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

by Kara Cooney

  Ahmes had experienced all the same anxieties herself when she had been a young queen. She, too, had served as the King’s Great Wife and felt the profound pressure to bear the next heir. Her daughter Hatshepsut had been the product of such a moment of disappointment and anguish after nine months of waiting and hours of tormented labor. Ahmes knew what it meant for Hatshepsut to have survived instead of her brothers: Ahmes was regent to a boy king who was not her own son, whose wife had just given birth to a girl. The cycle of no male heir was repeating itself. Once word of the baby’s sex traveled around Egypt, a new and fresh uncertainty would settle into the hearts of the elite families of the country. Ahmes knew the stakes of such failure intimately.

  Still, it is unlikely that Ahmes scolded Hatshepsut for delivering a daughter. The Egyptians believed that the husband’s seed, not the woman’s womb, determined the gender of a child. Thutmose II likely received the brunt of the ill will from courtiers and advisers who now had a new reason to be disappointed with him. Ahmes probably urged Hatshepsut to hand her tiny baby off to a wet nurse so that she could get her body ready for another pregnancy as soon as possible.

  In the midst of all these preoccupations about sex and pregnancy and babies and heirs, these women nonetheless found a way to create a strong kingship on behalf of a young, inexperienced king. They exercised Egypt’s power in foreign affairs, and they had to be merciless about it. Rebellion was dealt with swiftly, and from all accounts Ahmes granted no clemency to insurgents. Shortly after Thutmose II’s accession, there was an uprising within the colonial province of Kush in southern Nubia (modern-day Sudan), a region reincorporated into the Egyptian empire by Thutmose I only a decade earlier. A military campaign against the rebel Kushites was quickly organized, with orders to slaughter all male foes, except for one son of the chieftain who would be brought back to Egypt as a captive. Did the young king order this expedition? Thutmose II was only eleven or twelve years old, and Hatshepsut was likely a girl of thirteen. Ahmes was probably the one who instigated this cruel annihilation. It was her husband, Thutmose I, who had conquered southern Nubia in the first place, his first campaign there still famous for his slaughter of their chieftain and that influential display of the bowman’s corpse on the royal barge at Thebes. To her, this was sacred work.

  All three key players—the king, his queen, and his regent—were perhaps in the throne room when the pronouncement of no mercy was made. Both Hatshepsut and Thutmose II would have recognized the intent behind Ahmes’s decision and valued the resolution for what it was: rebellion against the king of Egypt was akin to jeopardizing the cosmos by acting against the sun god himself; such an act could never be permitted. When the Egyptian army reached Kush, they carried out their orders successfully. Egypt’s riches always came upon the backs of such atrocities. War was not just compulsory; it was a gift to the gods.

  Ahmes and Hatshepsut needed to add another pillar to support the new kingship: the immortalization of Thutmose II’s reign in Egypt through new temple construction. The women were not content to give the young king all the credit; indeed, they included their own images in the new structures they created at Karnak Temple, an unprecedented move that hints at just how powerful they really were. On at least one of the surviving monuments, Thutmose II shares equal space with his Great Wife, Hatshepsut, and his mother-in-law, Ahmes.7 These two women were responsible for establishing the visual ideology of the young king’s reign. In other reliefs, Hatshepsut even appears without the king, standing alone before the god Amen-Re in one of his temples, perhaps the first time a King’s Wife was depicted with such agency of her own, wholly removed from her husband. She is shown dressed as a traditional queen, wearing an archaic skintight linen dress that had been popular a thousand years before and a vulture headdress (which for all we know was an actual taxidermied vulture) with richly feathered wings that spread about her head like the lappets of a wig. A round crown called a modius sat atop the colorful vulture headdress, and Hatshepsut embellished the crown with two tall ostrich plumes as an extra extravagant touch. From the images on these temple blocks and stelae there is no mistaking Hatshepsut’s power as queen. The reliefs depict her performing rituals that were usually the king’s responsibility: Hatshepsut is shown standing before the god Amen, who is in either his clothed form or his sexualized manifestation; she is holding an offering, and the king is not present as an intermediary.8

