The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt

by Kara Cooney

  Typically, royal Egyptian women owed everything to the men to whom they were attached and only wielded power when they had a close connection to the king—as a mother, wife, daughter, or sister. The regency system worked because these women were invested with real, if temporary, power. It was a system of self-interested incentives revolving around the king.

  Ahmes-Nefertari was more than just a queen-regent, however. She was one of the first royal women (perhaps the second if her mother, Queen Ahhotep,9 was the first) to hold a newly influential religious office: the role of a priestess called the God’s Wife of Amen. Like Atum or Ptah (the craftsman god of the northern city of Memphis), Amen was a creator god.10 His regeneration, through his own agency, was the miracle that kept the Egyptian cosmos perpetually self-creating. The Egyptian temple of Karnak facilitated Amen’s ongoing process of creation.11 If the temple walls did not keep out enemies and profanity, if the offerings were not made, if the god was not fed, if the God’s Wife did not facilitate his rebirth, then, it was believed, creation would stop—or at least the creation that benefited the people of Egypt would collapse. The Nile might cease to flood its banks every year, leaving no life-giving silt and mud in which to farm. The sun could fail to rise in the east every morning, depriving the crops of life-giving rays.

  Egyptian texts clearly state how Amen of Thebes (or Atum of Heliopolis, who was the older manifestation of some of the same religious ideas of creation) enacted his self-creation through an act of masturbation with the God’s Hand, a priestess (often the God’s Wife) appointed to the temple ostensibly to provide the “activity” that a statue of a god was unable to provide for himself.12 There were probably multiple cult statues that required such assistance, one residing in each of the Theban temples. Each statue was most likely made of solid precious metal that the Egyptians believed constituted the flesh of the gods—gold, silver, or electrum—and probably crafted with an erect penis full of potentiality and creation.

  These active statues were not uncommon in ancient Egypt. In fact, the oldest known Egyptian monumental statuary, dating to before 3000 BCE, shows standing male gods performing masturbation (their display caused no end of embarrassment to Victorian museum curators and visitors).13 But for the ancient Egyptians, this act was the most sacred moment of creation, the alpha and the omega of everything, ground zero for the continuation of this world as they knew it. These mysteries had to be facilitated and witnessed by a cadre of elites with religious training. Second in importance only to men like the First High Priest of Amen at Karnak or the First High Priest of Ptah at Memphis, the God’s Wife of Amen was one of the elite few allowed into the sanctuary of the god to see him unveiled with all his vulnerable bits exposed and extended. She may have considered herself as separate from the god, protecting him, exciting him, but she must have also known the deeper mysteries of the rites: that she was part of him, an essential element of the agency that kick-started the universe every day.

  Ahmes-Nefertari was getting old, which limited her ability to sexually excite Amen, and perhaps the role of God’s Hand had already been given to a younger princess. But at some point, she passed the priestess position of God’s Wife on to her own daughter, Merytamen, a much younger woman and the sister-wife of Amenhotep I.14 Ahmes-Nefertari still retained the title of God’s Wife; it was her most important role—more central to her than King’s Great Wife, King’s Sister, or King’s Mother, a trifecta of royal titles for an influential Egyptian woman and a testament to the great religious and political power she amassed in her lifetime.

  Despite her great political power, she couldn’t will a grandson into being. Toward the end of her son’s reign, Ahmes-Nefertari must have found herself anxious about the prospects of the Ahmoside dynasty’s continuation. At some point, that anxiety would have turned to fatalism, and perhaps she even aided her son in finding a successor who was not of direct lineage. Amenhotep I had no living son, but a careful decision could still be made that preserved Egypt’s bright prospects. Presumably Amenhotep I had no surviving brothers, so ultimately the throne passed to a middle-aged elite man from Thebes named Thutmose (Djehutymes, “the One Born of Thoth,” the moon god of Hermopolis), a man who would go on to become Aakheperkare Thutmose, whom Egyptologists call Thutmose I. This king would flourish, expanding Egypt’s borders, increasing its wealth, and waging great battles in Syria-Palestine to the north and in Nubia to the south. He would begin building up Egypt’s sacred temples in stone, and he would raise the status of the god Amen to an unprecedented level. This official who became king was Hatshepsut’s father.

