The Woman Who Would Be King (12 page)

Now that she was queen, and even though she had grown up at court and seen her mother perform alongside her father on formal occasions, Hatshepsut likely still benefited from the behind-the-scenes guidance of Ahmes. The dowager-queen’s power was political and family based, less entrenched in the ideologies in which Hatshepsut had been steeped as the God’s Wife of Amen. Now, as regent, Ahmes could teach Hatshepsut how to curry favor among elite clans at court as well as model the traditions and expectations of the throne room and audience hall. She could also teach Hatshepsut the nuanced ways to behave toward the king to get what she wanted, or how to discover and diffuse conspiracies in the harem before
they caused any harm. Ahmes and Hatshepsut brought very different spheres of influence and training to a moment when they were needed most. These women were nothing if not survivors.

Ahmes’s position as regent was only immortalized obliquely in Egypt’s sacred temples, as we should expect—because the regency was always an informal post for the Egyptians, a temporary stopgap with no official titles. Since King Thutmose II was considered too young to rule on his own, it was likely Ahmes who ordered reliefs showing the king standing alongside his wife, Hatshepsut, and his mother-in-law, Ahmes. Nowhere to be seen on these new temple monuments is the king’s own mother, Mutnofret. We have no idea if Mutnofret, who was obviously still alive because she gained the title King’s Mother, had an adversarial relationship with the queen-regent and the King’s Great Wife, but we do know that despite her highborn status she was not acting as regent for her own son as we might expect. Thus there is at least some circumstantial evidence of friction among these main players in the palace. Mutnofret had all the connections a royal woman could want: King’s Daughter, King’s Sister, King’s Wife, and now King’s Mother. But despite all this, another queen had grasped control of the Two Lands as queen-regent. It was Ahmes who was given (or claimed) the responsibility of advising young Thutmose II on the best course of action in every given circumstance. Something lay behind that choice, but the messy details are obscured from view.

Hatshepsut’s mother stepped into a situation of great uncertainty, took control, and exercised more power than she had originally been given. She became a King’s Great Wife par excellence. Hatshepsut must have learned a great deal from watching her mother control a throne room for Thutmose II. For Hatshepsut, her mother was a paradigm of regency just as Ahmes-Nefertari, who had acted as regent for Amenhotep I two generations before, had been the example for Ahmes (although of course this is not an exact parallel since Ahmes-Nefertari was acting on behalf of her own son). We can even picture Hatshepsut and Ahmes having closet discussions about how to deal with Thutmose II and his faction of advisers or even his mother. It was up to them to maintain the course they believed best for Egypt, and they probably thought little about their own personal glories and ambitions as they busied themselves putting the new kingship on a firm foundation. It is quite possible that Ahmes asked Hatshepsut to feed information to Thutmose II, or to misdirect him and
his allies. Or perhaps the relationship between these formidable queens and the boy king was on sound footing, transparent and aboveboard, with all parties working to advance Egypt’s best interests.

We wonder if Ahmes imparted to Hatshepsut, in words or in gestures, how special she was. To prepare her daughter for more ambitious steps later, she probably instilled in Hatshepsut a dignity which surpassed that of everyone around her. The exact agendas of the women remain obscure, but it is safe to presume that these two resilient queens were able to exercise great authority over their new king, even perhaps bending him to their will. Hatshepsut thus found herself in an interesting position during the reign of Thutmose II. Her own mother was running the regime, with generals and high priests alike doing her bidding; her husband likely fell far behind her in years and maturity. Was it only a matter of time before Hatshepsut took advantage of the situation and took on more power? Likely no one, not even Hatshepsut herself, suspected that the young queen had loftier ambitions than God’s Wife of Amen and King’s Great Wife. In the minds of Egyptian officials, priests, and courtiers, there was no higher place to which she could ascend. As much power as could be imagined was already in the hands of these two royal women.

