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

by Kara Cooney

  Chapter One: Divine Origins

  1. There are no texts from Hatshepsut’s time—historical, administrative, religious, or otherwise—that betray openly expressed negative feelings toward the ruling king or political activities of officials. We do have veiled references from earlier Middle Kingdom literary texts that obliquely discuss the regicide of Amenemhat I, the instability of the times, and the royal family’s inability to trust any of the courtiers and officials. See Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 1, The Old and Middle Kingdoms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 135–38. Later legal texts will point toward another regicide, that of Ramses III in Dynasty 20, and the involvement of the royal harem. See Susan Redford, The Harem Conspiracy: The Murder of Ramesses III (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). The Tale of Wenamen, a text from the end of Dynasty 20 that belongs to both the literary and historical genres, reveals the opinion that the Egyptian king had lost his power over foreign lands and even his own country. See Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 2, The New Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 224–30.

  2. The length of Thutmose II’s reign is disputed, but most historians think he ruled for only three years. See Erik Hornung, Rolf Krauss, and David A. Warburton, eds., Ancient Egyptian Chronology, Handbook of Oriental Studies, sec. 1, The Near and Middle East (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 200–201; Luc Gabolde, “La chronologie de règne de Thoutmosis II, ses consequences sur la datation des momies royales et leurs repercutions sur l’histoire du development de la Vallée des Rois,” Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 14 (1987): 61–82. For the argument for a longer reign, see J. von Beckerath, “Noch einmals zur Regierung Tuthmosis’ II,” Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 17 (1990): 70–71. Betsy M. Bryan, “The Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” in The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, ed. Ian Shaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 235–36. Circumstantially, it could be argued that Hatshepsut’s kingship was only possible with a short reign for Thutmose II, because it was this king’s death that put Egypt into the hands of a toddler king, unable to rule for a dozen years at least.

  3. For a possible identification of Hatshepsut’s mummy, see Zahi Hawass, “The Quest for Hatshepsut—Discovering the Mummy of Egypt’s Greatest Female Pharaoh,” http://​www.​drhawass.​com/​events/​quest-​hatshepsut-​discovering-​mummy-​egypts-​greatest-​female-​pharaoh, and Zahi Hawass, Yehia Z. Gad, and Somaia Ismail, “Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun’s Family,” Journal of the American Medical Association 303, no. 7 (2010). Many are of the opinion, however, that Zahi Hawass’s identification of Hatshepsut as mummy KV 60A is not sound and certainly not backed up by DNA evidence. See Erhart Graefe, “Der angebliche Zahn der angeblich krebskranken Diabetikerin Königin Hatschepsut, oder: Die Mumie der Hatschepsut bleibt unbekannt,” Göttinger Miszellen 231 (2011). There is also the problem that both coffins in KV 60 bear only the title of Royal Wet Nurse. Despite the lack of evidence for Hatshepsut’s mummy, there is no reason to believe that Hatshepsut’s body was not prepared as a queen and God’s Wife, at the very least, and possibly even as a king. I did appear as an expert in the Discovery Channel’s Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen (2007), but I was not part of the mummy identification.

  4. If Hatshepsut’s rule lasted from 1473 to 1458 BCE, and if she started her kingship after her twentieth year, then she was born around year 1500 BCE. See Ian Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 481. Also see Hornung, Krauss, and Warburton, Ancient Egyptian Chronology, 201, 492.

  5. The word Hyksos comes from the Egyptian Heka khasut, meaning “rulers of foreign lands.” See Janine Bourriau, “The Second Intermediate Period,” in Shaw, Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, 184–217.

  6. Some historians have argued that he had a son named Amenemhat, whose mummy bore a pectoral with the name of Amenhotep I on it; see W. C. Hayes, Scepter of Egypt II (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1953), 419. However, because the pectoral probably dates from the Twentieth or Twenty-First Dynasty and because Amenhotep I was deified in later reigns, the pectoral is not evidence that Amenhotep I sired any children; see David Aston, Burial Assemblages of Dynasties 21–25: Chronology, Typology, Developments (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009), 231.

