Before she was erased from history, Hatshepsut had been both queen and king of Egypt.
Hat-who? Was what? We’ve heard of pharaohs and Cleopatra but who was Hatshepsut, how could she be both king and queen of Egypt?
She was king in Egypt’s 18th dynasty, nearly 3,500 years
ago. Daughter of King Thutmose I, she married her half-brother (a common
practice in Egyptian royal lineage) but as King Thutmose II’s queen,
had no power of her own. When he died early in his reign, the crown
prince Thutmose III, a mere toddler (not her son) was designated
successor.
Hapshetsut was the daughter of a highly successful king;
raised in the royal house she may have learned how to play Egypt’s
political game expertly. As the highest priestess of the highest god,
she may have understood how to pull the religious levers of Egyptian
society.
When the child king was to be crowned, Hapshetsut was
perfectly positioned to be his “co-regent,” ruling both on his behalf
and on her own, a delicate balance. Justifying her rule through divine
oracles, she was accepted and installed as king.
She engaged in an immense building program while
increasing her empire’s prosperity and memorialized herself in religious
texts, statues and temples, first as a woman, later as a man, sometimes
with crown or beard, with and without breasts.
“She had to act like a man, dress like a
man, and we don’t have details of this, but she had to present herself
as a man. No matter how much she could transcend her femininity and
become king, as a woman she was still cognizant of the way the system
worked. She knew she had to transform herself, rather than expect the
system to mold itself to her.”
Hatshepsut is forgotten because most statues of her were
smashed posthumously, and images on temple walls scraped off and
substituted, even though her name can still be seen beneath the
scrape-offs. We know about her through her remaining texts. And thanks
to great detective work done by devoted archeologists over the past 100
years, a number of smashed statues discovered in a pit have been
painstakingly reassembled, piece by piece.
by Santa Monica-based author
and Egyptologist Kara Cooney in her new book “The Woman Who Would Be
King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt.” Delving deep into
the life of this nearly forgotten ruler, the book may raise some
eyebrows amongst scholars.
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