  Thutmose I was not of direct royal birth. He never called himself King’s Son. He probably had connections to the family of Amenhotep I but was not himself the son of a king.15 He never once tells us who his father was—which is strange in itself—perhaps because the situation of continuing a defunct dynasty demanded his silence. Thutmose I was most likely a general before he was picked to become king. How he was chosen and why are never stated; such messy details were avoided in any formal or official Egyptian records. Kingship was a divine office, and it was not to be viewed as the subject of political haggling and horse-trading. Any real-world discussions of who would be the next king and why were kept strictly verbal. Thoughts about the royal family were whispered, obliquely discussed among a few colleagues, or kept within one’s mind; they were certainly not committed to papyrus.

  Perhaps Thutmose was the strongest of the strongmen in contention for the throne. Or maybe he was the one with the closest lineage of descent to the now-defunct Ahmoside dynasty. He could have been one of King Amenhotep I’s tutors and part of the royal household. It’s possible that he and the king were good friends from the wars in Syria-Palestine. Whatever the relationship and the circumstances, Thutmose I may have felt as if he did not belong on the throne at first, even if he was groomed for the position years in advance. It must have been a strange thing to step into such a sacred and formalized office instead of being born into its oddities and intricacies.

  Regardless of any feelings of inadequacy, he would have executed his duties to the best of his ability, knowing that kingship was essential to the survival of Egypt and the Egyptian people. Politics and religion went hand in hand in Egypt: if there was no king, there was only cosmic chaos. The king supervised military, political, economic, legal, and religious affairs, all of which were imbued with ideological weight. Wars were divinely inspired and divinely won, and all spoils went to the gods as gifts. Political power was granted to the king from the time his bones were knitted together in the womb, even before his accession. Kingship was a mysterious and timeless creation.

  Even a king’s economic power depended on his connection to the gods: if he pleased them, they would manifest a good Nile flood, which laid down a rich layer of mud so that the seeds of wheat and barley could be sown—as opposed to a disastrously low Nile inundation or a devastatingly high flood, both of which would result in drought, disease, and conflict. For the Egyptians, wheat and barley were money, and essentially money grew in the rich mud the Nile inundation left behind every year. That economic wealth was a gift of the gods. Prospects were good now, but perhaps Thutmose I worried that the gods’ whims would turn against him and toward devastation.

  Thutmose must have keenly felt the weight of this unexpected responsibility. Any of his legal decisions as king would be wrapped up in an Egyptian religious-ethical concept called ma’at, meaning “order,” “truth,” or “justice.” Ma’at was simply the way things were meant to function when a good king was in power, making effective, well-reasoned, fair decisions, when everyone knew their place, how to behave, and what was expected of them.

  But likely nothing would have created more feelings of insecurity in the freshly chosen king than the extensive religious duties foisted upon him day and night. He acted as chief priest of every temple throughout the land. In practical terms, everyone knew that the king could not simultaneously lead rituals in Heliopolis in the north and in
Thebes, some 400 miles to the south. Thus he appointed learned and intellectual chief priests to take up these duties in his stead, men who had a more profound grasp of the mysteries than the new king could ever hope to acquire, so that no temple would go without the rituals required to summon the gods into their statues: feeding them the appropriate foods in the appropriate order; performing the right kind of chanting, singing, and entertainment; offering the smell of sweet incense and maintaining the braziers; and safeguarding the golden shrines and implements on which the temple rituals depended.