As for Thutmose II, was he really just a puppet whose strings could be pulled at will? Ahmes’s regency suggests that no one expected this particular prince to become king, and we know from the inscriptions about Wadjmose and Amenmose that others had waited in line for this great honor before him. Thutmose II was probably not just third choice for king, but fourth or even fifth. This prince was likely educated only to hold a high position as some kind of administrator, perhaps in the army, to marry an official’s daughter, and to live well in a villa in the countryside, far away from the complexities of political life. He was probably trained for bureaucracy and perhaps for battle, but not for rule of the Two Lands. And he would have learned early on that his mother, Mutnofret, was always second to Ahmes, the King’s Great Wife. This reality must have affected his own position among his brothers when he was growing up. The focus of the royal family had always been placed on other princes of the Thutmoside line. In all probability, no one really entertained the thought that the young Thutmose would outlive the king’s other sons.

Prince Thutmose would have had little opportunity to know his father. He was a King’s Son, to be sure, but he would have encountered his
constantly campaigning father only in the presence of many other young princes during formal, uncomfortable affairs, and not for intimate father-son discussions. Meanwhile, Hatshepsut was the God’s Wife of Amen, or at least in training to become a priestess; her work threw her into close contact with her father. Lengthy and complicated rituals needed to be performed, and on special feast days Hatshepsut and her father might have spent hours together enacting these different rites—offering up milk, then wine, then meat accompanied by the right invocations, or walking in front of a sacred procession, or perhaps watching entertainments while seated on a dais at the temple. We have little notion of the intimacy of royal father-daughter relationships in Egypt, if they ever sat or stood close enough for some whispered quotidian conversations or if lengthy rituals allowed a little down time for them to get to know each other on a more personal level. If nothing else, they were accustomed to each other’s presence, and they experienced the mysteries of Amen in close proximity to one another. Perhaps Thutmose II was even jealous of this relationship as he grew up, feeling threatened by it once he and Hatshepsut married. There are no indications to that effect, but we would not expect there to be in the kinds of records the Egyptians left behind.

Was there an emotional relationship between Hatshepsut and Thutmose II? Here, again, the Egyptian sources are silent, at least concerning their affection for each other. Whether Hatshepsut was revolted by him or loved him is immaterial. They had a relationship based on politics, ritual, and sex. The ideology of kingship was central. He was chief priest and son of the sun god, and she was meant to be the vessel and protector of the next boy to hold the royal spirit in his heart. Their politics revolved around the demands of officials and priests and the nuances of foreign policy. As for the sex, well, they were probably expected to have it very often. They were told (and likely believed) that they were one step away from the gods, if not gods incarnate, and those mythologies were full of sexual creations and sacred conceptions. They desperately needed to produce an heir to save the Thutmoside dynasty. Thus, at the age of twelve, Hatshepsut found herself between two gods: the Great God Amen, who created himself and the world with his orgasm, and the
Good God Aakheperenre Thutmose, who, it was hoped, would conjure up the next living Horus falcon with his own sexual climax.

Ahmes likely advised Hatshepsut on effective pregnancy techniques that had been passed down for generations. Mother and daughter may even have gone to the temple together with prayers and offerings. One day, Hatshepsut’s monthly bleeding stopped. Perhaps her attendants noticed it before she did. Hatshepsut became more aware of the growing life inside her when she felt light-headed and nauseated at palace banquets. Her condition was a great relief to most of the palace courtiers and families whose living depended on continuing the current dynasty, and she was respectfully observed under the lowered lids of her people as she moved to and fro throughout the palace and temple.

When Hatshepsut’s time came to deliver, her ladies-in-waiting accompanied her to the birthing arbor and urged her on, holding her hands tightly. Hatshepsut’s body felt as if it were being ripped apart by her labor pains. Ahmes was there, too, amid the blood and shit and screams of pain, to check the child’s genitals, to see if it was a boy or a girl. And Ahmes’s heart probably fell deep into the pit of her stomach amid the new child’s cries when she saw no little penis or testicles on the royal baby, just the labia of a girl. Hatshepsut gave birth to a princess who would be called Nefrure, the Beauty of Re.

