The Woman Who Would Be King (30 page)

Thutmose III probably met with the ambassadors sent by kings of the city-states of Phoenicia; these kings were much older than he was, and unlike his, their dynastic lines stretched back many generations. Although they held far less territory than Thutmose, the Phoenicians counted as Egypt’s best trading partners. It was a time of possibilities, at the height of Bronze Age globalization and prosperity, and the young king likely watched the lands to the north of Egypt with a calculating eye, weighing the potential benefits of including some of them in an expanding Egyptian empire of his own. None of these northern territories were under Egypt’s control while he was growing up. He would have known, however, that control of Syria-Palestine implied an imperial force to be reckoned with, allowing him to demand tribute from numerous subjugated vassals even farther afield. Perhaps Thutmose recognized that it fell to him to conquer Syria-Palestine and re-create Egypt’s empire in the north. If Hatshepsut felt threatened by her co-king’s ambitions, she did not betray it. Instead, she seems to have welcomed any future improvements of Egypt’s empire and offered him the most sophisticated military training imaginable, even inspiring in him the lofty goal of fulfilling Egypt’s manifest destiny of hegemony over its traditional enemies.
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Hatshepsut’s young co-king was almost a man. As the king reached fifteen or sixteen years old, we can imagine that his opinions were not only more forcefully expressed but reasoned and educated. His bearing was manly, no longer boyish. He was probably now taller than his female co-king.
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And here Hatshepsut had another problem to put to right, one that good fortune and careful planning had thankfully allowed. It was quickly becoming unseemly for her to stand next to Thutmose III in the senior position during sacred rituals and at court. A woman could outrank a boy but not a man. If she was to continue her dominance in this unequal partnership, something had to change.

Hatshepsut began experimenting in earnest with how to represent her own sexual identity, negotiating between her actual feminine self and the masculine kingship she inhabited, striving
to find a more acceptable way to present her unusual rule. Images from the first years of her reign typically depicted her wearing the long dress of a woman and the crown of a king. At some point, Hatshepsut recognized that this honest and obvious depiction had lost its efficacy. Whether it was in the new context of a young man rather than a boy standing beside her, or some other factor, it seems that ultimately a feminine king was too jarring in the context of this coregency, even to the relatively liberated Egyptian mind. Egyptian female kings were rare, ephemeral, temporary solutions to a political crisis, not a long-lasting ideal.

In her early twenties, Hatshepsut had already taken the first steps in a manly direction by ordering her craftsmen to add some masculine elements to her feminine figures. They widened her shoulders and extended the stance of her legs, even in figures wearing a queen’s long dress, to give her the active pose of a king striding forth for duty. At this point in her reign, Hatshepsut was probably only conceding to add a masculine veneer to what was, at its core, a visibly feminine depiction of herself.

Hatshepsut chose the same blended male-female depictions in her statuary; it seems clear that she wanted to retain her female core at first. Her earliest three-dimensional images show a woman wearing a dress but the headgear of a king. Later she showed herself shirtless, ostensibly bare-chested like a man, but her incongruous retention of female breasts on the naked chest makes for a shocking image. The most famous example shows her wearing a masculine kilt and kingly headscarf with a completely bare chest, accentuated by small, but clearly feminine, breasts. The statue’s body shape betrays a slight and slim woman, not the typical strong shoulders of a masculine king. Most Egyptologists doubt that Hatshepsut wandered about the palace in such attire, with her pert breasts bared for all her courtiers to see, and it should come as no surprise that this statue type, such an experiment in hybrid sexuality, was not replicated, nor displayed openly before the populace, but only kept in the innermost rooms of Hatshepsut’s Djeser Djeseru temple, where the mysteries of Hatshepsut’s female kingship could be appreciated by those intellectual enough to understand it and by the gods who had ordained it.
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This openly feminine representation was deemed too problematic. Soon Hatshepsut would shift all her images to a broad-shouldered man’s body accentuated by strong pectoral muscles and wide shoulders—with no visible breasts.

Her earliest constructions at her Temple of Millions of Years at Djeser
Djeseru show the same combinations of masculine and feminine traits. In the first years of her reign, she commissioned dozens of statues showing herself as Osiris, the mummiform god of rebirth. On the whole, the image was a masculine one: a god with crossed arms with Hatshepsut’s portrait. But a closer look revealed the feminine elements on the earliest such statues: her skin tone was rendered in the yellow traditionally employed to depict an elite woman who stayed indoors, not the deep red ocher of a man who was part of the wider world. Her face included feminine aspects, too, such as a small smiling mouth and a delicate, heart-shaped visage with a dainty chin.

Ultimately, such a frank combination of fine womanly features on Osiris’s figure seems to have been insupportable, and Hatshepsut had to further masculinize the next series of images. The ensuing Osiris statues at Deir el-Bahri were painted with both yellow and red pigment, resulting in a strange hybrid orange skin color—not at all a part of the established color scheme for Egyptian art. The statue faces were carved with new masculine features, including a stronger chin, nose, and brow. This image was more in line with expectations, but Hatshepsut still made an undeniable attempt to retain some femininity. One can almost feel the underlying anxiety on her part, an uncertainty about how she should look to please the gods and her people, how much of her own self she could show and how much she had to transform. She may have been king, the most powerful person in the ancient world, but beliefs and expectations greater than she was forced her to perform unending ideological gymnastics to satisfy the sacred role. In the end, Hatshepsut had no choice but to change her outward appearance.

All the evidence suggests that Hatshepsut’s transformation toward masculinity was a process, not a sudden event, squarely in line with her modus operandi in claiming the kingship. It seems she opportunistically waited for the precise moment to move toward masculinity in her imagery. Just as her transition to kingship was careful and calculated, she did not suddenly appear as a man before her people or in her art. Hatshepsut only went as far as was needed at the time. She constantly negotiated ways to stay in power, and in this case she did whatever it took—eventually showing herself not as a female ruler or a strange hybrid, but simply as a man.

Hatshepsut did not manipulate her depictions because she lacked manly courage in leading military campaigns or because she was
losing the confidence of her generals. Hatshepsut had no problem with subjugating enemies, destroying rebels, and extending the borders of Egypt, and there is no evidence to suggest that her political clout was fading. Hatshepsut’s ongoing gender shifts thus seem to have had little to do with realpolitik or external political pressures and must have been motivated by deeper understandings of kingship and, in particular, her relationship with her co-king.

Whom did the changes in representation serve? The modifications probably appealed less to Hatshepsut than to others. She began her reign showing her sex, and this first imagery may have been her truest inclination. As the years went on, however, we see doubt creeping in. Her masculinization does not seem to appeal to any narcissistic desire on the part of Hatshepsut, some inner need to claim all aspects of masculine rule no matter the costs. Instead, she was obliging the ritual needs of her gods and allowing a precious and tenuously balanced co-kingship to continue without shaming the junior partner. She was fitting herself to her co-king’s changing agenda. Hatshepsut’s makeover has as much to do with Thutmose III as with anybody else. He no longer needed a motherly figure to watch over him—in life or in temple imagery. Now that he was older, Hatshepsut had to remake herself into something that did not threaten his authority or legitimacy. The public may have demanded her alterations; ideology certainly did. Thutmose III himself may have insisted on it as well, although we cannot know definitively. Because there was no mechanism in place for Hatshepsut to produce the next heir (the question of with whom being the greatest problem), the continuation of her dynasty now depended on Thutmose III’s growing cooperation and acceptance of this ongoing rule.
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With no mention of her makeover in ancient texts, we have only her changing depictions to tell the story. Hatshepsut soon decided to go all in. As time went on, her images were completely masculinized in face and body, which suggests that even in real life she may have worn a king’s kilt and either bound her breasts or included no shirt at all, at least during temple rituals. Hatshepsut could not force Egyptian kingship to fit her unconventional gender; instead, she had to conform to its sacred tenets. This was not a woman who demanded that the system mold itself to her. All the evidence shows an unusual monarch who continuously fretted about and experimented with her place in the world. Masculinity was a key component
of Egyptian kingship, and step by step, as her years of royal authority accrued, she concealed her feminine aspects until there was almost no woman left, except in the sacred texts alongside the pictures that continued referring to “she” and “her.”

