Hatshepsut worked to assuage any concerns that a female pharaoh would threaten the balance of Egypt not just by presenting as a man, but by doubling down on her connection to the gods.Īll pharaohs were considered godly in one way or another, so Hatshepsut had to do one better - while she was not the first or last female ruler of Egypt, she was the only one to claim the throne for herself while a male successor lived. What is known, however, is that the King Herself had a throne name, Maatkare, or “Truth is the Soul of the Sun God.” This name emphasized the Pharaoh Maatkare Hatshepsut’s connection to one of the many evolutions of Egypt’s sun god (known then as Amun and today as Ra) while referencing a Pharaoh's responsibility to maintain “ma’at,” harmony, through respecting tradition. While some have suggested that she even went so far as to changed her name from Hatshepsut, “She is First Among Noble Women,” to the male Hatshepsut, the academic source of this notion is unclear.
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Within a period of seven years, Hatshepsut statues and reliefs progressed from depictions of a subordinate queen ruling alongside a child king to that of a full fledged, male pharaoh with Thutmose III, who would have been around 10 by this time, literally below her. It was then that Hatshepsut became queen regent and, over the course of her 20-year rule, began to bend tradition to suit her needs. Like her mother and grandmother before her, Hatshepsut would then go on to have a daughter, Neferu-Ra, while a minor wife named Isis gave Thutmose II a son, creatively named Thutmose III, shortly before he died in 1479 BCE.
In place of the throne, she was granted the position of God’s Wife of Amun, or Amon-re, an honor which allowed her to participate in temple ceremonies alongside the male priesthood as the sun god’s chief consort and to carry out “Amun’s will” by dictating political policy. Hatshepsut was then passed over for the rule in favor of her half-brother and eventual husband, Thutmose II, a pretty standard move for royalty of the time. In that time, Egyptologists had come to agree on the broad strokes of her reign.īorn around 1508 BCE to Egypt’s 18th dynasty, Hatshepsut was the eldest daughter of Queen Ahmose and the Pharaoh Thutmose I, a general who married into the royal family after Hatshepsut’s grandfather (or rather his wife) failed to produce a male heir. Nearly 80 years later in 2007, this linguistic anomaly would lead an Egyptian archaeologist named Zahi Hawass to a mummy on the floor of Hatshepsut’s final resting place in the Valley of the Kings, a necropolis of her own creation. While the statues in the inner chambers of Hatshepsut’s Deir el-Bahri temple depicted a pharaoh wearing the striped cobra headdress, false beard and kilt of a king, the inscriptions on the temple walls were decidedly feminine.
It was one such contradiction that allowed French archaeologist Jean-Francois Champollion, also credited with deciphering the Rosetta Stone, to rediscover the first hints of Hatshepsut’s existence in 1928. Throughout the modern era, Hatshepsut, “the King Herself,” has served as a prism through which Egyptologists have reflected their beliefs about sex, gender, and power.
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