituals of the heb-sed included a reenactment of the dual coronation, where the monarch was reanointed first with the white crown of the King of the South and then with the red crown of the North, and a ceremonial run where the king, carrying traditional emblems, was required to race four times around a specially prepared arena or pavilion in order to prove his (or in this case her) physical fitness to rule.
In theory, a king was entitled to celebrate his first jubilee thirty years after his coronation and thereafter as frequently as he desired. Hatchepsut, atypical as always, announced her jubilee during regnal Year 15. This was by no means the first royal tradition to be broken by Hatchepsut, and indeed Hatchepsut was not the first king to bend the heb-sed rules; it is possible that her father had erected his obelisks to mark his own jubilee although he is unlikely to have ruled for more than fifteen years, while five kings later Amenhotep IV, before he became Akhenaten, celebrated a jubilee after a mere four years on the throne. There is no doubt that a national celebration relatively early in her reign would have been a sound political move, boosting national morale and providing a good omen for the future prosperity of the regime, and perhaps Hatchepsut felt that, after fifteen years as ruler of Egypt, she was in need of renewal. However, it remains possible that Year 15 was chosen as a special year because it marked an important thirtieth anniversary. If Hatchepsut had only been fifteen years old at the death of Tuthmosis II, this may well have been her own thirtieth year or, given that she frequently portrayed herself as the immediate successor to Tuthmosis I, it may well have been thirty years since the death of her father. It may even have been, given that Hatchepsut also described herself as her father's co-regent, thirty years since the accession of Tuthmosis I.
Hatchepsut's jubilee must, of course, in theory have also been Tuthmosis’ jubilee, and indeed the young king does appear to enjoy his own rather muted celebrations at this time. On the walls of the Deir el-Bahri temple we see both kings making parallel offerings of milk and water; Hatchepsut offers to the south, Tuthmosis to the north. The northern colonnade of the middle terrace shows Amen embracing Tuthmosis who wears the double crown and carries the ankh or life sign, and a mace, while in the northwest offering hall Tuthmosis presents a table of offerings to Amen who blesses him accordingly:
I give to you the celebrating of millions of sed-festivals on the throne of Horus and that you direct all the living like Re, forever.13
However, the occasion appears to have belonged almost entirely to Hatchepsut and she takes pride of place in every scene. Tuthmosis III later
celebrated his own independent jubilees on a far grander scale during Years 30 (the correct year for such a celebration), 34 and 37.
We shall probably never know what event precipitated Hatchepsut into proclaiming herself king. It is, of course, possible that she had always intended to seize power, and that following the death of Tuthmosis II she had merely been biding her time, waiting for the politically opportune moment to strike. Hayes is perhaps the most persuasive proponent of this theory:
… at the time of his [Tuthmosis II] death, her every waking thought must have been taken up with the stabilization of the government and the consolidation of her own position…14
It is, indeed, clear that the longer the move was postponed the more difficult it would have become to accomplish; for Tuthmosis III was all the while growing older, forming his own party and consolidating his own position.15
However biased his interpretation of Hatchepsut's character, Hayes must be correct in his assumption that such an unconventional move would need to be made sooner rather than later. Not only was Tuthmosis growing up and attracting his own supporters, there was also the possibility that he might die in infancy, lessening Hatchepsut's own claim to the throne by precipitating a dynastic crisis in which the position of the dowager queen might have been compromised by the introduction of a rival male claimant. Why then did Hatchepsut wait for between two and seven years before implementing her plan? Was she too young and inexperienced to act sooner? Or was she simply using the time to gather the support that she would need for her unorthodox actions?