The Woman Who Would Be King (4 page)

But before Hatshepsut was even born, despite Egypt’s resurgence on the imperial stage, there were storm clouds brewing. King Amenhotep I, who had helped to create all this prosperity, was facing a crisis. Despite twenty years of rule, there is no evidence that he produced any children at all.
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We can imagine the King’s Mother, Ahmes-Nefertari, hovering around him and procuring new queens and concubines for him after marriages to both of his sisters failed to produce the hoped-for boy—or any child for that matter. The Egyptians veiled any reference to disastrous outcomes related to the king in their formal historical texts and monuments, but the fact that Amenhotep I could not sire a living son cannot be disputed. It is possible that Amenhotep I was sterile, but the Egyptian royal family also practiced incest (and at times preferred it for political reasons); sex with his full sisters could have simply created deformed or gravely ill babies.

Incest is usually taboo, but it can be useful in the bedchambers of the powerful. In the case of ancient Egypt, it was justified by mythology. The very first god in all of creation, Atum, began existence floating weightless in the dark and infinite elements of precreation. Due to the lack of a partner beyond himself, he had sex with a part of himself (his hand
⁷
), thus magically producing his own birth and subsequently the first generation of male and female gods. This brother-sister pair, Shu and Tefnut, copulated with each other and produced the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut, another brother-sister pair who in turn produced the next generation of four children, each pairing up into brother-sister marriages: Seth married Nephthys, and Osiris married Isis. The office of the kingship descended directly from this lineage. Horus, king upon earth and the god whom the human king embodied in his palace, was the son of Osiris and Isis.

From this ancient Egyptian perspective, full brother-sister marriages were divinely inspired, and the Eighteenth Dynasty actually started with a full brother-sister marriage between King Ahmose I and Ahmes-Nefertari. The son they produced was Amenhotep I, and so perhaps we should not be surprised that the progeny of a fully incestuous relationship had trouble siring children, not only with his own sisters but also with other women. Ahmes-Nefertari, a sister-wife, was simultaneously aunt and mother to her own son. Amenhotep I may have had serious health issues throughout his life, although we cannot expect to find any mention of
them in the historical record. He came to the throne quite young, perhaps as a toddler, and his mother probably acted as regent and made decisions for him during much of his reign. Later depictions of Amenhotep I always pair him with his mother instead of his sister-wife Merytamen, perhaps an apt representation of political reality for a king with no offspring of his own.

We can imagine the throne room during the early years of the reign of Amenhotep I. A boy of perhaps four or five sits on (or near) the throne, being instructed by his tutors when he really wants to be outside playing. A general who needs a decision about a Nubian military campaign or a trading expedition enters. Who answers him? The boy’s mother, Ahmes-Nefertari, who is openly acknowledged to be the power behind his throne. It was common practice to assign the boy’s mother as regent for a king too young to rule, relying on her to make decisions beyond the child’s capabilities. It was a wise and safe practice, as even the most narcissistic mother was unlikely to betray her own son, cause his murder, or otherwise conspire against him. Such behavior would never have been in her own interest, since her power was inextricably connected to that of her child. A queen-regent would also be unlikely to alienate her son by ignoring or mistreating him, because as he grew into his power, any feelings of neglect or betrayal he harbored would only serve to ruin her. The system of queen-regent worked quite well in ancient Egypt, which was fortunate because most of the kings of the early Eighteenth Dynasty came to the throne as children, including Ahmose I and Amenhotep I.
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Typically, royal Egyptian women owed everything to the men to whom they were attached and only wielded power when they had a close connection to the king—as a mother, wife, daughter, or sister. The regency system worked because these women were invested with real, if temporary, power. It was a system of self-interested incentives revolving around the king.

Ahmes-Nefertari was more than just a queen-regent, however. She was one of the first royal women (perhaps the second if her mother, Queen Ahhotep,
⁹
was the first) to hold a newly influential religious office: the role of a priestess called the God’s Wife of Amen. Like Atum or Ptah (the craftsman god of the northern city of Memphis), Amen was a creator god.
¹⁰
His regeneration, through his own agency, was the miracle that kept the Egyptian cosmos perpetually self-creating. The Egyptian temple
of Karnak facilitated Amen’s ongoing process of creation.
¹¹
If the temple walls did not keep out enemies and profanity, if the offerings were not made, if the god was not fed, if the God’s Wife did not facilitate his rebirth, then, it was believed, creation would stop—or at least the creation that benefited the people of Egypt would collapse. The Nile might cease to flood its banks every year, leaving no life-giving silt and mud in which to farm. The sun could fail to rise in the east every morning, depriving the crops of life-giving rays.

Egyptian texts clearly state how Amen of Thebes (or Atum of Heliopolis, who was the older manifestation of some of the same religious ideas of creation) enacted his self-creation through an act of masturbation with the God’s Hand, a priestess (often the God’s Wife) appointed to the temple ostensibly to provide the “activity” that a statue of a god was unable to provide for himself.
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There were probably multiple cult statues that required such assistance, one residing in each of the Theban temples. Each statue was most likely made of solid precious metal that the Egyptians believed constituted the flesh of the gods—gold, silver, or electrum—and probably crafted with an erect penis full of potentiality and creation.

These active statues were not uncommon in ancient Egypt. In fact, the oldest known Egyptian monumental statuary, dating to before 3000 BCE, shows standing male gods performing masturbation (their display caused no end of embarrassment to Victorian museum curators and visitors).
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But for the ancient Egyptians, this act was the most sacred moment of creation, the alpha and the omega of everything, ground zero for the continuation of this world as they knew it. These mysteries had to be facilitated and witnessed by a cadre of elites with religious training. Second in importance only to men like the First High Priest of Amen at Karnak or the First High Priest of Ptah at Memphis, the God’s Wife of Amen was one of the elite few allowed into the sanctuary of the god to see him unveiled with all his vulnerable bits exposed and extended. She may have considered herself as separate from the god, protecting him, exciting him, but she must have also known the deeper mysteries of the rites: that she was part of him, an essential element of the agency that kick-started the universe every day.

Ahmes-Nefertari was getting old, which limited her ability to sexually excite Amen, and perhaps the role of God’s Hand had already been given to a younger princess. But at some point, she passed the priestess position of
God’s Wife on to her own daughter, Merytamen, a much younger woman and the sister-wife of Amenhotep I.
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Ahmes-Nefertari still retained the title of God’s Wife; it was her most important role—more central to her than King’s Great Wife, King’s Sister, or King’s Mother, a trifecta of royal titles for an influential Egyptian woman and a testament to the great religious and political power she amassed in her lifetime.

Despite her great political power, she couldn’t will a grandson into being. Toward the end of her son’s reign, Ahmes-Nefertari must have found herself anxious about the prospects of the Ahmoside dynasty’s continuation. At some point, that anxiety would have turned to fatalism, and perhaps she even aided her son in finding a successor who was not of direct lineage. Amenhotep I had no living son, but a careful decision could still be made that preserved Egypt’s bright prospects. Presumably Amenhotep I had no surviving brothers, so ultimately the throne passed to a middle-aged elite man from Thebes named Thutmose (Djehutymes, “the One Born of Thoth,” the moon god of Hermopolis), a man who would go on to become Aakheperkare Thutmose, whom Egyptologists call Thutmose I. This king would flourish, expanding Egypt’s borders, increasing its wealth, and waging great battles in Syria-Palestine to the north and in Nubia to the south. He would begin building up Egypt’s sacred temples in stone, and he would raise the status of the god Amen to an unprecedented level. This official who became king was Hatshepsut’s father.

Thutmose I was not of direct royal birth. He never called himself King’s Son. He probably had connections to the family of Amenhotep I but was not himself the son of a king.
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He never once tells us who his father was—which is strange in itself—perhaps because the situation of continuing a defunct dynasty demanded his silence. Thutmose I was most likely a general before he was picked to become king. How he was chosen and why are never stated; such messy details were avoided in any formal or official Egyptian records. Kingship was a divine office, and it was not to be viewed as the subject of political haggling and horse-trading. Any real-world discussions of who would be the next king and why
were kept strictly verbal. Thoughts about the royal family were whispered, obliquely discussed among a few colleagues, or kept within one’s mind; they were certainly not committed to papyrus.

Perhaps Thutmose was the strongest of the strongmen in contention for the throne. Or maybe he was the one with the closest lineage of descent to the now-defunct Ahmoside dynasty. He could have been one of King Amenhotep I’s tutors and part of the royal household. It’s possible that he and the king were good friends from the wars in Syria-Palestine. Whatever the relationship and the circumstances, Thutmose I may have felt as if he did not belong on the throne at first, even if he was groomed for the position years in advance. It must have been a strange thing to step into such a sacred and formalized office instead of being born into its oddities and intricacies.

Regardless of any feelings of inadequacy, he would have executed his duties to the best of his ability, knowing that kingship was essential to the survival of Egypt and the Egyptian people. Politics and religion went hand in hand in Egypt: if there was no king, there was only cosmic chaos. The king supervised military, political, economic, legal, and religious affairs, all of which were imbued with ideological weight. Wars were divinely inspired and divinely won, and all spoils went to the gods as gifts. Political power was granted to the king from the time his bones were knitted together in the womb, even before his accession. Kingship was a mysterious and timeless creation.

Even a king’s economic power depended on his connection to the gods: if he pleased them, they would manifest a good Nile flood, which laid down a rich layer of mud so that the seeds of wheat and barley could be sown—as opposed to a disastrously low Nile inundation or a devastatingly high flood, both of which would result in drought, disease, and conflict. For the Egyptians, wheat and barley
were
money, and essentially money grew in the rich mud the Nile inundation left behind every year. That economic wealth was a gift of the gods. Prospects were good now, but perhaps Thutmose I worried that the gods’ whims would turn against him and toward devastation.

Thutmose must have keenly felt the weight of this unexpected responsibility. Any of his legal decisions as king would be wrapped up in an Egyptian religious-ethical concept called
ma’at
, meaning “order,” “truth,” or “justice.”
Ma’at
was simply the way things were meant to function when a
good king was in power, making effective, well-reasoned, fair decisions, when everyone knew their place, how to behave, and what was expected of them.