  7. In Egyptian, the word for hand is djeret, a feminine word. Atum thus had sex with the feminine element of his person. See J. P. Allen, Genesis in Egypt: The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts, Yale Egyptological Studies (San Antonio, TX: Van Siclen Books for Yale Egyptological Seminar, Yale University, 1988).

  8. Indeed, back in the pioneering days of the First Dynasty, fifteen hundred years earlier, with Egypt newly minted out of hostile principalities, Merneith ruled the country in the name of her young son, Den, after the premature death of her husband, Djet. As such, she was granted a tomb among the kings of her time, of the same size and grandeur as theirs.

  9. Ahhotep I has the title of God’s Wife of Amen on her coffin in the royal cache of Theban Tomb 320, but nowhere else. Evidence for Ahmes-Nefertari’s priestesshood, on the other hand, is ample and comes from contemporaneous documents, in particular the Donation Stela of Ahmose, now in the Luxor Museum, on which King Ahmose documents his purchase of her priestly office from the Amen Priesthood at Karnak. Identifying Ahhotep I as the first God’s Wife of Amen is therefore problematic. For more, see Gay Robins, Women in Ancient Egypt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), chap. 8, and Anne K. Capel and Glenn E. Markoe, eds., Mistress of House, Mistress of Heaven: Women in Ancient Egypt (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1996), 91–120.

  10. Amen is also known as Amen-Re in his manifestation as King of the Gods. Amen literally means “hidden.” To unite that which is hidden and thus permeates everything with that which is visible—the sun god Re—creates a powerful new divine manifestation as Amen-Re. Amen’s other manifestations include Amen-Min, the sexually excited form of the god who can engender his own rebirth; Amen Kamutef, or “Amen Bull of His Mother,” who can impregnate his own mother with the essence of his own future self; and Amen-djeser-a, meaning “Amen Sacred of Arm,” a clear allusion to his ability to create himself from nothing. For more on the god Amen, see Kurt Heinrich Sethe, Amun und die acht Urgötter von Hermopolis, eine Untersuchung über Ursprung und Wesen des aegyptischen Götterkönigs (Berlin: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1929), and Jan Assmann, Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom: Re, Amun and the Crisis of Polytheism, Studies in Egyptology (London: Kegan Paul International, 1995).

  11. For more on Karnak, see Elizabeth Blyth, Karnak: Evolution of a Temple (London: Routledge, 2006), and Diane Favro, Willeke Wendrich, and Elaine Sullivan, “Digital Karnak,” University of California, Los Angeles, http://​dlib.​etc.​ucla.​edu/​projects/​Karnak/.

  12. For more on the God’s Wife of Amen, see Erhart Graefe, Untersuchungen zur Verwaltung und Geschichte der Institution der Gottesgemahlin des Amun vom Beginn des neuen Reiches bis zur Spätzeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1981), and Robins, Women in Ancient Egypt, 149–56. For more on the political and economic powers of the God’s Wife office, see Betsy Bryan, “Property and the God’s Wives of Amun,” in Women and Property, a conference with The Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard. Deborah Lyons and Raymond Westbrook, eds. Published online at www.​chs.​harvard.​edu/.

  13. For the statues of Min, see Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (London: Routledge, 1991), 79–85, fig. 28.

  14. This analysis isn’t completely accepted by scholars who see little evidence of Merytamen serving as God’s Wife, but see Lana Troy, Patterns of Queenship, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensus Boreas 14 (Uppsala: University of Uppsala, 1986), 162–63. For a brief history of the God’s Wives of Amen in the early Eighteenth Dynasty, see Bryan, “Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 226–30, and Robins, Women in Ancient Egypt, 149–56.

  15. It has been suggested
that Thutmose I’s mother was married to Ahmose-Sipairi, making him the grandson of Seventeenth Dynasty king Seqenenre Taa. See Aidan Dodson and Dyan Hilton, The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 126. The mummy from the royal cache at Theban Tomb 320 that is usually identified as Thutmose I is most certainly not him. See Salima Ikram and Aidan Dodson, The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 320–30.

