Read The Woman Who Would Be King Online
Authors: Kara Cooney
The Woman Who Would Be King (16 page)
Thutmose III was not just a figurehead, despite his age. It was believed that his kingship was developing inside him as the years passed. We can imagine Hatshepsut gently but firmly guiding her charge, a young king with a crown that was too big, through sacred and essential rituals. As the God’s Wife, she occasionally acted on behalf of the king in the temple, but she would have still required his presence for many rituals. He had to learn his place in the world sooner rather than later, and she likely put him to the task of learning his ritual and political responsibilities as young as possible. Throughout it all, Thutmose III watched her interact with officials, priests, administrators, palace women, and palace children; she was his greatest role model for wielding true power.
Thutmose III’s bold actions in his later reign do not give the impression that he turned into a spoiled king given to excess or narcissism. Indeed, he seems to have become a controlled and shrewd man, one who knew his own mind and trusted in his own abilities. As a boy, he was likely not given much leniency, and much was expected from him. We can assume that Thutmose III did not get his own way all the time, even though he was king. Hatshepsut must have played a role in this disciplined upbringing.
In fact, if we step back and look at the situation into which this child was thrust, we can see that the burden placed on him at such a young age was extraordinary, on par with Hatshepsut’s own. Thutmose III assumed a position for which he was simultaneously training. One wonders when he recognized the profound weight of it all—that the universe’s continued creation, the rising and setting of the sun in an organized fashion, the proper flooding and receding of the Nile, the safety of his land, the continued presence of the gods in their temples all depended on
him
, the rituals that
he
enacted, on
his
communication with the gods. At some point in his youth, he became aware that this burden would lay upon his shoulders
forever: he was a god, and upon his death he would rise to the heavens and join with the Imperishable Stars in the northern horizon. His heavenly burdens separated him from the people around him, shrouding him in loneliness, perhaps driving him toward activities that were anchored to the dirt and reality of this world.
Or maybe he never had such a moment of panicked clarity, because Hatshepsut was always there sharing his burden of rule and making sure his officials and priests were behaving, allowing Thutmose III to learn his craft as a ruler without the threat of betrayals or insolence toward a king who was too inexperienced to thwart them. Hatshepsut saw to it that he lived in a prosperous, expanding empire, with obedient vassals and secure sources of revenue. In many ways, Hatshepsut’s regency gave Thutmose III time to breathe, grow up, and foster his own skills. She was probably also the only other person in the palace who felt the depth and complexity of these responsibilities, the only other person in the entire world who could understand his anxieties.
Most of his education in kingship would have taken place at court, including a great deal of on-the-job training in the throne room or beyond Egypt’s borders in the land of the subjugated enemy. There was no need to make up arithmetic problems: just present the year’s tax revenue and ask him to allocate it. He didn’t have to be encouraged to learn his hieratic: he could read the dispatches from Nubia that had everyone so alarmed. The necessities of execution and punishment didn’t have to be explained to him in painstaking detail: he saw men impaled, staked, mutilated, or exposed firsthand, ostensibly on his orders.
Thutmose III also had formal instruction led by tutors who kept him on task. They taught him the many facets of the ancient and complicated Egyptian language. Although he likely learned no foreign languages, he was busy enough. He needed to master both hieroglyphic sacred inscriptions and hieratic cursive scripts. He learned the Middle and Old Egyptian of five hundred to one thousand years earlier. Even though no one spoke in such an archaic fashion anymore, these were the languages of the Pyramid Texts, the “Tale of Sinuhe,” and the “Instruction of Ptahhotep.” Mastering the oldest language forms would have been akin to learning the Greek of Plato for a Roman patrician or reading Beowulf at Oxford. He never really wrote the common vernacular that was spoken around him; even in letters, his language was formalized and archaic, befitting
an immortal king who had ruled for millennia and who would continue to rule Egypt forever. He also studied ethics, as passed down through the instruction texts of his forefathers, as in “Ptahhotep,” and learned to be a wise judge:
If you are a man who leads, who controls the affairs of the many, seek out every beneficent deed that your conduct may be blameless. Great is justice, lasting in effect, unchallenged since the time of Osiris. One punishes the transgressor of laws, although the greedy one overlooks this.
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And he learned about the divine responsibilities of kingship from the “Instruction for King Merikare”:
Work for god, and he will work for you also—with offerings that make the altar flourish, with carvings that proclaim your name. God thinks of him who works for him. Well tended is mankind—god’s cattle. He made sky and earth for their sake. He subdued the water monster. He made breath for their noses to live. They are his images who came from his body. He shines in the sky for their sake. He made for them plants and cattle, fowl and fish to feed them. He slew his foes, reduced his children when they thought of making rebellion. He makes daylight for their sake. He sails by to see them. He has built his shrine around them. When they weep he hears. He made for them rulers in the egg, leaders to raise the back of the weak. He made for them magic as weapons to ward off the blow of events, guarding them by day and by night. He has slain the traitors among them as a man beats his son for his brother’s sake, for god knows every name.
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He also exercised his body. Thutmose would have been trained in the art of battle—in the athletics of warfare and hunting, archery, charioteering, as well as dagger and scimitar handling. Unlike Hatshepsut, Thutmose III was expected to spend time out of doors, where he wore nothing but a short kilt and allowed his skin to bronze to a dark brown, hunting game in the desert, hippos in the marshes, or fish along the river.
And, of course, he spent countless hours in the temple, memorizing the secret names of gods that were only revealed to the initiated, absorbing never-ending temple liturgies, and digesting theological treatises, as he worked toward the performance of vital and imperative rituals. He
probably started this process as young as three or four years old. As he got older, Thutmose III likely began to ask his priestly instructors questions that led to vibrant theological discourse about the nature of gods and the universe, divinity’s connection to this world, and the king’s place in it. For this boy, temple mysteries became normal and familiar. The grand temples of Egypt, birthplaces of the gods and machines of the universe, were where Thutmose III played, literally, while lengthy festivals and rites were taking place; kind priests might have crafted toys for their young king or encouraged him to find secret passages in the pylons and the crypts. In many ways, he probably felt that the gods’ abode—with its stillness, cool stone walls, inlaid gates, gilded columns, the sounds of chanting, the smell of incense, the cries of the calves, and the acrid tang of sacrificial blood—was his own beloved home as well.
We do not know how old he was at the time of his official religious initiation to the temple mysteries, but given his position as king, he was probably quite young. According to Thutmose III himself, it occurred just after his selection as king by the oracle. This is clearly an exaggeration—he was only a toddler at the time of his coronation—but the same text in which Thutmose III recollects how Amen chose him to be king tells us that after this ceremony he flew up to heaven as a divine falcon, using the body of his incarnation, Horus upon earth, to come into contact with the divine world. When he arrived in the celestial realm, the gates of heaven were thrown open for him, allowing him to cross the sky. There, he expressed his love for the gods, whose mysterious forms he contemplated. He saw the manifestation of the sun god on his descent in the west and on his rising in the east, and in between the two, in the land of the dead. He was able to understand the true nature of the universe. And then he returned to Egypt to inhabit his earthly body again, to rule Egypt as a divine Horus.
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This is heady stuff, at any age. From his first memories, Thutmose III knew that he was exceptional, able to commune with the gods in an intimacy and with an intricacy to which few others had access. The only other person who seemed to share those same abilities and duties was his stepmother, his aunt, his regent, the God’s Wife of Amen, Hatshepsut.
During the early part of her career as regent, Hatshepsut wore the long linen gown of a queen and priestess; her
head was covered by a vulture headdress and her forehead decorated with a cobra. Her mother, Ahmes, may still have been alive at this time, although we have little record of her. In many ways, Hatshepsut had simply taken over where her mother had left off, acting as regent for the new male king and relying on memories of her own mother’s regency as her best model for rule.
Yet Hatshepsut surpassed her mother and built a career not solely connected to a man’s power—because she also maintained her role as Egypt’s highest priestess. Hatshepsut continued her temple duties as God’s Wife of Amen during this time, and she quickly began to lay the groundwork for the future care and satisfaction of her god under this new king. Hatshepsut probably trained her daughter Nefrure for the God’s Wife of Amen position personally and attentively. The young girl likely shadowed her mother in the temple during the daily meals and all festival processions, learning the rituals at a young age just as Hatshepsut had done before her. Nefrure was in training alongside Thutmose III—two small children inhabiting roles much bigger than they could comprehend.
During this vulnerable and liminal time, Hatshepsut was the only one who could build the pillars of Thutmose III’s new kingship, and she began a campaign of temple renewal throughout Egypt and Nubia. One scene, commissioned by her at Semna temple in Nubia, shows her with Thutmose III carved as a man, not a boy. Hatshepsut chose to show herself wearing a long gown and to name herself God’s Wife of Amen and King’s Wife. Texts tell us that Thutmose III and Hatshepsut rescued this temple from ruin. Even though Thutmose III was the king in body, it was Hatshepsut who enacted a systematic program of monumental building to ensure that her rule was depicted alongside his throughout the land and that her image as a woman of authority was carved in Egypt’s sacred temples.
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Her mother, Ahmes, had done the same for herself and Hatshepsut during the reign of Thutmose II. But now Hatshepsut went even further, claiming more space for herself in the temples she built for her young charge. Such depictions of a God’s Wife were unprecedented, just like her powerful regency.
As she strengthened Thutmose III’s kingship with new buildings, she also erected sacred monuments in the name of her dead husband, perhaps reminding her people why she, and not another, served as regent. In the temple of Khnum, the god who the Egyptians believed created the world
on his potter’s wheel, located on Elephantine Island in Egypt’s south, just above Nubia, Hatshepsut set up a statue of Thutmose II, with the inscription “for her brother,” thus making the pious addition as much about her as about the dead monarch.
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She also began a series of stone monuments at Karnak, now only preserved as blocks, on which the dead Thutmose II filled a prominent role. Hatshepsut seems to have been playing up her connection to Thutmose II in these monuments, perhaps with the realization that her connection to his son Thutmose III—as his aunt—was only tenuous and by no means direct. It is as if she was manipulating the monuments to rewrite history: perhaps she thought that if she focused on her relationship with the father, everyone might begin to see the son as hers, too.
