The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt
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In the ancient world, female power was made possible only in times of crisis; catastrophe was seemingly a prerequisite to a woman’s participation in an exclusively male system. Queen Tawosret of the Nineteenth Dynasty claimed the kingship alone for a mere two years after she had no son to continue her lineage; however, the only thing her reign brought about was the beginning of a new ruling family. Boudicca led her Britons against the aggressions of Rome around 60 CE, but only after that relentless imperial force had all but swallowed up her fiercest and most noble kinsmen. A few decades later, Cleopatra used her great wealth, intelligence, and sexuality to tie herself to not one but two of Rome’s greatest warlords, just as Egypt was on the brink of provincial servitude. She bore offspring to Julius Caesar and Marc Antony in the hope that her children would bond Egypt’s dynastic succession to the fortunes of a victorious Roman warlord. Boudicca and Cleopatra gained power only once the Roman Empire threatened their people’s sovereignty and only because there were no remaining male candidates to lead the defense. Both women saw the destruction of their dynasty, their independence, their very way of life, and ultimately their own selves during the crises that defined their rule.
Not until the development of the modern nation-state did women like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great take on long-lasting mantles of power. The post–Roman Empire, Christian reconfiguration of a fragmented Europe depended on a delicate balance of intertwined dynastic bloodlines that always preferred the person, male or female, who had the clearest claim of descent. In other words, in an ethnically and linguistically divided Europe, when no man could be found to continue a ruling house’s bloodline, a female representative of the ruling family was generally preferred over handing the kingdom over to a “foreigner.”
Through all of antiquity, however, history records only one female ruler who successfully negotiated a systematic rise to power—without assassinations or coups—during a time of peace, who formally labeled herself with the highest position known in government, and who ruled for a significant stretch of time: Hatshepsut. She should have been no exception to the biological rules that stymied ancient women’s ability to hold political power—the vulnerabilities of their wombs, their childbearing abilities, their hormonal changes, their physical weakness. The ancient Egyptians themselves conceived of the Egyptian goddess not only as a womb for the regenerating god but also as an unstable and fickle feminine force—sometimes kind, other times vicious—that could decide on a whim to destroy or to safeguard. Feminine power was a dangerous energy that needed to be contained and placated, not encouraged or expanded. As a rule, women in ancient Egypt were only allowed to rule as a regent on behalf of a man, as Ahmes-Nefertari did for her young son, or as the last living member of a ruling family, as Sobeknefru did on behalf of her dying dynasty. Given more latitude than in most other places in the ancient world, women in Egypt assumed leadership roles in the household and palace and every so often popped up on the political landscape as king of all Egypt: Nitocris of Dynasty 6 (if Herodotus is to be believed), Sobeknefru of Dynasty 12, Hatshepsut of Dynasty 18, Nefertiti of Dynasty 18, Tawosret of Dynasty 19, and Cleopatra VII of the Ptolemaic dynasty, all of them, with the exception of Hatshepsut (and Nefertiti), the last gasp of their dynastic lineage (although Tawosret was not of royal blood and may have come to the kingship by murdering the young king for whom she was acting as regent: she showed none of Hatshepsut’s compassion, elegance, or political acuity).
In the eyes of the Egyptologist Betsy Bryan, Egyptian women fulfilled an important role: they were a reliable means of transferring elite lineage within a dynasty. Kings often married their highborn sisters because those elite women were connected to the people and families who were meant to be in power and thus could serve as receptacles to breed the next king.
Bryan describes female power as analogous to the spokes of a wheel radiating out from the king, the hub of the political system. The king required unions with multiple women to continue the royal lineage from himself to a son, but when that son did not materialize, a woman could—albeit rarely—become ruler of Egypt. As Bryan puts it, “Females were guarantors of dynasty continuity.”30 Thus, in a few cases, the desire to protect the interests of the ruling family could trump the imperative to have a male king rule Egypt, but usually only at the end of the line.
And so, as Bryan argues, royal women were sometimes essential in moments of great political uncertainty, when the ruling family needed a monarch with ironclad and uncontested connections to the family lineage. But once power returned to a man, all evidence of that woman’s rule was stifled, which explains why we have so little information about female kings of Egypt or anywhere else in the ancient world.31
Hatshepsut learned firsthand that a female leader could not transmit succession through her own womb. As a queen, if she had produced a son, the boy could have acted as the next ruler. But as king, Hatshepsut was not, it seems, allowed to hand the reins of power to any of her own offspring, including her daughter. She may have tried to place the girl next in line for power, just as a man would do with his son. Her attempts to position Nefrure ultimately failed, and she may have even lived to see them collapse. Since Hatshepsut was essentially acting as a placeholder for Thutmose III, any male child of her womb at this point in her reign would have produced a reaction even stronger than that against Nefrure. She was ruling alongside a masculine ruler as coregent. He was the spoke of the political wheel. She was just the insurance policy against the young king’s unexpected death and an interim solution to his temporary youth and inexperience.
