Hatshepsut, the woman pharaoh

The story

A queen who wears a beard

In her statues, Hatshepsut has a woman's body or a man's, depending on the period in which it was carved. At the start of her reign she is seen in a woman's dress and with a delicate face; later she appears with the short kilt of the pharaohs, the striped headcloth and a false beard tied to her chin, like all kings. She did not want people to believe she was a man. In the inscriptions she often uses the feminine, speaks of herself as “I” and calls herself “daughter of Amun”. But for Egypt the pharaoh was by definition the king, the keeper of the order of the world, and a king wore those symbols. Hatshepsut had to adapt tradition, because there were very few models of a woman pharaoh: only Sobekneferu, centuries earlier.

She was born around 1500 BC, daughter of Thutmose I, and married her half-brother Thutmose II, who became king. When he died, around 1479 BC, the son he had had by a secondary wife, Thutmose III, was a child of a few years. It was normal for a widowed queen to govern in the name of the little king, and for a few years Hatshepsut acted as regent. Then, around the seventh year of the reign, she took an extraordinary step: she had herself crowned king of Egypt in full, beside her nephew and stepson Thutmose III, who remained formally co-ruler but without power.

How she justified her power

Hatshepsut understood that to be accepted she had to show that the gods wanted her. She had the story of her divine birth told on the walls of her temple: the god Amun, in the form of her father Thutmose, was said to have visited her mother, and the god Khnum to have shaped the baby on the potter's wheel. Another story says that her father, Thutmose I, had chosen her as heir before the court. Historians think these stories were political propaganda, which she felt she needed.

She did not reign alone. She surrounded herself with loyal officials, among whom Senenmut stands out, a man of non-noble origins who became her highest officer, tutor to her daughter and overseer of works. There has been much discussion of a closer relationship between them, but there is no evidence: they are only guesses.

The reign of peace and trade

Unlike many other pharaohs of her dynasty, Hatshepsut was not remembered for wars. The inscriptions speak of a few campaigns in Nubia, but her reign was above all a long season of peace, rebuilding and trade. She restored the temples damaged in the time of the Hyksos and had two very tall granite obelisks raised at Karnak: one is still standing, about thirty metres tall, and is among the tallest of antiquity.

The enterprise she was proudest of was the expedition to Punt, in the ninth year of her reign, around 1471 BC. Five large ships set out from the Red Sea and came back loaded with incense, myrrh, ebony, ivory, gold, leopard skins, live animals such as monkeys, and even thirty-one myrrh trees with their roots, carried in big baskets, perhaps the first known attempt to transplant trees from one country to another. Where Punt was is not known precisely: scholars suggest the coast of Eritrea and Sudan, or Somalia, or even the Arabian peninsula. The expedition is told in lively reliefs on the walls of her temple, including the queen of Punt, portrayed with a body shape that scholars have interpreted as a sign of illness.

The temple at Deir el-Bahari

Hatshepsut's masterpiece is her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari, on the west bank at Luxor. It stands at the foot of a very pale rock wall, as if it were a continuation of it, and consists of three great terraces linked by long ramps, with rows of elegant columns. The Egyptians called it Djeser-djeseru, “the holiest of the holy”. Tradition says Senenmut designed it, but the attribution is uncertain. Today it is among the most visited monuments in Egypt.

Erased, but not entirely

Hatshepsut reigned about twenty-two years and died around 1458 BC. Then Thutmose III took power alone and became Egypt's greatest conqueror. Towards the end of his long reign, about twenty years after his aunt's death, Hatshepsut's names and images were chiselled from the temple walls, and the statues broken and thrown into a quarry. For a long time it was believed to be a personal revenge. Today historians are more cautious: the erasure happened late, and perhaps served to make the line of succession towards Thutmose III's son, Amenhotep II, clear, or to remove the example of a woman on the throne. Certainly, the Egyptians did not intend to destroy her completely.

And her remains? In 2007 a team led by the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass claimed to have identified her mummy, thanks to a tooth found in a box with her name. Other scholars, however, have raised doubts about this conclusion, and the matter is not closed.