Hatshepsut: The Woman Who Ruled Egypt as Pharaoh

Hatshepsut was a queen of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty who ruled as pharaoh from about 1479 to 1458 BC, one of the very few women to hold the full title of king in ancient Egypt. Starting as regent for her young stepson Thutmose III, she took royal power for herself and reigned for about two decades of prosperity and ambitious building. Some twenty years after her death her images and name were systematically attacked, and she was largely forgotten until Egyptologists pieced her story back together in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Background: a royal daughter

Hatshepsut was born around 1500 BC as the daughter of Thutmose I and his principal wife, Queen Ahmose. Her father, a successful warrior king, had campaigned as far as the Euphrates in the north and deep into Nubia in the south. The family belonged to the dynasty that had driven the Hyksos rulers out of northern Egypt and founded the New Kingdom, a new age of Egyptian power.

Following royal custom, Hatshepsut married her half-brother Thutmose II, the son of Thutmose I by a secondary wife. As his Great Royal Wife she also held the important religious title “God’s Wife of Amun”, which gave her estates, staff and a role in the rituals of the god’s temple at Karnak. The couple had a daughter, Neferure, but no son.

Thutmose II died after a fairly short reign, probably in about 1479 BC. His heir was a small boy, Thutmose III, the son of a minor wife named Iset.

From regent to king

At first Hatshepsut acted in the normal way for a royal widow, governing as regent on behalf of the child king. Inscriptions from the first years show her as a queen standing behind Thutmose III. Some time between his second and seventh regnal years, roughly 1477–1473 BC, she was crowned king herself and took the full five-part royal titulary, with the throne name Maatkare (“Truth is the soul of Ra”).

Hatshepsut did not depose Thutmose III. Instead the two ruled as co-kings, with dates still counted from his accession, but Hatshepsut was clearly the senior partner. She kept him in a visible but subordinate role, and he seems to have trained as a soldier during these years.

To justify her unusual position, Hatshepsut emphasised her descent from Thutmose I and claimed that her father had named her as his heir. Reliefs in her temple at Deir el-Bahari go further, showing that the god Amun himself fathered her by visiting her mother, a story of divine birth that made her the god’s chosen child.

How she presented herself

Egyptian kingship was imagined as a male office, and there were no words or images ready-made for a woman king. Early statues show Hatshepsut with a female body wearing a king’s headdress. Over time she was shown more and more in the conventional form of a male pharaoh, with a broad chest, kilt and ceremonial false beard. Texts about her mix feminine and masculine grammar.

This was not an attempt to fool anyone into thinking she was a man. It reflected the idea that the king played a fixed role in the cosmic order, and that the role had a set appearance.

Her many statues, including colossal sphinxes with her face and granite figures of her kneeling with offerings, were made in large numbers for her temples. Together they show a carefully managed royal image that changed as her position grew more secure, from queen to king and from female to conventionally male forms.

Building and trade

Hatshepsut’s reign was mostly peaceful at home and abroad, though there is evidence of at least one military campaign in Nubia and possibly operations in the Levant. Her main legacy is in building. She restored temples damaged or neglected during the Hyksos period, and an inscription at the rock temple of Speos Artemidos in Middle Egypt boasts that she rebuilt what had been destroyed.

At Thebes she added to the great temple of Amun at Karnak. She commissioned the Red Chapel, a shrine of red quartzite for the god’s sacred boat, and built the eighth pylon. For her jubilee around her 16th year she had a pair of granite obelisks set up in Karnak. The one still standing is about 29 metres tall, among the tallest ancient obelisks in Egypt, and an inscription claims that the work at the quarry took seven months.

Her masterpiece was her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari, called Djeser-Djeseru (“Holy of Holies”). Built in terraces against the cliffs on the west bank of Thebes, it was designed for the cult of Amun and of Hatshepsut herself. Its reliefs record her divine birth, her coronation and her most celebrated undertaking: the expedition to the land of Punt around her ninth year, which brought back incense, myrrh trees, ebony, gold and exotic animals from a distant land along the Red Sea.

