Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (9 page)

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A Strong Family: The Tuthmosides

The King [Ahmose] himself said ‘I remember my mother's mother, my father's mother, the Great King's Wife and King's Mother, Tetisheri the justified. She now has a tomb and cenotaph on the soil of the Theban province and the Thinite province. I have said this to you because my majesty wants to have made for her a pyramid estate in the necropolis in the neighbourhood of the monument of my majesty, its pool dug, its trees planted, its offering loaves established…’ Now his majesty spoke of the matter and it was put into action. His majesty did this because he loved her more than anything. Kings of the past never did the like for their mothers.
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When King Ahmose decided to honour the memory of Queen Tetisheri, the commoner wife of King Sekenenre Tao I, mother of Sekenenre Tao II and grandmother of both Ahmose and his consort Ahmose Nefertari, he was making an important public statement about the revised status of women, and in particular queens, within the new ruling family. In defiance of previous royal tradition, the Theban rulers of the late 17th and early 18th Dynasties accepted that their womenfolk were capable of assuming a prominent role in state affairs and, most importantly, were happy to acknowledge the unique significance attached to the positions of King's Wife and King's Mother. For the first time since the Archaic Period, 1,500 years before, the queen consorts of Egypt were to be openly celebrated in their own right. Consequently the early New Kingdom is now widely recognized as being remarkable not only for its succession of strong and effective warrior-kings but for its sequence of high-profile, influential and long-lived queens. It was the queens, and not the kings, who were to provide Egypt with an unbroken succession lasting for over a century from Queen Tetisheri, who should perhaps be regarded as the true founder of the 17th/18th Dynasty, to Queen Hatchepsut and beyond.
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Fig. 2.1 King Ahmose and his grandmother, Queen Tetisheri

The tradition of the semi-invisible queen consort is one which evolved during the Old Kingdom. The queens of the preceding Archaic Period – the 1st and 2nd Dynasties, an unsettled time of gradual consolidation which saw Egypt slowly evolving from a group of semi-independent city states into a single unit – seem to have been strong and politically active women whose role in the unification of their country has for a long time been greatly underestimated. Unfortunately, our information about the personalities of the Archaic Period is severely limited, but four queens (Neith-Hotep, Her-Neith, Meryt-Neith and Nemaathep) have left enough archaeological evidence to prove that women of high birth could wield real power, and indeed one of these ladies, Meryt-Neith, may actually have been a queen regnant rather than a consort.
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However, following unification and the acceptance of a single divine king ruling over a peaceful country, there was little need for a strong consort and the shadowy and now mostly unknown queens of the Old and (even more so) Middle Kingdoms made little impact on state affairs. Barring exceptional circumstances, such as the untimely death of the king or the lack of a male heir to the throne, royal women confined themselves to family and domestic concerns.

This queenly modesty was entirely in keeping with contemporary views on the conduct proper to married women, particularly during the Middle Kingdom when the sudden disappearance of the queen from royal monuments coincided with a marked decrease in non-royal titles accorded to women. Although Egyptian women could always be included amongst the most legally independent females in the ancient world, with accepted rights which would have been envied by their more protected sisters in Asia, Greece and Rome, there was a clear and well-understood gulf between the work considered appropriate to women and that done by men. As a general rule, men were expected to work outside the home while women remained inside.
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Similarly, the husband had overall control over external affairs while the wife became Mistress of the House. ‘Keep your wife from power, restrain her’, argued the Old Kingdom sages. Marriage and motherhood formed the axis of the woman's world and, like any good Egyptian wife, the pre-New Kingdom queen had her clearly defined female tasks which, while not exactly
Kinder, Küche und Kirche
(presumably the queen would not have been expected to do too much cooking), must have been something fairly close. Her duties involved providing her husband with as many children as possible, ensuring the smooth running of the palace, adding silent support to her husband's actions and even, if necessary, acting as regent for a fatherless son. Her primary role was, however, to provide an almost entirely passive complement to her active husband. She was not expected to become a prominent public figure, had no state duties, held few official titles and was powerful only to the extent that she could influence her husband.

