The Woman Who Would Be King (36 page)

Throughout the process, men assisted with basins of water to allow the chief embalmer to wash his bloody hands. Priests would have chanted spells and kept the incense pellets burning until a new set of instruments was brought. At this point, the embalmer would have selected a long metal hooked tool and approached Hatshepsut’s head, leaning down so that he was face-to-face with the mighty king, his chin at her forehead, before carefully inserting the tool into the nose of the corpse. He likely reached for another tool from the tray—a small mallet, which he could use to smack the metal stick sharply until he heard the crunch of the ethmoid bone giving way. After repeating this gesture on the other nostril, he would have inserted a long-handled spoon into the skull cavity and scooped out bit after bit of brain through the nose, trying to remove large chunks to speed the work, but not so large that his actions would harm the nostrils, certainly knowing that any impatience would result in a dilated and deformed nose.

When the spoon no longer pushed easily through soft, fatty brain matter but collided with the back of the skull, Hatshepsut’s corpse would have been turned facedown and tilted feet up so that the rest of the brain matter could slide toward the nostrils for removal. With no way to take out the brain in one piece, its removal was laborious and time-consuming. Hatshepsut’s brain tissue was thus not embalmed, but likely saved for burial in a mummification cache, a collection of used embalming materials and bits of human tissue. One did not just throw away the remnants of a pharaoh’s putrefaction; this was a god’s body, after all.

The body cavity would then have been packed inside and out with natron salts to draw out the moisture, the salts either held in linen bags or left loose like sand. Hatshepsut’s naked body, rounded with middle age, was likely covered by these salts for weeks; when the natron became soaked with liquids after a few days, the embalming priests would apply a fresh salt treatment, slowly and carefully drawing all the moisture from Hatshepsut’s body. This curing process lasted for more than a month, during which time the corpse was never left unattended. The king’s body was believed to be like the god’s statue in a sanctuary; it was meant to be safeguarded and cared for, while priests chanted spells, made offerings, and
burned incense night and day. Hatshepsut herself was finally receiving the ritual attention that she had been trained to perform as a girl and had done for countless gods in countless sanctuaries as king. As a mummy, she was transformed into a god, clothed, anointed, and revered.

When the body was finally cured, it would have appeared brittle and brown, with its hair and toenails in danger of falling away; Hatshepsut’s face contracted to the skull; her eye cavities sunken under closed eyelids; her body shed of its fat and lifelike fullness; and her ribs protruding through slack folds of grayish-brown skin. To rectify this, the embalmers would have dipped their hands into precious oils and fats, which they carefully poured over and massaged into the royal corpse, granting it pliability and flexibility. They used fatty unguents and fragrant tree resins to treat every part of the king’s body. A funnel was likely placed into the nostrils, and aromatic resins were even poured into the empty skull cavity.

When the body was ready for wrapping, embalmers would have worked closely with priests who chanted transformative spells while the first layers of sacred temple linens—specially woven for the occasion—were wound about the corpse. Necklaces and collars were placed around Hatshepsut’s neck, rings on fingers and toes, belts around her waist, and a golden diadem upon her head. Each finger and toe was likely individually wrapped over the jewelry, adding layer after layer of finely woven temple linen, restoring fullness to the corpse and lending sacred protection to the sanctity of this holy body. When the embalming was finally complete, after about two and a half months, the Egyptians believed the corpse of Hatshepsut had become Osiris, ready to be interred into his tomb.

Thutmose III would have received word when the embalming was done—it was his responsibility to act as chief priest at the funerary rituals of his aunt and co-king. He may have even visited the house of embalming to ensure that the wrapped body was properly prepared for the transformation rituals.
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It was his duty to bring the body of Maatkare Hatshepsut to the temple of Djeser Djeseru for the last time.

The procession from the temple to the river was orchestrated to be a demonstration of grief: some priests beat drums as they walked, officials and other priests dressed in their finest white linen with bowed, freshly shaved heads followed behind, and elites in their wigs and finery made a
more stoic march. Hatshepsut’s women would have provided a stark contrast, ripping at their clothing and beating their breasts, throwing sand and dirt upon their heads. The royal children may have trailed along, their eyes wide at seeing their first royal funeral. Nefrure may have paced in the procession as God’s Wife of Amen, behind her king and husband, Thutmose III.

Oxen would have dragged the prepared corpse and gilded coffins on sleds toward Djeser Djeseru on Thebes’s west bank in Hatshepsut’s last sacred festival procession. Her canopic chest—containing her stomach, liver, lungs, and intestines, each in its own cylindrical container—followed on another sled. Servants would have carried stools, tables, chests, boxes with wigs and clothing, sheets and food, makeup, and sandals. Priests likely bore shrines containing the statues of divinities, sacred papyri, and boxes containing mummified meats. Others brought amphorae of beer and wine. This long and opulent procession wound its way to the quay where all of these necessary commodities were loaded on a Nile boat for the king’s last journey to the west.
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The rituals inside Hatshepsut’s funerary temple must have lasted for many days, if not weeks. Thutmose III, now the sole living king, would have acted as her son and heir in the Opening of the Mouth rite when her mummy was placed upon its feet so the living king could touch different parts of the body with sacred instruments, thus enlivening her mouth and eyes, opening her ears, and enabling her arms and hands to be cut loose from their bonds of death, so they might reach out and touch and take again. Food was offered in a lengthy ritual meal. Drums banged. Sistra shook. Chanting filled the room.