  Even though Thutmose worked with chief priests as surrogates in temples throughout Egypt, the religious responsibilities of the king cannot be underestimated. Not only was the intellectual preparation for such work rigorous and time-consuming, but he must have known that it was up to him to channel the goodwill of the gods to earth through complex rituals, to meditate on the mysteries of divine creation and his place within it. One can only wonder if Thutmose ever felt like a fraud because he was not brought up for this profound duty of acting as intermediary between heaven and earth, or if he worried that his inadequacies would bring about the failure of creation itself. Egypt’s very well-being depended on a healthy, fit monarch, and we can picture the people’s anxiety any time the king was incapacitated or unable to fulfill his sacred duties. The king should be a model specimen—a godly perfection on earth.

  As every king had before him, Thutmose I would serve as the linchpin that held the created and ordered cosmos together. Whereas before his coronation he could have risen in the morning for a quick prayer at the household altar with statues of ancestors and gods to keep his family (or army) safe, he now had to rise before dawn for complex ablutions involving the bathing and shaving of his entire body, anointment with oils, and dressing in restricting kilts, corselets, and aprons. He had to don unwieldy headgear like the atef crown, with tall double plumes balancing a sun disk atop ram’s horns, and the Double Crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, which featured a high-backed red crown joined with a white crown that looked something like a bowling pin protruding from a tall basket. His body had to be made ritually pure to enter the most sacred spaces in the state temples throughout Egypt, which meant that certain kinds of food or drink or human contact were prohibited. Priests around Thutmose I may have constantly rattled off rules for this or that, annoying him when his mind was bent toward more worldly issues. As he performed ritual after ritual for Atum of Heliopolis, Ptah of Memphis, Amen of Thebes, and dozens of other state gods throughout Egypt, were his religious obligations a constant and unending drain?

  He may have even balked at some of the indignities: at the most important festivals, he was required not just to fulfill his duties inside the temple but also to lead public processions along two or three miles of hot paved surfaces lined with stone sphinxes. He had to perform ceremonial runs while clutching all kinds of unwieldy things—rowing oars, jars of liquid, thrashing live birds—as he sped on foot around a sacred circuit. One ritual involved hitting four balls with a stick in the four cardinal directions; in another he had to bash special chests with a bat of some kind. On a different day he might have to herd live, and probably uncooperative, calves into the god’s presence. He was called on to strike and kill repellent animals with a spear. Along with these feats of strength or piety, he always had to go through the tedium of offering incredibly long and intricate meals to the gods, presenting courses accompanied by difficult incantations that could number over fifty. He had to accomplish all this while mastering the more subtle challenges of the rituals, such as learning to embrace a statue representing the fertile form of the god Amen, holding his arms high and away from his body so that his own nether regions did not come into contact with the massive erect phallus of the sacred god’s form. In every circumstance, it was in the king’s best interest to be athletic and mentally fit.

  As Egypt’s solar priest, Thutmose I now entered into the great mysteries of the sun god. He probably participated in a mind-numbing initiation that took place in the god’s sanctuary, drinking and ingesting herbs until he was taken into the god’s embrace and shown his unique place in the cosmos, finally grasping how the successful rising and setting of this ball of fire could only happen through his incantations and offerings. Thereafter, he would have woken every morning before dawn to greet the coming sun on the eastern horizon and would have communed with other manifestations of the sun god during the deepest hours of night, meditating on the mysteries of how the dead sun was able to fight off the destructive advances of Apophis, who wanted nothing more than to uncreate the universe. These solar mysteries were so meaningful to Thutmose I that he was perhaps the very first king to include excerpts from the solar temple liturgy in his own tomb decoration: scenes from the Book of Amduat16 documenting the terrifying and perilous journey of the sun during the hours of night were carved into his burial chamber in what we now call Kings Valley 38 (KV 38).17 Thutmose I likely believed he himself would meld with the sun god on his journey through the heavens, that his own journey into death was the rising and setting of the sun god himself.