  In addition to these traditional trappings of a strong kingship—waging ruthless military campaigns and building monuments in the king’s name—Ahmes and Hatshepsut added an unexpected twist. Something new emerged from the process of crafting this young boy’s kingship: unprecedented depictions of female power, and their source is likely found in the feminine underpinnings of Thutmose II’s kingship. For millennia Egyptian temples had been places of both ritual and architectural conservatism. Yet these two women not only held the reins of political power but also formally recorded that power in stone. And the remaining evidence suggests that courtiers and priests accepted these images in the most sacred temple of Thebes. Any discussions the elite may have had concerning the audacity of a woman depicted performing such sacred rituals went unrecorded, but tellingly the stone carvings from Hatshepsut’s time as queen remain unmarred. Given that her supremacy on the reliefs produced during her husband’s reign is so overt, many Egyptologists believe that Hatshepsut herself became a kind of regent to Thutmose II, alongside her mother; she told him what to do, ruled for him, stepped in as chief priest for some temple rituals, and used her confidence to sway his decisions. She simply overpowered him. One of the most impressive structures attributed to the king was the Great Festival Court9 of Thutmose II. But given the circumstances, perhaps it was really Hatshepsut’s plan to build this massive court at Karnak, as a gift to her lord Amen-Re. As would be expected, Hatshepsut and Ahmes were successfully establishing Thutmose II as a viable king, and whether by design or not, they were creating strong, unprecedented leadership positions for themselves in the process. But could they maintain this power that was only informally defined?

  To retain their dominance, Ahmes and Hatshepsut relied on a stable of loyal officials and priests whose families had lived in Thebes for generations and who seem to have been more than happy to accept the status quo. The women had traditional nobles to support them, but they also required a new kind of lieutenant to enact their plans exactly as they wanted. Building programs and military campaigns cost money, and breaking with established traditions probably required a subtle and clever operator. Timing and political circumstance aligned to bring a new player into the political arena, a valuable asset who seemingly came from nowhere. His name was Senenmut. He had no previous palace connections, nor any links to the old Theban families, yet at some point during the reign of Thutmose II he was appointed by one woman—or perhaps both—as Overseer of the Large Hall in Thebes. (This was probably the audience hall in which the thrones of the king and queen were placed to receive visitors.) And he immediately went to work implementing the unprecedented plans of Ahmes and Hatshepsut. Somehow a nobody had managed to snag a position that put him in the company of the top decision makers of the greatest land in the Mediterranean region.10

  In the court of Thutmose II, a savvy operator could have won favor in a number of ways. With access to the Large Hall, Senenmut likely had the opportunity to charm the women behind the throne. Or perhaps a display of tact and strategy while arranging the queens’ formal meetings with courtiers left a strong impression. Whatever his method of ingress, he was favorably received by the royal court, and soon he was promoted once again to the even more powerful position of Overseer of the Two Granaries of Amen, a hugely important office that guaranteed a new source of income for Senenmut and extended his political authority in an economic direction.

  Ahmes may have had her own tactics in play as well. Perhaps Senenmut was chosen by the queen-regent as her son-in-law’s administrator because this was a man who had no ties to either the Thutmosi
de clan or the Ahmoside family, making him the ideal subordinate, one obliged only to the inner circle of the royal family. Soon after his initial appointment, he was also named steward of two more financial powerhouses: the king’s palace and the queen’s palace. Being entrusted with the oversight of the income and expenditures of the richest rulers in the ancient world11 represented a massive step forward in Senenmut’s career, and it was probably engineered to further the plans of Ahmes and Hatshepsut. He now had economic power in the temple as well as in the palace. He was able to wield influence in both the sphere of the king and that of the god Amen, which made him a bridge to temple bureaucracies likely valued by the royal family. Senenmut came from nothing and wound up as the most trusted adviser to the king and queen; as the years passed, he collected more titles and influence. To Hatshepsut, he would soon become indispensable and, in some ways, the closest member of her own family.

