The Woman Who Would Be King (11 page)

Certainly the mother of the princes grieved, but beyond this, the entire palace structure would have been paralyzed with worry; circumstances had suddenly put the royal succession, and thus their own positions as officials, in doubt. Great hopes had been placed on these princes, and the loss was palpable.
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We can imagine the whispers, the scrutiny of the king’s women, the talk of which of their sons was old enough and of the purest lineage, the discussion of the future king’s mother and what kind of influence she could wield. But none of this is preserved for us. The ancient Egyptians were nothing if not discreet, particularly about court activities and intrigue. We know that this dynasty’s royal succession had been jeopardized, but we are left very much in the dark about who was working to rectify the situation and how. The stakes for this new Thutmoside family were high, and elements of the old Ahmoside branch—the children of Amenhotep I’s brothers—were likely waiting in the wings to step in. The human loss was keenly felt by the royal family, but the consequences of that loss were highly political. There would have been precious little time to grieve.

Hatshepsut was probably just twelve years old as she negotiated this formative moment, watching the machinations of a palace lost to uncertainty, witnessing the disquiet and bitterness of her father, the fretting and pain of her mother. She knew that she was now more important than ever to her father, as the single remaining issue of the pure and holy union of Thutmose I and Ahmes, because at some point in her early years, her sister Neferubity had also died. In her own funerary chapel at Deir el-Bahri, Hatshepsut would later memorialize the profound and lasting
grief she felt over this loss: a carving in one of her most sacred sanctuaries shows Neferubity worshipping the barque of Amen.

Hatshepsut’s bloodline and position were the highest of the remaining royal children, and she must have sensed the sudden weight of power and responsibility spiraling inexorably toward
her
. She was now peerless, the highest-born daughter, destined to serve the next king and save her father’s dynasty with a son. But there was more to it than that, and one wonders if twelve-year-old Hatshepsut was aware of her new status: as the most mature and educated surviving child, if she were to marry one of her younger brothers, she would serve as his guide, as a decision maker, perhaps even as the power behind the throne.

King Aakheperkare Thutmose must have had doubts regarding the eldest and most wellborn of his princes left in the royal nursery, one who shared his name but apparently not his strength. If the identification of the mummy of Thutmose II is to be believed, the boy was never in good health. His skin was covered with lesions and raised pustules. He had an enlarged heart, which meant he probably suffered with arrhythmias and shortness of breath.
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It’s fair to say that Thutmose II was no athlete. And yet everyone at court depended on this boy king to continue the Thutmoside line and thus defend their own jobs and livelihoods. This prince lacked Thutmose I’s endurance and vitality; he was possibly cursed with a poor constitution after surviving one of the many scourges that afflicted the royal nursery. We are not sure if there ever was a formal designation of the boy’s new position, or if his mother, Mutnofret, was stunned or smug when she was singled out as the mother of the new crown prince.

The prince was so very young, a mere fledgling in the nest. Given life’s hard realities, Thutmose I must have worried that a wan and unhealthy nine- or ten-year-old could hardly take the reins of Upper and Lower Egypt, let alone keep and enlarge its borders. When word spread of the king’s choice of crown prince, the palace was probably filled with apprehension that everything the king had spent the last dozen years building would unravel in the blink of an eye, and Egypt might once again descend into anarchy, misfortune, and disgrace. Wrapped up in such anxieties, Thutmose I may have looked askance at Hatshepsut and wished fervently that she had been a son. Or perhaps he saw in her a solution to these problems. His eldest eligible sons had just died. At fifty years of age, he would have known that he himself was nearing the end of his time on earth. It
is possible that he looked to the brightest and most capable member of his family as a salvation against political shame and ignominy before the gods, perhaps even keeping his clever daughter close, allowing her to train at his side—not to assume the throne, of course, but to provide wisdom and balance to an unready king.

And then tragedy struck the palace again, even before all the pieces of the game could be set for the next move. The great king Thutmose I, a man who had never been bred to rule, who was not the son of a king himself, died, leaving behind a boy too young to understand any of the complex political realities facing him.

Aakheperenre Thutmose (Thutmose II) indeed took the throne, but it was clear he would need a queen-regent to guide his leadership. Somehow, Thutmose I’s Great Wife, Queen Ahmes, stepped in as regent, ruling for a boy who was not her own son, pushing his highly ranked mother, Mutnofret, aside.
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With Ahmes’s own daughter, Hatshepsut, soon to become the King’s Great Wife, it was as if the Thutmoside women had launched a double-pronged attack of feminine political manipulation, as if they saw the threat and rose up, using their remaining influence to shore up enough support to block the new King’s Mother, Mutnofret, from any real power.

The crowning of Thutmose II was probably a tedious affair, given the new boy king’s constitution and inexperience. He may have been too tired to run before the god holding the golden oars, instead jogging along feebly. Perhaps he struggled to remember the proper incantations and motions due to infirmity or youth or lack of training that rendered him a poor study. Courtiers and priests might have looked on apprehensively, wondering if such a child could sire an heir, let alone live to rule effectively himself. Thutmose II’s character is shielded from us, but it didn’t matter if the boy was stupid or lazy or cruel or kind: Hatshepsut stood by his side and assisted with the long coronation ritual as his queen.