  When he became king, Thutmose I’s life was turned upside down. Leaving his family’s villas and lands, presumably near the town of Thebes, he would have moved to head up the palaces and campaign encampments throughout Egypt. Thutmose I’s mother, Seniseneb, previously the mistress of her own home in Thebes, now became the King’s Mother, with the great responsibility to watch over the newly installed harem of wives, concubines, and ornaments—all put in place to produce many sons and secure the king’s dynasty.18 Thutmose I could not have lived in one place for long; he and his entourage moved in their comfortable barges up and down the Nile or through dusty desert roads to border fortresses, as need and weather allowed. His journeys on campaigns may have seemed like second nature to him, but palace life would have demanded some psychological shifts.19

  First off, Thutmose I needed to abandon all notions of having just one wife as was common for Egyptian men. He would have to marry again to connect himself to the family of Amenhotep I and to the mythology of masculine kingship. Assuming he had a family before his accession, we are left to wonder if his wife, sons, and daughters moved to the palace with him and what their change in status was. If his wife was still alive, she must have been anxious about being superseded by the other women to whom he bound himself upon his accession to the throne. These family details were never recorded, and we cannot expect that they ever would have been. Nonetheless, the changes in Thutmose I’s life would have been a tumultuous existential shift for both himself and his family when he ascended the throne and married his new “great” royal wife.

  The new wife’s name was Ahmes,20 and she would soon bear him a daughter named Hatshepsut. Thutmose I was never clear about Ahmes’s origins, at least not in the formal temple inscriptions that are left to us. She is called King’s Sister and King’s Great Wife. The second part is easy to understand: she was now the wife of Thutmose I, and her status was higher than that of all his other women. But which King’s Sister was she? Sister of Amenhotep I, the king who had just died? Or was she the sibling of his predecessor Ahmose? Or perhaps she was related to neither, because she was never named King’s Daughter. Some say that Ahmes’s title of King’s Sister was derived from her marriage to her own brother Thutmose I. If this explanation is true, then one of Thutmose’s younger, nonroyal sisters was asked to marry her own brother at his royal accession, perhaps so that he could legitimize himself as a god by sacredly connecting to his own flesh and blood as Osiris had done. This scenario would have presented a real challenge for the siblings as they carried out their duties, because they had most likely grown up in a nonroyal household, in each other’s presence every day, eating meals together, arguing with each other, playing jokes, revealing secrets, sharing the love of a platonic family relation. In the palace, royal brothers and sisters were probably kept in different quarters once they had reached a certain age, which limited the closeness the siblings could sh
are, and in any case, the sheer numbers of wives, offspring, and other relations might have been enough to discourage the close bond between a brother and sister who grew up in a patrician nuclear family. While this hypothesis may excite our imagination, most Egyptologists believe that Ahmes was not one of Thutmose’s own sisters but instead related to the older Ahmoside family, even if she wasn’t a daughter of a king, thus securing the place of Thutmose I (and his progeny) in a family that was not his own.21 If Ahmes was indeed unrelated to Thutmose I, then their union to save the Egyptian kingship brought together two people who had barely, if ever, spoken to each other.22

  If Ahmes grew up as a princess in the palaces, then marriage to the next king was expected of her. The evidence suggests that during the Eighteenth Dynasty King’s Daughters and Sisters were allowed to marry only the reigning king, although centuries earlier and later it was quite in order for royal daughters to marry outside the royal court. But all signs point to a much stricter regime during the Eighteenth Dynasty, with royal sisters marrying their brother the king, but no one else. Royal daughters produced from such unions would then have to wait to marry the next king to take the throne, ideally their own brother. These marriage restrictions are never explicitly stated, but they are a possible explanation for the lack of marriages between princesses and commoners during the Eighteenth Dynasty.23 These limitations might have been an effective way to keep all the wealth, power, and potential for future heirs within one family. Most important, this stricture on royal women preserved the king’s funds to reward his officials for loyal service rather than waste heaps of money paying off all the expectant sons-in-law with rich dowries when they married his daughters.24 With this Eighteenth Dynasty system, the king had no sons-in-law at all; conveniently, his own son was also his son-in-law. Any daughters sired by Thutmose I would marry the next king.