Key people at her court

Hatshepsut relied on a circle of officials. The most famous is Senenmut, the steward of Amun and tutor of her daughter Neferure, often credited with overseeing the Deir el-Bahari temple. He left many statues of himself holding the princess and had small portraits of himself carved behind doors in the temple, which was a remarkable privilege. His precise relationship with the queen is unknown, and claims of a romance rest on no good evidence.

Other key figures were Hapuseneb, high priest of Amun and vizier, and the treasurer Nehesi, who led the Punt expedition. Neferure, her daughter, held the title God’s Wife of Amun and appears prominently in the first half of the reign but vanishes from the record around year 11, probably because she died.

Death and burial

Hatshepsut’s last recorded date is in year 22 of the joint reign, around 1458 BC. After that Thutmose III ruled alone and soon launched the campaigns in the Levant that made Egypt an empire. Hatshepsut had prepared a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, KV20, which she extended to hold her father’s burial as well.

In 2007 the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, led by Zahi Hawass, identified a mummy of an obese older woman from tomb KV60 as Hatshepsut. Part of the evidence was a loose molar in a box inscribed with her name, which matched a gap in the mummy’s jaw. The identification is widely reported but not accepted by every specialist. Possible causes of death proposed after the study, such as cancer, remain uncertain.

The erasure of her memory

Late in the reign of Thutmose III, roughly 20 years after Hatshepsut died, a campaign began to remove her from the record. Her statues at Deir el-Bahari were smashed and thrown into quarry pits, her name and image were chiselled out of temple walls and replaced with those of Thutmose I, II or III, and her obelisks at Karnak were walled in. Later king lists, such as the one carved at Abydos under Seti I, skip from Thutmose II to Thutmose III.

Earlier historians pictured an angry stepson taking revenge as soon as she died. The timing makes that unlikely. Most Egyptologists now see the erasure as a political act intended to make the royal line run cleanly from Thutmose I through the male kings to Thutmose III’s son, Amenhotep II, and to prevent any rival branch of the family or any future woman from using Hatshepsut as a precedent.

The damage was incomplete. Many inscriptions survived, and the fragments of her statues were recovered by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s excavations under Herbert Winlock in the 1920s. Many of these reassembled statues are now in New York and Cairo.

Myths and facts

Myth: Hatshepsut was the only female pharaoh. Sobekneferu of the 12th Dynasty ruled as king centuries earlier, and Twosret later ruled at the end of the 19th Dynasty. Cleopatra VII also ruled Egypt, as a Ptolemaic queen.

Myth: she disguised herself as a man. Her male-style images followed the rules of royal art; texts openly called her a daughter of Ra and a woman.

Myth: Thutmose III erased her out of hatred at once. The attacks began two decades after her death and were selective, which points to a calculated decision about the succession.

Timeline

• c. 1504 BC: Thutmose I, Hatshepsut’s father, becomes king.
• c. 1479 BC: Thutmose II dies; Hatshepsut becomes regent for the young Thutmose III.
• c. 1477–1473 BC: Hatshepsut is crowned king with the throne name Maatkare.
• c. 1471 BC: In her ninth regnal year, an expedition sails to the land of Punt.
• c. 1464 BC: Her jubilee obelisks are raised at Karnak, around year 16.
• c. 1458 BC: Hatshepsut’s last attested date, year 22; Thutmose III rules alone.
• c. 1438–1425 BC: Her monuments are attacked late in Thutmose III’s reign.
• 1920s: Herbert Winlock’s excavations recover fragments of her smashed statues.
• 2007: A mummy from tomb KV60 is identified as Hatshepsut.

Why it matters

Hatshepsut showed that a woman could hold Egypt’s supreme office and rule effectively for two decades within a deeply traditional system. Her buildings, especially Deir el-Bahari, are among the finest of the New Kingdom, and her reign laid the economic foundations for Thutmose III’s empire. The attempt to erase her, and her modern rediscovery, also show how history can be shaped by those who come after.