The Woman Who Would Be King (44 page)

Through the millennia, we have called powerful women many things—bitches, witches, regents, seductresses. And we have demanded that women relinquish their sexuality to assume authority, including the God’s Wives of Amen of the Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Sixth Dynasties, vestal virgins of ancient Rome, Catholic nuns, and countless women of the 1970s and ’80s in business or government or academia. In the ancient world (and in many places today), women who made decisions about their own bodies were at first seen as threatening to systems of power and were usually considered nothing more than immoral sluts. The women of antiquity who held political and military power can be counted on the fingers of one hand—women like Boudicca, Empress Lü, Cleopatra, and Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut’s story can help us appreciate why authoritative women are still often considered to be dangerous beings who need to be controlled, monitored, contained, and watched.

Hatshepsut had to carve out her own niche in a society that identified power with masculinity. To do this, she had to explore what feats a woman could accomplish: commission obelisks the likes of which Egypt had never seen or trade with far-flung lands like Punt. She recorded a step-by-step account of her divine origins from Amen-Re and how the god’s statue revealed that she was chosen to rule all of Egypt. The challenges Hatshepsut faced and the sacrifices she made are familiar to powerful women of the twenty-first century: balancing the personal and the political, overcoming stereotypes of hysterical and unbalanced femininity, and making compromises never asked of powerful men. For Hatshepsut, her unprecedented success was rewarded with a short memory, while the failures of other female leaders from antiquity will be forever immortalized in our cultural consciousness.

This book was started when my son was just a few months old and finished at his fourth birthday. No woman should write a book during those years. No one. And yet I am glad that Hatshepsut picked me at this time in my life. The hard edges of sleep deprivation and the complexities of breast-feeding and child care demanded that I not forget the biological and economic truths of womanhood. Thank you, Julian, for providing hard realities that I had blithely ignored (and denied) in my twenties and early thirties. I could not have understood Hatshepsut then.

The idea for this book came from
Out of Egypt
, a comparative archaeology television series I developed and produced with my husband, Neil Crawford. We never did do an episode on women in power, but Hatshepsut remained on my brain. Thus when book agent Marc Gerald suggested I write a biography on Hatshepsut (and after I had initially replied, “I can’t write a biography about Hatshepsut”), I took on the task with enthusiasm. If he hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t have written the book. Thank you, Marc, for telling me what you wanted to read (instead of accepting what I thought a young academic should write).

I am deeply (and profoundly) grateful to my husband, Neil Crawford, for reading the manuscript multiple times with relentless attention. If there is any narrative life in this biography, it is because of him. Neil is always my sounding board for ideas about human systems and personal motivations, and I am grateful for the time he gave to these discussions and revisions. I was never more nervous than when he was reading the manuscript for the first time. I’m thankful that my most honest critic also loves me so much. He also took Julian to Disneyland, the park, Fast
Taco, etc., while I wrote. I will always be grateful that my life has been shaped by his considerable influence.

I’m indebted to Betsy Bryan, my dear
Doktormutter
from Johns Hopkins University, who provided a profound role model of a woman in power. While I was at graduate school, I had no idea how hard it must have been for her to balance a growing career and family; now I can’t believe she came through unscathed. I couldn’t have written this book—with its unorthodox interest in human emotions and intents—without her blessing. She is more a master of the Eighteenth Dynasty than I will ever be.

Thanks are also due to old friends JJ Shirley and Violaine Chauvet, both alums of Johns Hopkins, for reading the manuscript, providing bibliography, talking over ideas, and for encouraging me to write a readable and smart biography of Hatshepsut. I owe much to our conversations (and some frantic e-mails about sources and facts). I will return the favor.

My dear friend Rebecca Peabody at the Getty Research Institute has been a confidante from the proposal stage to publication. Like me, she always has a gig on the side. Rebecca is knowledgeable and skilled in the ways of publishing, and I benefited from her experience. She was the first to read anything from the manuscript, and her support encouraged me when I needed it most. To have the encouragement of a fellow academic (and non-Egyptologist!) while writing a nontraditional book delivered me from many anxieties along the way.

