Egypt has been around for a while and when you're working with multiple
thousands of years of history, time can get pretty fuzzy. The pyramids were older to Cleopatra than she is to us. And long before
Herodotus or Thucydides did us all the favor of committing the events of Greek history to writing, the Egyptians were well aware of
the interplay between past, present and future. To that end, there's one particularly noteworthy
example of how the notions of history can end up influencing how the history itself gets written -- or in this case
overwritten -- and it's the story of Hatshepsut.
Not only was she one of Egypt's most successful rulers in the New Kingdom, with a considerable long-term impact on Egypt's well-being,
but she was also arguably Egypt's first female Pharaoh. And perhaps most
Intriguingly a couple decades after her death. her name was erased from her monuments and her statues were quite literally
defaced. In many ways
it's a miracle that we even know about her at all.
But her rule was a truly exceptional one. She became Pharaoh through unconventional means, completed
extraordinary feats for the cultural and economic benefit of Egypt and after her death, her name and entire existence was almost erased from memory.
Every part of her life was either an oddity, an exception, or a complete mystery, yet her name and
fantastic story were almost lost to time. While some have ascribed to this grand erasure to familial rage,
Hatshepsut's post-mortem demise was almost entirely due to
perceptions of history and attempts to clean up the historical narrative to suit the wishes of her successors. So, with my grand
thematic preamble all laid out,
let's do some history. Hatshepsut was born in the late 1500s BC to the Pharaoh Thutmose the First, whose accomplishments
included military campaigns into Syria and Nubia
which you may note are in -different-
directions!
So props to him. Hatshepsut, who was a full royal, married her half brother Thutmose the second, who was from a different
wife who wasn't quite as royal.
It's important to know that Egyptian royalty typically intermarried so as to keep the family line pure
but also the King practiced mild polygamy and bore children from multiple royal wives
So as not to keep the family -too- pure. (Check out this video on the dumpster fire of a family tree that is the Ptolemaic
Dynasty for a case study in why practicing inbreeding for 300 years is a terrible idea.)
Anyway, Hatshepsut had served Thutmose the Second's Queen for the decade and change that he ruled for. He...honestly didn't do a
whole lot -- possibly in part because he was notoriously sickly.
But whatever the case, even when Hatshepsut was still simply a queen, she wielded
what was likely quite a bit of power over Egypt. When Thutmose the Second died, the throne passed on to his son and Hatshepsut's
stepson, Thutmose the Third. The problem was that Thutmose the Third was a very tiny child, so he was still in Egyptian
Preschool learning his "A B squiggles". As such, most of the actual power went back to Hatshepsut, who served
officially as his regent. Now, this had happened at several points in the past -- as Egyptian Queens serving as Regents was perfectly fine in the
eyes of everyone involved -- but at some point,
somewhere,
somehow (we don't really know), the balance of power shifted.
Hatshepsut officially declared herself to be Co-Pharaoh of Egypt along with her young stepson.
And this was interesting because it wasn't strictly -illegal- in any sense
and she wasn't usurping power from her "still probably chewing on his arm for entertainment" stepson.
It's just that no one had really...
done it before. But in Egyptian culture, the Pharaoh is the incarnation of the male god Horus.
So while being the regent for her stepson was completely innocuous,
being a -pharaoh- was new for people.
And this is actually really cool because of how it relates to her projection of her gender
She dressed in the typical male attire of a pharaoh and even wore a fake beard, but in all surviving writings
she's referred to with grammatically female language and titles so she wasn't trying to hide anything from anyone,
but she was conscious of the cultural and ceremonial importance of a pharaohs appearance!
it's actually pretty funny! The
archaeologist and Egyptologist Jeff Francois Champollion, like -the- guy who discovered how to translate
hieroglyphs after Napoleon dug up the Rosetta Stone, was notoriously super confused on account of this one
specific monarch that repeatedly showed up in art and records with female titles and attributes despite the masculine dress and very
man-like beard. People argued over this for a century and a half until we all finally figured out that our bearded Hatshepsut was,
indeed, a queen. So now that she's on the throne,
let's take a look at exactly what Hatshepsut did with her two decades in power.
