The World

She believed she was born to rule. ‘The God’s Wife Hatshepsut conducted the affairs of the land, the Two Lands being in her counsels,’ read one of her inscriptions from her regency. ‘She is served; Egypt bows the head.’ After seven years, she declared herself king in her own right. But it was a challenge to fit her vision of herself within the traditions of male kingship and she solved it in a bewildering display of sexual fluidity that the twenty-first century should find understandable: she presented herself first as male, King Maatkare, even appearing as a man, though often with female epithets, sometimes as a beautiful woman with a broad intelligent face but a male body; at other times she depicts herself in traditional male kilt and headdress but with breasts. The word for palace – peraa – was used to describe Egypt’s sovereign: Hatshepsut became the first ‘pharaoh’.

She adored her father, projecting herself as the King’s First-Born Daughter but simultaneously as the daughter of Amun (originally the god of air, increasingly the senior deity), who was Thutmose too. Her father had declared that Hatshepsut would make a better king than a weak son. ‘Then His Majesty said to them: “This daughter of mine, Hatshepsut – may she live! – I have appointed as my successor,”’ she claimed in her mortuary temple. ‘“She shall direct the people … Obey her.”’

She was not alone. Her intimate adviser was one of her father’s courtiers, Senenmut, who climbed from obscurity to Steward of the King’s Daughter – tutor to Hatshepsut’s daughter, Neferure, a position that gave him access to the queen. When she herself was promoted to king, he became High Steward of Amun and Overseer of the King’s Works, mentioning himself in inscriptions at royal temples.^* Rumours spread that he was her lover – partly a reflection of the chauvinistic belief that behind a clever woman there must be a cleverer man. Ministers often boasted that they were ‘beloved of the King’, but he went further: ‘I entered into the mysteries of the Lady of the Two Lands.’ At their greatest monument, cheeky Theban workmen drew graffiti of a figure penetrating a slim woman from behind, presumed to be Senenmut having sex with Hatshepsut.

Assisted by Senenmut, Hatshepsut built monuments all over the empire, from Nubia to Sinai, dispatching an expedition in 1463 BC to the Land of God – the Egyptian name for Punt – to procure materials for her buildings and festivals, including incense, ebony, cosmetics and pet monkeys. Five ships, each with a crew of 210 including marines and 30 oarsmen, were led by her keeper of the seal, Nehsi, a Nubian. In a world that now boasted around 30 millions, there was a regular trade route down the Red Sea to east Africa and probably another to west Africa where, over the next centuries, the Nok people would create exquisite terracotta statues, later using furnaces to make iron, and a third route through the Gulf to India. Nehsi met the rulers of Punt, King Parahu and his enormously proportioned wife Ati, and returned with frankincense and thirty-one myrrh trees, which Hatshepsut replanted at her temples.

At Karnak, already expanded by her father,^* she created a national shrine to Amun-Ra, the god associated with her father, adding a mudbrick palace designated ‘The Royal Palace – I am not far from him’.^*

As Thutmose III grew up, Hatshepsut felt the pressure to hand over power to her stepson/nephew, whom she married to her daughter. As she entered her fifties, suffering arthritis, then diabetes and cancer (revealed by a mummy recently identified as her), after twenty successful years in power, she must have reluctantly watched Thutmose III develop into a vigorous pharaoh with the courtiers increasingly turning to the rising sun. When Hatshepsut was dead, Thutmose III defaced her monuments, but she had laid the foundations for his successes. Every year he campaigned in Canaan and Syria, eighteen campaigns altogether, defeating the Syrian kingdom Mitanni and its Canaanite allies at Megiddo, where he addressed his troops with the words, ‘Be steadfast, be steadfast! Be vigilant! Be vigilant!’, returning with booty of 2,000 horses and chariots, 1,796 male slaves and uncounted females, among them three Syrian girls who became special for him. The Ahmoses were bombastic, militaristic monarchs who were expected to look and live the part: Thutmose III’s son Amenhotep II was the model of the athletic prince of a martial empire: he rode faster than anyone else, rowed harder than 200 rowers and could shoot an arrow through a copper target one palm thick.

BOY RACER, MARKSMAN, HORSE WHISPERER, BULL BREAKER: AMENHOTEP