The Woman Who Would Be King (5 page)

But likely nothing would have created more feelings of insecurity in the freshly chosen king than the extensive religious duties foisted upon him day and night. He acted as chief priest of every temple throughout the land. In practical terms, everyone knew that the king could not simultaneously lead rituals in Heliopolis in the north and in Thebes, some 400 miles to the south. Thus he appointed learned and intellectual chief priests to take up these duties in his stead, men who had a more profound grasp of the mysteries than the new king could ever hope to acquire, so that no temple would go without the rituals required to summon the gods into their statues: feeding them the appropriate foods in the appropriate order; performing the right kind of chanting, singing, and entertainment; offering the smell of sweet incense and maintaining the braziers; and safeguarding the golden shrines and implements on which the temple rituals depended.

Even though Thutmose worked with chief priests as surrogates in temples throughout Egypt, the religious responsibilities of the king cannot be underestimated. Not only was the intellectual preparation for such work rigorous and time-consuming, but he must have known that it was up to him to channel the goodwill of the gods to earth through complex rituals, to meditate on the mysteries of divine creation and his place within it. One can only wonder if Thutmose ever felt like a fraud because he was not brought up for this profound duty of acting as intermediary between heaven and earth, or if he worried that his inadequacies would bring about the failure of creation itself. Egypt’s very well-being depended on a healthy, fit monarch, and we can picture the people’s anxiety any time the king was incapacitated or unable to fulfill his sacred duties. The king should be a model specimen—a godly perfection on earth.

As every king had before him, Thutmose I would serve as the linchpin that held the created and ordered cosmos together. Whereas before his coronation he could have risen in the morning for a quick prayer at the household altar with statues of ancestors and gods to keep his family (or army) safe, he now had to rise before dawn for complex ablutions involving the bathing and shaving of his entire body, anointment with oils, and dressing in restricting kilts, corselets, and aprons. He had to don
unwieldy headgear like the
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crown, with tall double plumes balancing a sun disk atop ram’s horns, and the Double Crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, which featured a high-backed red crown joined with a white crown that looked something like a bowling pin protruding from a tall basket. His body had to be made ritually pure to enter the most sacred spaces in the state temples throughout Egypt, which meant that certain kinds of food or drink or human contact were prohibited. Priests around Thutmose I may have constantly rattled off rules for this or that, annoying him when his mind was bent toward more worldly issues. As he performed ritual after ritual for Atum of Heliopolis, Ptah of Memphis, Amen of Thebes, and dozens of other state gods throughout Egypt, were his religious obligations a constant and unending drain?

He may have even balked at some of the indignities: at the most important festivals, he was required not just to fulfill his duties inside the temple but also to lead public processions along two or three miles of hot paved surfaces lined with stone sphinxes. He had to perform ceremonial runs while clutching all kinds of unwieldy things—rowing oars, jars of liquid, thrashing live birds—as he sped on foot around a sacred circuit. One ritual involved hitting four balls with a stick in the four cardinal directions; in another he had to bash special chests with a bat of some kind. On a different day he might have to herd live, and probably uncooperative, calves into the god’s presence. He was called on to strike and kill repellent animals with a spear. Along with these feats of strength or piety, he always had to go through the tedium of offering incredibly long and intricate meals to the gods, presenting courses accompanied by difficult incantations that could number over fifty. He had to accomplish all this while mastering the more subtle challenges of the rituals, such as learning to embrace a statue representing the fertile form of the god Amen, holding his arms high and away from his body so that his own nether regions did not come into contact with the massive erect phallus of the sacred god’s form. In every circumstance, it was in the king’s best interest to be athletic and mentally fit.

As Egypt’s solar priest, Thutmose I now entered into the great mysteries of the sun god. He probably participated in a mind-numbing initiation that took place in the god’s sanctuary, drinking and ingesting herbs until he was taken into the god’s embrace and shown his unique place in the cosmos, finally grasping how the successful rising and setting of this
ball of fire could only happen through his incantations and offerings. Thereafter, he would have woken every morning before dawn to greet the coming sun on the eastern horizon and would have communed with other manifestations of the sun god during the deepest hours of night, meditating on the mysteries of how the dead sun was able to fight off the destructive advances of Apophis, who wanted nothing more than to uncreate the universe. These solar mysteries were so meaningful to Thutmose I that he was perhaps the very first king to include excerpts from the solar temple liturgy in his own tomb decoration: scenes from the Book of Amduat
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documenting the terrifying and perilous journey of the sun during the hours of night were carved into his burial chamber in what we now call Kings Valley 38 (KV 38).
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Thutmose I likely believed he himself would meld with the sun god on his journey through the heavens, that his own journey into death was the rising and setting of the sun god himself.

When he became king, Thutmose I’s life was turned upside down. Leaving his family’s villas and lands, presumably near the town of Thebes, he would have moved to head up the palaces and campaign encampments throughout Egypt. Thutmose I’s mother, Seniseneb, previously the mistress of her own home in Thebes, now became the King’s Mother, with the great responsibility to watch over the newly installed harem of wives, concubines, and ornaments—all put in place to produce many sons and secure the king’s dynasty.
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Thutmose I could not have lived in one place for long; he and his entourage moved in their comfortable barges up and down the Nile or through dusty desert roads to border fortresses, as need and weather allowed. His journeys on campaigns may have seemed like second nature to him, but palace life would have demanded some psychological shifts.
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First off, Thutmose I needed to abandon all notions of having just one wife as was common for Egyptian men. He would have to marry again to connect himself to the family of Amenhotep I and to the mythology of masculine kingship. Assuming he had a family before his accession, we are left to wonder if his wife, sons, and daughters moved to the palace with him and what their change in status was. If his wife was still alive, she must have been anxious about being superseded by the other women to whom he bound himself upon his accession to the throne. These family
details were never recorded, and we cannot expect that they ever would have been. Nonetheless, the changes in Thutmose I’s life would have been a tumultuous existential shift for both himself and his family when he ascended the throne and married his new “great” royal wife.