Ahmes had experienced all the same anxieties herself when she had been a young queen. She, too, had served as the King’s Great Wife and felt the profound pressure to bear the next heir. Her daughter Hatshepsut had been the product of such a moment of disappointment and anguish after nine months of waiting and hours of tormented labor. Ahmes knew what it meant for Hatshepsut to have survived instead of her brothers: Ahmes was regent to a boy king who was not her own son, whose wife had just given birth to a girl. The cycle of no male heir was repeating itself. Once word of the baby’s sex traveled around Egypt, a new and fresh uncertainty would settle into the hearts of the elite families of the country. Ahmes knew the stakes of such failure intimately.

Still, it is unlikely that Ahmes scolded Hatshepsut for delivering a daughter. The Egyptians believed that the husband’s seed, not the woman’s womb, determined the gender of a child. Thutmose II likely received the brunt of the ill will from courtiers and advisers who now had a
new reason to be disappointed with him. Ahmes probably urged Hatshepsut to hand her tiny baby off to a wet nurse so that she could get her body ready for another pregnancy as soon as possible.

In the midst of all these preoccupations about sex and pregnancy and babies and heirs, these women nonetheless found a way to create a strong kingship on behalf of a young, inexperienced king. They exercised Egypt’s power in foreign affairs, and they had to be merciless about it. Rebellion was dealt with swiftly, and from all accounts Ahmes granted no clemency to insurgents. Shortly after Thutmose II’s accession, there was an uprising within the colonial province of Kush in southern Nubia (modern-day Sudan), a region reincorporated into the Egyptian empire by Thutmose I only a decade earlier. A military campaign against the rebel Kushites was quickly organized, with orders to slaughter all male foes, except for one son of the chieftain who would be brought back to Egypt as a captive. Did the young king order this expedition? Thutmose II was only eleven or twelve years old, and Hatshepsut was likely a girl of thirteen. Ahmes was probably the one who instigated this cruel annihilation. It was her husband, Thutmose I, who had conquered southern Nubia in the first place, his first campaign there still famous for his slaughter of their chieftain and that influential display of the bowman’s corpse on the royal barge at Thebes. To her, this was sacred work.

All three key players—the king, his queen, and his regent—were perhaps in the throne room when the pronouncement of no mercy was made. Both Hatshepsut and Thutmose II would have recognized the intent behind Ahmes’s decision and valued the resolution for what it was: rebellion against the king of Egypt was akin to jeopardizing the cosmos by acting against the sun god himself; such an act could never be permitted. When the Egyptian army reached Kush, they carried out their orders successfully. Egypt’s riches always came upon the backs of such atrocities. War was not just compulsory; it was a gift to the gods.

Ahmes and Hatshepsut needed to add another pillar to support the new kingship: the immortalization of Thutmose II’s reign in Egypt through new temple construction. The women were not content to give the young king all the credit; indeed, they included their own images in the new structures they created at Karnak Temple,
an unprecedented move that hints at just how powerful they really were. On at least one of the surviving monuments, Thutmose II shares equal space with his Great Wife, Hatshepsut, and his mother-in-law, Ahmes.
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These two women were responsible for establishing the visual ideology of the young king’s reign. In other reliefs, Hatshepsut even appears without the king, standing alone before the god Amen-Re in one of his temples, perhaps the first time a King’s Wife was depicted with such agency of her own, wholly removed from her husband. She is shown dressed as a traditional queen, wearing an archaic skintight linen dress that had been popular a thousand years before and a vulture headdress (which for all we know was an actual taxidermied vulture) with richly feathered wings that spread about her head like the lappets of a wig. A round crown called a modius sat atop the colorful vulture headdress, and Hatshepsut embellished the crown with two tall ostrich plumes as an extra extravagant touch. From the images on these temple blocks and stelae there is no mistaking Hatshepsut’s power as queen. The reliefs depict her performing rituals that were usually the king’s responsibility: Hatshepsut is shown standing before the god Amen, who is in either his clothed form or his sexualized manifestation; she is holding an offering, and the king is not present as an intermediary.
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