Besides presumably annoying her temporally substandard Co-Pharaoh to no end by the sheer virtue of her being there,
Hatshepsut's most notable accomplishments come through to us in her extensive building program.
She built and restored temples all across
Egypt -- from the furthest reaches of the Nile all the way up into the Levant. In the city of Thebes, the temple complex of Karnak
had somewhat fallen into disrepair and Hatshepsut fixed a lot of it up.
Not only did she carve relief sculptures into and/or paint on most of the walls,
she had a particular fondness for erecting obelisks.
And as it happens, the tallest surviving ancient obelisk that we know of is from Hatshepsut's
reign. And it's just kind of cool for me to think that even they had that same preservative instinct towards the past. Even
3500 years ago, there was still at least a thousand more years of history that people saw is worth saving. Perhaps her most notable
accomplishment -- as far as buildings go -- is her mortuary temple of Djeser-Djeseru, meaning "holiest of holies".
We've unfortunately lost parts of it over the millennia, but even back in the day people knew that it was a big deal.
It's a triple terraced
colonnaded temple complex that almost looks like it's coming out of the mountain behind it. The terraces were connected by a series of long
ramps surrounded by foreign plants and trees. It's an amazing feat of architecture
that's not only beautiful, but quite unique in its style. as well. Hatshepsut's steward and architect
Senenmut -- who has been speculated to be her lover, but it doesn't really matter because we have no real way of knowing -- did a spectacular job on this one.
And you can't just go around building and restoring temples left and right all willy-nilly without having the economic resources to pay for it...
so it's a good thing that Hatshepsut had pursued an extensive campaign of trade with regions outside of Egypt. As
documented in beautiful reliefs from her mortuary temple, she conducted a trading mission to the Land of Punt which resulted in Egypt bringing back a
comical amount of valuable foods, gold, ivory, trees, plants and other cool stuff from the region.
While that's her most famous achievement, she also established trade ties with the lands in and around the Levant -- which proved to be quite lucrative for Egypt.
In times to follow, as far as we know, her reign was largely internally and externally
peaceful. Like many people who existed before the discovery of penicillin in 1928, Hatshepsut died of...
probably an infection around when she was 50. A handful of years,
and maybe even a couple decades
after her death, her name and statues were widely wiped out in an attempt to erase the fact that she ever existed
...Which is pretty harsh.
It is no fun having your own name taken off the mortuary temple that you built for yourself.
The prevailing theory is that her stepson Thutmose the Third did it, but not because he had some built-up resentment
towards her and destroyed her images in a fit of rage. There are a few reasons why that doesn't really work.
What's more likely is Thutmose erased his stepmother's name in an attempt to clean up the narrative.
We know this because in some places where her name gets crossed out,
it's written over with the name of Thutmose's son, Amenatep the Second. Since Hatshepsut
came to power in an unconventional way, Thutmose would have had good reason to try and sideline that part of the narrative to more strongly
establish the legitimacy of his
patrilineal royalty. And like I said with the "Curious Case of the Confused Champollion", it worked for a good long time.
I'm pretty sure the only reason we still have just Djeser-Djeseru is because, rather than destroy it, other pharaohs
just kept taking credit for it themselves in an eternal cycle of plagiaristic self-aggrandizement. After centuries of mystery surrounding
Hatshepsut, archaeologist Zahi Hawass discovered what he -- and also I -- believed to be the body of
Hatshepsut in the cave e60 tomb in the Valley of the Kings. They
Identified her by matching a tooth found in a canopic box bearing Hatshepsut's name to the mouth of the mummy itself.
It's not DNA evidence, so some people still have doubts,
but when you find the mummy of a royal in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings right next to a box that's
essentially marked "The royal guts of Hatshepsut" which contains a tooth that matches exactly...
What can I say? Color me convinced. So that's Hatshepsut -- a queen who became a pharaoh through unusual means and went on to accomplish
extraordinary things before suffering one of the most brutal historical erasures ever and subsequently turning into one of Egypt's most
fascinating mysteries. As Egyptian history is a long and winding road, there may well be many other
interesting characters like this that we just don't know about. So the joke's honestly on us because to future
archaeologists we'll look just as silly as poor old Champollion on does to us
tearing his hair out over the bearded Pharaoh with woman's name.