Only in these labels, hieroglyphic texts associated with her depictions, do we see a stubborn refusal to give up her feminine self; she decided on a confusing combination of masculine and feminine markers in the accompanying inscriptions so that sometimes she was called “he” and sometimes “she.” She was on occasion entitled “Son of Re” but more often called “Daughter of Re.” Occasionally she was labeled the “good god,” but in most places, even next to an image that was totally masculine, she was the “good goddess.” Usually Hatshepsut was named with a masculine Horus bird, but sometimes she even feminized this divine element, creating an extraordinary, unprecedented, and abstract feminine version of the god Horus, thus turning herself into a female heir to the gods.

One title that she never feminized was King of Upper and Lower Egypt, which in Egyptian literally translates as “He Who Belongs to the Sedge Plant and the Bee,” with the sedge being emblematic of Upper Egypt and the bee of Lower Egypt. Likely it was considered too theologically fraught to feminize such an archaic royal title. When Hatshepsut bore this label at the beginning of her reign, she always included some masculine elements in her depiction, even if it was only a king’s wig and headgear. As her kingship continued, she accompanied the title King of Upper and Lower Egypt with a fully masculine figure.

In inscriptions from Hatshepsut’s reign, we also see a new use of the word for palace (
per-aa
, which meant “great house”) in association with the king’s authority. This way of referring to the king as “the palace” would later be taken up in the Bible as “pharaoh,” but perhaps Hatshepsut’s advisers created the new meaning expressly to create an easy way out of a complicated situation in which no one knew which king in this strange coregency was responsible for which message or which opinion. Or perhaps Hatshepsut herself invented the new meaning to veil her femininity.

Her given name, Hatshepsut, was more of a problem when it came to her masculine transformation: “the Foremost of Noble Women” was not an easy name to masculinize. Nonetheless, Hatshepsut and her advisers had already hit upon an ingenious solution. Just after her accession, she had added the phrase “the One United with Amen” to her birth name.
When Hatshepsut said she was “united” with Amen, she meant that she had actually joined her feminine self with his essence, taking on Amen’s aspects of divinity, his mind, his intentions, and even, to some extent, his abilities. This particular name modification also suggests that Hatshepsut did not undergo her gender transformation manipulatively or cynically, but piously. It is quite possible that she actually believed Amen had allowed her to transcend her own human body to become an entity greater than herself. In fact, Hatshepsut actually feminized the word
khenem
, “to unite,” in her inscriptions by adding a
-t
, so that her name read “Hatshepsut the Female One Who Unites with Amen.”

She had already found an intellectual solution for her feminine kingship that was much more elegant than just putting on masculine garb. The texts betrayed Hatshepsut’s femininity even when the associated images showed her as a man. It is almost as if she knew the sacred inscriptions had to carry her true nature, while her depictions could cloak and transform it when necessary. Just as she did during her regency when she was depicted as God’s Wife but referred to herself as a ruler in the text, Hatshepsut was broadcasting different messages to different sets of people. To those elites who could read hieroglyphic text and participate in complex theological discourse, she presented the full complexity of gender-ambiguous kingship. There was no need to hide her feminine self from these learned men and women anyway because of their close access to her and her palace. But for the common man or woman who could not read and who might not understand such academic explanations, Hatshepsut presented a simplified and unassailable image of idealized and youthful masculine kingship. For them, she became what everyone expected to see—a strong man able to protect Egypt’s borders and a virile king able to build temples and perform the cult rituals for the gods.