When a woman was king of Egypt
In this day and age, questions of gender and identity are a matter of frequent discussion.
We are encouraged to refer to people by the gender they identify as, rather than automatically considering them to be the gender that they were defined as at their birth. A great many people thoughtfully add an assortment of pronouns to the end of their email or website identity to show their gender identity.
Yet this understanding of gender fluidity is nothing new and it goes back in history a very long way.
Today we shall briefly consider the career of one of ancient Egypt’s greatest kings, the Pharaoh Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, who came to power about 1478 B.C.
King Hatshepsut shared many of the talents of the other great pharaohs, except for one point. He was a woman, and therein lies an interesting tale.
To give one bit of linguistic background:
The ancient Egyptian language has no word for “queen,” either in the sense of a queen consort who is married to a ruling king, or a queen regent, one who is the actual head of state. The women tied to the royal throne went by different titles. The principal wife of the king was called the Great Royal Wife. This title might be given to the mother of a king when he came to the throne even if the mother had not been called Great Royal Wife before her son’s accession. Lesser wives of the king were simply called Royal
Wife or Foremost of Women. In the time of Hatshepsut, the king’s wife might be given the prestigious name
God’s Hand. A woman who was a mere royal concubine might be given the title of King’s Ornament.
Most of these female titles are often listed in books or films as “queen” for the sake of convenience, but the Egyptians had a different understanding.
Hatshepsut began her career as the daughter of King Tutmose I and in time was married off to the future Tutmose II, the earlier king’s son by another wife. She became Great Royal Wife of King Tutmose II and the couple are known to have had a daughter named Neferure, to whom Hatshepsut was very attached.
The king named a son by another wife to be his heir who in due course became King Tutmose
III. But No. 3 was only 2 years old when his royal father died, and so it was not hard for Hatshepsut to get herself made regent in the name of the young boy, although that office normally went to the new young king’s biological mother.
But Hatshepsut did not stop there.
At first Hatshepsut presented herself to the public in statues where she stood behind her royal son, but very soon she began to raise up statues of her own, adding more royal titles as she went. Like other kings, she took a religious throne name, Maatkere, meaning “Truth is the Soul of Re.” The patronal deity of the Egyptian kings was the falcon god Horus, and so she took the title of Female Horus Wosretcau, King of Upper and Lower Egypt. To persuade the public still further, she ordered the erection of her statues wearing the double crown of the pharaohs complete with the cobra headband and the ritual square beard worn by other kings.
Kings were normally buried in this period in secret places in the Valley of the Kings, and so many kings liked to build mortuary temples to the gods where the devout could go and pay their respects — and at the same time take note of the larger and lavish wall paintings and statues of the king who raised the temple. In a project that took 15 years, Hatshepsut built a monumental temple for herself and her fellow gods at Deir el-Bahri.
The task of building this temple was entrusted to a gentleman named Senenmut, sometimes called Hatshepsut’s chief adviser. Many modern Egyptologists have suggested they may have been lovers. The laborers who built the temple had no doubts about the relationship and drew lewd pictures of the two of them in places that were never supposed to be seen by the light of day.
One of the crowns of King Hatshepsut’s career was a large-scale mission of five ships to the land of Punt, which is probably modern Eritrea. The ships came back laden with large amounts of incense and other commercial goods. These included a number of live myrrh trees, transported in large containers and replanted at her temple. In a magnificent, if explicit, wall carving she depicted her conception, in a union between the goddess Isis who flutters over the prone body of King Tutmosis II in the form of a sacred bird.
There, we read that the high god Amun-Re declared to her, “Welcome my sweet daughter, my favorite, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare, Hatshepsut. Thou art the Pharaoh, taking possession of the Two Lands.”
Were this declaration from a god not enough, we are told that Tutmose II chimed in and tells the reader: “This daughter of mine, Khnumetamun Hatshepsut — may she live! — I have appointed as my successor upon my throne… she shall direct the people in every sphere of the palace; it is she indeed who shall lead you. Obey her words, unite yourselves at her command.”
Hatshepsut’s relationship with the actual heir to the throne, Tutmose III, is not clear. After her death, her public monuments were desecrated as if to remove her memory, suggesting that he resented her holding power for so long. On the other hand, she made him commander of all her armies, and he made no attempt to take the throne from her. He followed her on the throne and conducted a number of successful military conquests.
King Hatshepsut died on the 16th of January in the year 1458 B.C., and was mummified and buried with her fellow kings in the Valley of the Kings. Her body was discovered and identified only in 2007. She ruled Egypt in one of the most wealthy and prosperous periods in its history, mostly avoided wars and kept the peace. Many other kings have not done better. According to Egyptian ritual, when her tomb was finally closed and the caskets laid to rest, the mortuary priests would have intoned, “You will live again. You will live again. You will live again forever.”