The Woman Who Would Be King (29 page)

After her coronation, Hatshepsut’s first moments as king likely took place in a throne room, seated on a raised dais, and she may have looked much like this red granite statue depicting her wearing a traditional, tight-fitting linen sheath dress but also the masculine
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head cloth of an Egyptian king. The sight must have been strange to behold for all those accustomed to the divine system of masculine kingship.
Rogers Fund, 1929, Torso lent by Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden (L.1998.80), © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Early on in her kingship, Hatshepsut attempted to add a layer of masculinity to her feminine forms, and halfway measures resulted in strange androgyny. On this life-size limestone statue from her Temple of Millions of Years, she shows herself without a shirt, wearing only a king’s kilt, but she retains her gracile shoulders, delicate facial features, and even the generous hint of feminine breasts. The statue is shocking in its blend of masculinity and femininity. It is unknown if she ever dressed this way in public rituals or in festival procession.
Rogers Fund, 1929, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Eventually, Hatshepsut opted for a fully masculinized image in her statuary, showing herself with wide and strong shoulders, firm pectoral muscles, and no sign of breasts. Even her face is altered: the fuller cheeks and a stronger aquiline nose replaced the Barbie-doll nose of previous portraits. This change in depiction accompanied her own aging process, and we can only wonder how Hatshepsut herself dressed as she got older.
Rogers Fund, 1928, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Some twenty years after Hatshepsut’s death, Thutmose III sent chisel bearers throughout the land to remove her name and images from Egypt’s sacred temple monuments. Here, in the heart of Karnak temple, artisans so carefully chiseled out her human form that the shadow of her former kingship still haunts Amen’s temple walls.
De Agostini Picture Library via Getty Images

This sketch of Hatshepsut’s key lieutenant, Senenmut, looks quite different from the sweet, childlike face shown on his statuary. These portraits betray not only his age, but perhaps also a hint of his shrewd character. His was not the handsome, banal face we see in formal images, but one carved by lines of age. Many such sketches were found in Senenmut’s burial chamber, and on the back of one is the inscription “a lean hairy rat with massively long whiskers,” maybe referring to the reputation of the man himself and betraying the reason so many of his monuments were destroyed after his death.
Anonymous gift, 1931, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

With the King’s Daughter Nefrure’s tiny head peeking out of Senenmut’s enfolding garments, this statue communicates warmth, love, and protective embrace; by the same token, this publicly displayed stone block constituted an unmistakable and presumptuous communication to all of Senenmut’s peers that his access to Hatshepsut was unrivaled.
© Werner Forman/Corbis

Shown as a queen wearing a king’s crown on this limestone block from the heart of Karnak’s Temple, Hatshepsut audaciously names herself as King of Upper and Lower Egypt and includes her newly granted throne name Maatkare (The Soul of Re Is Truth), all of it, it seems, before the coronation that should grant such divine privileges.
Block discovered by Henri Chevrier at Karnak Temple in 1933, Luxor Museum, drawing by Deborah Shieh

In this relief from a limestone temple once erected at Karnak, Hatshepsut is depicted as the God’s Wife of Amen, likely when she was the Great Royal Wife of Thutmose II or at the very beginning of her regency for Thutmose III. Her ideological and political powers were clearly communicated to her people in the imagery because she stands directly before divinities without the king; she acts as her own mistress. Embraced by the goddess Hathor, she is offered life and power through her nostrils by Seth, god of violent power. Wearing feminine dress and a modius crown, this image was not a target of Thutmose III’s later destruction because here she is not claiming the kingship, only her role as high priestess of Thebes.
Luc Gabolde, via IFAO

Around Thutmose III’s fourteenth birthday, some of the wives in his harem were likely beginning to grow with child. Thutmose probably married Nefrure around this time as well. As a King’s Daughter and King’s Sister, Nefrure was expected to join with him and no other man. This union was his sacred duty, as it was her privilege. She was a royal daughter, and their son would be of the purest blood, destined to rule Egypt as his father and grandfather had done before him.

Hatshepsut’s risky plan to keep the Thutmoside family in power was paying off. Thutmose III had turned out to be a vigorous young man, able not only to sire children, but to participate in military campaigns. Hatshepsut’s reign with Thutmose III included several foreign wars to the south of Egypt,
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and Thutmose III probably accompanied such campaigns. No matter what his precise role at this young age, he was growing into a mighty warrior-king before the eyes of his people.

There is no evidence that her femininity made Hatshepsut soft toward her traditional enemies. To the contrary: she knew that foreign suppression was Egypt’s lifeblood, a key source of her country’s great wealth. Nubia’s subjugation was not just to Hatshepsut’s advantage as king but to
the economic advantage of her military elite. The notion entertained by some Egyptologists
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that she was a pacifist just because she was a woman is simply wrong. Hatshepsut may have traveled personally with her troops to Kush,
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and there was every reason to bring Thutmose along.
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Hatshepsut likely organized four campaigns to Kush, and Thutmose III may have participated in all of them.

Hatshepsut did not campaign in the north, but that was probably because she was able to maintain active and effective diplomatic connections there. Her father, Thutmose I, had already campaigned in Syria-Palestine, which raised awareness of Egypt’s growing military presence among the kings beyond the Sinai. With no evidence that any kings in northwest Asia decided to become aggressive just because a woman was on the throne, it seems that her gender made little difference in the politics of the region. Egypt’s position in the north, in Syria-Palestine, remained largely unchanged throughout her reign, and Hatshepsut never brought troops there—either because she did not have the strength to do it, or because the mere threat of her military power maintained some tribute payments. Possibly her campaigns to Nubia kept her men busy and rich without the complications of constant war on two fronts. Hatshepsut was smart enough to establish a steady stream of wealth from Nubia and Kerma in the south early in her reign; these were certainly much easier conquests than the urban Syrian centers of Kadesh and Megiddo to the north.

Hatshepsut knew that it was in Egypt’s and her own best interest for her co-king to be trained as a skilled general. There is reason to believe that she sent Thutmose III to the north of Egypt to learn about the system of border fortresses along the Sinai road and to train with the army at the ancient military stronghold of Perunefer, modern-day Tell el-Daba.
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While he was there, his privileged training and military contacts likely helped him appreciate Egypt’s place in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. He would have met leaders from Babylon, Susa, Phoenicia, Anatolia, Canaan, and Crete. The Egyptians called the Cretans Keftiu and depicted them wearing colorful woolen garments and fabulous high looping hairstyles. In fact, everything Cretan was all the rage in Egypt during Thutmose’s adolescence. Artisans from Crete were invited to the royal palace at Perunefer to create frescoes in the colorful style of their people,
and bull-leaping demonstrations were likely incorporated into the royal court entertainment.