  Because of Senenmut’s access to the king’s treasury, the queen’s treasury, and, to a large extent, the Amen temple’s treasuries, many people would have reached out to him for favors. It would seem he was perfectly situated to move funds between palace and temple, although there is no surviving record of this type of transaction between royal and divine purses. Ahmes and Hatshepsut likely needed an official who could influence both of these arenas, a man who understood that economic influence was the path to political control and who could exert financial power without creating too many enemies.

  His appointment exemplifies the ancient Egyptian system of bureaucratic patronage: as a loyal and effective official serving the king and queen, he was handsomely rewarded, and he would have understood how to reward officials below him in kind. His own landholdings and wealth would have been expanded, and he would have gained the power to do the same for others. Later, after being named to the prestigious office of Overseer of Royal Works, he took blocks of expensive stone from the royal quarries to commission statuary of himself for placement along processional ways in temple spaces. He was able to access gold from the royal mines, probably also turquoise, carnelian, and other precious stones from royal trade routes. Although the details of how this happened are not explicit in the ancient bureaucratic records, Egyptian officials were indeed allowed to skim off the top. The tomb chapels of hundreds of Egyptian bureaucrats make it clear that their offices enriched them—royal treasurers got access to metals and riches, overseers of granaries became rich in commodities and the products of the land, and so on.12

  There is no doubt that someone in the royal family trusted Senenmut enormously—most likely Ahmes and Hatshepsut. He was given more and more authority during the reign of Thutmose II, and he seems to have been their most effective deputy. His ability to instrument change would become vital to Hatshepsut in the years to come. But how he was brought to the palace in the first place, after having been born, as far as we can tell, to a low-level official in the backwater of Armant, some fifteen miles from Thebes, remains a mystery.13

  Senenmut had grown up provincial and poor, not as destitute as a peasant, perhaps, but underprivileged enough to ostensibly wonder at how circumstances had transformed him into a man running the economic affairs of the royal palaces. Because he grew up without the advantages of the old elite families, he might have had great feelings of inadequacy when those around him spoke an archaic and fancy language, wrote in ancient forms of Egyptian that no one used anymore, and told tales of faraway lands that he had never visited. He must have been very intelligent to make up for the lack of highborn tutelage or to have inveigled his way into such an education as a boy. But it was not only his cleverness that brought him to the king and queen’s side. We can only guess at his other abilities: proficiency in organization, mathematics, and accounting; political acumen; sharp memory; astute conversationalist; effective at persuasion—and, more than anything else, he must have been ambitious.

  Did Senenmut harbor a secret anxiety that he did not fit in at the palace? Was he ashamed when a learned elite from a venerable old family said something at which he knew he should take offense, but which he did not really understand? Did he cover over that disgrace with a witty retort?

  Given Senenmut’s humble origins, it’s all the more astounding that toward the end of Thutmose II’s reign, Senenmut was appointed tutor of the king’s firstborn daughter, Nefrure. Hatshepsut would have been almost sixteen years old at this point. Ahmes could have made this appointment, or perhaps Hatshepsut was more than able to see Senenmut as a man to whom she could entrust her own flesh and blood. By appointing him as tutor of her young daughter, probably less than two years old at the time, Hatshepsut was inviting Senenmut, a lowborn man, to share her, or at least her daughter’s, circle, to take part in instruction, meals, and religious rituals with Nefrure, thereby creating the intimacy that a father shares with a daughter.

  The title for the royal tutor in Egyptian is mena nesut, which essentially means “male breast for the king”; that is to say, it is the masculine version of a wet nurse whose milk provided an infant with nourishment and protection against disease. The Egyptians believed that a wet nurse became related to her charge through the milk she fed the baby—in a sense, artificially creating blood relations. The tutor “fed” his royal charge from his experience and his knowledge. His careful attention protected the child from harm when his or her parents’ duties kept them away. The notion of family intimacy was meant to be the same for both the male nurse and the wet nurse.