Aidan Dodson, an Egyptologist who knows his Eighteenth Dynasty history much better than I do, read the manuscript, alerting me to red flags and potential problems. Although we didn’t always agree (as I’m sure he’d want me to point out), I am grateful for his attention to this biography.

Deborah Shieh acted as my research assistant. Her drawings of Karnak and of temple blocks were skillfully and patiently done. She also kindly fetched books, scanned countless images, worked on bibliographies, and performed other technical tasks. I could not have completed this project without her help.

My colleagues and students at UCLA have been patient listening to me talk about women and power for years upon years. My course on the subject at UCLA is now taken by many enthusiastic undergraduates (not all women, I might add), and whether they like it or not, they will soon be reading this book.

My family—my mother and father, sisters and brother—have all
supported me throughout the writing of this book, always simultaneously confused by and proud of my intense interest in the ancient world. In particular, I need to thank my mother, Pamela Cooney, who provided me with my first model of a woman with authority. She helped me write this book in more ways than she knows. My sister Erin Cooney also threw her considerable attention and energies my (and Julian’s) way, as did Jim and Kelli Cooney whenever I was in New York.

I thank Vanessa Mobley, my editor at Crown, who understands my preoccupation with women and power deep in her own soul. Because this book was written while both our children were very young, we always understood, without ever having to communicate it outright, the panicked inability to finish a project with any kind of elegance or timeliness. I am grateful for her patience with my messy process.

Finally, much of this book was written at a Mexican joint across the street from me, and I owe thanks to Martin, Mario, Carmen, Rosendo, Sandra, Manuel, Erick, and many more whose names I don’t know but whose faces I recognize. All of them facilitated my concentrated work, even on Taco Tuesday.

1.
My thoughts on this subject have been informed by a class I recently developed at UCLA called Women and Power in the Ancient World, in which we examine biological and social motivators for women’s lesser place in politics in complex society, including R. D. Masters and F. de Waal, “Gender and Political Cognition: Integrating Evolutionary Biology and Political Science,”
Politics and the Life Sciences
8, no. 1 (1989): 3–39; M. Ingalhalikar et al., “Sex Differences in the Structural Connectome of the Human Brain,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(2013); Carol R. Ember, “The Relative Decline in Women’s Contribution to Agriculture,”
American Anthropologist
85, no. 2 (1983): 285–304; Ernestine Friedl, “Society and Sex Roles,”
Human Nature
(April 1978), reprinted in
Anthropology 94/95
(Guilford, CT: Dushkin Publishing, 1994), 124–29; Bella Vivante,
Women’s Roles in Ancient Civilizations: A Reference Guide
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).

1.
There are no texts from Hatshepsut’s time—historical, administrative, religious, or otherwise—that betray openly expressed negative feelings toward the ruling king or political activities of officials. We do have veiled references from earlier Middle Kingdom literary texts that obliquely discuss the regicide of Amenemhat I, the instability of the times, and the royal family’s inability to trust any of the courtiers and officials. See Miriam Lichtheim,
Ancient Egyptian Literature
, vol. 1,
The Old and Middle Kingdoms
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 135–38. Later legal texts will point toward another regicide, that of Ramses III in Dynasty 20, and the involvement of the royal harem. See Susan Redford,
The Harem Conspiracy: The Murder of Ramesses III
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). The Tale of Wenamen, a text from the end of Dynasty 20 that belongs to both the literary and historical genres, reveals the opinion that the Egyptian king had lost his power over foreign lands and even his own country. See
Miriam Lichtheim,
Ancient Egyptian Literature
, vol. 2,
The New Kingdom
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 224–30.

2.
The length of Thutmose II’s reign is disputed, but most historians think he ruled for only three years. See Erik Hornung, Rolf Krauss, and David A. Warburton, eds.,
Ancient Egyptian Chronology
, Handbook of Oriental Studies, sec. 1, The Near and Middle East (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 200–201; Luc Gabolde, “La chronologie de règne de Thoutmosis II, ses consequences sur la datation des momies royales et leurs repercutions sur l’histoire du development de la Vallée des Rois,”
Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur
14 (1987): 61–82. For the argument for a longer reign, see J. von Beckerath, “Noch einmals zur Regierung Tuthmosis’ II,”
Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur
17 (1990): 70–71. Betsy M. Bryan, “The Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” in
The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt
, ed. Ian Shaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 235–36. Circumstantially, it could be argued that Hatshepsut’s kingship was only possible with a short reign for Thutmose II, because it was this king’s death that put Egypt into the hands of a toddler king, unable to rule for a dozen years at least.

