The Woman Who Would Be King Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Kara Cooney

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cooney, Kara.

  The woman who would be king / Kara Cooney. —First edition.

  pages cm

  1. Hatshepsut, Queen of Egypt. 2. Queens—Egypt—Biography. 3. Pharaohs—Biography. 4. Egypt—History—Eighteenth dynasty, ca. 1570–1320 B.C. 5. Egypt—Kings and rulers—Biography. I. Title.

  DT87.15.C66 2014

  932.014092—dc23

  2014000243

  ISBN 978-0-307-95676-7

  eBook ISBN 978-0-307-95678-1

  Map copyright © 2014 by David Cain

  Illustration on this page and maps on this page and this page by Deborah Shieh

  Jacket design by Chris Brand

  Jacket photography by Sam Weber

  v3.1

  For Neil, with whom I have walked

  through so many fires.

  And for Julian, whose happiness

  doesn’t yet make him cry.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHRONOLOGY

  FAMILY TREE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  MAPS

  Preface

  ONE Divine Origins

  TWO A Place of Her Own

  THREE King’s Great Wife

  FOUR Regent for a Baby King

  FIVE The Climb Toward Kingship

  SIX Keeping the Kingship

  Photo Insert

  SEVEN The King Becomes a Man

  EIGHT The Setting Sun

  NINE The King Is Dead; Long Live the King

  TEN Lost Legacy

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  FURTHER READING

  About the Author

  CHRONOLOGY

  New Kingdom 1539–1077 BCE

  Eighteenth Dynasty 1539–1292 BCE

  Ahmose I (Nebpehtyre)

  1539–1515 BCE

  Amenhotep I (Djeserkare)

  1514–1494 BCE

  Thutmose I (Aakheperkare)

  1493–1483 BCE

  Thutmose II (Aakheperenre)

  1482–1480 BCE

  Thutmose III (Menkheperre/​Menkheperkare)

  1479–1460 BCE

  Hatshepsut (Maatkare)

  1472–1458 BCE

  Thutmose III (Menkheperre)

  1460–1425 BCE

  Amenhotep II (Aakheperure)

  1425–1400 BCE

  Thutmose IV (Menkheperure)

  1400–1390 BCE

  Amenhotep III (Nebmaatre)

  1390–1353 BCE

  Amenhotep IV/​Akhenaten (Neferkheperure)

  1353–1336 BCE

  Smenkhkare/​Neferneferuaten

  1336–1334 BCE

  Tutankhaten/​Tutankhamen (Nebkheperure)

  ?–1324 BCE

  Itnetjer Ay (Kheperkheperure)

  1323–1320 BCE

  Horemheb (Djeserkheperure)

  1319–1292 BCE

  Nineteenth Dynasty 1292–1191 BCE

  Ramses I (Menpehtyre)

  1292–1291 BCE

  Seti I (Menmaatre)

  1290–1279 BCE

  Ramses II (Usermaatre setepenre)

  1279–1213 BCE

  Merneptah (Baenre)

  1213–1203 BCE

  Seti II (Userkheperure)

  1202–1198 BCE

  Amenmesses (Menmire)

  1202–1200 BCE

  Siptah (Akhenre)

  1197–1193 BCE

  Tawosret (Sitre merytamen)

  1192–1191 BCE

  Twentieth Dynasty 1190–1077 BCE

  Setnakht (Userkhaure)

  1190–1188 BCE

  Ramses III (Usermaatre meryamen)

  1187–1157 BCE

  Ramses IV (Heqamaatre setepenamen)

  1156–1150 BCE

  Ramses V (Usermaatre sekheperenre)

  1149–1146 BCE

  Ramses VI (Nebmaatre meryamen)

  1145–1139 BCE

  Ramses VII (Usermaatre setepenre meryamen)

  1138–1131 BCE

  Ramses VIII (Usermaatre akhenamen)

  1130 BCE

  Ramses IX (Neferkare setepenre)

  1129–1111 BCE

  Ramses X (Khepermaatre setepenre)

  1110–1107 BCE

  Ramses XI (Menmaatre setepenptah)

  1106–1077 BCE

  (Based on 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].)

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Certainty plays little role in this history of Hatshepsut. The nature of the information passed down to us is uneven, and because so many of her monuments were destroyed, the jumble of perceptions we are left with are from other people, many of whom lived millennia after her death. I have had to break many rules of my Egyptological training in order to resurrect and reanimate Hatshepsut’s intentions, ambitions, and disappointments, by engaging in conjecture and speculation, and creating untestable hypotheses as I attempt to fill out her character and decision-making processes (even though I document my sources and accentuate my uncertainties). Any supposition on my part is warranted, I believe, because Hatshepsut remains an important example of humanity’s ambivalent perception of female authority. Even in the absence of exact historical details and reasons behind Hatshepsut’s actions, I can still track her rise to power by following the clues left behind by herself, other kings, courtiers, officials, and priests, thus filling out the circumstances of her life’s journey as I go.