  16. The Amduat was the first of the Underworld Books, a series of magical incantations and descriptions of the underworld space inside of the sky, through which the dead sun god was believed to travel after his setting in the west. The Amduat came to be used only for kings’ burials, but curiously the vizier Useramen, a contemporary of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, had the text inscribed in his private tomb. Some Egyptologists believe the Amduat was composed from scratch during the Eighteenth Dynasty, while others believe that these texts were parts of older temple liturgies that tied the king’s afterlife journey to the successful passage of the sun through the hours of night. See Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 27–53.

  17. There is a debate over whether KV 38 was Thutmose I’s original tomb, or whether it had been made for him by his grandson Thutmose III after his mummy’s removal from Hatshepsut’s burial chamber in KV 20. It is also possible that even if the tomb was made during his lifetime, the decoration was added at the time of the move from KV 20 and that the latter was decorated with the Amduat by Hatshepsut. For more on the debate about these royal tombs, see Catharine H. Roehrig, “The Building Activities of Thutmose III in the Valley of the Kings,” in Thutmose III: A New Biography, ed. Eric H. Cline and David O’Connor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 238–59.

  18. For more on the Egyptian harem, see Silke Roth, “Harem,” UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2012, http://​escholarship.​org/​uc/​item/​1k3663r3​?query=​harem.

  19. For a discussion of ancient Egyptian palaces, see in particular Manfred Bietak, ed., House and Palace in Ancient Egypt, Denkschriften der Gesamtakademie 14 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1996).

  20. I have chosen to use the name Ahmes instead of Ahmose for Hatshepsut’s mother, to avoid confusion with King Ahmose. Both names mean “The moon is born” and are spelled with the same hieroglyphs, except for the determinative (the explanatory sign at the end of a word); however, the pronunciation for each sex would have likely been different. Most think Thutmose I did not marry Ahmes until his accession; see Bryan, “Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 231. Some Egyptologists argue that Ahmes may have married Thutmose I before his accession to the throne, which would mean Hatshepsut was many years older when she married Thutmose II. See Ann Macy Roth, “Models of Authority: Hatshepsut’s Predecessors in Power,” in Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh, ed. Catharine H. Roehrig (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 11, and Peter F. Dorman, “The Early Reign of Thutmose III: An Unorthodox Mantle of Coregency,” in Cline and O’Connor, Thutmose III: A New Biography, 60. This is unlikely, however, given the many ostensible barriers for the King’s Sisters and Daughters to marry anyone other than the king. It is also unlikely that a nonroyal man would have been allowed to marry a King’s Sister before his accession to the throne, and there is no evidence of such a thing taking place in the early Eighteenth Dynasty.

  21. This is not to say that I argue for any kind of “heiress theory” that the new and unrelated king was required to marry a specific female member of the old family to secure his place. I do suggest, however, that a new king with no relation to the old dynastic line would have been expected to take on one or more of that older family’s women as wives, to ensure that his offspring also be related to that original family. For more on the importance of royal women in the Eighteenth Dynasty, see Bryan, “Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 226–30. Also see Gay Robins, “A Critical Examination of the Theory That the Right to the Throne of Ancient Egypt Passed Through the Female Line in the 18th Dynasty,” Göttinger Miszellen 62 (1983): 68–69.

  22. The historical information about Ahmes is unclear. She has the title of King’s Sister but not King’s Daughter. See Troy, Patterns of Queenship, 163. In L’Égypte et la vallée du Nil, vol. 2, De la fin de l’ancient empire à la fin du nouvel empire (Paris: PUF, 1995), Claude Vandersleyen argues that she was Thutmose I’s own sister. But according to Betsy Bryan (“Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 231), Ahmes’s name suggests that she was a member of Amenhotep I’s family, perhaps a daughter of Prince Ahmose-ankh, a son of Ahmose and Ahmes-Nefertari and a brother of Amenhotep I.

  Even though we do see Ahmes’s title of King’s Sister only after the marriage, there is no evidence of a woman named Ahmes at all before the reign of Thutmose I. Before her marriage to the king, she was essentially invisible, as so many royal women were when they had no political or ideological use. Based on the fact that Ahmes was named King’s Sister but not King’s Daughter, we might conclude that she was sister to Amenhotep I or another early Eighteenth Dynasty king and that Amenhotep I could not produce male or female heirs. If Ahmes was the sister of Amenhotep’s father, Ahmose, the previous king, then she must have been one of his much younger sisters, given that Ahmose’s son, Amenhotep I, ruled for twenty years.