From the late 17th Dynasty onwards, we can see a profound change in the nature of the role of queen consort. Casting off her cloak of invisibility, she now emerged to claim a highly public position since, even though her status was still ultimately derived from her relationship with the king, increasing emphasis was placed both on the individuality of each queen and on the divinity of her role. By the early 18th Dynasty, queens were routinely awarded a range of secular and religious titles, owned their own estates which came complete with land, servants and administrators, and were portrayed wearing a range of distinctive crowns. This newly expanded repertoire of queen's regalia was clearly designed not only to stress ‘royalness’ and the connection with the king, but also to emphasize links with various deities. It had always been
recognized that the role of queen had semi-divine origins, but this aspect of queenship now became far more blatant. For example, the new double uraeus headdress, two flat snakes worn side by side on the brow, was directly associated with the Lower Egyptian cobra goddess Wadjyt and the Upper Egyptian vulture goddess Nekhbet, but also had connections with the cults of Hathor and Re. The vulture crown, which resembles a rather limp bird draped over the queen's head with the wings hanging down against the sides of her face and the head of the vulture rising above the wearer's forehead, was a long-established queen's crown again linked with Nekhbet, while the double plumes – tall falcon feathers attached to a circular base – had been worn since the 13th Dynasty to stress links with the male gods Min and Amen and with the sun cult of Re. Depictions of the goddesses Isis and Hathor now show them wearing similar crowns so that the distinction between the mortal queen and the immortal goddesses becomes deliberately blurred.

Why should such a change have come about at this time? For over a century egyptologists, heavily influenced by now largely outdated theories of kinship and social evolution,
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have speculated that the new royal family must have been organized along matriarchal rather than patriarchal lines. The more prominent role allowed to the queens, an otherwise inexplicable deviation away from normal Egyptian behaviour patterns, could then be understood as something unfortunate but unavoidable. However, the theorists, in their desire to provide a simple explanation for the otherwise inexplicable, were somewhat haphazard in their classification. In its strictest sense a matriarchy involves the complete domination of the female line with all property and inheritance rights being held by women and transmitted from mother to daughter, and with the women holding all the power within the family unit.
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In such a system the women may be said to control the men. It is clearly distinct from both matrilocal kinship systems (where the women remain in their own homes following marriage) and from matrilineal systems (where descent is traced through the female line rather than the male); in both these cases the male, either the spouse or the brother, still retains overall family control. It is also, unhappily for the theorists, clearly distinct from the situation in the Theban royal family, where there is no suggestion that the kings ever relinquished their control to their queens.

Although the idea of an archaic female-dominated state has been a popular one amongst both old-fashioned anthropologists and extreme feminist historians, it is now widely recognized that such a state has never existed anywhere in the world. The Theban royal family may have allowed its queens to play a more prominent role in matters of state, but that role never allowed the queen to take precedence over the all-powerful pharaoh while Hatchepsut, the seeming exception to this rule, only sought the powers of a king when she had actually transformed herself into a female king. She would have probably been as horrified as anyone to think that a mere consort could rule in the place of a divinely appointed monarch. The ‘power’ of the Theban women should instead be seen in its true perspective as an increase in status and perhaps influence rather than a complete reversal of domestic custom.

Perhaps a more accurate explanation for the change in attitude towards the higher-ranking royal women can best be found by considering conditions in Egypt at the start of the Theban royal family's rule. This was a period when, as during the Archaic Period, Egypt was suffering from profound civil unrest. The kings who emerged during the late 17th Dynasty were warrior-kings, their reigns characterized by successive successful military campaigns. Under normal circumstances, and apart from a somewhat vague reference to Queen Ahhotep commanding troops which is discussed in further detail later in this chapter, it is the active Egyptian men who provide military leadership while their passive womenfolk attend to their separate domestic concerns; when the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Amenemhat I asked, ‘Has any woman previously marshalled troops? And has rebellion previously been plotted in the palace?’ he was posing intentionally ridiculous questions.
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However, at times of national crisis we often find that traditional roles no longer apply, and that women may be actively encouraged to leave the shelter of their hearths and seek employment without incurring public disapproval. This is precisely what occurred during the First and Second World Wars in Britain when women were expected to play an active part in the war effort, taking over jobs previously reserved exclusively for men.

When a monarchy feels itself to be under threat, we might expect to find the royal family relying on its most loyal and devoted supporters – other family members – to provide much-needed strength and support, regardless of sex. This is particularly true of the close-knit Theban royal
family where the queen was often the full or half-sister of the king, was equally descended from the founders of the dynasty and would presumably have the same interests vested in her family. At such a time, when family might be set against family, it would be an act of great folly to overlook the potential contribution of an intelligent and politically astute woman, and a queen or queen mother who could effectively deputize for the king would be a valuable asset. It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising to find that the late 17th and early 18th Dynasty kings followed their Archaic Period predecessors in utilizing their womenfolk far beyond their ability to produce male children.