Hatshepsut’s death rites visited all of the cult spaces within her funerary temple, connecting the dead Hatshepsut with a series of divinities, including Amen, Hathor, Re-Horakhty, Anubis, Ptah-Sokar-Osiris (an amalgamation of mummiform gods who have the power to resurrect themselves), and even her deified father, Thutmose I. The cult space dedicated to Hatshepsut as a woman was inscribed with the Book of Hours
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and chapter 148 from the Book of the Dead.
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Here Thutmose III probably enacted hourly incantations connecting Hatshepsut’s transformations with the sun god’s movement. Her mummy was probably set up like a cult statue in this consecrated sanctuary, as rituals enabled a sacred transfer of power from Hatshepsut to her nephew.

Now believed transformed in her Temple of Millions of Years, Hatshepsut’s mummy would have been placed back into the coffin, loaded on the sacred sled once again, and dragged over the dirt and sand roads in yet another stately procession. Attended by all of Thebes along the way, her revitalized corpse was eventually brought to the valley hidden behind the cliff face of her funerary temple, its entrance nestled high in the western mountain sacred to the goddess Hathor. The crowd was not allowed into this mysterious valley, home of the Thutmoside kings.

Hatshepsut was probably less than forty when she died. Despite the claims of a Discovery Channel television show
The Lost Queen
, her mummy has still not been firmly identified. Given that there is no direct evidence for any kind of foul play,
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Hatshepsut probably died the same way most people did in her day: from a viral or bacterial inflammation of some kind. She must have already suffered her share of infections and survived—perhaps tuberculosis or malaria or eye maladies—but each would have taken a toll on her health. With a steady supply of rich palace food, malnourishment wasn’t an issue, but her diet also meant she would not have kept the trim shape of a young woman into middle age. Still, as a woman required to be on her feet for much of her daily duties, walking before processions and performing cult rituals in temples throughout Egypt, it’s unlikely that she was the indolent, lazy monarch some claim she was.
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Hatshepsut seems to have been treated with care and respect at her death. Indeed, objects recovered from western Thebes indicate that she was buried as the king she claimed to be.
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As Hatshepsut’s corpse was transported to her sacred tomb, the procession would have thinned to less than a dozen people, not counting the craftsmen and laborers pulling the corpse and all the funerary objects. Only those initiated in the mysteries of royal burial and transformation could enter and perform the necessary rituals, including another Opening of the Mouth. It is possible that Nefrure, as God’s Wife of Amen, was able to accompany her mother’s body into the tomb, ready to act as a grieving goddess for the king, a sacred bird who spread her wings over the deceased in protection. There is no reason, however, to believe that Senenmut, a highly placed bureaucrat, would have been allowed to take part in such a hallowed procession.

By the time Hatshepsut was placed into her sarcophagus in her tomb, she had been dead for almost three months. Her mummy may have been covered with a shroud similar to the decorated cloth that was later placed
over the body of her nephew Thutmose III. The words on the surface of his linen linked the king inextricably with the sun god: “His ba soul is your ba soul. His corpse is your corpse. Re says to Menkheperre: You are like me, my own second self.” This total identification of the king with the sun god was included in the Litany of Re, which listed the seventy-four different manifestations of the sun god.
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The series of nested coffins containing Hatshepsut’s mummy was then placed in a quartzite sarcophagus. The coffins are now lost (apart from some fragments found elsewhere in the Valley of the Kings), but the sarcophagus in which she was buried lies today in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Despite the Egyptians’ obsession with dates and regnal years, the actual date of Hatshepsut’s death is also a mystery. We know that Thutmose III left for his great Syrian campaign in year 22, and because there was no mention of Hatshepsut in the inscriptions recording those battles, Egyptologists assume that Hatshepsut died in or just before year 22, probably just shy of forty years of age. She had spent her childhood as the God’s Wife of Amen during the reign of her father, Thutmose I, a few years as chief queen to a short-lived king, seven years as a regent to a child king, and fifteen years in a coregency with her nephew-king, Thutmose III. Neither she nor her daughter had sons who survived to take kingly office. Despite not having an heir herself, Hatshepsut had trained Thutmose III, creating the conditions for him and his offspring to continue what she had created. Her legacy thus lived on through the Thutmoside line she had scratched and clawed and fought to maintain, against all the odds. She may have died aware of her unprecedented achievements, knowing that all was in place for her legacy to be celebrated for millennia after. Hatshepsut died as king, and she was buried as such—serving forever as this ancient land’s longest-lived and most successful female monarch. Egypt would not be ruled by another such woman for fifteen hundred years.

But if Hatshepsut had hoped to be buried alongside her father, Thutmose III had other ideas. The dead do not bury themselves, after all. He seems to have moved the mummy of his grandfather from Hatshepsut’s tomb and into KV 38, which was either Thutmose I’s original tomb or a new tomb made especially for his grandfather by Thutmose III. In any case, the dedicatory inscriptions on the sarcophagus and canopic chest that came to house Thutmose I in KV 38 show that they were made for the reinterment by Thutmose III. Poor Thutmose I could not rest in peace,
his mummy moved first by Hatshepsut and then by his grandson. Everyone wanted to claim lineage from this great man to form a royal dynastic mythology. Thutmose III’s future kingship depended on creating his own direct connection to his grandfather.

Whether Nefrure lived on after her mother’s death is still a matter of debate, as is the fate of Senenmut. If they were still alive, how they reacted to Hatshepsut’s end is not known, but her death must have devastated both of them, if in different ways. Nefrure lost more than a mother; Hatshepsut had been her best means to acquire further political power. Without Hatshepsut there, Nefrure’s position as highest-ranking wife was likely threatened; indeed, Satiah, the daughter of treasurer Ahmose Pennekhbet, seems to have been promoted to chief wife after Hatshepsut’s death. As for Senenmut, Hatshepsut had provided the only means for him to gain and keep economic power. After she was gone, not only did he never climb another rung of the Theban social ladder, but he fell off completely.