The Woman Who Would Be King (43 page)

In keeping with Hatshepsut’s model, her officials and priests sought more immersion in religious mysteries and wider access to sacred books, which led to the first extensive papyri inscribed with the Book of the Dead. She instituted an intellectual theological renaissance in Thebes. Before that time, extracts of sacred books had appeared on funerary pieces like coffins or canopic jars, but now for the first time elites were being buried with lengthy and personalized papyri, which provided evidence of participation in the mysteries of divine renewal at a broader, abstracter, level than ever before. During her reign, people were writing new things down on papyrus and carving inscriptions into stone that they hadn’t ever recorded before.

In the end, Hatshepsut’s greatest accomplishment and most daring innovation was her methodical and calculated creation of the only truly successful female kingship in the ancient world. Historians can find almost no evidence of effective, formally defined, long-term female leadership from antiquity—not from the Mediterranean, the Near East, Africa, Central Asia, or the New World. These societies—city-states, regional states, or vast empires—were inherently based on masculine dominance because of their reliance on kingship and dynastic succession. A woman could take the throne only when regional or imperial aggressions had removed all men from the centers of power or when a dynasty was at its end and all appropriate males in the royal family were dead. The only rivals to Hatshepsut’s models of female power would come later, from imperial China.
²⁹

In the ancient world, female power was made possible only in times of crisis; catastrophe was seemingly a prerequisite to a woman’s participation in an exclusively male system. Queen Tawosret of the Nineteenth Dynasty claimed the kingship alone for a mere two years after she had no son to continue her lineage; however, the only thing her reign brought about was the beginning of a new ruling family. Boudicca led her Britons against the aggressions of Rome around 60 CE, but only after that relentless imperial force had all but swallowed up her fiercest and most noble kinsmen. A few decades later, Cleopatra used her great wealth, intelligence, and sexuality
to tie herself to not one but two of Rome’s greatest warlords, just as Egypt was on the brink of provincial servitude. She bore offspring to Julius Caesar and Marc Antony in the hope that her children would bond Egypt’s dynastic succession to the fortunes of a victorious Roman warlord. Boudicca and Cleopatra gained power only once the Roman Empire threatened their people’s sovereignty and only because there were no remaining male candidates to lead the defense. Both women saw the destruction of their dynasty, their independence, their very way of life, and ultimately their own selves during the crises that defined their rule.

Not until the development of the modern nation-state did women like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great take on long-lasting mantles of power. The post–Roman Empire, Christian reconfiguration of a fragmented Europe depended on a delicate balance of intertwined dynastic bloodlines that always preferred the person, male or female, who had the clearest claim of descent. In other words, in an ethnically and linguistically divided Europe, when no man could be found to continue a ruling house’s bloodline, a female representative of the ruling family was generally preferred over handing the kingdom over to a “foreigner.”

Through all of antiquity, however, history records only one female ruler who successfully negotiated a systematic rise to power—without assassinations or coups—during a time of peace, who formally labeled herself with the highest position known in government, and who ruled for a significant stretch of time: Hatshepsut. She should have been no exception to the biological rules that stymied ancient women’s ability to hold political power—the vulnerabilities of their wombs, their childbearing abilities, their hormonal changes, their physical weakness. The ancient Egyptians themselves conceived of the Egyptian goddess not only as a womb for the regenerating god but also as an unstable and fickle feminine force—sometimes kind, other times vicious—that could decide on a whim to destroy or to safeguard. Feminine power was a dangerous energy that needed to be contained and placated, not encouraged or expanded. As a rule, women in ancient Egypt were only allowed to rule as a regent on behalf of a man, as Ahmes-Nefertari did for her young son, or as the last living member of a ruling family, as Sobeknefru did on behalf of her dying dynasty. Given more latitude than in most other places in the ancient world, women in Egypt assumed leadership roles in the household and palace and every so often popped up on the political landscape as king of
all Egypt: Nitocris of Dynasty 6 (if Herodotus is to be believed), Sobeknefru of Dynasty 12, Hatshepsut of Dynasty 18, Nefertiti of Dynasty 18, Tawosret of Dynasty 19, and Cleopatra VII of the Ptolemaic dynasty, all of them, with the exception of Hatshepsut (and Nefertiti), the last gasp of their dynastic lineage (although Tawosret was not of royal blood and may have come to the kingship by murdering the young king for whom she was acting as regent: she showed none of Hatshepsut’s compassion, elegance, or political acuity).

In the eyes of the Egyptologist Betsy Bryan, Egyptian women fulfilled an important role: they were a reliable means of transferring elite lineage within a dynasty. Kings often married their highborn sisters because those elite women were connected to the people and families who were meant to be in power and thus could serve as receptacles to breed the next king.

Bryan describes female power as analogous to the spokes of a wheel radiating out from the king, the hub of the political system. The king required unions with multiple women to continue the royal lineage from himself to a son, but when that son did not materialize, a woman could—albeit rarely—become ruler of Egypt. As Bryan puts it, “Females were guarantors of dynasty continuity.”
³⁰
Thus, in a few cases, the desire to protect the interests of the ruling family could trump the imperative to have a male king rule Egypt, but usually only at the end of the line.