3.
For a possible identification of Hatshepsut’s mummy, see Zahi Hawass, “The Quest for Hatshepsut—Discovering the Mummy of Egypt’s Greatest Female Pharaoh,”
http://​www.​drhawass.​com/​events/​quest-​hatshepsut-​discovering-​mummy-​egypts-​greatest-​female-​pharaoh
, and Zahi Hawass, Yehia Z. Gad, and Somaia Ismail, “Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun’s Family,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
303, no. 7 (2010). Many are of the opinion, however, that Zahi Hawass’s identification of Hatshepsut as mummy KV 60A is not sound and certainly not backed up by DNA evidence. See Erhart Graefe, “Der angebliche Zahn der angeblich krebskranken Diabetikerin Königin Hatschepsut, oder: Die Mumie der Hatschepsut bleibt unbekannt,”
Göttinger Miszellen
231 (2011). There is also the problem that both coffins in KV 60 bear only the title of Royal Wet Nurse. Despite the lack of evidence for Hatshepsut’s mummy, there is no reason to believe that Hatshepsut’s body was not prepared as a queen and God’s Wife, at the very least, and possibly even as a king. I did appear as an expert in the Discovery Channel’s
Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen
(2007), but I was not part of the mummy identification.

4.
If Hatshepsut’s rule lasted from 1473 to 1458 BCE, and if she started her kingship after her twentieth year, then she was born around year 1500 BCE. See Ian Shaw, ed.,
The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 481. Also see Hornung, Krauss, and Warburton,
Ancient Egyptian Chronology
, 201, 492.

5.
The word
Hyksos
comes from the Egyptian
Heka khasut
, meaning “rulers of foreign lands.” See Janine Bourriau, “The Second Intermediate Period,” in Shaw,
Oxford History of Ancient Egypt
, 184–217.

6.
Some historians have argued that he had a son named Amenemhat, whose mummy bore a pectoral with the name of Amenhotep I on it; see W. C. Hayes,
Scepter of Egypt II
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1953), 419. However, because the pectoral probably dates from the Twentieth or Twenty-First Dynasty and because Amenhotep I was deified in later reigns, the pectoral is not evidence that Amenhotep I sired any children; see David Aston,
Burial Assemblages of Dynasties 21–25: Chronology, Typology, Developments
(Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009), 231.

7.
In Egyptian, the word for hand is
djeret
, a feminine word. Atum thus had sex with the feminine element of his person. See J. P. Allen,
Genesis in Egypt: The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts
, Yale Egyptological Studies (San Antonio, TX: Van Siclen Books for Yale Egyptological Seminar, Yale University, 1988).

8.
Indeed, back in the pioneering days of the First Dynasty, fifteen hundred years earlier, with Egypt newly minted out of hostile principalities, Merneith ruled the country in the name of her young son, Den, after the premature death of her husband, Djet. As such, she was granted a tomb among the kings of her time, of the same size and grandeur as theirs.

9.
Ahhotep I has the title of God’s Wife of Amen on her coffin in the royal cache of Theban Tomb 320, but nowhere else. Evidence for Ahmes-Nefertari’s priestesshood, on the other hand, is ample and comes from contemporaneous documents, in particular the Donation Stela of Ahmose, now in the Luxor Museum, on which King Ahmose documents his purchase of her priestly office from the Amen Priesthood at Karnak. Identifying Ahhotep I as the first God’s Wife of Amen is therefore problematic. For more, see Gay Robins,
Women in Ancient Egypt
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), chap. 8, and Anne K. Capel and Glenn E. Markoe, eds.,
Mistress of House, Mistress of Heaven: Women in Ancient Egypt
(New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1996), 91–120.