  But why was Senenmut chosen? Perhaps other officials, unlike Senenmut, were connected to the old elite families and were too embroiled in political scheming, or maybe Hatshepsut wanted to keep her little daughter close to the money that Senenmut managed. Given that Senenmut had risen to become an economic powerhouse in both temple and state, it was not only clever but also farsighted of Hatshepsut to appoint him as Nefrure’s tutor. Her little girl was destined to be God’s Wife of Amen and to become a great queen, just as she had.

  Whether for emotional or worldly reasons, Senenmut clearly valued his relationship with Nefrure. Later he would have at least ten statues carved, each at great expense, depicting him as he cuddled the small princess in his embrace, with her little head and sweet face peeping out of his robes, or seated on his lap like a crown prince. In these statues, she looks to be two or three years of age. Her cheeks are full and cherubic. Senenmut himself looks like the kind tutor we would want him to be, young and happy, almost feminine in his visage. The images are touching and engaging, full of intimacy and notions of protection and safety.

  But Senenmut was also openly displaying something else to other Egyptian elites through these statues: that only he had the right to touch this royal child, that only he belonged to this inner sphere of power and they did not, that only he had access to expensive granodiorite stones from the royal quarry and to the gilding that once adorned the statues. He was telling his colleagues that he now belonged to another family, a higher family than the one into which he was born. He was sending a message to his fellow elites: if you want any of these riches or this influence, then you must go through me. At first glance, these stone blocks express a bond with a precious child whom he may very well have loved, but they were also a blatant and open declaration of his royal political connections and access to great wealth. Hatshepsut would have been cognizant of what Senenmut was really doing with his statue program, publicly set up in temple courtyards and festival spaces. And she seems to have had no problem with the open display of his presumptions.

  His relationship with Hatshepsut’s daughter seems to have been quite intimate, even fatherly, so much so that some Egyptologists have whispered that Senenmut could have been Nefrure’s real father and that the sickly Thutmose II was simply not capable of siring a child. Much ink has been spilled on conjectures about the relationship between Hatshepsut and Senenmut; however, there is no clear indication that Senenmut was anything more than Nefrure’s tutor and protector, albeit a very close one.

  While Senenmut was busy cr
eating a spectacular career and working his way into the royal family, Hatshepsut may have given birth to another child; and because we have so little evidence of the baby, it was probably another daughter, one who died young.14 There is no mention of grief, or how Hatshepsut felt about delivering another girl instead of a boy heir. If Hatshepsut ever bore a son, and there is absolutely no evidence of this, he was stillborn or too weak to survive infancy. The ancient Egyptian royal family never mentioned children in the monumental or historical record until they were a viable and useful part of their political society. If royal children died as infants, they were not declared at all. Hatshepsut likely endured many heartbreaks of which her scribes left no record. And with so much riding on the outcome of her unions with Thutmose II, she must have experienced myriad emotions—guilt, shame, anger, bitterness—none of which leave a trace in our records.

  Was Hatshepsut close to Princess Nefrure? Hatshepsut would have been just thirteen or fourteen years old when she bore her. Apparently she took a strong interest in the baby, even though evidence suggests that royal child care was a duty best passed to wet nurses, especially for a woman so burdened with responsibilities. There is no indication whatsoever that she resented the girl because of her gender. In fact, Hatshepsut seems to have kept her daughter by her side, knowing that only an educated child could serve her family well. She must have been profoundly grateful that Nefrure was still alive, not a circumstance any mother could take for granted. Indeed, it is likely that Hatshepsut was training Nefrure in the temple for duties as the next God’s Wife by letting the girl trail after her while she conducted rituals, so that the incantations and movements would become familiar to Nefrure, flowing into her lifeblood like osmosis.

  Despite all the appearances of a close bond with her daughter, Hatshepsut had still failed to bring her most important task to completion. Anxiety within the royal palace was likely building over the king’s inability to produce a son with his Great Wife, or with any of his proper wives, for that matter. We must remember that Thutmose II was just a boy himself when he became king. And if he did produce any male children they would have been just infants at this point, not substantial and tested human beings on which to pin anyone’s hopes of future kingship.