Hatshepsut ruled Egypt in her own right, to be sure, and she ruled until her life ended. She was the ultimate working mother, hiring wet nurses and nannies to care for her offspring during those vulnerable years before her children reached the age of five. She may have even felt the ancient version of “mommy guilt” for relegating her precious daughter Nefrure to the care of others while she saw to the leadership of Egypt. But in the long term, Hatshepsut’s authority was finite and severely limited. A man could pass down rule to his male progeny in the ancient world whereas a woman could not—because when considering men as an economic construct, the male body will always outproduce the female body. He can create multiple children simultaneously, using the wombs of many women, but women can only depend on their one womb, with one (or, rarely, two) offspring in a given year. In a system dependent on royal succession, it was in no dynasty’s best interest to place a woman at the center of the wheel of political power. Evolutionarily speaking, this was tremendously inefficient. Even if she was surrounded by a series of men, a female ruler still could not secure the succession of her dynasty because her production of offspring would always be limited. Thus no female monarch could expect her rule to last long in any ancient complex society or, if she reigned until her death, to continue after her through her own female progeny. Her leadership would always conclude with a man resuming the throne.
All of this biological reality only makes Hatshepsut’s achievements that much more extraordinary. She was only twenty years old when she methodically consolidated power and catapulted herself into the highest office in the land. She stepped into the position of king during the Eighteenth Dynasty, when the Egyptian empire was experiencing a renaissance—imperialism made everyone rich, and new building projects were under way, including the sprawling temples of Karnak and Luxor. Hatshepsut remains the only ancient woman who claimed absolute authority on a firm foundation when her civilization was at its most robust.
Her femininity was really the only strange part of her rule. In many ways, Hatshepsut’s unconventional kingship was an exercise in conformity. Apparently it was too much to expect the kingship to adapt to her womanhood. Instead, she fit herself into the patterns of kingship with which she had grown up, at least those in which a woman could conceivably participate. Like any successful male king, she waged imperial warfare and ruthlessly exploited the population of Nubia to enrich her gods and her people. She participat
ed in the respected system of coregency in which an elder king fostered a junior king in a divinely inspired partnership, thus protecting the future kingship of Thutmose III. She created a masculine identity for herself so that she could perform and participate in religious rituals that demanded a male presence. She constructed temples and obelisks according to accepted traditions and left behind more stone temples and monuments than any previous Egyptian king. Her innovation was directed at sustaining a successful, if unusual and unprecedented, kingship. She wreaked no havoc on the economic and political systems around her; she led no insurrections. She made no revolutionary breaks with tradition but attempted to link herself to the unending line of masculine kings who had come before her. Hatshepsut’s kingship was a fantastic and unbelievable aberration, but little more than a necessity of the moment. Her feminine kingship was always to be perceived as a negative complication by the ancient Egyptians, a problem that could only be reconciled publicly and formally through its obliteration. After all her great accomplishments, despite her unique triumph, her fate was to be erased, expunged, silenced.
Thousands of years later, when archaeologists began to find traces of her rule, historians disparaged her character, saying little about her success and a great deal about how she had stolen the throne from its rightful heir, Thutmose III. They commented on her torrid affair with Senenmut and her audacity to make the ridiculous and scheming claim to be a man, or to celebrate a Sed festival, or to be the offspring of the gods. The chisel marks and smashed statues were seen by some as indications of some kind of transgression on her part, proof that she really was a bad woman in need of a beating. When historians began to correct the simplistic misconception of Hatshepsut as an overreaching witch, some ended up turning her into a selfless, first-wave feminist, willing to sacrifice her sexuality for her career, dynasty, and family, paving the way for her nephew’s future success as king. And as for academia, most Egyptologists became so mired in the thousands of monuments, statues, and inscriptions she left behind that many forgot Hatshepsut was human at all.
Through the millennia, we have called powerful women many things—bitches, witches, regents, seductresses. And we have demanded that women relinquish their sexuality to assume authority, including the God’s Wives of Amen of the Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Sixth Dynasties, vestal virgins of ancient Rome, Catholic nuns, and countless women of the 1970s and ’80s in business or government or academia. In the ancient world (and in many places today), women who made decisions about their own bodies were at first seen as threatening to systems of power and were usually considered nothing more than immoral sluts. The women of antiquity who held political and military power can be counted on the fingers of one hand—women like Boudicca, Empress Lü, Cleopatra, and Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut’s story can help us appreciate why authoritative women are still often considered to be dangerous beings who need to be controlled, monitored, contained, and watched.
Hatshepsut had to carve out her own niche in a society that identified power with masculinity. To do this, she had to explore what feats a woman could accomplish: commission obelisks the likes of which Egypt had never seen or trade with far-flung lands like Punt. She recorded a step-by-step account of her divine origins from Amen-Re and how the god’s statue revealed that she was chosen to rule all of Egypt. The challenges Hatshepsut faced and the sacrifices she made are familiar to powerful women of the twenty-first century: balancing the personal and the political, overcoming stereotypes of hysterical and unbalanced femininity, and making compromises never asked of powerful men. For Hatshepsut, her unprecedented success was rewarded with a short memory, while the failures of other female leaders from antiquity will be forever immortalized in our cultural consciousness.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was started when my son was just a few months old and finished at his fourth birthday. No woman should write a book during those years. No one. And yet I am glad that Hatshepsut picked me at this time in my life. The hard edges of sleep deprivation and the complexities of breast-feeding and child care demanded that I not forget the biological and economic truths of womanhood. Thank you, Julian, for providing hard realities that I had blithely ignored (and denied) in my twenties and early thirties. I could not have understood Hatshepsut then.
The idea for this book came from Out of Egypt, a comparative archaeology television series I developed and produced with my husband, Neil Crawford. We never did do an episode on women in power, but Hatshepsut remained on my brain. Thus when book agent Marc Gerald suggested I write a biography on Hatshepsut (and after I had initially replied, “I can’t write a biography about Hatshepsut”), I took on the task with enthusiasm. If he hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t have written the book. Thank you, Marc, for telling me what you wanted to read (instead of accepting what I thought a young academic should write).
I am deeply (and profoundly) grateful to my husband, Neil Crawford, for reading the manuscript multiple times with relentless attention. If there is any narrative life in this biography, it is because of him. Neil is always my sounding board for ideas about human systems and personal motivations, and I am grateful for the time he gave to these discussions and revisions. I was never more nervous than when he was reading the manuscript for the first time. I’m thankful that my most honest critic also loves me so much. He also took Julian to Disneyland, the park, Fast Taco, etc., while I wrote. I will always be grateful that my life has been shaped by his considerable influence.
I’m indebted to Betsy Bryan, my dear Doktormutter from Johns Hopkins University, who provided a profound role model of a woman in power. While I was at graduate school, I had no idea how hard it must have been for her to balance a growing career and family; now I can’t believe she came through unscathed. I couldn’t have written this book—with its unorthodox interest in human emotions and intents—without her blessing. She is more a master of the Eighteenth Dynasty than I will ever be.
Thanks are also due to old friends JJ Shirley and Violaine Chauvet, both alums of Johns Hopkins, for reading the manuscript, providing bibliography, talking over ideas, and for encouraging me to write a readable and smart biography of Hatshepsut. I owe much to our conversations (and some frantic e-mails about sources and facts). I will return the favor.
My dear friend Rebecca Peabody at the Getty Research Institute has been a confidante from the proposal stage to publication. Like me, she always has a gig on the side. Rebecca is knowledgeable and skilled in the ways of publishing, and I benefited from her experience. She was the first to read anything from the manuscript, and her support encouraged me when I needed it most. To have the encouragement of a fellow academic (and non-Egyptologist!) while writing a nontraditional book delivered me from many anxieties along the way.
Aidan Dodson, an Egyptologist who knows his Eighteenth Dynasty history much better than I do, read the manuscript, alerting me to red flags and potential problems. Although we didn’t always agree (as I’m sure he’d want me to point out), I am grateful for his attention to this biography.
Deborah Shieh acted as my research assistant. Her drawings of Karnak and of temple blocks were skillfully and patiently done. She also kindly fetched books, scanned countless images, worked on bibliographies, and performed other technical tasks. I could not have completed this project without her help.
My colleagues and students at UCLA have been patient listening to me talk about women and power for years upon years. My course on the subject at UCLA is now taken by many enthusiastic undergraduates (not all women, I might add), and whether they like it or not, they will soon be reading this book.
My family—my mother and father, sisters and brother—have all supported me throughout the writing of this book, always simultaneously confused by and proud of my intense interest in the ancient world. In particular, I need to thank my mother, Pamela Cooney, who provided me with my first model of a woman with authority. She helped me write this book in more ways than she knows. My sister Erin Cooney also threw her considerable
attention and energies my (and Julian’s) way, as did Jim and Kelli Cooney whenever I was in New York.
I thank Vanessa Mobley, my editor at Crown, who understands my preoccupation with women and power deep in her own soul. Because this book was written while both our children were very young, we always understood, without ever having to communicate it outright, the panicked inability to finish a project with any kind of elegance or timeliness. I am grateful for her patience with my messy process.
Finally, much of this book was written at a Mexican joint across the street from me, and I owe thanks to Martin, Mario, Carmen, Rosendo, Sandra, Manuel, Erick, and many more whose names I don’t know but whose faces I recognize. All of them facilitated my concentrated work, even on Taco Tuesday.
NOTES
Preface
1. My thoughts on this subject have been informed by a class I recently developed at UCLA called Women and Power in the Ancient World, in which we examine biological and social motivators for women’s lesser place in politics in complex society, including R. D. Masters and F. de Waal, “Gender and Political Cognition: Integrating Evolutionary Biology and Political Science,” Politics and the Life Sciences 8, no. 1 (1989): 3–39; M. Ingalhalikar et al., “Sex Differences in the Structural Connectome of the Human Brain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2013); Carol R. Ember, “The Relative Decline in Women’s Contribution to Agriculture,” American Anthropologist 85, no. 2 (1983): 285–304; Ernestine Friedl, “Society and Sex Roles,” Human Nature (April 1978), reprinted in Anthropology 94/95 (Guilford, CT: Dushkin Publishing, 1994), 124–29; Bella Vivante, Women’s Roles in Ancient Civilizations: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).