The Woman Who Would Be King (34 page)

Thutmose III’s eldest son was named Amenemhat, and Nefrure—if indeed she was married to the king—was most likely to have been the boy’s mother; Amenemhat would have been seven or eight years old in Hatshepsut’s last years.
⁹
But this child is hard to find in the ancient sources, and uncertainty swirls about him. It remains unclear how many times Nefrure became pregnant, if ever; how many times she brought a child to term; how many miscarriages or stillbirths she suffered; or any other details about her ability to bear children. Thutmose III had many
other wives, most of them unnamed and unrecorded—though some, like Queen Satiah, the daughter of the treasurer and tutor Ahmose-Pennekhbet, came from the families of powerful officials—and they all would have been engaged in a high-stakes race to produce sons. Viable successors were always a necessary commodity. A king wasn’t truly accomplished until his heir was securely placed on the throne after him. Perhaps Hatshepsut dwelled upon this fact and was anxious to fill in this last remaining gap.

Hatshepsut was now an androgynous, mature, and unmarried female king, and the long-term possibilities of claiming future rule for her direct lineage (via Nefrure) were fated to fail. Everything would have depended on the political success of just one girl. But there is indeed evidence that Nefrure, like her mother, reached a status higher than that of the typical Egyptian queen and God’s Wife of Amen. In the reliefs on the upper terrace of Hatshepsut’s funerary temple, Egyptian artisans were ordered to carve a large-scale female figure (whose name is now erased but who many think was once Nefrure); she is shown standing directly before a goddess, a kingly presumption not fit for a queen and proof for some that Nefrure was indeed raised as her mother’s heir to take over some kind of shared kingship with Thutmose III.
¹⁰
Perhaps Hatshepsut was now considering Nefrure as a kind of female heir. At this point in Hatshepsut’s reign, Nefrure was labeled on a Sinai inscription as Mistress of the Two Lands and Mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt—titles used by the female king Hatshepsut herself.
¹¹
The stela from the Sinai seems to be dated to Nefrure’s own regnal year, an audacity in itself—“year 11 of the majesty of the God’s Wife Nefrure”—as if she were a king in her own right.
¹²
On the same Sinai stela, her name was followed by royal epithets like “living forever” or “stability and power like Re,” which should only follow the name or image of a king, not of a woman, no matter how highly born. All of this hints that Hatshepsut really did intend for Nefrure to become some kind of coruler to Thutmose III. It was an indication that she trusted her daughter more than anyone else to keep her legacy secure: Hatshepsut continually placed her in powerful positions, set her up for more authority in the future, and depended upon her to keep the family dynasty thriving.

Between years 18 and 21, Hatshepsut ordered craftsmen to create
another such image of Nefrure, this time at her Djeser Djeseru temple in Thebes, where everyone would see it, and with the title Mistress of the Two Lands, which was reserved only for the highest-ranked queens capable of political leadership.
¹³
Whatever the real intentions of this scene, it seems to have been too much for some to take. Nefrure’s names were later removed and changed to those of Hatshepsut’s mother, Ahmes, long since dead, suggesting that depicting Nefrure in such a powerful position was considered inappropriate by influential power players. There is further evidence to the same effect: in the Upper Chapel of Anubis at the same temple, Nefrure’s images were replaced by carvings of Thutmose I, Hatshepsut’s father, modifications many believe were made during Hatshepsut’s lifetime.
¹⁴
It is possible that Hatshepsut had wanted her daughter to attain a status approaching her own, a level of power that neared that of a king, but she was ultimately forced to change her plans. It is likely that Thutmose III, or the Amen priesthood, or some faction of elites resisted, fearing the creation of another strange male-female coregency, this time beyond the justification of necessity and dynastic security. Hatshepsut apparently relented, bowing to political or religious pressures and ordering the removal of all such images from her funerary temple. Or maybe no one dared speak against the senior king at all. Nefrure might have died during her mother’s reign, ruining all such hopes for an heir of her own lineage.

If Hatshepsut was really considering the elevation of Nefrure to co-king, then it suggests that there was more to her own rule than selfless protection of her dynasty; perhaps her power had developed beyond a need to serve the gods and the country. Or it raises the possibility that by the time Thutmose III had become an active co-king, she now saw this arrangement of elevating Nefrure as preferable to just letting Thutmose pass the kingship on to an heir of his choice. If she was really attempting to give Nefrure unprecedented power as God’s Wife and queen (or even co-king) alongside Thutmose III, then she was meddling with affairs of succession after her death, trying to force the selection of an heir from her chosen wife. If all of these hypotheses bear out, then Hatshepsut did finally become a revolutionary thinker, a romantic idealist who believed she could permanently change the nature of the kingship, by appending a queen, in the modern sense of the word, as a coruler. This may have been Hatshepsut’s last, best attempt to institutionalize the ongoing power of a woman, a decision she could make only after years of authority had changed her
character. When she began her rise to power, it was in a mad scramble to save her dynasty. When she claimed the kingship, there is every suggestion that she was constantly negotiating and adapting her femininity to accepted traditions. But then, finally, in her last years, secure upon her throne and possibly lost in anxious ruminations, she acted on her own personal investments, attempting to institute a significant change in Egypt’s system of kingship on behalf of her daughter. The details are murky, but Hatshepsut’s orders toward the end of her reign suggest her modus operandi had shifted.