And so, as Bryan argues, royal women were sometimes essential in moments of great political uncertainty, when the ruling family needed a monarch with ironclad and uncontested connections to the family lineage. But once power returned to a man, all evidence of that woman’s rule was stifled, which explains why we have so little information about female kings of Egypt or anywhere else in the ancient world.
³¹

Hatshepsut learned firsthand that a female leader could not transmit succession through her own womb. As a queen, if she had produced a son, the boy could have acted as the next ruler. But as king, Hatshepsut was not, it seems, allowed to hand the reins of power to any of her own offspring, including her daughter. She may have tried to place the girl next in line for power, just as a man would do with his son. Her attempts to position Nefrure ultimately failed, and she may have even lived to see them collapse. Since Hatshepsut was essentially acting as a placeholder for Thutmose
III, any male child of her womb at this point in her reign would have produced a reaction even stronger than that against Nefrure. She was ruling alongside a masculine ruler as coregent.
He
was the spoke of the political wheel. She was just the insurance policy against the young king’s unexpected death and an interim solution to his temporary youth and inexperience.

Hatshepsut ruled Egypt in her own right, to be sure, and she ruled until her life ended. She was the ultimate working mother, hiring wet nurses and nannies to care for her offspring during those vulnerable years before her children reached the age of five. She may have even felt the ancient version of “mommy guilt” for relegating her precious daughter Nefrure to the care of others while she saw to the leadership of Egypt. But in the long term, Hatshepsut’s authority was finite and severely limited. A man could pass down rule to his male progeny in the ancient world whereas a woman could not—because when considering men as an economic construct, the male body will always outproduce the female body. He can create multiple children simultaneously, using the wombs of many women, but women can only depend on their one womb, with one (or, rarely, two) offspring in a given year. In a system dependent on royal succession, it was in
no
dynasty’s best interest to place a woman at the center of the wheel of political power. Evolutionarily speaking, this was tremendously inefficient. Even if she was surrounded by a series of men, a female ruler still could not secure the succession of her dynasty because her production of offspring would always be limited. Thus no female monarch could expect her rule to last long in any ancient complex society or, if she reigned until her death, to continue after her through her own female progeny. Her leadership would always conclude with a man resuming the throne.

All of this biological reality only makes Hatshepsut’s achievements that much more extraordinary. She was only twenty years old when she methodically consolidated power and catapulted herself into the highest office in the land. She stepped into the position of king during the Eighteenth Dynasty, when the Egyptian empire was experiencing a renaissance—imperialism made everyone rich, and new building
projects were under way, including the sprawling temples of Karnak and Luxor. Hatshepsut remains the only ancient woman who claimed absolute authority on a firm foundation when her civilization was at its most robust.

Her femininity was really the only strange part of her rule. In many ways, Hatshepsut’s unconventional kingship was an exercise in conformity. Apparently it was too much to expect the kingship to adapt to her womanhood. Instead, she fit herself into the patterns of kingship with which she had grown up, at least those in which a woman could conceivably participate. Like any successful male king, she waged imperial warfare and ruthlessly exploited the population of Nubia to enrich her gods and her people. She participated in the respected system of coregency in which an elder king fostered a junior king in a divinely inspired partnership, thus protecting the future kingship of Thutmose III. She created a masculine identity for herself so that she could perform and participate in religious rituals that demanded a male presence. She constructed temples and obelisks according to accepted traditions and left behind more stone temples and monuments than any previous Egyptian king. Her innovation was directed at sustaining a successful, if unusual and unprecedented, kingship. She wreaked no havoc on the economic and political systems around her; she led no insurrections. She made no revolutionary breaks with tradition but attempted to link herself to the unending line of masculine kings who had come before her. Hatshepsut’s kingship was a fantastic and unbelievable aberration, but little more than a necessity of the moment. Her feminine kingship was always to be perceived as a negative complication by the ancient Egyptians, a problem that could only be reconciled publicly and formally through its obliteration. After all her great accomplishments, despite her unique triumph, her fate was to be erased, expunged, silenced.

Thousands of years later, when archaeologists began to find traces of her rule, historians disparaged her character, saying little about her success and a great deal about how she had stolen the throne from its rightful heir, Thutmose III. They commented on her torrid affair with Senenmut and her audacity to make the ridiculous and scheming claim to be a man, or to celebrate a Sed festival, or to be the offspring of the gods. The chisel marks and smashed statues were seen by some as indications of some kind of transgression on her part, proof that she really was a bad woman in need of a beating. When historians began to correct the simplistic misconception
of Hatshepsut as an overreaching witch, some ended up turning her into a selfless, first-wave feminist, willing to sacrifice her sexuality for her career, dynasty, and family, paving the way for her nephew’s future success as king. And as for academia, most Egyptologists became so mired in the thousands of monuments, statues, and inscriptions she left behind that many forgot Hatshepsut was human at all.