The new wife’s name was Ahmes,
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and she would soon bear him a daughter named Hatshepsut. Thutmose I was never clear about Ahmes’s origins, at least not in the formal temple inscriptions that are left to us. She is called King’s Sister and King’s Great Wife. The second part is easy to understand: she was now the wife of Thutmose I, and her status was higher than that of all his other women. But which King’s Sister was she? Sister of Amenhotep I, the king who had just died? Or was she the sibling of his predecessor Ahmose? Or perhaps she was related to neither, because she was never named King’s Daughter. Some say that Ahmes’s title of King’s Sister was derived from her marriage to her own brother Thutmose I. If this explanation is true, then one of Thutmose’s younger, nonroyal sisters was asked to marry her own brother at his royal accession, perhaps so that he could legitimize himself as a god by sacredly connecting to his own flesh and blood as Osiris had done. This scenario would have presented a real challenge for the siblings as they carried out their duties, because they had most likely grown up in a nonroyal household, in each other’s presence every day, eating meals together, arguing with each other, playing jokes, revealing secrets, sharing the love of a platonic family relation. In the palace, royal brothers and sisters were probably kept in different quarters once they had reached a certain age, which limited the closeness the siblings could share, and in any case, the sheer numbers of wives, offspring, and other relations might have been enough to discourage the close bond between a brother and sister who grew up in a patrician nuclear family. While this hypothesis may excite our imagination, most Egyptologists believe that Ahmes was not one of Thutmose’s own sisters but instead related to the older Ahmoside family, even if she wasn’t a daughter of a king, thus securing the place of Thutmose I (and his progeny) in a family that was not his own.
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If Ahmes was indeed unrelated to Thutmose I, then their union to save the Egyptian kingship brought together two people who had barely, if ever, spoken to each other.
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If Ahmes grew up as a princess in the palaces, then marriage to the next king was expected of her. The evidence suggests that during the Eighteenth Dynasty King’s Daughters and Sisters were allowed to marry
only
the reigning king, although centuries earlier and later it was quite in order for royal daughters to marry outside the royal court. But all signs point to a much stricter regime during the Eighteenth Dynasty, with royal sisters marrying their brother the king, but no one else. Royal daughters produced from such unions would then have to wait to marry the next king to take the throne, ideally their own brother. These marriage restrictions are never explicitly stated, but they are a possible explanation for the lack of marriages between princesses and commoners during the Eighteenth Dynasty.
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These limitations might have been an effective way to keep all the wealth, power, and potential for future heirs within one family. Most important, this stricture on royal women preserved the king’s funds to reward his officials for loyal service rather than waste heaps of money paying off all the expectant sons-in-law with rich dowries when they married his daughters.
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With this Eighteenth Dynasty system, the king had no sons-in-law at all; conveniently, his own son was also his son-in-law. Any daughters sired by Thutmose I would marry the next king.

Retaining royal women in the family would have granted the king a massive amount of economic power, but it also meant that a daughter of the king could only find her place in the world within the palace. If Amenhotep I’s sisters were not allowed to marry wellborn officials’ sons or to move into their own villas as Mistress of the House, they could not have any children unless their destiny tied them to a brother-king of appropriate age who was able and willing to sire them. And any of their offspring were liable to bear signs of the incestuous union. In the Eighteenth Dynasty, the future of a royal woman would have been tied exclusively to the king.

If Hatshepsut’s mother, Ahmes, was a younger sister of Amenhotep I, perhaps she had been too young to have sexual relations with him. Or possibly she was already married to him and was transferred to Thutmose I when he assumed the kingship. Perhaps Amenhotep I’s entire harem was shifted to the incoming Thutmose I, and it was then that Ahmes was selected as the right age and bloodline to be the highest-ranking wife among them.

The female progeny of all kings, past and present, would thus have been kept in the palace, awaiting their chance to become mothers. If the king was too young or too infirm to serve as a real husband, many royal women would grow old without one. Some women would share a brother-husband
with a hundred other ladies. None of these women, except perhaps the King’s Great Wife, had the slightest chance of a real partnership in marriage.

Later in the Eighteenth Dynasty, there were other, even less appealing, options for King’s Daughters: they could also become wives of their fathers. (The short life spans of most of the kings of the early Eighteenth Dynasty meant this did not happen to Ahmes, however.) During the reign of a later, long-lived king, Amenhotep III, a royal daughter might marry her father during her limited years of reproductive potential. Two of Amenhotep III’s daughters—Sitamen and Isis—became the King’s Great Wives, thereby demoting their own mother, Tiy, as the older woman reached the end of her reproductive potential. If a royal daughter did not marry her own father during a long reign, she would have no partner whatsoever, it seems, and become a childless spinster.

Presumably these royal women were conditioned to count themselves blessed to marry the king, but we can also envision the heartache and trauma produced by these limitations on relationships. Queen Ahmes was either born into this system or had to quickly adapt. Royal women likely had entourages made up of commoners—ladies who were mistresses of their own homes when they weren’t at court and who were allowed to marry men other than their brothers or fathers. The royal women may have been envious of their ladies-in-waiting’s freedom to run their own households and forgo competition with their own sisters for one man’s attention. Admittedly, these attendants did not have the power and the money of the King’s Daughters, Wives, and Sisters, but the visibility of this unattainable “normal” life must have been painful for some of the royal women.
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