Despite Hatshepsut’s maneuvering (perceived or real) to ensure her daughter the best possible political and religious positions, all we see today are hints of Nefrure’s name, and the clear evidence of a systematic campaign to remove her from the record. Why? Nefrure was also born to Thutmose II, making her a sibling of Thutmose III. Who would harm the King’s Sister, ordering an assault on the girl most closely connected to Hatshepsut? If Nefrure’s execrations happened during her mother’s lifetime, it could indicate that the God’s Wife had fallen out of favor with one or both of the ruling kings. If her names were removed after Nefrure’s death, after another woman took over as chief queen of Thutmose III and God’s Wife of Amen, it is likely that people suffered her aspirations and presumptions only while she was alive and gladly removed any trace in her absence. But in the end, the destruction of her names implies that Nefrure’s claims to kingly power—at least in the way she was depicted as standing directly before divinities, offering to them as a king, and calling herself Mistress of the Two Lands—were seen as overreaching and something that needed to be expunged.

Hatshepsut lost all ambitions for her daughter when Nefrure’s names were erased. If the execrations happened in these last years of Hatshepsut’s life, this massive political defeat must have been a devastating end to all the female king’s plans and ambitions, perhaps even hastening an early death. Indeed, Nefrure’s presumptive claims of royal titles are enough for some Egyptologists to whisper that Hatshepsut did not die a natural death at all
¹⁵
but was helped to a premature end because her presumptions for Nefrure were made out of personal ambitions that were likely antithetical to the agenda of her partner on the throne.

Senenmut’s role in Nefrure’s fall is unknown. According to the sources, Senenmut was the overseer of the ongoing work at Djeser Djeseru,
and ostensibly he was the one who supervised the creation of Nefrure’s images and possibly even the one who subsequently had to see to their removal. Because Nefrure had the potential to be a great future patron to Senenmut, just as her mother had been, he may not only have protected her but also actively promoted her interests. If she were to fall from grace, Senenmut would have tumbled as well.

A few circumstantial clues point to tensions during the later years of Hatshepsut’s reign. Carved repeatedly at her temple of Djeser Djeseru is the phrase “he who shall do her homage shall live, he who shall speak evil in blasphemy of her Majesty shall die.”
¹⁶
This statement is not typically found on a New Kingdom funerary temple, leading us to wonder what criticisms people were actually whispering about Hatshepsut’s reign. Despite such a warning, there is no evidence that Hatshepsut killed any of her officials for noncompliance. To the contrary, the fact that Nefrure’s names may have been replaced during Hatshepsut’s reign indicates that she was not able to get her way all the time, and that she may have bent to the will of the majority who longed for traditional models of kingship.

There can be no doubt that Hatshepsut’s unprecedented power came at a price, literally, and during her reign officials were well compensated, spending more money on conspicuous displays of statuary and tombs than during any previous period in the New Kingdom. The number and size of the elites’ tomb chapels in western Thebes testify to the rapid uptick in wealth among her officials, riches they could only have earned under her watch. Officials commissioned numerous temple statues of themselves and competed with one another for the most unusual and impressive tomb chapel paintings and secret religious inscriptions.
¹⁷
To be sure, Hatshepsut ruled over a time of prosperity and expansion for Egypt, but this boom of nonroyal construction represented something more. The elites understood the unusual nature of the current kingship, as well as the affluence of the nation’s financial situation; they combined the two to create a perfect recipe for their personal enrichment, one that verged on bureaucratic blackmail. This new breed of king was dependent upon their approval, and collectively they seem to have taken advantage of their clout, asking for more tombs, more statues, more sacred texts—more than previous
officials ever felt they could demand. These men formulated new rules of style and convention and reveled in their creativity and one-upmanship.
¹⁸
Hatshepsut likely created her own monsters—nobles she bought off and had to keep compensating and elevating.
¹⁹

Luckily for Hatshepsut, Egypt’s current state of prosperity could support such payoffs to loyal men. Without gold from Nubia and the Eastern Desert, sacred stones from her quarries, turquoise from the Sinai, cedar from Lebanon, ebony from sub-Saharan Africa, electrum from the Eastern Desert, ivory, and panther skins from Punt, stores of grain from rich harvests, and trade with Phoenicians and Cretans of the Aegean, it is unlikely that Hatshepsut ever could have gained as much power as she did. She did not create her position as female king through bullying or charm; she bought it.

Hatshepsut also commodified her ability to talk to the gods. Many officials had their pious monarch painted into their tomb chapels because she could speak to divinity on their behalf.
²⁰
These “loyalist” depictions provide some clue as to the coercions and inducements that transpired during Hatshepsut’s reign, implying that there was something material and political to be gained from having a figure of Hatshepsut in one’s tomb and that an individual would thrive from showing the king such respect and demonstrate his favored status at court. There is no evidence that any officials refused to display such loyalty or, on the other end of the spectrum, that they were compelled to do so by force or threat; rather, it seems an oft-deployed tactic, and royally bestowed honor, to win and keep the king’s favor. Her officials knew that they needed to stay on her good side, or at the very least everyone was happy to ride the gravy train and toe the line.