by Kara Cooney
During this vulnerable and liminal time, Hatshepsut was the only one who could build the pillars of Thutmose III’s new kingship, and she began a campaign of temple renewal throughout Egypt and Nubia. One scene, commissioned by her at Semna temple in Nubia, shows her with Thutmose III carved as a man, not a boy. Hatshepsut chose to show herself wearing a long gown and to name herself God’s Wife of Amen and King’s Wife. Texts tell us that Thutmose III and Hatshepsut rescued this temple from ruin. Even though Thutmose III was the king in body, it was Hatshepsut who enacted a systematic program of monumental building to ensure that her rule was depicted alongside his throughout the land and that her image as a woman of authority was carved in Egypt’s sacred temples.14 Her mother, Ahmes, had done the same for herself and Hatshepsut during the reign of Thutmose II. But now Hatshepsut went even further, claiming more space for herself in the temples she built for her young charge. Such depictions of a God’s Wife were unprecedented, just like her powerful regency.
As she strengthened Thutmose III’s kingship with new buildings, she also erected sacred monuments in the name of her dead husband, perhaps reminding her people why she, and not another, served as regent. In the temple of Khnum, the god who the Egyptians believed created the world on his potter’s wheel, located on Elephantine Island in Egypt’s south, just above Nubia, Hatshepsut set up a statue of Thutmose II, with the inscription “for her brother,” thus making the pious addition as much about her as about the dead monarch.15 She also began a series of stone monuments at Karnak, now only preserved as blocks, on which the dead Thutmose II filled a prominent role. Hatshepsut seems to have been playing up her connection to Thutmose II in these monuments, perhaps with the realization that her connection to his son Thutmose III—as his aunt—was only tenuous and by no means direct. It is as if she was manipulating the monuments to rewrite history: perhaps she thought that if she focused on her relationship with the father, everyone might begin to see the son as hers, too.
Indeed, her own individual legitimacy—as regent, as priestess, as queen—was now at stake as she faced a political-religious issue of palace-temple protocol. The position of God’s Wife of Amen was powerful, to be sure, but the holder of this office was meant to be closely and directly related to the current king, preferably as King’s Daughter or King’s Sister or King’s Wife. Hatshepsut had been all of those, but only in relation to Thutmose I or II. Now, her connection as God’s Wife—as the current king’s aunt and stepmother—was questionable. The lineage of the priestess office needed to follow the living king; it could not move down a peripheral female line. Indeed, Hatshepsut probably hoped to finish training and appoint her daughter to the post as soon as possible. Nefrure was Thutmose III’s half sister and without a doubt destined to be King’s Wife at some point, if she lived to see that day. But like Thutmose III, Nefrure was only a small child. Hatshepsut played a waiting game, filling the role of Egypt’s two most important positions simultaneously—effective king (as regent) and God’s Wife—while both young officeholders grew up. Some decorated blocks from Karnak suggest Nefrure’s transition to the office happened quite early, perhaps around her fifth or sixth year. The reliefs show Nefrure identified as God’s Wife and also pictured as a grown woman, even though she must have been just a little girl, standing behind her mother dressed as a queen.16
Hatshepsut’s life thus far was full of rich and varied experiences, as necessity led her from one vital role to another. During the first five years of Thutmose III’s rule, as Hatshepsut edged closer to her twenties, she was a priestess and a politician, a mother and a widow, a dowager queen and de facto ruler of Egypt, all the while constantly scrambling to find a formally defined place in the world. She engaged in temple rituals, the training of her daughter, meetings with high priests from temples throughout Egypt, discussions with her officials—viziers, treasurers, stewards, and overseers of public works and temple construction—and gatherings with her military wing.
Her husband had been her half brother, probably her junior, and sickly to boot. Regardless of whether theirs had been a passionate love affair or if she felt him her true overlord, he was dead now. One might assume that this fact was liberating for her. Never again would there be a man to whom she was supposed to report or to whom she was meant to be subservient. There was nothing left for Hatshepsut now but to rule at the highest level. Every piece of evidence about her future actions suggests that she knew this.
But she was still a young woman, with desires and normal human tendencies, in a land where sexuality was not controlled by the same religious strictures as in much of the modern world, where royal births still needed to be managed and authenticated, but where one highborn widow’s sexuality was probably not monitored or judged in the way we might expect. Sexuality was an integral part of the human experience in ancient Egypt, and Hatshepsut had no master. We should not assume her to have been chaste and nunlike. With her husband dead, she could not be accused of infidelity. She likely had no issues about faithfulness to her divine husband Amen-Re, either, because we know the God’s Wives of Amen were allowed to marry at this time.17
Indeed, it is quite likely that Hatshepsut had lovers, affairs, trysts, whatever we want to call them. All the academic speculation about Senenmut being Hatshepsut’s lover seems rather silly, as if this man were her only opportunity for an affair. Given her position of power and her lack of a husband, she could have had relationships with any number of officials, young or old, male or female. Why would we expect Hatshepsut to have embraced celibacy when she was the person to whom all looked for favor? When she took lovers, did her courtiers look the other way, or were her attachments openly acknowledged and welcomed at court meals and parties? Did she love any of her men (or women)? Did she ever have a real partner with whom she could share anxieties or talk through strategies? None are depicted in any of her formal art because there was no ideological need to record such personal details in a sovereign’s life. No lovers or romantic partners are mentioned anywhere in the informal documents, either, not that we should expect them. Economic records, graffiti, and letters are devoid of any mention of Hatshepsut’s (or any other ruler’s) conquests.18
Even so, Egyptologists have often speculated whether Senenmut might have been Hatshepsut’s lover, perhaps her principal one. For example, some have even suggested that a sexual graffito found in the tombs above Deir el-Bahri showing a woman being taken from behind actually represents a political satire of Hatshepsut and her submission to her lover Senenmut, even though the subservient figure in this scene is not labeled as Hatshepsut and wears no uraeus or other mark of kingship or rule.19 There is no reason to identify these graffiti as Hatshepsut’s. On the other hand, the fact that Senenmut’s burial chamber would later lie within the precincts of Hatshepsut’s funerary temple, and that the two owned sarcophagi seemingly designed and made as a pair means that such speculations do not easily die.
Supposing that Hatshepsut did engage in sexual activity during Thutmose III’s reign, she still had to be careful. She was a young woman, and a pregnancy might cause problems politically.20 Her husband’s legacy as king was over, and any child she gave birth to at this point would have to remain unacknowledged. She had already been given the opportunity to bear the next heir, and after that failure, the next king had to be fathered by Thutmose III. We know that the Egyptians were capable of dealing with both the prevention and termination of pregnancy.21 If necessary, Hatshepsut had these options available to her.
She knew that she could never be seen to bear or formally acknowledge another child, but how she confronted this fact emotionally eludes us. Perhaps Hatshepsut experienced profound grief at the loss of future children. Or possibly her work consumed her so that another child was the farthest thing from her mind. It could have been around this time that Hatshepsut lost a daughter,22 a blow that would have stung this young mother. In the ancient world, the sad but common loss of one child was often ameliorated by the birth of another, but this was not t
o be for Hatshepsut. She may not even have allowed herself the space to grieve for the little girl, because her duties demanded a compartmentalized existence that left no room for such weaknesses.
Grief was a part of Hatshepsut’s life, but her precarious position as regent demanded some creative thinking to secure a place for herself during Thutmose III’s reign, and perhaps even beyond his tenure if he succumbed to an early death. There is some indication that Hatshepsut was busy building a political foundation for herself as an unattached woman standing behind the throne of Egypt’s king. A series of monuments from Karnak23 show her in the company of the new king Thutmose III, depicted not as a child but as the idealized and fully functional man he would soon become; Hatshepsut seems to be saying that this is the glorious future that will come to pass if she is allowed to continue her support. Elsewhere on this monument she is depicted accompanying the king (shown fully grown) in the presence of the gods, signifying to the Egyptian elite both that she had brought about Thutmose III’s rule and that their positions of wealth and power would be in jeopardy if she were not around. Whether she held a formally defined position or not, Hatshepsut knew how to cloak herself in the legitimacy and necessity of temple ideology.
Hatshepsut was playing a cool and, some might even say, calculated game. She established an unbreakable connection to every sphere of power in Egypt, including palaces, temples, and army. She already had Thutmose III and his mother under her control; they were dependent on her for their own positions until the boy king came of age. Her trusted official Senenmut continued to run her palace finances as steward, and she was now using him for tasks beyond the sphere of her household. As for the army, there is some evidence that continued campaigns in Nubia, under her command, enriched everyone with the movable wealth of gold and minerals.24 Her rewards to the Amen temple during the reign of her husband were significant, so much so that there is little doubt that the Amen priesthood fully supported her continued rule as regent. It is likely that other temple hierarchies, such as those in Memphis or Heliopolis, were keyed to Theban religious politics, and the evidence suggests that Hatshepsut also compensated religious institutions outside of Thebes. The documentation of her building activity in temples throughout Egypt during her regency indicates a level of construction, job creation, and income for priests and temple bureaucrats that had never been seen before in Egypt. Hatshepsut’s regency for Thutmose III was probably quite popular among most Egyptians, especially if they were generals, priests, or treasurers—not bad people to have on your side.
And throughout all of this, Hatshepsut continued solidifying and expanding her influence. She never seems to have assumed more authority than she could handle or more than the Egyptians could give. But when there was an opening, Hatshepsut seized the opportunity. She made political moves incrementally, constructing her base of support slowly, as well as broadly, using many different arenas of power to engender backing and many different individuals to help her get it. In other words, Hatshepsut never favored the palace to the detriment of the army or played one side against another. And she never attempted a glorious, momentous coup, which in one bold stroke would have pushed Thutmose III from power. Hatshepsut was practical and elegant, not devious and cunning. She was intelligently ambitious.
To rule Egypt effectively, Hatshepsut needed to delegate authority to officials whom she could trust. Senenmut, her lead administrator and steward, was soon placed in charge of Nefrure’s household finances as well. But even more important than Senenmut at this early point in her regency was an official with the unwieldy name of Ahmose Pennekhbet. He was part of an old and venerable family from the southern Egyptian city of el-Kab who had served the royal family for generations. Hatshepsut designated him chief treasurer.25 Ahmose Pennekhbet controlled the finances for all of Egypt, monitoring taxes and other income, as well as all expenditures. He opened the House of Gold (in the company of the vizier) every day. He was responsible for all the state’s wealth inside its treasuries, including commodities such as grain and other food stores, stone, metal, and linens. As the man who essentially bankrolled her regency, he was one of the early financial sources of Hatshepsut’s power.
Men with economic authority allowed her to sustain power after the death of her husband and into the reign of Thutmose III; indeed, the continued existence of the Thutmoside line was in their best interest. Hatshepsut knew that Ahmose Pennekhbet was essential and also named him as a tutor to her eldest daughter, Nefrure. As with Senenmut, being a tutor implied a close familial relationship with one’s charge; Hatshepsut seems to have wanted to keep Egypt’s money in the family, so to speak.
Senenmut did not lag far behind Ahmose Pennekhbet in his own career advancement, and his ambitions began to carry him beyond the confines of the royal palace. Hatshepsut asked him to oversee the carving and transport of obelisks for Karnak Temple from the southern granite quarries at Aswan, a hundred miles south of Thebes; he recorded his efforts on a monumental relief during the job. Because much of Karnak was archaic and constructed of mud brick, Hatshepsut, like her father before her, had a desire to renew it in stone. She envisioned a pair of granite obelisks shooting up to the sky, able to catch the rays of the sun and gilded along their length.26 She yearned to show the world wonders not seen for hundreds of years and entrusted this duty to Senenmut. He acknowledged her supremacy in turn: one of the statues he produced during her regency names only Hatshepsut as his master, noticeably and aberrantly omitting the actual ruling king, Thutmose III. As steward to the queen and her daughter during the reign of Thutmose II, Senenmut had been an essential part of Hatshepsut’s palace administration in direct service to the royal family. But Hatshepsut seems to have decided during her regency to entrust him with even more responsibility, concluding that she could rely on him during this time of great political uncertainty for Egypt and for herself.
Soon after she appointed Ahmose Pennekhbet treasurer, she named Senenmut to the same post. Somehow the two men were meant to act as equal partners in the position, but the mechanics of how this worked are lost to us. And this was becoming a pattern, since she named both Ahmose Pennekhbet and Senenmut as tutor to Nefrure. It is almost as if Hatshepsut wanted Senenmut to watch over Ahmose Pennekhbet or vice versa. Regardless, she seems to have depended on this pair of officials to keep the two most sacred sources of her power safe at this early stage in her regency: her money, with which she could keep all her officials happy, and her daughter, who acted as God’s Wife and who would soon be queen, finally cementing an incontrovertible connection to the new king.
The nature of each man’s personal dealings with Hatshepsut remains a mystery, and we know even less about their relationship to each other. Did she appoint the two men to the same office so that neither could become overly powerful from access to all of Egypt’s wealth? Had experience with competition taught the Egyptian elite to create a system of government that avoided such a concentration of power in one man? The country already had a tradition of two viziers, one for the north and one for the south. Perhaps Hatshepsut was simply continuing this approach of checks and balances among her officials.
These two men could not have had more different backgrounds. Unlike Senenmut, Ahmose Pennekhbet came from a patrician family who lived in el-Kab, a town close to Thebes, and he had served the early Eighteenth Dynasty kings in their campaigns against the fleeing Hyksos in Syria-Palestine, getting rich in the process on the spoils of war. He seems to have established his career in the military and later became ensconced in the upper echelons of palace administration and finance. The family tombs at el-Kab suggest that Ahmose Pennekhbet’s wife was a wet nurse to Thutmose III, probably a move made by Hatshepsut to keep this important official close—the family’s residence would have been in a palace apartment to accommodate his wife’s duties.
Senenmut, in contrast, was one of Hatshepsut’s “new men”; he came from more humble beginnings. And unlike his patrician colleague, he left absolutely no evidence of a wife o
r children. Not one of his dozens of statues, reliefs, and temple depictions records the existence of a family of his own. Without a doubt, if anything should make us wonder about the nature of his relationship with Hatshepsut, it is his lack of a wife. All Egyptian elites married. If a wife died in childbirth or from disease, an official usually married again. To not have any mention of a female partner anywhere in his extensive historical record is more than strange—it is aberrant. And so we wonder if he blatantly ignored his family to please Hatshepsut, because they were in fact lovers, or if there was something else going on. Senenmut’s historical record is much more extensive than that of any other official at the time, but it seems that some of Hatshepsut’s other officials also made no mention of their families on their tombs or statues.27 Perhaps such absences were demanded by a jealous mistress, and if so then there is a lot more about Hatshepsut’s character that we do not know.
Of course, homosexuality might seem another possible explanation for Senenmut’s lack of a wife. The ranks of Egyptian elites undoubtedly included some men with same-sex desires, and some of these men might even have been able to talk of their sexual interests openly. But all our evidence indicates that such men would have still married in the hopes of having sons to inhabit their offices after their death. A man’s future lay with his children. An official’s prosperous retirement rested with his son’s ability to take over his profession. Senenmut’s lack of a wife (or lack of mention, at least) and the great favor Hatshepsut showed toward him do indeed raise suspicions, despite the probable twenty-year difference in their ages.28 These are interesting conjectures, but because other officials neglected to mention their wives in their tomb chapels, Senenmut’s similar omission confirms nothing about his lifestyle, let alone his relationship with Hatshepsut.