  In any event, the lack of an heir made Ahmes very important. This royal woman’s connections to the Ahmoside family may have been essential for Thutmose to create a convincing claim to the throne, because only with Queen Ahmes could this general produce children with a link to the kings who began the Eighteenth Dynasty. The dynastic succession had been broken on the male side, but an appropriate royal woman could create some kind of continuation. Their children, at least, would have the royal blood that Thutmose I did not have.

  23. There has been the suggestion that royal women “gave up” their titles of King’s Daughter or King’s Sister to marry outside the royal family, thus providing an explanation for why we never see these women anywhere but married to the king at Hatshepsut’s time. However, there is little, if any, evidence for this happening during the Eighteenth Dynasty. See Roth, “Models of Authority,” 11.

  24. Bryan, “Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 227–28.

  25. I have to be clear that there is no explicit evidence that marrying the king was a formal “rule” for royal women, only that there is no evidence of royal sisters or daughters marrying anyone but the king in the early Eighteenth Dynasty. Such strict control over royal women was not characteristic of all time periods. Back in the Old Kingdom and later in the Third Intermediate Period, royal daughters regularly married outside the royal family. Although some historians argue that there are simply not enough definite sister-wives during the New Kingdom to be able to infer this kind of endogamous “rule” (see Dodson and Hilton, Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt, 122–41), I conclude that King’s Daughters and King’s Sisters were expected to marry the current or next king, at least during the early Eighteenth Dynasty, and that there were important political and economic benefits for this practice.

  26. For more about marriage in ancient Egypt, see Robins, Women in Ancient Egypt, and J. Toivari-Viitala, Women at Deir el-Medina: A Study of the Status and Roles of the Female Inhabitants in the Workmen’s Community During the Ramesside Period (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2001).

  27. Some Egyptologists see no reason to date the marriage of Thutmose and Mutnofret to his accession as king, leaving room for an earlier date. Aidan Dodson, for instance, believes that Mutnofret could have been Thutmose I’s wife for many years before he became king and that their relationship would provide an excellent argument against a ban on royal women “marrying out” (Dodson, personal communication, 2013; also see Peter Dorman, “Early Reign of Thutmose III” in Cline and O’Connor, Thutmose III: A New Biography, 59n7). However, because the only evidence for their mar
riage comes from after his accession and because there is no other evidence of royal daughters marrying nonroyal men, I prefer the hypothesis that Mutnofret married Thutmose I after his ascension.

  28. Thutmose I reigned for thirteen or fourteen years. See Hornung, Krauss, and Warburton, Ancient Egyptian Chronology, 199–200; Dorman, “Early Reign of Thutmose III,” 39; and Bryan, “Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 230–35.

  For related discussions of Hatshepsut’s age at queenship, regency, and kingship, see F. Maruéjol, Thoutmosis III et la corégence avec Hatchepsout (Paris: Pygmalion, 2008), 22–25, and David A. Warburton, Architecture, Power, and Religion: Hatshepsut, Amun & Karnak in Context, Beiträge zur Archäologie 7 (Zurich: LIT Verlag, 2012), 239–40.

  29. For details on childbirth and childhood in ancient Egypt, see J. J. Janssen and Rosalind Janssen, Growing Up in Ancient Egypt (London: Rubicon Press, 1990); Robins, Women in Ancient Egypt; and Toivari-Viitala, Women at Deir el-Medina.

  30. For proof that hunter-gatherers understand the link between breast-feeding and conception, see M. Konner and C. Worthman, “Nursing Frequency, Gonadal Function, and Birth Spacing Among !Kung Hunter-Gatherers,” Science 207 (1980). For evidence of knowledge of this link in the ancient world, see V. Flides, Breasts, Bottle and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986). Egyptians must have known about breast-feeding and its immunity and contraception benefits. See Erika Feucht, “Women,” in The Egyptians, ed. Sergio Donadoni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 315–46.