And so at the age of twelve or thirteen, Hatshepsut, the Foremost of Noble Women, became King’s Great Wife to her younger half brother, a king no one seems to have expected or even wanted on the throne. And her own mother became regent for the boy. It’s as if the two women surveyed
the situation and knew it was up to them to transform a weak heir into a strong king, to create all the pillars needed to support a new Egyptian monarch. There was much to do, and it was up to these royal women to see it was done. To secure and expand the frontiers, Ahmes had to make her military ready for campaigns to put down uprisings in Nubia and Kush to the south. She also commissioned an ambitious building program that locked the new king’s name in sacred stone. Using her position as God’s Wife of Amen, Hatshepsut was tasked to curry the favor of Egypt’s many religious institutions. But more important than these duties, Hatshepsut needed to conceive a male heir to ensure the continuation of their line. There was no room for failure.

For her part, Hatshepsut would not have seen her marriage to the next king as an honor; rather, as King’s Eldest Daughter, she expected it to happen. Her rightful place was as Great Wife to the king, but she was probably as surprised as anybody that the next king turned out to be Thutmose II and not one of her other brothers. In the eyes of many elites, her attachment to young Thutmose II granted
him
legitimacy, not the other way around.

We don’t know exactly when Hatshepsut married him. Marriages in Egypt were not formal affairs celebrated by revelry, feasts, and teary-eyed handfasting; they were economic contracts. And it doesn’t seem as if royal marriages were formally celebrated at all, except perhaps during coronation rituals that marked the pair as king and King’s Great Wife. Their wedding night was a moment for their sacred intercourse that would invite the god Amen into the physical person of the king, to impersonate him, and thus imbue the next heir with a god’s holy essence. The Egyptians called the legitimate king “King of His Loins” or “King of His Body,” and those loins belonged simultaneously to the previous king and to the creator god Amen-Re. We can only wonder how the night proceeded and what complications may have ensued.

Did Ahmes herself counsel the young Hatshepsut on how to excite her husband and how to effectively catch his seed? She may have been very frank with her daughter—was Hatshepsut embarrassed or not? Or maybe they did not talk about it at all, resorting instead to oblique references. Hatshepsut had been married to the god Amen for some time now, instructed at an early age in at least the mechanics of sexual congress.
Mother and daughter both knew that a son was essential to a smooth transition from one Thutmoside king to another. If Hatshepsut bore a prince, and soon, all talk of an heir from a different family might be silenced.
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On the wedding night, lamps would have flickered all around a sleeping platform covered with royal embroidered linens. Hatshepsut likely wore a diaphanous pleated linen garment that revealed her youthful breasts, her trim waist, and the growing hips of a thirteen-year-old girl just ready for breeding. The Egyptians knew how to dress a young girl to elicit a sexual response. How did Thutmose II, just a boy, react when his sister approached him in her seductive dress? Perhaps he giggled in embarrassment and nervousness. He and his half sister had grown up in the same royal nursery. They had seen each other in the palaces of Egypt all their lives. Now they were meant to lie together and produce the next heir, the future Golden Horus. He may have worried about performing the act as Amen intended, about being too young, impotent, or sickly.

As much as we might like to know how it all proceeded and how each party felt about the circumstances, the Egyptians never left us with such intimate particulars of kingly succession, of family intrigue, or, to say the least, of wedding nights. It is impossible to know how Hatshepsut envisioned sex with her young half brother or how she felt about becoming the King’s Great Wife. Hatshepsut was probably apprehensive about the wedding night, too, but she followed through with her duty.

The half siblings, both young and inexperienced, knew only what they had seen in the palace apartments between courtiers and their wives or servants. There were no religious strictures about the sinful nature of sex in the ancient world. With no societal qualms about premarital sex or images of gods masturbating, and with many extended Egyptian families living in one-room homes with no protection of privacy, sex was simply more visible, even to a young child of the royal nursery. A short life expectancy meant that people grew up faster and started sexual activity younger than we would think appropriate or even ethical.

Hatshepsut and Thutmose may not even have been alone on their first night together. Perhaps the queen-regent was there to give practical advice, or special priestesses were invited to make the experience more erotic (that is, effective) for Thutmose and his new queen. Servants were probably present, ready to assist with disrobing and preparation for sleep
afterward; the queen-regent likely interrogated them about every aspect of the act. It is unlikely that Hatshepsut and Thutmose II had a private, intimate sexual encounter. This union was not a partnership of two people; it was meant to sustain an entire land, and its biological progress was probably closely monitored by those in power.

Hatshepsut was likely older than Thutmose II, perhaps only by a year or two, just enough to give her an advantage over her brother in terms of maturity.
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More to the point, she had likely served as God’s Wife of Amen for some years before her marriage to the king, and had run a complex and wealthy household before Thutmose had even learned to string his bow and arrow effectively. She would have had a head start in experience and training, despite her gender. The evidence suggests that Hatshepsut exercised her influence over him quite early in their relationship by making her position as queen visible and powerful. She was a princess who had been sustained in her own self-worth from childhood, who was probably more self-confident and more educated than her husband, who was not awed in the presence of the public but conducted herself properly and elegantly, who had served at her father’s side in complex rituals that Thutmose II was now having to learn in all their intricacies. Hatshepsut would have known her value. She could likely delegate authority with ease or put a rude noble deftly in his place. She had learned how to command an audience. Thutmose II’s position as a lesser prince probably meant that he did not have the same kind of confidence in himself or his abilities.