Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (24 page)

The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment; for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord.
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Hatchepsut, living in a far more relaxed society, had a far more focused need. The queen, however well-born, would always be seen as a mere woman who was occasionally permitted to rule Egypt on a temporary basis. The king was male (an irrelevance to Hatchepsut), divine, and able to communicate with the gods. Hatchepsut did not want to be seen as a mere queen who ruled: she wanted to be a king.

To emphasize her changed status, Hatchepsut made full use of the concept of the divine duality of kings. Theology decreed that the king of Egypt should be a god, the son of Amen, who received his divinity on the death of his predecessor. At the same time, however, it was obvious that the king of Egypt was a mere human being born to mortal parents and incapable of performing even the most minor of divine acts
in his own lifetime. This duality of existence resulted in the recognition of an important distinction between the office and the person. The office holder (pharaoh) who enjoyed a particular status because of his office was recognized as being a completely separate entity from the human being (Hatchepsut) who was that office holder. It was this con which helped men from outside the immediate royal family, such as Tuthmosis I, to become accepted as the true pharaoh: the coronation confirmed the divinity of the new king, and from that point on he was truly royal. Throughout her reign Hatchepsut strove to emphasize the conventional aspects of the role of pharaoh, a role which she felt she could fill regardless of gender. By so doing, however, she effectively eliminated herself from the archaeological record as an individual in her own right.

Why, then, was it so necessary for Hatchepsut to become a king rather than a queen? To modern observers there may appear to be little difference, if any, between the roles of king and queen regnant. If Queen Elizabeth II were suddenly to announce that she wished to be known as King Elizabeth her decision would be viewed as eccentric, but not as a fundamental change of function. It would be a mere playing with words. Hatchepsut was not, however, playing with words. To the ancient Egyptians, a vast and almost unbridgeable gulf separated the king from the rest of humanity, including the closest members of his own family. There was, in fact, no formal Egyptian word for ‘queen’, and all the ladies of the royal household were titled by reference to their lord and master: the consort of the king was either a ‘King's Wife’ or a ‘King's Great Wife’, the dowager queen was usually a ‘King's Mother’ and a princess was a ‘King's Daughter’. An Egyptian queen regnant simply had to be known as ‘king’; she had no other title.

The correct presentation of the king was clearly a matter of great importance to the ancient Egyptians, to the extent that those who invaded and conquered Egypt almost invariably adopted the traditional pharaonic regalia as a means of reinforcing their rule. We therefore find non-Egyptians, such as the Asiatic Hyksos rulers of the Second Intermediate Period or the Greek Ptolemies of the post-Dynastic Period, all dressing as conventional native pharaohs. It may be that the obvious combination of female characteristics and male accessories shown at the start of her reign should be interpreted as a short-lived attempt to
present a new image of the pharaoh as an asexual mixture of male and female strengths.
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If this is the case, the experiment surely failed, as Hatchepsut soon reverted to the all-male appearance of the conventional Egyptian king. These early statues do not suggest a blend of sexual characteristics in the way that the later statuary of Akhenaten does – it is always possible to tell whether Hatchepsut intended to be depicted in the body of a woman or a man – and this may be an indication that they in fact belong to a transitional period when either Hatchepsut or her sculptors was uncertain of the image which the new king wished to project.

The only king who dared to go against established tradition, consistently allowing himself to be depicted as far removed from the accepted idealized stereotype, was the later 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Akhenaten. This unconventional monarch was apparently happy to see himself presented as a virtual hermaphrodite with a narrow feminine face, drooping breasts, a sagging stomach and wide hips, although even he retained the conventional crown, false beard and crook and flail which symbolized his authority. These representations have cast a doubt over the sexuality of Akhenaten, although he is known to have had at least two wives and to have fathered at least six daughters, which is entirely absent from images of Hatchepsut. Many early egyptologists believed, on the basis of his portraits, that the heretic king was a woman, while Manetho's second 18th Dynasty queen regnant, Akhenkheres daughter of Oros (Amenhotep III), is now thought to be Akhenaten.