  I have decided to forgo any long-winded analysis of architectural history, reliefs, statuary, text, and genealogy, instead focusing solely on Hatshepsut’s narrative; you will find discussions of topics tangential to the main story in the notes. I have also eschewed reconstructions of Hatshepsut’s ambitious building program, because the extensive evidence of it already fills many volumes. (Indeed, Hatshepsut’s impressive architectural agenda has lured historians into creating a narrative of objects and buildings in lieu of a history of Hatshepsut herself.) This book is about a woman of antiquity and her interactions with Egyptian systems of government and power players, her decisions, her ambitions, her desperation, her triumphs, and her defeats. As I follow Hatshepsut’s story from her ancestral beginnings to her bitter end, I will watch what she did and how she did it, within the context of her times, and present my hypotheses explaining her motivations and thought processes.

  Many historians will no doubt accuse me of fantasy: inventing emotions and feelings for which I have no evidence. And they will be right. As I try to get at the human core of Hatshepsut, I will put many ideas and assumptions on the page; this is the best way for me to reconstruct her decision-making process. My conjectures, founded on twenty years of Egyptological research, are bounded and informed. What I say about Hatshepsut’s emotions may not be right, but when I engage in conjecture, I do my best to qualify the statement, or to offer alternatives, or to clarify any uncertainty in my writing. The inexactitude remains, however, as is the case with any historical study of the ancient world.

  This book is a kind of pause for me, something completely different from my previous Egyptological research dealing with funerary data sets and coffin studies. I have used all my
skills as a researcher, but I have also allowed myself to think out loud, to infer and imagine, in a way I would not do in my other work. This book finds its origins in my intimate (and strange even to myself) connection to the ancient world, and I have to thank the countless scholars who share the same obsession with Egypt’s past—generations of archaeologists who uncovered Hatshepsut’s remnants in the dirt, philologists who translated and analyzed her texts, art historians who pieced together broken statues and found traces of her relief erased by chisels. They have paved the way for this biographical discussion of Hatshepsut’s relevance.

  To view a full-size version of this image, click HERE.

  Map of Hatshepsut’s funerary temple, Deir el-Bahri, Thebes, Eighteenth Dynasty. Map by Deborah Shieh.

  To view a full-size version of this image, click HERE.

  To view a full-size version of this image, click HERE.

  Map of Karnak Temple, Amen precinct, during the time of Hatshepsut. Map by Deborah Shieh.

  PREFACE

  Hatshepsut was the first woman to exercise long-term rule over Egypt as a king. Other Egyptian women had governed before her, but they merely served as regents or leaders for short periods of time. If we combine her regency and kingship, Hatshepsut reigned for almost twenty-two years. Even more remarkably, Hatshepsut achieved her power without bloodshed or social trauma. We have no evidence of any messy assassinations of her family members or attempted coups that nearly succeeded (led by her or anyone else). Though Hatshepsut’s rise to power was clean and creative, it required every weapon in her arsenal—invoking her bloodline, education, political acumen, along with a deep (and sometimes radical) understanding of religious power.

  So why do so few people today know the name of this extraordinary woman? We know about Cleopatra VII’s murders, sexual exploits, economic excesses, and disastrous military campaigns. Hatshepsut was, as far as we can tell, not a seducer of great generals in charge of legions, for the practical reason that there existed no men greater than she. Rather than seduce mere mortals, she created a mechanism to publicly and inexorably prove the gods’ love for her without having to submit sexually to men. She is not remembered for any disastrous battles because all her military exploits brought her people and her gods greater imperial wealth. There are no stories preserved about her conniving to procure cash because she had more money than anyone in the known world. She is not remembered for her nasty death because there is no evidence of her expulsion, murder, or suicide.

  Hatshepsut has the misfortune to be antiquity’s female leader who did everything right, a woman who could match her wit and energy to a task so seamlessly that she made no waves of discontent that have been recorded. For Hatshepsut, all that endured were the remnants of her success, props for later kings who never had to give her the credit she deserved.

  Male leaders are celebrated for their successes, while their excesses are typically excused as the necessary and expected price of masculine ambition. A king’s risk taking is more likely to be perceived as crucial and advantageous, something that can bring great reward if he wins. Even the sociopathic narcissism of a male leader can be suffered. Women in power who do everything wrong offer great narrative fodder: Cleopatra, Jezebel and her daughter Athaliah, Semiramis, Empress Lü. They are dangerous, untrustworthy, self-interested to a fault. Their sexuality and powers of attraction can bring all to ruin. History has shown that a woman who pushes the envelope of ambition is not just maligned in the history books as a conniving, scheming seductress whose foolhardy and emotional desires brought down the good men around her, but also celebrated in infamous detail as proof that females should never be in charge. In this regard, ancient Egypt was surprisingly contemporary, allowing Hatshepsut any opportunity to rule in the first place.1

  But Hatshepsut saved the day and her dynasty by paving the way for a baby king who was probably gnawing on his crook and flail during his own coronation. And what may consign Hatshepsut to obscurity is our inability to appreciate and value honest, naked, female ambition, not to mention actual power properly wielded by a woman. Posterity cherishes the idea that there is something oppressive and distrustful about women who rule over men—that their mercurial moods have the power to destroy, that their impolitic natures ruin carefully tended alliances, that their agenda on behalf of their children will endanger any broader political interests. These critical perceptions make it difficult to properly rank Hatshepsut’s achievements in history. We lose the opportunity to either laud her for her successes or dissect her methodologies and tactics. How does one categorize a female leader who does not follow the expected course of disaster and shame, one who instead puts everything to rights in the end, in a way so perfect that her masculine beneficiaries just sweep her victories under the rug and ignore her forever?

  Why does Hatshepsut’s leadership still trouble us today? Female rulers are often implicitly branded as emotional, self-interested, lacking in authority, untrustworthy, and impolitic. The ancient Egyptians likewise distrusted a woman with authority, and this context makes Hatshepsut’s achievements all the more astonishing. For more than twenty years, she was the most powerful person in the ancient world. But when she finally died, all that she had built was instantly over; there would be no legacy.

  Hatshepsut’s achievements are relevant to us precisely because they were ultimately rejected and forgotten—both by her own people and by the subsequent authors of history. She was the most formidable and successful woman to ever rule in the ancient Western world, and yet today few people can even pronounce her name. We can never really know Hatshepsut, but the traces she left behind teach us what it means to be a woman at the highest echelons of power: she transcended patriarchal systems of authority, took on onerous responsibilities for her family, suffered great personal losses, and shaped an amazing journey out of circumstances over which she had little control.

  We do have a great deal of information about Hatshepsut and the Egypt of almost thirty-five hundred years ago, and from that I have built this story of her life and what she created. All the details that will give us insight into her anxieties, grief, disappointments, and aspirations—from government offices, countless bureaucrats, palaces and temples, riverboats and horse-drawn chariots to the diseases and illnesses that threatened her and her family—are vital to understanding this woman.

  As a social historian of ancient Egypt, I am drawn to the nitty-gritty of ancient life, particularly those circumstances that could not be conquered: disease, social place, patriarchal control, gender inequality, geographic location. I want to know how people coped in a world over which they had so little control and in which they had so little time to make their mark, a place where grief, sorrow, and apprehension were more commonplace than success and where most knew they could never create any kind of change in their life, beyond doing what their fathers or mothers had done before them. My Egyptological work on social life has enabled me to re-create Hatshepsut’s world as best I can and thereby to know her better.

  I have spent two decades studying the remnants that ancient Egyptians left behind—letters, receipts, funerary texts, coffins, funerary bandages, magical talismans—any attempt by people to work their social circumstances into something better. Most ancient Egyptians used the meager tools they had available to effect small changes in their lives—bribing an official to get a craftsman’s job, demanding testimony from family members to divorce a husband who was physically abusive when he drank too much beer, disowning children in a last will and testament if they did not care enough for their parents—all the while knowing that most of life was already written by forces far beyond anyone’s ability to change them. Hatshepsut was born into the highest echelons of society, to be sure, but even she had plenty of obstacles in her path, not least of which was her female identity. It took all her perseverance and creativity to strategize a change in her social circumstances beyond society’s perceived expectations. Hatshepsut was a rare human being, a woman able to see beyond the mac
hine and set forces in motion to shape her own destiny. She effected the ultimate change to make herself king. She did everything right, but none of it mattered. She was maligned not just by the ancient Egyptian rulers who followed her but also by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egyptologists who were suspicious of her motivations and ready to judge her for taking what did not rightfully belong to her.

  Hatshepsut’s story should teach us that women cannot rule unless they veil their true intent and proclaim that their pretentions are not their own but only for others. They must claim to sacrifice themselves to service, declare that they have been chosen by providence or destiny for such a role, and assert that they never sought such authority for themselves. If a woman does not renounce ambition for ambition’s sake, she will be viewed as twofaced or selfish, her actions fueled by ulterior motives. Maybe Hatshepsut was so intent on climbing the ladder to power, one rung at a time, that she never grasped these truths; perhaps she believed that she could change the system. And maybe we still believe the same thing.

  ONE

  Divine Origins

  The Nile, lifeblood of the world’s first great civilization, flowed calmly outside her palace window. The inundation had receded, and she could see the farmers readying themselves in the predawn hour, milking their cows, getting their sacks of emmer and barley seed ready to cast upon the rich black earth. In a few hours, the air would fill with the sounds of men shouting, children laughing, and animals bleating as they ran behind the plows, treading upon the scattered seeds and driving them into the soil. But for now, the sun was yet to crest the horizon. There was still time before she would be called to awaken the god in the temple. The girl dismissed her handmaiden to have a moment of privacy for herself.

  Hatshepsut was around sixteen years old, and her life’s purpose was over. Her husband Aakheperenre Thutmose, Lord of the Two Lands, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, may he live, was gravely ill, despite his youth. He and Hatshepsut had failed to produce an heir. She had only one daughter, Nefrure, who was strong and healthy but just two years old—not old enough to marry, reproduce, or forge the alliances that princesses so often do. Hatshepsut herself was the daughter of the previous king and was married to her father’s successor—her own younger brother. She now sat as the king’s highest-ranking wife. Her bloodline was impeccable: daughter of the king, sister of the king, wife of the king. Her biggest failing was not giving birth to a son: the heir to the throne would not come from her.