The Woman Who Would Be King (33 page)

Depictions of Hatshepsut’s daughter Nefrure on her mother’s now-extensive temple reliefs or stelae show her to be one of her dynasty’s most significant royal women.
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Images of Nefrure focus on her priestess duties as God’s Wife of Amen more than her role as King’s Wife to Thutmose III. The details of Nefrure’s life are almost impossible to elucidate because someone would later attack her name and images,
viciously removing almost all trace of her from the many temples and shrines created during this period. Many of these monuments displaying a queen of Thutmose III were later recarved, but some traces of a name underneath—maybe Nefrure’s—remain. If nothing else, circumstantial evidence points to a marriage between Thutmose III and Nefrure.
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For Nefrure, it was likely a decision between marriage to Thutmose III or spinsterhood. She probably had no real choice at all.

Because she was erased from a number of monuments, Nefrure’s history is fragmentary, but generations of Egyptological detective work have given us the veiled outlines of her life. The story may go something like this: Nefrure was married to her brother Thutmose III (in the Egyptian sense—that is, for procreation). Nefrure was his highest-ranking wife. Her life story mirrored that of her mother, Hatshepsut, who was also God’s Wife as a young girl and then Great Wife to her own half brother, Thutmose II. Hatshepsut and courtiers alike hoped that Nefrure would be blessed with a strong and healthy son so that she could someday gain the title King’s Mother and avoid all the dynastic trouble that had been plaguing the court since the early death of Thutmose II.

We also know that Nefrure was put into the strange position of acting as her own
mother’s
wife, at least for ritual purposes, in temple rites and in public processions.
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Perhaps it was even Hatshepsut who forbid any inscriptions calling Nefrure King’s Great Wife because she needed the girl for her own political purposes. It would make sense that Hatshepsut, as senior king, would want to play down Nefrure’s union to Thutmose III, thus highlighting her own connection with the God’s Wife. We are left with a very interesting situation: if Nefrure was married to Thutmose III, and there is good reason to believe that she was, then she was also acting as wife to her mother simultaneously, at least for ritual events. Poor Thutmose III: he had to share absolutely everything with his aunt Hatshepsut, even his own Great Royal Wife.

If this was the reality, the royal family formed a unique political ménage à trois—aunt and nephew both tied to the same girl who, when acting as a consort in either a ritual or a spousal sense, was daughter to one and sister to the other. Nefrure probably had no illusions about her own importance as the only living princess born to Thutmose II and Hatshepsut. She was a key player for both monarchs: she allowed her mother to have a highborn King’s Daughter playing the female role in temple rituals
and gave her brother the opportunity to produce offspring of pure royal blood. Nefrure had become the bearer of sacred female sexuality in the royal palace in every sense.

Nefrure was a formidable presence; even as a girl, she had courtiers and a household of her own as God’s Wife of Amen. An inscription placed in the Sinai in year 11, when she was around thirteen years old, shows her offering directly to the goddess Hathor—this level of cultic access was typically reserved for kings.
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Some have even suggested that Nefrure was encouraged to transcend her roles as priestess and queen so that she could emulate the female sovereign her mother had become. One statue found in Rome in 1856 that now resides in the Museo Barracco depicts a female sphinx with a curled wig. It was probably produced during the joint reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III and is the largest sphinx that can be attributed to this period. The name of the woman for whom it was cut has been lost, but some Egyptologists make a convincing argument that it depicts Nefrure at the height of her power.
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Even if she was a wife to her half brother Thutmose III,
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Nefrure may have preferred to use her title God’s Wife of Amen, just as her mother before her had, because of the power associated with it. Or perhaps it was understood that every God’s Wife was also a King’s Wife, given that there is no evidence the royal women could marry anyone else. Or maybe Hatshepsut demanded that Nefrure only be named God’s Wife to keep the powers of this priestly office in her camp instead of under the influence of her co-king and his entourage. Confusion continues to swirl around Nefrure: What was her place in the family? How important was she to both Hatshepsut and Thutmose III? What motivated her: power, religious duty, loyalty to her mother? Our bewilderment is compounded by Nefrure’s later obliteration from temple reliefs: an indication that darker days lay ahead for the female caretakers of the Thutmoside family.

Now in her late thirties, Hatshepsut seems to have devoted her time as king to cult activity, either by building temples or by celebrating festivals. She was still the senior monarch, but Thutmose III had emerged as an energetic co-king. New temple scenes were ordered to show and name the junior monarch—if not to put him on equal footing with his senior king, then at least to raise his status. Now in his twenties, Thutmose III ruled as commander of the army. If he had wanted to get rid of his aunt, this would have been the time to do it, but there is no evidence that he made any such move. What did he think about being the only male king in Egypt’s fifteen-hundred-year pharaonic history to rule as the junior of a woman monarch? Did he prepare for the day when he would finally rule alone? We can only wonder. The evidence suggests that Hatshepsut and Thutmose III worked within a partnership of mutual dependence because of the strange way in which their joint rule had been formed at its outset.

The year 16 Sed festival had already changed their relationship irrevocably, and to Thutmose III’s benefit, by elevating the nature of his kingship, finally making him a visible partner. He seems to have kept his altered throne name at the jubilee—which had been changed from the original Menkheperre to Menkheperkare with Hatshepsut’s accession, but in just four short years, around year 20,
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he would have the agency to change it back, moving from “the Manifestation of
the Soul
of Re Is Enduring”
to “the Manifestation of Re Is Enduring,” no longer separating him from the true embodiments of the sun god.

After the Sed festival, Hatshepsut began work on the artistic masterpiece of her reign: a small chapel of sparkling deep red quartzite built in the heart of Karnak Temple, which is fittingly called the Red Chapel by Egyptologists. The reliefs and texts found here represent the culmination of Hatshepsut’s conception of divine kingship. Nowhere is she represented as a woman; rather, she is always fashioned with a masculine kingly form—broad shoulders, narrow hips, muscular legs, and a masculine nose and chin—that makes her depiction on this monument almost indistinguishable from her nephew’s. Apparently the artisans who carved their figures side by side into the red stone were instructed to make the co-kings look exactly alike, as if they were replicas of the same king. There are more figures of Hatshepsut than Thutmose III in the Red Chapel, and she was still given the primary position in each scene, but something about their relationship had changed. Only her names and pronouns distinguish her from her nephew and betray her feminine nature. Thutmose III and Hatshepsut are placed symmetrically—as partners—in the relief scenes on many of the carved blocks: both oversee countless festivals and religious rites and act in concert to keep Egypt in the gods’ good graces.

Hatshepsut had to relocate the barque shrine that was standing where she intended to build her Red Chapel; it was a shrine at which she had performed countless rituals.
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All of this work to disassemble structures and construct new ones demonstrates how vital Hatshepsut felt it was to inject her presence—through the carving of her images and names—into the very core of Karnak Temple where the great god Amen dwelt and was transformed. Perhaps she was looking forward to her legacy after death, when future kings would perform cultic rituals to Amen while lamplight flickered over
her
many images, just as she had made offerings in the sanctuary of her forefathers. Hatshepsut wanted to leave an indelible mark on Karnak’s most sacred heart, and near her new barque shrine
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she built a suite of rooms called the Palace of Truth that was decorated with her introduction into the gods’ presence and highlighted by a scene of purification by two gods who poured streams of holy water over her head and welcomed her into their holy midst.
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She called her new barque chapel “the Place in the Heart of Amen.” Some of the blocks were so dark red they appeared to be purple, the perfect
color to evoke the sun as he expired and slipped below the western horizon full of the potentiality of rebirth. It was a fitting construction for the last years of Hatshepsut’s pious reign: it exemplified her claims to supernatural abilities and characteristics,
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and by representing her heir Thutmose III, it promoted her Thutmoside dynasty in the future on her terms. On this structure, she explained how and why her kingship was supported by the gods and highlighted her support of Thutmose III’s junior leadership. The walls featured a list of the king’s duties, with an emphasis on the obligations of being chief priest: how she stocked the altars with food and drink, tended the temple and palace lands, relegated duties to her priests, created and implemented laws and regulations, built temples of sandstone and granite, created statuary of herself and her co-king, constructed a proper homelike setting for each and every god according to his or her requirements (Mut liked beer, Amen needed his wife’s sexual abilities, etc.), and created the appropriate conditions for each god’s “primeval time,” or sexual rebirth. Finally, like a good ruler, she sought out economic growth to increase her empire and expand her treasuries to support the Egyptian deities.
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The Red Chapel was a culmination of what Hatshepsut believed her kingship to be, and to Hatshepsut that meant unceasing and untiring activity, always being there when the gods needed her. She used the Red Chapel blocks to highlight her piety by showing the daily meal for the god Amen in his sanctuary (perhaps this was something that she enjoyed doing, like a daily meditation that calmed her and cleared out her head): awakening the statue of the god, purifying and anointing him, changing his clothing, offering food and drink, then resealing and veiling the gilded shrine. Upon leaving, she would have erased all traces of having been there; a scene from the Red Chapel shows Hatshepsut herself sweeping the floor of her footprints as she backs out of the sanctuary.

Another scene from the Red Chapel suggests that such rituals were performed for statues of the living king, a new hallmark of the New Kingdom seemingly started by Hatshepsut and continued by the likes of Amenhotep III and Ramses II.
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Thutmose III is depicted offering in front of a statue of Hatshepsut as Osiris at one of the way-station chapels on the processional avenue between Karnak and Luxor Temples. In another scene, Hatshepsut herself is represented performing rituals before her own Osirian statue. Such ritual activity reinforced the mysteries of the Egyptian
monarchy at the most profound level, with the living king offering to the larger kingship, of which he was a part but still simultaneously served.

Given that cult activity was so time-consuming, particularly for a pious monarch like Hatshepsut, the female king needed support in the form of priests or priestesses in temples throughout the land.
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The royal family could not spend all their time in the temple. Instead, Thutmose III and Hatshepsut probably passed most of their days and nights in the plastered and painted mud-brick palaces along the Nile and scattered around the delta, shaded by palm trees and near pools of cool water. The junior king probably went wherever important administrative or military duties pulled him, while Hatshepsut likely preferred her beloved hometown of Thebes.

Apparently Thutmose III was constantly in transit, whether visiting the harem palace at Medinet el-Gurob at the mouth of the Fayum oasis, working with venerable elites at Memphis, celebrating Atum’s creation at Heliopolis, or inspecting the fortresses along the northwest border from his base at Perunefer. He was fulfilling the duties of the junior king, to the benefit of both himself and Hatshepsut, becoming the Thutmoside heir Hatshepsut needed. Evidence suggests that sporting activities—like hunting, archery, rowing, running, and charioteering—were important to Thutmose III and his entourage. We can only imagine the Egyptians energetically relating the zeal of their young, fit king and his manly exploits on the battlefield or hunting grounds. The previous years under Hatshepsut’s leadership had been rather thin in the area of royal sport, what with the partnership of a woman and a child king, and before that with the short-lived Thutmose II and the older Thutmose I. These last years of the joint reign must have been an exciting time for the young king to display his physical prowess. The Egyptians had not had a vigorous young man on the Egyptian throne for generations. Thutmose III fit the ideals and expectations of the royal hymns of old.