Hatchepsut's bold decision to throw off the feminine appearance which would for ever classify her as a queen (and therefore by definition as not divine and vastly inferior to the king) was an eminently sensible one which solved several constitutional problems at a stroke. She could now be seen to be the equal of any pharaoh, she could ensure the continuance of the established traditions which were vital to the maintenance of
maat
, she could become the living embodiment of Horus, a male god and, last but certainly not least, she could replace Tuthmosis III in the religious and state rituals which only a king could perform. It may be that a more secure female monarch would have had the confidence to adapt the traditional masculine garments and accessories to produce a more feminine version for her own use, and indeed the previous queen regnant Sobeknofru had not found it necessary to alter her way of dress when she ascended to the throne, but Hatchepsut
clearly felt that it was important to be seen to be as ‘normal’ a king as possible. Sobeknofru in any case does not present an exact parallel to Hatchepsut. She came to the throne at a time when there was no obvious male heir, and therefore she had no need to justify or excuse her rule. She also reigned for less than four years; hardly enough time to construct the impressive monuments and statues which would present her with the opportunity to display large-scale images of herself as king.

Throughout the dynastic period the image was viewed as a powerful force which could, if required, provide a substitute for the person or thing depicted. The image could also be used to reinforce an idea so that, by causing herself to be depicted as a traditional pharaoh in the most regal and heroic form, Hatchepsut was making sure that this is precisely what she would become. Egyptian art is notoriously difficult for modern observers to understand on anything other than a superficial level; it needs a willingness to abandon ingrained ideas of perspective, scale and accuracy of depiction as well as an understanding of contemporary symbolism. However, Hatchepsut's regal scenes must be regarded as highly successful in that they effectively convey a comparatively simple message: here is the legitimate king of her land. Just as Queen Elizabeth I of England, as an old woman in the last decade of her 45-year reign, could be celebrated and painted as ‘Queen of Love and Beauty’ – an ever-young maiden with flowing hair and a smooth complexion and wearing the crescent moon of Cynthia, goddess of the Moon
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– so Hatchepsut, a widow and mother, could command her artists and sculptors to depict her as a traditional Egyptian pharaoh, complete with beard.

The god knows it of me, Amen, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands. He gave me sovereignty over the Black Land and the Red Land as a reward. None rebels against me in all lands. All foreign lands are my subjects. He made my boundary at the limits of heaven. All that the sun encompasses works for me…
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Hatchepsut chose to re-invent herself not merely as a king, but as a traditional warrior-king, conqueror of the whole world. To many modern historians this was nothing but a giant fraud. Her reign was perceived as being disappointingly ‘barren of any military enterprise except an unimportant raid into Nubia’,
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and it therefore followed that
‘the power of Egypt in Syria was much shaken during the regency of Hatchepsut’.
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This deliberate non-aggressive stance was in marked contrast to the expansionist policies of Tuthmosis I, Amenhotep I and the great warrior Ahmose, and was to put Tuthmosis III at a severe disadvantage when, at the beginning of his solo reign, he was required to quell uprisings amongst the Egyptian client states in Palestine and Syria. The unfortunate tendency towards pacifism was generally considered to be the direct result of Hatchepsut's gender. As a woman, it was reasoned, she was not only unlikely to wish to indulge in wars, but she would also have been physically incapable of leading the army into battle:

Hatchepsut was neither an Agrippina nor an Amazon. As far as we know, violence and bloodshed had no place in her make-up. Hers was a rule dominated by an architect, and the Hapusenebs, Neshis and Djehutys in her following were priests and administrators rather than soldiers.
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Hatchepsut stands out as one of the great monarchs of Egypt. Though no wars or conquests are recorded in her reign, her triumphs were as great as those of the warrior-kings of Egypt, but they were the triumphs of peace, not war. Her records, as might be expected from a woman, are more intimate and personal than those of a king… This was no conqueror, joying in the lusts of battle, but a strong-souled noble-hearted woman, ruling her country wisely and well.
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Few historians working in the pre-politically correct 1950s and 1960s, faced with the apparent pacifism of Hatchepsut's reign and the well-documented military activities of Tuthmosis III, were able to resist drawing sweeping conclusions. The two kings, already deadly enemies, were now to be seen as the leaders of two opposing political factions. Hatchepsut the female, with her interest in internal works and foreign trade, belonged to what could be classed as the party of peace. She was supported in her ideas by a party of self-made bureaucrats. Tuthmosis, supported by the traditional male élite including the priesthood of Amen, belonged to the more radical ‘war’ party, his vigorous programme of conquests and expansion being interpreted as a sign that Egypt was attempting to shake off her insular past and become a major world power:

Our theory then is that there was a choice to be made and that two different parties chose differently, Hatchepsut's faction in terms of the lesser effort of earlier times and Tuthmosis III's faction in terms of a new and major international venture.
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Old-fashioned egyptologists are not the only ones to have assumed that a woman's natural sensitivity, physical frailty and ability to generate life would naturally lead her to shy away from bloodshed. For a long time this, in a slightly altered form, has been the sincerely held belief of many feminist theorists and historians who view extreme violence and aggression as a purely male phenomenon and who associate the peace movement, now seen as a strength rather than a weakness, with women and motherhood. Woman's ability to create life is often seen as incompatible with the wish to order the death of another human being. Various theories have been put forward to explain the phenomenon of male aggression, ranging from the simple biological (the higher testosterone levels found in men) to the complex psychological (men's need for compensation for their inability to bear children), while Freud suggested that male aggression was the natural result of the sexual rivalry between father and son competing for the love of the mother. Freud went on to deduce from this that men had developed civilizations as a means of compensating for the suppression of their childhood sexual instincts, while the feminist theorist Naomi Wolf, discussing the ‘beauty myth’ which she sees as ensnaring modern women, has developed this argument a stage further by suggesting that as ‘Freud believed that the repression of the libido made civilization; civilization depends at the moment on the repression of the female libido…’
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However, the idea that a woman would automatically be less aggressive than a man may appear strange to those who have lived under some of the world's most recent female rulers. Neither Mrs Golda Meir nor Mrs Indira Gandhi was known for her soft and passive femininity while the track record of the ‘Iron Lady’, Margaret Thatcher, speaks for itself. Mrs Thatcher, following a tradition established by Hatchepsut and continued by Elizabeth I, even dressed as a soldier during an official visit to Northern Ireland, a gesture which was presumably intended to express solidarity with the troops as she herself had no intention of taking up arms and fighting on the streets of Belfast. It could almost be argued on this admittedly very small sample that modern women who obtain positions of power normally reserved for men are more and not less
likely to resort to military action, particularly if they feel that they still have something to prove. There is certainly nothing in Hatchepsut's character to suggest that she would be frightened of taking the military initiative as and when necessary.

A quick survey of the prominent women of history tends to confirm that being female is not necessarily a bar to taking decisive military action. Societies in general may have prevented their women from fighting but there have been some notable exceptions. Hippolyta, Penthesilea and the other single-breasted warrior Amazons may be dismissed as a legend invented to frighten men but Boadicea, Zenobia of Palmyra and Joan of Arc, real women living in societies which would not traditionally allow females to enlist, all donned masculine battle dress to lead their male soldiers into action. Other queens, including Elizabeth I as she rallied the English fleet at Tilbury, wore the battle dress to show their commitment to the cause but commanded from afar, while Cleopatra, who participated peripherally in the battle of Actium before fleeing ‘true to her nature as a woman and an Egyptian’
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never, as far as we are aware, dressed as an Egyptian soldier. All these women seem to have been instinctively aware that the very presence of a fragile woman on the field of battle, far from discouraging the troops, may actually bring out feelings of latent gallantry and thereby inspire their soldiers to greater effort. Antonia Fraser, who dubs this type of woman a ‘Warrior Queen’, notes that: